Screen Bodies Volume 3, Issue 2, Winter 2018: 79–85 © Berghahn Books doi: 10:3167/screen.2018.030206 ISSN 2374-7552 (Print), ISSN 2374-7560 (Online) Report Grief and Truth at the Beginning: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist Lorenzo Javier Torres Hortelano In Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009), the inverted story of a modern-day Adam (He) and Eve (She) and the death of their son, we witness the deep wound that von Trier himself sufered when his mother revealed to him a truth. He would later reveal this truth to the general public, and I follow the flm’s own allusive structure by returning to this revelation only at the end of this report. What we fnd in Antichrist is, basically, an inverted account of the Garden of Eden: a couple, in the middle of intercourse, lose their infant son in a tragic accident with dramatic consequences. As in the Bible story, the characters are, in some way, driven from their own private Eden, but here the fall occurs in an already fallen world. The flm’s black-and-white prologue would appear to be telling us that Anti- christ’s enactment of the expulsion from Eden, as it were, is triggered by the negligence of parental duties, by the parents’ sexual self-abandon in place of looking afer their son. The presumptive link between the two accounts would be the moment of sexual ignition, which makes von Trier’s story an inversion of the biblical fall from grace. Certainly, the afected black-and-white aesthetics of Antichrist’s prologue, the pristine baroque music in the shape of Rinaldo by Handel, and the seductive choreography of the naked bodies lead us to envisage a dreamlike or Edenic sequence. But the inversion of Eden is, from the start, almost complete. Castrati In the European Baroque era, Rinaldo’s aria was sung by the castrati: lyrical singers who, as children, were castrated in order to preserve their high-range, pristine voices. Von Trier does, efectively, castrate the male character by show- ing a closeup of sexual penetration. 1 Shot at an oblique angle, the greyscale shot is more about showing a sorrowful loss of a phallus than it is about showing erotic action. Indeed, what von Trier does from the beginning of Antichrist’s prologue is to imbue us with a sense of melancholy with the use of sad music that regis- ters the simultaneous loss and immortalization-in-death of a child. The aria, as