Nature’s Horror and Grand Style in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

Abstract

This essay brings forward and analyzes some constitutive elements of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist that enable an understanding of its alleged morbidity and misogyny in terms of the sovereignty of aesthetic experience and its relation to the problem of cultural nihilism. These elements are the followings: the juxtaposition of horror and lyricism, and a corresponding archaic understanding of nature; the disengagement of visual and audio elements from their narrative function, and a corresponding deconstruction of the representational character of the movie itself.