Notes on Lars Van Trier's new movie, Antichrist.

This is not a review. There are spoilers herein!! This is just an attempt to nail down some of the swirling imagery.

Ok, in the opening sequence, you are quickly made aware that this is a Serious Symbolic and Edgy Movie... it's b&w, slow mo, VERY cool camera work, and the score is operatic. There's what might be considered porn, but it's very arty. You also see the three states of water within the first minute and a half or so -- shower water, steam, and snow. You're set up immediately to think in terms of cycles, and threes. Water keeps reappearing. There is also shots of a fan, and washing machine going... cycles, and water in churning, cyclical motion.

Three characters: I don't even remember the main characters' names, but they are man, woman and child. There's some playing with archetypes like this, and the main action takes place in Eden (the Garden at Eden, no less). Archetypes: the man is rational, sky, logic, good, justice. The woman is emotion, evil, feet, ground.

Antichrist... funny that Willem Dafoe, who played Christ in the Last Temptation, stars. I think in part this character is the anti-christ because he kills that all may live. The woman character embodies evil, not in an Eve temptation way, but more in an opposite of Mary maternal love gone all wrong kind of way.

Dafoe doesn't get nailed to a cross, but he does get screwed to a mill wheel.

The three beggars... the three animals that represent the chaos / entropy of nature and also its three aspects, birth (deer), death (fox), and life-after-death (the crow that apparently rises from the dead).

Both characters suffer genital trauma... appropriate payment for parents whose only child dies while they fuck.

The female talks about nature ruling women's bodies... more cycle reference. She also apparently believes that woman is evil.

Still sorting this out.