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Lars von Trier’s Violent Misogyny: Phallogocentric Master Narratives, Authoritarian Aesthetics, and Fascist Impulses

Allow me to begin with Julie Bindel’s incisive 2009 review of Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s ninth film overall but his fifth major international release, published when the film was first previewed: "Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema?" Bindel’s review was part of The Guardian's multi-critic response to the film’s premiere, and while hers was not the only scathing critique, it remains one of the most uncompromising in framing Antichrist as not only deeply misogynistic but also as one of the most extreme and perversely aestheticized portrayals of violence against women ever taken seriously by the art film world.


At the time, critics debated whether von Trier’s film was a work of transgressive genius or an exercise in gratuitous cruelty, but Bindel—along with others—situated Antichrist among the most disturbing films ever made, particularly in its fetishization of female suffering and its highly stylized depiction of sexualized violence:


Julie Bindel Journalist and Activist

Watching this film was like having bad sex with someone you loathe – a hideous combination of sheer boredom and disgust. I hated it, and I hate the director for making it. So, Von Trier was depressed a while back, had nightmares and decided to write the script of this atrocity as a form of therapy. Couldn't he have kept it to himself?

No doubt this monstrous creation will be inflicted on film studies students in years to come. Their tutors will ask them what it "means", prompting some to look at signifiers and symbolism of female sexuality as punishment, and of the torture-porn genre as a site of male resistance to female emancipation.

It is as bad as (if not worse than) the old "video nasty" films of the 80s, such as I Spit On Your Grave or Dressed To Kill, against which I campaigned as a young feminist. I love gangster movies, serial killer novels and such like. But for me they have to contribute to our understanding of why such cruelty and brutality is inflicted by some people on others, rather than for the purposes of gruesome entertainment. If I am to watch a woman's clitoris being hacked off, I want it to contribute to my understanding of female genital mutilation, not just allow me to see the inside of a woman's vagina.

If there is any justice in the world, this film would sink into oblivion. Aside from the risible script and potty plot, we have rubbish acting. Having previously loved Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I will now cross the street to avoid watching anything with them in. Apparently, both read the script and couldn't wait to be in it. That makes them almost as bad as Von Trier.

If you see this film you will be putting your money into something which deserves to bomb – and give a grain of validity to the sickest general release in the history of cinema.


What follows is an examination of the "sick" aspect of this critique—not in a moralizing sense, but in the way one might engage with a profoundly pathological text. Analyzing von Trier’s misogynistic and authoritarian films is akin to conducting psychoanalysis with a deeply disturbed patient: the critic, like the analyst, must be willing to endure, hold, and process the film’s pathogenic fantasies without immediate rejection or disavowal. To truly engage with von Trier’s work critically requires allowing the filmmaker’s world—his obsessions, his perversions, his brutality—to enter the critic’s world without being overtaken by it. It is in this fraught space of containment and reflection that a deeper understanding of von Trier’s aesthetic, ideological, and psychic investments in cinematic misogyny can emerge.


Antichrist Reimagined: What If a Woman Had Made It?

Imagine, for a moment, that Antichrist wasn’t made by Lars von Trier but by a female filmmaker—let’s say a bold, feminist provocateur with a reputation for cinematic transgression. Now take it one step further: imagine that in this version, the gender roles are reversed. The film still follows a grieving couple retreating to the woods, but instead of the woman unraveling into a frenzy of self-loathing and sadomasochistic violence, it’s the man who descends into madness. And in the film’s infamous climax? Instead of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character mutilating herself, it’s Willem Dafoe’s character who castrates himself on screen.

Would the reception of Antichrist have been the same?

A Mirror to Misogyny

When Antichrist premiered in 2009, critics were split between outrage and awe. In The Guardian, Julie Bindel called it "one of the most extreme and perversely aestheticized portrayals of violence against women ever taken seriously by the art film world." Peter Bradshaw described it as a "smirking contraption of a film", engineered to shock, while Catherine Shoard wrestled with its beauty and horror, acknowledging its raw artistic ambition. The film was, as many saw it, a nightmare of female self-hatred masquerading as arthouse horror—a work drenched in the aesthetics of suffering, where the woman's body becomes both the site of punishment and the source of evil.

But if a female filmmaker had made Antichrist and flipped the gender dynamic, would critics still have framed it as an art film? Or would it have been universally condemned as an act of misandrist brutality?

Castration, Horror, and the Limits of Acceptable Violence

Let’s say that in our alternate version, the grieving husband, overcome with guilt and paranoia, begins to turn his anger inward. Instead of his wife enduring cycles of torture, he subjects himself to physical and psychological destruction. In the climactic moment, in an act of delusional self-punishment, he castrates himself on screen—the male body becoming the ultimate spectacle of self-inflicted horror.

Would this film be called a "deeply misandrist fever dream"? Would male critics decry it as a hateful desecration of the male form, a film that fetishizes male suffering and indulges in gendered sadism?

We already have a clue as to how it might be received. When Lars von Trier subjected Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character to graphic sexual violence and genital mutilation, it was defended—if not by all, then certainly by some—as a philosophical meditation on grief, madness, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Many critics questioned whether the film was really misogynistic or if it was a self-conscious indictment of misogyny itself. But let’s be real—if a male character’s castration had been treated with the same slow-motion, hyper-stylized aestheticism that von Trier used for Gainsbourg’s self-mutilation, the film likely wouldn’t have been praised for its deep existential themes.

Instead, it would have been called a grotesque, unforgivable attack on men.

Would It Have Been Taken Seriously?

Would the art-house crowd have championed a woman director who put Willem Dafoe through the same hell that von Trier inflicted on Charlotte Gainsbourg? Would she be considered a visionary provocateur, or would she be written off as a man-hating extremist?

History suggests the latter. Female filmmakers who depict extreme violence, especially against men, often face accusations of "agenda-driven misandry"—a charge rarely leveled at male directors who linger on women’s suffering. Catherine Breillat, for example, has long explored female sexuality and violence in ways that make audiences uncomfortable, but her films are often marginalized as niche provocations rather than taken as serious philosophical inquiries. Meanwhile, von Trier—whose work repeatedly indulges in aestheticized violence against women—is still hailed as an intellectual enfant terrible of cinema.

Would critics have excused our hypothetical female filmmaker’s gender-reversed Antichrist as an honest exploration of male fragility? Would they have seen the self-castration scene as a brave confrontation with masculinity’s destructive impulses?

Or would they have dismissed it as a hysterical, hateful mess?

The Double Standard of Cinematic Violence

The truth is, von Trier’s Antichrist was palatable to many precisely because it was about a woman’s pain, a woman’s breakdown, a woman’s body being punished. The film taps into a long cinematic tradition of female suffering that has been elevated to high art—from Hitchcock’s blonde victims to the martyrdom of women in Bergman’s films to the sadomasochistic thrillers of Polanski.

But reverse the dynamic? Put the male body through the same ritual of pain and destruction, and suddenly, the discourse would shift. What was once "daring" would become "hateful." What was once "philosophical" would be seen as "grotesquely political."

Which begs the question—was Antichrist ever about grief and the human condition? Or was it just another elaborate excuse to turn female suffering into an aesthetic fetish?


Introduction

Lars von Trier’s films have long sparked controversy for their brutal portrayals of women, which many critics interpret as a form of violent misogyny. Far from being incidental, this misogyny is deeply woven into the phallogocentric master narratives and authoritarian aesthetics that structure his cinema. Phallocentrism refers to the privileging of the masculine—symbolized by the phallus—as the central organizing principle in meaning-making. Feminist theorists have used this concept to critique classical psychoanalytic theory and Western narratives, which, they argue, systematically center masculinity while marginalizing or erasing feminine difference. Logocentrism, a key concept in deconstruction, refers to the privileging of logos—reason, speech, or a transcendental signified—as the foundation of meaning. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism is not merely about the grounding of meaning in idealism or formalism but about the hierarchical privileging of presence over absence in language and thought, a tendency embedded in the Western metaphysical tradition. Derrida (especially in Spurs) ties logocentrism to phallocentrism, arguing that the privileging of a stable center of meaning often aligns with the privileging of the masculine as the site of authority.


In my essays "The Actual Phallic Function: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Two Films by Lars von Trier" (1998) and "The Phallus and Its Discontents: Castration, Fetishism, and the Limits of Psychoanalytic Theory" (2025), as well as in my doctoral dissertation, Disturbing Psychoanalytic Origins: A Derridean Reading of Freudian Theory (2000), I critique the foundational sexism embedded in psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, I demonstrate how both Freudian and Lacanian frameworks fetishize the notion of "the reality of [woman’s] castration" (as articulated in the Wolfman case), treating it as the concealed yet indispensable linchpin of their master narratives and psychoanalytic Weltanschauung. By exposing how this logic sustains itself through an economy of absence, lack, and symbolic authority, my work interrogates the structural dependencies that render psychoanalysis not only phallocentric but also bound to a metaphysics of exclusion.


Building on these ideas—that Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis are fundamentally phallocentric, with phallocentrism serving as the structuring logic of their logocentrism—we can see how von Trier’s films amplify and extend these dynamics into cinematic representation. His films construct heightened, stylized fantasies of violent misogyny, all governed by a phallogocentric Weltanschauung that closely mirrors the underlying assumptions of Freudian and Lacanian theory. In both psychoanalysis and von Trier’s films, the feminine is positioned as an object of fascination, excess, and punishment, its supposed "lack" operating as the concealed engine of desire, narrative momentum, and symbolic structure. By transposing this psychoanalytic logic onto the screen, von Trier’s work does not merely depict misogyny but formalizes and aestheticizes it, reproducing in visual and narrative terms the very mechanisms of exclusion, subjugation, and fetishization that structure the psychoanalytic tradition.


Through an analysis of Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Antichrist (2009), and Zentropa (1991), this essay argues that von Trier’s storytelling operates via phallogocentric masterplots that demand women’s suffering and submission, enforced by an authoritarian, even fascistic, directorial vision. Instead of merely cataloging instances of misogyny, we will undertake a rigorous theoretical critique linking von Trier’s artistic tendencies to broader structures of phallogocentric domination and authoritarianism in culture. In doing so, we treat von Trier’s cinema as a case study in how master narratives can erase difference and reinforce systems of domination and absolute control – a dynamic with gendered and political ramifications. The following analysis combines perspectives from Women’s Studies and Film Studies, drawing on feminist psychoanalytic critique to interrogate von Trier’s oeuvre as an aesthetic system of patriarchal power.


Phallogocentrism and Master Narratives of Domination

Philosopher Jacques Derrida coined phallogocentrism to describe how Western thought combines phallocentrism (centering the masculine/phallic) with logocentrism (centering a singular Logos or truth). In the context of gender, phallogocentrism implies that meaning and subjectivity are organized around the masculine as the default or “universal,” relegating the feminine to a position of lack or otherness ([PDF] Phallus/Phallocentrism - Digital Commons @ George Fox University). Classical psychoanalytic theory exemplifies this: Freud famously defined female sexuality in terms of the male organ (treating the clitoris as a “little penis”) and posited women’s development as marked by “penis envy,” thus conceiving the origins of female sexuality in terms of the masculine phallus ([PDF] Phallus/Phallocentrism - Digital Commons @ George Fox University). Lacan radicalized this idea by elevating the phallus to the key signifier in the symbolic order, effectively making the presence/absence of the phallus the structuring difference for all subjects. The result is a phallic monism in which there is only one primary signifier of power (the phallus), and women are defined negatively (by what they lack in this schema). Feminist critics have long argued that such theory erases female specificity and voices – Luce Irigaray, for example, described Freud’s model as one in which woman is nothing but “the lack of the penis,” a blank or mirror for male desire.

Eric W. Anders extends these critiques by exposing an unconscious fetishism at the heart of psychoanalytic sexism (The Phallus and Its Discontents: Castration, Fetishism, and the ...). In The Fetish of Castration, Anders notes that Freud’s concept of fetishism involves a disavowal: the (male) fetishist both knows and denies that the mother has no phallus, oscillating between acknowledging female “castration” and pretending she isn’t castrated (thus inventing a fetish object as a substitute). Anders suggests that psychoanalysis itself engages in a similar disavowal – a fetish of castration – by obsessively centering the narrative of women’s lack (castration) as the truth that must be simultaneously acknowledged yet covered over by elaborate theoretical constructions (The Phallus and Its Discontents: Castration, Fetishism, and the ...). In other words, the actual phallic function of these theories is to uphold a master narrative of male sexual authority: the phallus becomes the organizing principle of meaning and order, and the anxiety around its absence/presence drives the entire drama of subject formation (The Phallus and Its Discontents: Castration, Fetishism, and the ...). This is a deeply mastering or authoritarian narrative: it permits only one axis of difference (having or not having the phallus), subordinating all other differences (between individual subjects, or between cultural contexts) to that single binary logic.


Such master narratives are inherently reductionist and dominative. They impose a totalizing story about gender – for instance, that all desire and power flow from the male organ/signifier – thereby silencing alternative stories or experiences (the “difference” that doesn’t fit the masterplot). Phallogocentrism operates in the service of domination by making its male-centered viewpoint appear as universal truth, effectively erasing the voices and experiences of those who don’t conform. It creates what Anders (following Derrida) would call a logocentric closure: a sealed framework where the feminine only exists as a shadow of the masculine, never as an independent term. When such a framework informs narrative art, it often manifests as stories that relentlessly reinforce male control and female subjugation. The master narrative erases difference: any deviation by a female character – any assertion of her own subjectivity or desire outside the male-defined structure – is punished, corrected, or absorbed back into the dominant logic of the story. In this way, phallogocentrism not only reflects sexism but actively reinforces domination and absolute control in cultural representations.

Authoritarian Aesthetics and Fascist Impulses in von Trier’s Cinema

Von Trier’s filmmaking style and narrative structures can be understood as authoritarian systems in their own right – that is, highly controlling, often cruel frameworks that mirror fascistic impulses to dominate and eradicate difference. This is evident both in how his films are made and in what they depict. As a self-declared auteur, von Trier exerts extreme control over the filmic universe, often using austere or dogmatic aesthetic rules. (Notably, he co-founded the Dogme 95 movement, which imposed strict “vows of chastity” on filmmakers to eliminate certain freedoms in shooting and editing – an ironic manifesto of control in the name of artistic purity.) His narratives are frequently chapterized or guided by voice-of-God narrators, suggesting an omniscient, controlling authorial presence that dictates the fates of characters with little room for spontaneity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the thematic and visual homage he pays to fascist and totalitarian motifs. For instance, Zentropa (Europa), set in post-WWII Germany, begins with a hypnotic voiceover counting down as if to place the viewer under trance; the stark black-and-white cinematography with occasional color, the rigid compositions, and the depiction of a society in the grip of rebuilding (and lingering Nazi conspiracies) all evoke the aesthetics of control associated with fascist propaganda and film noir. The film explicitly engages fascism in its content – Zentropa is a depiction of Germany’s fascist culture in stark contrast with American pragmatism (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative) – but also enacts a kind of fascistic control over its audience through style. The viewer, like the film’s protagonist Leopold, is “hypnotized” into a journey where moral agency is suspended and a commanding narrative voice dictates reality.

Crucially, von Trier’s cinematic worlds operate with fascistic logic internally. In a fascist ideology, power demands absolute conformity and punishes deviation; it thrives on the spectacle of domination and the scapegoating of an “other.” Von Trier’s stories consistently construct women as that scapegoated Other who must be dominated, punished, or sacrificed to preserve a (patriarchal) order. One commentator observes that the fascistic perspective “cannot brook any deviation from a society that functions in lockstep with its introspective vision of a perfect model” and demands a bureaucratic authority “to oversee and regulate everything” (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative). This description uncannily fits the internal logic of von Trier’s narratives: any attempt by a female character to deviate from the role assigned to her (usually a role of service, submission, or silent suffering) is met with narrative discipline – often violent or deadly. In Breaking the Waves, when Bess acts on her own desire and later on her own interpretation of spiritual duty (a deviation from her community’s norms), the story’s events brutally correct her, leading to her demise. In Dancer in the Dark, Selma’s small transgressions (hiding money, defending herself against exploitation) inexorably lead the system to execute her, as if to reassert the social order she inadvertently defied. Von Trier’s cinema allows no woman to get away unpunished for deviating from patriarchal expectations, which is very much in line with an authoritarian ethos that enforces uniform obedience. This has led critics to label his directorial stance as overtly misogynistic and even fascist in spirit. (Indeed, in broader discourse, von Trier has been provocatively associated with fascism – not least due to his ill-judged joke about sympathizing with Hitler at the Cannes press conference in 2011, which resulted in his temporary ban from the festival. While he claimed it was in jest, the remark underscored his penchant for flirting with fascist rhetoric and the discomforting power dynamics it entails.)

Even behind the camera, von Trier’s behavior has reflected an authoritarian patriarchal dynamic. He is notorious for pushing his actresses to psychological extremes during production. Björk, the star of Dancer in the Dark, accused von Trier of sexual harassment and bullying on set (she described the experience as making her realize “a director can touch and harass his actresses at will and the institution of film allows it” (Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny)). Other actresses have given mixed accounts: Charlotte Gainsbourg, who worked with him repeatedly, said “maybe he’s capable of that… but he didn’t do it with me” (Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny) – a defense that inadvertently mirrors the logic of excusing abusive men as long as they aren’t abusive to everyone. Such stories support the view that von Trier runs his film sets (and narratives) like a tyrant testing the limits of his power over those in weaker positions. The power dynamic is clear: the (male) director-author as the locus of control, and the female performer/character as the subject of that control. This dynamic translates into the films’ content, where female characters often seem like marionettes of a cruel puppeteer, made to dance through suffering for the spectacle of it.

Phallogocentric Fantasies on Film: Case Studies of Misogynist Masterplots

Von Trier’s most infamous works reveal a consistent pattern: they place a female protagonist at the center, only to construct a narrative that torments, breaks, and often destroys her. As one commentator wryly notes, “female protagonists do not a feminist film make” – in von Trier’s case, having a woman lead serves to foreground her torment, not her empowerment (Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny). Time and again, his plots centre around a woman’s ruin, as if enacting what Anders would call the ultimate masterplot of phallogocentric culture: the sacrificial story of the female Other, who must suffer to affirm the male-dominated moral order. Below, we examine four key films – Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist, and Zentropa – to see how phallogocentrism, misogyny, and authoritarianism intertwine in von Trier’s narratives.

Breaking the Waves (1996): Sacralizing Female Sacrifice

(Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny)In Breaking the Waves, the heroine Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) endures a harrowing journey of self-abnegation. A devout, childlike woman in a strict Calvinist community, Bess marries Jan, a worldly oil-rig worker. When Jan becomes paralyzed in an accident, he beseeches Bess to prove her love by having sex with other men and recounting the encounters to him – a request Bess believes is sanctified by God’s voice. In her naiveté and devotion, Bess willingly prostitutes herself, convinced that this sacrifice will somehow heal her husband (Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny). The film charts Bess’s descent from innocent bride to outcast: she is increasingly degraded by the men she solicits (at one point brutally beaten and raped on a ship by clients so violent “other prostitutes would not go there” (plot explanation - What happened to Bess near the end of Breaking the Waves - Movies & TV Stack Exchange)). Eventually, Bess is murdered by these thugs – a graphic culmination of her attempt to fulfill Jan’s phallic fantasy. In the end, Jan miraculously recovers (the implication is that Bess’s sacrifice worked), and the film iconically closes with an image of church bells ringing in heaven, as if celebrating Bess’s martyrdom.

Critics have hotly debated the meaning of Breaking the Waves’ conclusion, but from a feminist perspective it appears deeply phallogocentric and misogynistic. The entire narrative is a masterplot of female sacrifice: Bess has no storyline of her own apart from serving her husband’s desire, and the film’s “miracle” ending essentially validates Jan’s exploitation of her. Bess’s difference – her own yearnings, her mental instability, her sexuality – is systematically erased or redirected to serve the male other. She literally gives body and soul to uphold a masculine fantasy (that a wife’s sexual purity/impurity can save her man’s life). The phallus-as-master-signifier drives the plot: Jan, who cannot perform sexually due to paralysis, still occupies the position of the one-who-has (the phallic authority), as he dictates Bess’s sexual actions from afar. Bess, in turn, occupies the position of lack or instrument: her only way to gain meaning is through obedience to his narrative. The film’s overt religious imagery further paints Bess as a Christ-like figure who dies for another’s sin/need – a classic patriarchal trope co-opting a woman’s agency in the name of a “higher” (male-defined) purpose.

Many viewers experience the film as profoundly disturbing in its treatment of Bess, and not without reason. Critic Mark Kermode famously condemned Breaking the Waves as “a genuinely pernicious and misogynist movie” ("Breaking the Waves" | World Literature Forum), and others have echoed that the film appears to glorify the victimization of a woman under the guise of spiritual purity. The opera adaptation of the film (by composer Missy Mazzoli in 2016) consciously altered aspects of Bess’s characterization to counter this misogyny: reviewers noted that the opera “subtly but effectively redresses the misogyny of von Trier’s film, imbuing Bess with strength, complexity, and a sense of agency” that the original denied her (Adelaide Festival: Breaking the Waves – Witness Performance). Such a correction highlights how one-dimensional and authoritarian Bess’s portrayal in the film is – she is confined to the role of “good, submissive woman” to a horrifying extreme. The master narrative admits no alternative outcome: the film does not entertain, for instance, that Bess could refuse Jan’s request and still be “good,” or that Jan’s demand is fundamentally abusive. Instead, any deviation by Bess from absolute self-sacrifice is framed as lack of love or faith. In this way, Breaking the Waves operates like a morality play written by a tyrannical patriarch: its heroine’s only path to (posthumous) glory is through total obedience and annihilation of self. It’s a narrative that reinforces domination and absolute control by showing a woman who internalizes that control so completely that she destroys herself with a smile of beatific devotion.

From Anders’ perspective, we might say the film intensifies the fetish of castration inherent in phallogocentric thought. Bess’s “value” in the narrative comes from her willingness to be castrated symbolically and literally (she is stripped of dignity, ostracized, physically violated and killed). This gruesome spectacle serves as the fetishistic proof of devotion: the film (like Jan) lingers on her suffering as if it were the necessary currency to buy back male wholeness. In Freudian terms, Jan’s terror of loss (of life, potency, phallus) is allayed by offering up the woman as sacrifice; the woman’s body becomes the fetish-object that is destroyed to deny the fragility of the male body. Such subtext is not far-fetched – von Trier’s narrative logic aligns closely with the unconscious logic of fetishism and misogyny that Anders critiques in psychoanalysis. The difference is that von Trier presents it not as pathology, but as tragic transcendence, which is perhaps even more insidious. By couching Bess’s abuse and death in romanticized, transcendental tones, the film aestheticizes misogyny – turning “woman’s ruination” into a grand, meaningful drama, rather than a reprehensible injustice.

Dancer in the Dark (2000): Maternal Martyrdom under the Law

If Breaking the Waves evokes a religious master narrative to justify female suffering, Dancer in the Dark uses the melodrama of a musical to similar effect, positioning its female protagonist as a martyr under an authoritarian system. Selma Ježková (played by Icelandic singer Björk) is a Czech immigrant in 1960s America, a single mother working in a factory. She is also slowly going blind from a genetic condition. Selma’s sole guiding purpose is to save money for an operation that will prevent her young son from suffering the same fate of blindness. In the course of the film, Selma is exploited and betrayed by a male “friend” (a neighbor who steals her savings), and when she attempts to recover her money, she ends up killing him in self-defense. Despite her understandable motive, Selma is arrested and subjected to the full force of the American justice system. The climax of the film sees Selma convicted of murder and, in a drawn-out, emotionally shattering sequence, executed by hanging – all while she, a former musical-lover, sings through her tears in a final hallucination of song. The film thus traces an arc from selfless motherly devotion to ultimate self-sacrifice: Selma dies so that her son may have the operation and see in the future. It’s no coincidence that she literally refuses to speak the truth that could save her (revealing the reason she hoarded money) because she swore an oath not to divulge it – effectively choosing martyrdom over self-defense.

Like Bess, Selma is constructed as a perfect victim, a woman whose goodness is defined by her willingness to suffer unjustly without anger or resistance. This is the patriarchal ideal of the sacrificial mother taken to extremes. The narrative’s phallogocentric structure lies in how it frames law, authority, and reason against a singular, innocent feminine subject. Selma’s worldview is one of emotion, art (she loves musicals), and personal loyalty – all coded as naïve, “feminine” qualities in contrast to the cold, procedural logic of the law (the logos of the patriarchal order). When these worlds collide, the master narrative of authoritarian justice grinds her to dust. There is no space in that narrative for Selma’s difference (her poverty, her disability, her foreignness, her femininity) to be accommodated or understood with empathy. Instead, she is processed as a criminal and disposed of, as the letter of the law dictates. The film thereby underscores the cruelty of an absolute system of control – ostensibly the American penal system, but symbolically the entire patriarchal structure that punishes women who do not or cannot conform. Selma’s act of violence, however desperate and forced, marks her as deviant and dangerous in that system’s eyes; like many real women who have been harshly punished for defending themselves against male violence, she is shown no mercy. The outcome reinforces domination: the state (a male-coded authority) demonstrates its total power by executing a powerless woman, regardless of extenuating context.

Von Trier heightens the pathos of this tale with a highly manipulative aesthetic. The film’s notable stylistic quirk is that Selma frequently retreats into imagined musical numbers (shot in vibrant color and sweeping camera movements) whenever reality becomes too painful; yet these joyous interludes only accentuate the bleakness of her actual situation when the music stops. By the final scene, as Selma sings “Suspended in air” while blindfolded on the gallows, the emotional manipulation is at its peak. The audience is made to weep for her — an effect von Trier clearly orchestrates — but one must ask: to what end? Is it merely to shock and sadden (aesthetic cruelty for its own sake), or is there a critique embedded? Some have argued the film is an indictment of American justice or capital punishment, given its obvious critique of the death penalty and the mob-like delight of the onlookers at Selma’s execution (Dancer in the Dark - THE CINEMATOGRAPH). Indeed, von Trier, a European, positions the American system as an explicit villain. Yet, in doing so, he still uses the suffering of a woman (and an immigrant disabled woman at that) as the dramatic vehicle. The critique of systemic injustice comes at the cost of subjecting a female character (and the actress – who reportedly was so traumatized by the process she vowed never to act again) to every conceivable torment. Selma’s story becomes another voyeuristic martyrdom, consistent with von Trier’s pattern. As a review in Cinema Scandinavia bluntly summarized, “for much of Dogville’s three-hour running time, Nicole Kidman is beaten, chained and raped; ... poor Emily Watson gradually became a brutalised prostitute in Breaking the Waves (1996)” – and by implication, Dancer in the Dark adds that Björk’s Selma is falsely accused, impoverished, and hanged (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com). In von Trier’s filmography, it seems, women are fated to suffer horrifically: “in his films, women are beaten, raped, depressed, falsely accused, murdered, and commonly said to side with the devil” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com).

From a theoretical angle, Selma’s fate in Dancer in the Dark can be read as the ultimate maternal castration fantasy. In psychoanalytic terms, the mother is often the figure who must be sidelined or sacrificed for the child (the next bearer of the phallus, if male) to thrive; Freud’s theory implies women gain fulfillment only through bearing sons who will then carry on the legacy that they, as women, cannot. Selma’s entire motive is exactly that: she works herself to death (literally) so that her son might have a sighted life. The master narrative of patriarchy idealizes such maternal self-sacrifice – it’s the logic behind countless cultural stories of the “good mother.” Von Trier intensifies it to a tragic extreme, stripping Selma of any possibility of personal happiness or agency outside her role as mother. Notably, Selma is virtually asexual and undesiring in the film (unlike Bess or other von Trier heroines who have sexual components); she exists almost as an embodied will-to-sacrifice. By removing her sexuality, the film makes her a pure martyr, which in some ways is even more dehumanizing. She is positioned as the ultimate object – an object of pity, of legal punishment, of narrative catharsis – rather than a subject who desires. The phallic order (embodied by the court and the executioners) speaks and acts; Selma sings, but ultimately she is silenced when the trapdoor drops. The overwhelming message is that the order must be satisfied, the debt paid in blood – a very authoritarian, even ritualistically fascist notion of justice.

For all its evocation of compassion, Dancer in the Dark thus reinforces the idea that a woman’s highest virtue lies in silently accepting violence for the sake of others. This is a notion entirely in line with patriarchal folklore (from saints to fairy tales), and von Trier’s aesthetic virtuosity only sugarcoats the bitter pill. The audience may cry for Selma, but the film allows no one to save her or question the inevitability of her punishment. In this closed moral universe, like in Breaking the Waves, a woman’s difference (her pleas, her unique situation) cannot be heard by the law or by God; she can only achieve a form of tragic transcendence in death. It is the erasure of difference par excellence – Selma’s individual life is obliterated to uphold the abstract rule. As Anders might say, the phallogocentric master narrative (here, the Law of the Father/Nation) demands its human sacrifice, and it is always the “not-all” (the woman who is outside full symbolic power) who is offered on the altar.

Antichrist (2009): Misogynist Horror and the Demonization of Woman

If Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark swathe their misogyny in art-house melodrama, Antichrist lays it bare in the visceral language of horror. This film is perhaps von Trier’s most overt confrontation with the figure of the female as evil or chaotic, and it explicitly draws on the Western history of misogynistic ideology – from witch-hunts to Freud’s notion of feminine madness – albeit in a grotesquely exaggerated fashion. The premise is deceptively simple: a married couple, identified only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), lose their infant son in a tragic accident. The mother is plunged into crippling grief and guilt, and the father (a therapist by profession) takes her to a remote forest cabin named Eden to undergo an experimental psychotherapy retreat. In the isolation of the woods, unnatural and terrifying events unfold as She’s mental state deteriorates. The film spirals into surreal, nightmarish territory: there are talking animals (a self-disemboweling fox intones “Chaos reigns”), visions of macabre sexuality, and eventually, episodes of extreme violence – including the infamously graphic scenes of genital mutilation (She cuts her own clitoris with scissors, and earlier brutally injures He’s genitals). The climax involves She attempting to kill He, and He ultimately strangling her to death and escaping the cabin as seemingly damned souls of women (perhaps the spirits of witches) rise from the earth.

From its title onward, Antichrist engages with religious and psychoanalytic symbols of woman-as-demon. The film’s epigraph “Nature is Satan’s Church” and its setting in Eden position the story as a perverse anti-Genesis: instead of Eve tempted by Satan, we have a modern woman who becomes a kind of Satanic force (or channels it) in the wild. Throughout the film, it is suggested that the female character has internalized profound misogyny during her academic research on witch trials. He discovers her thesis notes, which indicate she had been studying the systemic torture of women (called “gynocide”) and the idea that women are inherently evil; disturbingly, it appears She started to believe these ideas, developing a conviction that all women are evil. Thus, von Trier folds in a metafictional layer: the female character believes in misogynistic doctrine, which then possesses her, as she acts out monstrous cruelty. This narrative turn intensifies Lacanian sexism to a fever pitch – the woman effectively occupies both sides of the phallogocentric equation: she is the castrated, abject subject, and she is also the punishing phallic authority (when she mutilates herself and attacks her husband, she is enacting the law against her own femininity). In psychoanalytic terms, one could see this as the ultimate tragic result of internalized phallogocentrism: the female subject, driven mad by a society that labels her sex as sin, becomes the agent of her own (and other women’s) destruction.

Critics were sharply divided on Antichrist’s meaning and value. Many denounced it as simply misogynistic horror porn, reveling in archaic hatefulness under the guise of art. The film was notable for receiving an unprecedented “anti-prize” at Cannes from the ecumenical jury for its perceived misogyny (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen) (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com). Daily Mail critic Christopher Tookey, for instance, said of Antichrist that “the man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink,” encapsulating the view that the film’s portrayal of its female character is sick and indefensible (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com). It’s easy to see why the backlash occurred: Antichrist explicitly focuses on the psychological instability and moral depravity of women, to the point that it suggests (even if ironically) that womankind is a force of nature aligned with Satan (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen). Von Trier even reportedly hired a “misogyny consultant” on set – someone whose job was “to furnish proof of the fact that women are evil” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com) – a provocation that indicates how self-consciously the director was leaning into sexist tropes. Indeed, as the Cinema Scandinavia article quips, “in his films, women are… commonly said to side with the devil” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com); Antichrist is the film where this literally happens, as She aligns with (or is overtaken by) dark natural forces. The laundry list of atrocities in the movie (mutilation, murder, bizarre sexual violence) reads like the fever dream of the most woman-hating subconscious – a fact not lost on viewers who felt von Trier had perhaps let his own unconscious aggressions run wild.

Some scholars and critics, however, have argued that Antichrist is not endorsing misogynistic ideas but interrogating them in an extreme form. For example, Nolan Boyd’s analysis in Offscreen posits that the film is a polemical critique of hegemonic patriarchy: it dramatizes the oppressive symbolic violence enacted upon women under patriarchal ideologies, by showing a woman’s psyche (and body) destroyed by those very ideologies (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen). According to this view, the husband’s rational, clinical approach in the film represents arrogant masculine science trying to control feminine nature, and the ensuing chaos and horror expose the toxic repression at work. Boyd suggests that Antichrist “exposes the evil of heteropatriarchal paradigms of cultural hegemony” by carrying them to apocalyptic extremes (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen). In this reading, the film’s world is one where feminine subjectivity has no room to exist, crushed by the “pernicious cultural tyranny” of male-dominated order (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen) – hence the extreme outcome. There is textual support for such an interpretation: for instance, He’s inability to truly empathize with She’s grief and his insistence on treating her like a case study can be seen as the male logos trying to dominate the feminine chaos of mourning, which backfires disastrously. The cabin is named Eden – a site of first sin and female blame – suggesting that the couple are trapped in age-old scripts of gendered guilt and power. She’s turn to violence could be seen as a grotesque rebellion against a culture that has demanded she be either Madonna or witch; in choosing witch, she embraces the role ascribed to women by centuries of patriarchy and thus holds a dark mirror to He (and the audience).

However, even if one grants von Trier the benefit of the doubt that Antichrist is a kind of deconstruction of misogyny, the question remains: does the film merely depict misogynistic violence, or does it end up participating in it? The imagery is so extreme and the identification so lopsided (for much of the film, the audience is aligned with He’s perspective, seeing She as a problem to be solved or an enemy to survive) that many argue the film becomes an exercise in sadistic spectacle. By the end, when He kills his wife, the narrative has come full circle to a conservative conclusion: the hysterical, violent woman is eliminated by the rational man, who then wanders out into a sunlight clearing. One could read that as triumphant reassertion of patriarchy – the literal extinguishing of the empowered feminine force. The epilogue shows anonymous women (perhaps the souls of those persecuted as witches) swarming the forest; their presence is haunting but also suggests that female agency remains spectral, not concretely victorious. It’s ambiguous at best whether von Trier is sympathizing with those “witches” or using them as one more creepy image.

From a phallogocentric standpoint, Antichrist is intriguing because it makes the usually implicit sexist logic explicit and visceral. The film’s master narrative is essentially the oldest one in the Judeo-Christian book: Woman is the source of sin/chaos, and must be controlled or destroyed by Man for order to return. It’s the story of Adam and Eve re-enacted as psychological horror. Anders’ critique of psychoanalytic sexism – that it builds an entire theory of subjectivity on the notion of woman’s dangerous lack/excess – is almost too well illustrated here. She’s sexuality and grief are portrayed as an excess that cannot be contained by He’s symbolic mastery; ultimately, the only “solution” is violent containment (first her own self-mutilation, then He’s killing her). The film could be seen as presenting the inner workings of phallogocentrism in nightmare form: the male subject under threat (He, grieving and fearful), confronted by the female other whose jouissance (“feminine enjoyment” in Lacanian terms, tied to nature and flesh) is terrifying and disordering. The violent misogynist fantasy comes to life when that other is first pathologized (She is labeled sick, evil) and then punished/destroyed. In essence, Antichrist could be viewed as a phallogocentric exorcism ritual, in which all the demons associated with woman (irrationality, sexuality, witchcraft, maternity turned deadly – She is implied to have had a role in her child’s death through negligence or subconscious malice) are brought forth only to be spectacularly smashed. It’s a film that doesn’t just hint at castration anxiety or the male unconscious; it plunges into it, wielding the imagery of castration and witch-hunting with a disturbing literalness.

For many, this goes beyond critique into the realm of indulgence. The sheer relish of grotesquery suggests that von Trier is, at least in part, intensifying Lacanian sexism for shock value rather than offering any catharsis or alternative. Unlike a truly feminist horror film that might allow the woman to claim power or subjectivity from the chaos, Antichrist allows her none – She is utterly abject at the end. That nihilism aligns well with von Trier’s often professed personal depression and despair, but it does little to subvert the sexist master narrative it depicts. In the final analysis, whether one interprets Antichrist as misogynistic trash or a daring exposure of misogyny’s darkest heart, the film undeniably expands upon patriarchal myths rather than inventing new ones. It takes the worst ideas about women – that they are crazy, evil, sexually deranged, inherently tied to the Devil – and splashes them on the screen in bold letters. The oppressive symbolic violence long enacted upon women in culture is rendered literal violence in the film (“Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – Offscreen). For a Women’s Studies perspective, the concern is that von Trier’s portrayal does not challenge these ideas so much as reinforce their horrific power, leaving us with images that could easily fuel a misogynist’s fantasies (however unintended that might be). It’s the epitome of violent misogynist fantasy under the veneer of arthouse cinema – a film that, as one scholar noted, leaves one to wonder if it is “a work of genius or the sickest film in the history of cinema” for its portrayal of gendered violence (Antichrist: a work of genius or the sickest film in the history of cinema?).

Zentropa (Europa, 1991): Fascist Aesthetics and the Female Traitor

Although Zentropa (released as Europa outside the U.S.) predates the other films discussed, it provides a crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding von Trier’s authoritarian and fascist stylistic tendencies – and it, too, contains a telling portrayal of gender. Set in 1945 immediately after Germany’s surrender in World War II, Zentropa follows a young American of German descent, Leopold Kessler, who enters occupied Germany with idealistic intentions. He takes a job as a sleeping-car conductor on the Zentropa railway line, hoping to “show some kindness” and help rebuild Europe. Instead, Leo becomes entangled with a web of lingering Nazi resistance (the Werewolf terrorists) and moral ambiguity. Central to his entrapment is his romantic involvement with Katherina Hartmann, a beautiful German woman who is the daughter of the railway owner and, as it turns out, secretly a Werewolf agent. Through a series of noir-esque events, Leo is manipulated by Katherina and coerced into participating in a sabotage plot (placing a bomb on a train). In the finale, Leo, unable to escape the forces closing in on him, ends up on a train that plunges into a river – a bleak metaphor for Europe’s plunge into the abyss of its own guilt and conflict.

Zentropa is often analyzed for its striking form and political allegory. The film blends expressionist visuals (high-contrast black and white with occasional bursts of color), rear-projection techniques, and a hypnotic narration (voiced by Max von Sydow) that directly addresses Leo and the audience. This narration is memorable for its commanding, repetitive phrases (“You will now enter Europa…”), which serve to literally hypnotize Leo at the film’s opening and closing. The aesthetic is highly controlled, even oppressive – the viewer is constantly aware of an authorial voice and a contrived stylization that mirrors the feeling of being under some ideological spell (Europa (Zentropa) A Film by Lars Von Trier (1991)). Indeed, one critic noted that von Trier “wants his audience to watch… under a spell” in this film (Europa (Zentropa) A Film by Lars Von Trier (1991)). Such techniques underscore von Trier’s fascination with fascist aesthetics: the power of voice, image, and montage to overwhelm rational resistance and induce submission (a la Riefenstahl’s propaganda or Hitchcock’s psychological manipulations). It aligns with what we earlier identified as an authoritarian impulse in his directing – here wielded deliberately as part of the story’s form.

Within the narrative, Zentropa explores fascist and capitalist master narratives clashing on German soil. The character of Leo is caught between the American “pragmatic, capitalistic culture” and the German “idealistic, fascist culture” (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative). The film suggests that this external conflict mirrors an internal human divide – Leo himself has a divided psyche between duty and desire, conscience and compulsion (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative) (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative). What’s notable for our analysis is the role Katherina plays: she is the femme fatale who personifies the seductive appeal of the fascist side and ultimately the betrayal of Leo’s ideals. In the tradition of film noir, Katherina is at once alluring and treacherous, exploiting Leo’s attraction to lead him into catastrophe. This character type, the dangerous seductress, is a familiar misogynist trope in Western narratives, rooted in the idea of woman as traitor/other – the beautiful spy who will lead a man to his doom, the Eve who will make Adam fall again. By making Katherina an ex-Nazi conspirator, von Trier links sexual treachery with political treason, reinforcing the association of femininity with duplicity and threat to the social order.

In Zentropa, difference is literally deadly: Leo’s attempt to bridge cultures (American vs German) through love is repaid with betrayal. The master narrative at work is one of paranoia and purity – the idea (held by both the occupying Americans and the Nazi loyalists) that one must not fraternize with the enemy. Katherina embodies the taboo Other whom Leo naively trusts. The fascist mentality depicted in the film, as one analysis pointed out, cannot tolerate deviation or mixing; it demands uniform agreement and loyalty without exception (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative) (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative). Leo violates this by sympathizing with a German woman, and he is punished by becoming a pawn in her (and her faction’s) deadly agenda. Symbolically, one could read Katherina as a stand-in for how patriarchal or fascist ideology views Woman: as the uncanny infiltrator, the beautiful liar who could corrupt the male subject from his duty. It’s a very old archetype (from Delilah and Samson to Mata Hari), and von Trier’s usage of it here shows how comfortable he is leveraging misogynist archetypes in service of his narrative goals. While Zentropa’s primary aim is to critique (or at least depict) the futility and moral murk of post-war Europe, it incidentally reiterates a gendered masterplot: trusting a woman leads to ruin. Unlike Bess or Selma, who are innocent sufferers, Katherina is more akin to the Antichrist figure – an agent of chaos – but notably, she too is subjugated by narrative’s end (if alive, she loses Leo and her cause fails; in the original European cut, a voiceover indicates she commits suicide, though this was cut from the U.S. version). In von Trier’s universe, it seems no woman, whether saintly or evil, escapes unscathed. Each is either destroyed or neutralized within the closure of the film.

Stylistically, Zentropa doesn’t revel in Katherina’s punishment the way, say, Antichrist does with She’s, but it does apply an impersonal fatalism to all its characters. This aligns with the existential note scholars have observed: von Trier stages Zentropa in a phenomenological mode, caring less about individual psychology than about the grand mechanism of history and ideology in which individuals are caught (The Existential Framework of Zentropa's Narrative). That grand mechanism is very much a master narrative of history, one that in this film is explicitly linked to fascist and authoritarian structures. Katherina and Leo are small figures moved by larger trains (literally) of events. The film’s bleak conclusion – the train wreck – can be seen as a metaphor for Europe’s trajectory when trapped between two totalizing systems (fascism and capitalism). But on a micro level, it also signals the annihilation that occurs when a human relationship (like that of Leo and Katherina) is subsumed by those master narratives. There is no space for trust or love to thrive; only control, deceit, and violence prevail. Thus, while Zentropa is less overtly about misogyny than the other films, it still operates within a paradigm where female characters are cogs in a patriarchal-historical machine rather than agents of change. Katherina’s difference – her perhaps genuine conflict between love for Leo and loyalty to her cause – is not explored; she remains an enigmatic archetype. The authoritarian aesthetic of the film, with its commanding narration and stylized detachment, further keeps the audience from accessing her interiority. In this way, the fascistic impulse of von Trier’s storytelling extends even to how characters are rendered: with a certain coldness, as figures to be moved (or eliminated) by an overarching design.

Conclusion: The Master’s Tools and the Master’s House

Across Lars von Trier’s films, we witness a striking consistency: women are placed in master’s narratives that demand their suffering, degradation, or eradication as the price of storytelling. Whether the setting is a Scottish village, a American factory town, a primeval forest, or a shattered post-war landscape, the logic of phallogocentric domination persists – a logic in which male-defined structures (be it a husband’s wish, the justice system, religious morality, or ideological allegiance) exert totalizing control, and female difference is either punished or made sacrificial. In examining von Trier’s oeuvre through the lenses of Women’s Studies and Film Studies, informed by Anders’ critiques of psychoanalytic sexism, we see not merely isolated instances of a director “being mean” to his female characters, but rather a deeper alignment with the very frameworks that have justified misogyny through the ages. Von Trier’s art often mirrors the workings of patriarchy instead of challenging them: it enacts phallogocentric scenarios to an extreme degree, essentially playing out fantasies of women’s subjugation under the guise of auteur cinema.

One might argue that von Trier is holding up a mirror – that his violent misogyny is a deliberate reflection of society’s, meant to make us recoil. Indeed, his films generate intense discomfort and debate, possibly prompting viewers to question the paradigm that causes such cruelty. However, the mode of his presentation often blurs the line between critique and complicity. By failing to provide any alternative perspective or outcome in these narratives, von Trier’s films frequently reify the absolute power of their master narratives. In a sense, they can feel like closed systems – much like the fascist or phallogocentric systems they depict – leaving little breathing room for resistance or genuine critique from within. The aesthetic virtuosity and emotional power of his filmmaking can even seduce audiences into empathizing with the inevitability of these outcomes (“this is just how cruel the world is,” one might feel, rather than “this is unjust”). Without a doubt, von Trier is a provocateur; he “likes to be the man everyone hates,” as he himself admitted (Female protagonists do not a feminist film make: how Lars von Trier let slip his misogyny). But that provocation often comes at the expense of the very subjects (women, the marginalized) whose plight he portrays. It is telling that to many women viewers and scholars, these films do not liberate or illuminate so much as retraumatize and reinforce the sense of a rigged game.

Eric Anders’ theoretical lens helps clarify why von Trier’s cinema can be seen as an intensification of Lacanian sexism rather than a dismantling of it. Anders calls for freeing theory (and by extension narrative) from the rule of the phallus, to open possibilities beyond the binary of having/not-having (Disturbing pschoanalytic origins - UFDC Home - University of Florida). Von Trier’s films, however, are firmly ruled by the phallus in narrative terms: everything revolves around male needs (spiritual or carnal), male authority (legal or therapeutic), male gaze (the camera often aligned with the perspective of a controlling figure), or masculine-coded ideology (fascism, religious dogma). Female characters are conscripted into these regimes, much as the women of old Hollywood melodramas were conscripted into plots that punished them for desiring autonomy. The difference is von Trier cranks the dial to 11, amplifying the violence and agony, arguably to shock the audience’s awareness. Yet, in doing so, he sometimes reproduces the fetishistic logic Anders identified: an almost obsessive focus on women’s “castration” – in narrative terms, their humiliation and loss – that becomes the very fetish object of the film’s style. We watch Bess be destroyed, or Selma be hung, or She mutilate herself, with the camera unflinching, as if the films cannot look away from the spectacle of feminine pain. This risks turning the audience into voyeurs of misogyny rather than critical witnesses. The critical question becomes: does von Trier interrogate the phallogocentric master narrative, or does he masturbate it, so to speak, under the pretense of deconstruction? Many critics lean toward the latter interpretation – that he indulges in the misogynist fantasies even as he displays them.

For students and scholars in Women’s Studies and Film Studies, von Trier’s work serves as a challenging subject. On one hand, it provides clear examples of how phallogocentric domination can structure narratives and aesthetics: his films could be used as case studies in a class on the male gaze, the trope of the suffering woman, or the intersection of fascist ideology and gender (particularly Zentropa and Antichrist). On the other hand, his work raises ethical questions about representation: is it possible to critique violence by showing extreme violence, or does that risk valorizing it? Can an auteur’s self-aware misogyny escape being misogynistic in effect? These questions do not have easy answers, but they are precisely the kind of inquiries a rigorous academic discussion should tackle. Von Trier once hired a “misogyny consultant” as a provocatively literal acknowledgement of what many had accused him of; yet acknowledging a problem is not the same as solving it. Ultimately, whether one views von Trier as a sadistic showman or a tortured social critic (or both), the patterns in his films affirm a fundamental insight: master narratives – in myth, theory, or art – wield great power in shaping how we understand gender and power. When those narratives are phallogocentric and authoritarian, they work to erase difference and reinforce domination, often through compelling storytelling that normalizes the subjugation of the Other.

In conclusion, Lars von Trier’s violent misogyny on screen can be seen as the product of intertwining phallogocentric and authoritarian currents. His films build worlds where one master narrative or authority (be it a husband’s will, the law, God, or an ideological cause) demands total compliance, and where women’s lives become the canvas on which the costs of that demand are gruesomely illustrated. Viewed through Anders’ critique, von Trier doesn’t break free from psychoanalytic sexism but rather magnifies its darkest fantasies – exposing, yes, but also exploiting the cultural scripts that cast women as objects of violence. In doing so, he forces us to confront the uncomfortable proximity between art and oppression: how easily a film can slip from critiquing a nightmare to simply making us relive it. Perhaps the ultimate takeaway is the need for alternative narratives – films and theories alike – that do not take the master’s house (phallogocentric fascist logic) for granted. Only by imagining and enacting stories where difference is not a punishable offense, and where power is not synonymous with cruelty, can we move beyond the bind that von Trier so dramatically (if grimly) illuminates. Until then, his films remain cautionary tableaux of what happens when the master’s tools are the only ones used: they will carve the same wound again and again, in ever more elaborate patterns, all while calling it art.

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