Is this film promoting misogyny?

Same here... I had your exact thoughts.

What one man can do, another can do.

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I was really confused by what the film was trying to portray. I really enjoyed it but, as a woman, I was a little unsettled trying to figure out the point. Yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg's character was crazy. But that wasn't what seemed misogynistic to me. It was the fact that Willem Dafoe's character said she was wrong for believing all the misogynistic propaganda she read in her studies of gynocide, but then he started seeing these animal figures from her research and then she went crazy, and the constellations from the picture, and he ended up killing her and then that was the end.

So was he proven wrong by the animals assembling and his wife going crazy and trying to murder him? Was the final message that women are inherently evil like his wife said? Or was he hallucinating all that stuff and his visions of the animals and his murder of his crazy wife and all the women at the end (who were what? the spirits of murdered women? idk) supposed to symbolise the inherent violent misogyny in all men (even ones who denounce gynocide). I was so confused. The fact that he saw a talking fox and a deer before he saw the picture of the three beggars in the attic makes me think that the film was in fact supernatural and its message might have been one of mysogyny...

Or, was the point for the audience not to know what was real and which message was true in order to express the themes of human nature, like it's every woman's nature to be crazy and murderous and every man's nature to be violent and misogynistic? I don't know.

What about Misandry? Hurting a man in the balls has always been considered 'OKAY' by society- even for just trying to chat up or 'pull'

I think it's a justified reaction to interpret this movie as promoting misogyny. But I think rather that it's more promoting misanthropy, simply as viewed through the lens of committing violence against women. If that makes sense.

The way I see it is that this film is promoting misanthropy while commenting on double standards in society. The existence of this thread proves that this point has gone unheard, so yes, you indeed have missed something. The misogyny referred to in this film wasn't foreshadowing his attack on She, but actually her study on misogyny and violence against women. She fooled herself into believing women were inherently evil and thus deserved all the abuse throughout history. The misogyny came from her, actually, all the chapter titles were references to the stages of depression she went through in the film. His actions were merely responses to the things she did, caused by her own paranoia. It's about the reactions of outsiders towards one individual's depression, since this is what Lars went through while writing. He probably also had problems with his psychiatrist, haha.

It felt to me that she went mad from isolation, a probable latent mental illness and the overwhelming monstrosity of the misogynistic texts she was studying. My interpretation of the movie was that she was herself a victim of the hateful views she studied. Because she was so deeply involved with them, and since she was mostly alone (a small child isn't the best conversation subject), she began to unwittingly adopt that hatred for women and to be convinced that they were evil in nature.

I guess that the final straw for her was when she realized that she actually had seen her child climb up the window but had decided not to act to save his life. And that's because she had been convinced that she was evil, and thus acted in an evil way. Maybe she actually wanted to be guilty of something, so to better justify that hatred of herself and women in general.

All that said, I don't believe that Lars Von Trier's message is that all woman are evil or that he somehow promotes misogyny. If anything, it seemed to me that it was the insanity of the old misogynistic texts that was directly responsible for brainwashing Gainsbourg's character and pushed her into her own dementia. That misogynistic ideology is represented in such an hideous way, it itself seems to be tantamount to insanity and an ominous sense of horror.

I think it's just a theme, not necessarily something that is being promoted. I don't think it is saying that violence is justified. The man is faced with the truth that nature isn't pretty, it's not ideal. He can't control it despite his best efforts. She has refused to live up to her natural role of mother. She has internalized misogyny so she mutilates herself.

I think it's Man and Reason vs. Woman and Nature, and nature can't be reasoned with so it erupts in violence with man destroying it.


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You'll never get what you want if you don't know what it is.