Antichrist

Well, I have finally done it. I have watched Antichrist. The sounds that escaped me while watching, in the den of my bedroom, surrounded by photos of women I recognize but have never known and charcoals and comforters and candles, my own strange spiritual shrine, were unrecognizable to me as my own.

1.  Frustrated with the ending. If She shared the connection with the earth, if She understood the whisperings in the woods, the happenings of nature, the acorns falling and the grass biting, why does He get to kill her at the end? Because of course, I have a heavy reverence for this plane of existence. 
2.  But burning her in a glorious fire is our return to historical gynocide. It is a truthful look at how we interact with humans who take in the world differently. She, holding great despair, despair for which doctors can find no cure, must go. There is no place in the stoic world of reasoning for her kind of tumultuous anguish. 
3.  And, how shocking, the reveal that She watched her child clamber out the window and fall to his death as she experienced pleasure. But was it pure pleasure? I have an inkling that she also understood the comingling of great pain and great ecstasy. 
4.  He is a grand idiot, for deciding it was "Me" at the top of the fear pyramid. She knew herself, she saw herself just fine. He was missing one letter. It was "Men" she feared the most. For they have their way of killing women and she had become all too familiar with this reality. How could she live in the world with these men and still be complete? How could she ensure they could not run away or break her first or take advantage? Tie their shoes on the wrong feet from the early ages so his little feet are unable to move freely? Drive a stake through his leg and weigh him down with a grinding stone? Let them fall to their own death of their own accord?
5.  Self loathing is present. As She comes to grips with her own powers, her own awareness, her own insanity and despair, she also wills it away. Wouldn't it be nice to be "cured", to be able to walk among the moral majority in stride? I produce suffering so I too, must suffer. *cue genital mutilation*
6. My greatest question: When She claims that the women were burned, tortured or killed for being evil and He adamantly fights back, telling her that is not the truth, we are faced with another truth: that all of us, male or female, outsider or privileged, hold the capacity for good and evil. That is the point of the story of Eden, right? Perhaps she just understood this on a deeper level. She saw the evil that she was capable of and it made her mad (by our societal standards.) I could make an argument that She is simply enlightened. 
7. Even still, it is She that dies at the end. I am haunted by it, as the masses of women materialize and climb the hills of Eden. 
8. This is not a world in which life always wins. This is a world in which chaos reigns. Another word for which, I believe is choice. 
9. We hold the power to choose, at the very least we hold the belief that we can choose. But the ways in which our choices will reverberate through the universe, making lasting impact, are unbeknownst to us. This may ultimately wind up looking like chaos, I think it often does. But I also believe chaos has its own laws of governance.
10. Glad I watched it. Utterly perplexed. May go write a paper on it tonight. Is there anything better than imagery, the defiance of constructions, and the pulling apart of religion? I think not. Well, poetry. But poetry is all of those things implicitly. 
11. At this point I've made it through Melancholia, Nymphomaniac 1 and 2, Breaking the Waves, Antichrist. Next is Dancer in the Dark and then Dogville. Then I can move on to another director.