Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF The Films of Lars Von Trier and Philosophy Provocations and Engagements Jose A Haro Ebook Full Chapter
PDF The Films of Lars Von Trier and Philosophy Provocations and Engagements Jose A Haro Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/politics-theory-and-film-
critical-encounters-with-lars-von-trier-bonnie-honig/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-phd-at-the-end-of-the-world-
provocations-for-the-doctorate-and-a-future-contested-robyn-
barnacle/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-chronicle-of-prussia-by-
nicolaus-von-jeroschin-a-history-of-the-teutonic-knights-in-
prussia-1190-1331-nicolaus-von-jeroschin/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-legacy-of-tatjana-
afanassjewa-philosophical-insights-from-the-work-of-an-original-
physicist-and-mathematician-jos-uffink/
The Securitisation of Climate Change and the
Governmentalisation of Security Franziskus Von Lucke
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-securitisation-of-climate-
change-and-the-governmentalisation-of-security-franziskus-von-
lucke/
https://textbookfull.com/product/childhood-and-nation-
interdisciplinary-engagements-1st-edition-zsuzsa-millei/
https://textbookfull.com/product/ancient-ink-the-archaeology-of-
tattooing-lars-krutak/
https://textbookfull.com/product/artists-in-the-archive-creative-
and-curatorial-engagements-with-documents-of-art-and-
performance-1st-edition-paul-clarke/
https://textbookfull.com/product/understanding-conflict-
imaginaries-provocations-from-colombia-and-indonesia-simon-
philpott-nicholas-morgan/
The Films of Lars von
Trier and Philosophy
Provocations
and Engagements
Edited by
José A. Haro
William H. Koch
The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy
José A. Haro • William H. Koch
Editors
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
Sandy and Joe… Thanks for tolerating this project and loving us.
v
Contents
2 The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss
Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the
Films of Lars von Trier? 7
S. West Gurley
4
Manderlay and the Universe of American Whiteness 37
José A. Haro
vii
viii Contents
8 Melancholia’s End 91
Timothy Holland
Index133
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
William H. Koch
In Lars von Trier’s most recent movie The House that Jack Built, the main
character Jack reflects on the nature of art. As he speaks the screen is filled
with clips from many of von Trier’s films, all but assaulting us with the idea
that his works should be considered in light of Jack’s statements and per-
haps the movie as a whole:
Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner
desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So they are
expressed, instead, through our art. I don’t agree. I believe heaven and hell are
one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell. The soul
is reason and the body is all the dangerous things, for example art and icons.
W. H. Koch (*)
Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan
Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
There are reasons to be skeptical of Jack as a stand-in for von Trier, though
von Trier certainly provokes this interpretation in a very intentional way.
Jack is a serial killer who views his violence as art. Von Trier is an artist who
has frequently been accused of violence against the audience through his
films as well as blatant misogyny and the outright abuse of his actresses. It
is possible to think of him as an artist who has been implicated in serial
violence both in his work and through his actions. A book such as this
wouldn’t be honest if it didn’t confess to anxiety in engaging extensively
with the work of someone about whom there is much reason to be uncom-
fortable. The material requires that we think and write against it, even as
we work through it, with hermeneutic suspicion and care. In his surface
identification with Jack, it is clear von Trier himself recommends such
anxiety and caution in the face of his work.
Despite the intentional resemblance, however, it is hard to imagine von
Trier extensively identifying with Jack or trusting his evaluations of his
work. Jack is successful as a killer more by chance and fate than through
his skill or art. He is a largely clumsy and incompetent monster. The “artis-
tic” nature of his kills is largely pedantic or crass. Though he pictures
himself as very clever and subtle, choosing the name “Mr. Sophistication”
for his serial-killing persona, he is far from sophisticated or even all that
interesting. His most artistic characteristic is that he is an engineer who
dreams of being an architect, and he crafts careful models and plans for a
house he will one day build. However, he turns out to be utterly incapable
of creating his house. As an artist, Jack is a banal failure. Perhaps we should
take this to mean that Jack is not von Trier or that von Trier’s violent
“killer” side is banal and uninteresting in comparison to the other charac-
teristics of his art. Or, perhaps, art itself is overestimated in terms of its
own qualities, no different from the pile of frozen and mutilated bodies
that constitute Jack’s “house” near the end of the film.
Determining how we should interpret The House that Jack Built in rela-
tion to Lars von Trier’s entire body of work is beyond the scope of this
introduction. But it does provide us with a useful fulcrum from which to
address the question of what philosophers are doing mucking about with
the films of von Trier. Art, Jack insists, is one of the dangerous things of
the body and of hell. Reason, and we might replace this with philosophy,
is of the soul and of heaven. If heaven and hell, body and soul are one, we
can see philosophy as a useful impetus for art or, more to our point, art as
a necessary provocation to philosophy. As Longtin states in the second
essay, “von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and
1 INTRODUCTION: PROVOCATION TO PHILOSOPHY 3
evaluating how we see and understand the world, which makes it the
perfect medium for moral provocations aimed at self-examination.”
The movies of Lars von Trier impact us, often enough, at the bodily
level, provoking visceral disgust, rage, fear, and despair—as Gurley states
in Chap. 1 they “gut us and leave us lying on the floor.” For many of us,
the unavoidable response to such an experience is to think, to reflect, and
eventually to speak and write. We are provoked to philosophy by the
bodily impact of von Trier’s assault. We are also provoked by the impor-
tance and agonizing demand of the questions and problems his movies
raise—problems translated to a bodily experience that insists on a reply.
If this is a major reason why philosophers are interested in the films of
Lars von Trier, it does not yet make clear why others might find useful
what it is we have to say about them. Why should you turn to the philoso-
phers in this volume to assist you in grappling with von Trier’s work?
There is a methodological connection between the way that von Trier’s
movies achieve their effect and the way in which philosophy operates.
Philosophy, often enough, shocks and discomforts us. It might begin in
wonder, but it tends to live out its life in the medium of the uncanny and
uncertain. The process of interrogating the obvious, the immediate, and
the fundamental is not without its costs and sacrifices. Frequently it can
only achieve its effect—getting us to see and think about the questionable
in what had seemed most firm and clear—by making our life-world some-
thing suddenly unfamiliar and strange.
For the most part, the movies discussed in this volume take as their
subject matter the most ordinary and common of human experiences. Our
cast of characters is not at all strange: newlyweds, husbands and wives
struggling with the illness of their partners, sisters tending to the sickness
of their siblings, mothers fighting for the future of their children, mothers
mourning the death of their children, communities offering assistance to
strangers, and strangers seeking to right communal wrongs. To be sure,
from time to time, the end of the world or a nymphomaniac may appear,
but they stand out far more for their familiarity than their foreignness—as
if the apocalypse were a common family drama and nymphomania our col-
lective nature. The chapters in this book are populated with similar char-
acters, so intimate with us as to be entirely unseen, and ultimately
monstrous in their own right: phantasms and wild tongues, the Death
Drive and the Semiotic Chora, the flesh of the world and states of excep-
tion. What discomforts about these movies and philosophical investiga-
tions, what provokes thought, is that the familiar becomes very uncanny
4 W. H. KOCH
S. West Gurley
Abstract Should we refrain from watching the films of Lars von Trier as
some critics, philosophers, feminists, and cultural theorists have suggested?
Trier’s films and his public antics have certainly given his critics ground
upon which to defend the claim that we should stop watching him. However,
there are multiple depths that may be plumbed in order to understand that
which his films have to offer. For instance, he may be sacrificing women for
some sort of cheap thrill that may be experienced by himself and his audi-
ence; he may be deploying a kind of irony that seeks to make explicit the
sacrificial treatment of woman as something written into Western cultural
practices—a sordid practice that he believes ought to be stopped; he may be
exorcising some of his own psychosexual demons; and he may be exploring
the relationship between all these possibilities. This chapter seeks to clarify
these possibilities through an examination of his trilogies and through an
examination of his own public and private commentary about the issue.
S. W. Gurley (*)
Department of Humanities and Philosophy, Blinn College, Brenham, TX, USA
“misogyny,” which had been following him around and that he most cer-
tainly had been aware of since his presentation of the character Bess in
Breaking the Waves (1996), by invoking some sort of l’art pour l’art kind
of defense that would thereby exonerate his personal life from the allega-
tions, he failed miserably. In fact, his comments to the two actresses
seemed, rather, to reinforce the claims that Lars von Trier hates women.
This time not solely the imaginary women of his film characterizations,
but in real life, in real time, with real live human beings who happened to
be women. There exists a pool of resources for those who hope to make
the allegations of misogyny—both in his films and in his articulated
thought life—stick. For instance, in one of his earliest manifestos, von
Trier says (1984), “We want to see heterosexual films, made for, about and
by men. We want visibility!”2 (Bainbridge 2007, 168). And then there is
the matter of his films, which I am here to think about.
Please indulge me as I attempt to catalyze the discussion with an appar-
ent divertissement. In a moment that puzzles me more and more the more
I think about it, a moment from The Apology of Socrates, Socrates initiates
his defense with a request that the citizens “pay no attention to my manner
of speech—be it better or worse—but to concentrate your attention on
whether what I say is just or not, for the excellence of a judge lies in this, as
that of a speaker lies in telling the truth” (Plato 1981, 24). Many folks read
over this request in light of the context in which Socrates already under-
stands that he is up against people who have convinced the audience that
there’s something important about following the protocols that they devel-
oped and codified and that now reflect how one “does things around here.”
There is an established way of doing things at proceedings such as this trial
that Socrates fears, having never learned the ways, will likely make him look
inept. Seems like a reasonable concern. This, for Socrates, is the first thing
that needs to be dealt with if he is to be successful at convincing the jury
either of his innocence or of the bogus nature of the charges against him.
We, instructors of Philosophy, pass over this apparently innocuous moment
in Socrates’ defense routinely when we teach the Apology as if it were to be
accepted because Socrates, after all, is able to discern the true from the
attractively said. I approach Platonic texts with an abundant dose of suspi-
cion that the assumptions ought to be challenged by the astute reader. In
this case, the underlying assumption seems to be that the truth is detach-
able from its manner of presentation or its packaging. And I am not sure
how one would go about verifying such an assumption. For one thing, any
alternative packaging that may be offered—in this case, Socrates’ more raw
10 S. W. GURLEY
and unrehearsed approach—for the truth may change the very truth that is
being conveyed. Here, it feels as if I need to assert that the assumption
seems to be that truth is not stated by, but rather indicated by, the packag-
ing, the manner of speaking. And maybe this is true about some things like
mathematical principles (a triangle is a three-sided figure, a triangle has
exactly three interior angles, etc., where I have said two things about tri-
angles that seem to indicate or call to mind a single thing, viz., a triangular
figure and I can say this in multiple languages that all seem to indicate the
same thing), but is this true of ALL things? If not, then what kind of things
are to be excluded? And what is the truth that Socrates seeks to indicate?
So many questions to ask. Whatever the case, it does seem that Socrates, by
beginning in this way, works within the possibility that those who accuse
him of corrupting the youth and of not believing in the gods of Athens are,
by virtue of the manner in which they speak, setting up the conditions
under which their accusations cannot but be seen as indicative of the truth.
And Socrates hopes to dislodge their manner of speaking, presumably in
order to indicate a different (perhaps even truer) truth.
I am currently convinced that Lars von Trier may be understood as one
who, like Kierkegaard and Socrates before him, attempts by way of the
multiple layers within his films of reflection on hot button topics to com-
municate the truth indirectly, to communicate by gesturing toward, but
never stating, the truth. A moment or two ago and a moment or two from
now, I was and will be convinced also that von Trier believes (and believes
that we should all notice) that truth is only ever communicated indirectly
as if one can only stand in some sort of oblique or parallax relationship to
truth. For the hard-nosed analytic language philosophers, I concede (as
von Trier surely would) that some truths can be stated directly and
unequivocally, like for instance that I gave an early version of this chapter
on Thursday, March 2, 2017, and that I was in Kansas City, MO, and so
forth. But, also like von Trier, I would add that we really haven’t said any-
thing resembling the deeply significant kind of truth—the kind that leaves
us wasted on the floor—that his work leads us to see, however vaguely or
ephemerally we may see it.
I limit my work here to discussions of some features of the following
films: (1) “The Gold Heart” trilogy, from which I have viewed Breaking
the Waves and Dancer in the Dark and not The Idiots; (2) “The USA—
Land of Opportunity” incomplete trilogy, from which I drew upon
Dogville and Manderlay; and (3) “The Depression” trilogy, which includes
Melancholia, The Antichrist, and Nymphomaniac. Some really interesting
2 THE ASS I KICK TODAY MAY BE THE ASS I’LL HAVE TO KISS TOMORROW… 11
work could and should be done in trying to map the evolution of thought
about women occasioned by the specific order in which these films were
made available to the public.3 The female characters in these films share
the common fate that they are sacrificed for the sake of something—a
husband’s physical mobility and sex life, a child’s ability to see, a commu-
nity, a rectification of a terrible injustice, a society of sane people, a force
of nature, and finally a belief about women’s sexuality. In her terrific book
on von Trier, Linda Badley writes:
When asked the loaded question about why he makes women suffer in (and
for) his films, Trier’s answer is disarmingly straightforward: ‘Those charac-
ters are not women. They are self-portraits’ [says von Trier] and his films are
psychodramas in which gender roles are metaphorical projections in a role-
playing project whose core is an urgent identity politics. Vibeke Windeløv,
Trier’s producer from 1996 to 2006, offers this spin: ‘In society, women are
allowed to express more, emotionally, verbally. Think how rare it is for a
male in a movie to say and do all the things women say and do in Lars’ films’
(Tranceformer). Portraying himself as the victim of a kind of male repres-
sion, Trier claims to be repossessing aspects of himself that his parents had
discouraged—emotions, religious yearning, Guld Hjerte itself—and that
melodramatic Gold Heart Trilogy, being ‘feminine’ was therapeutic.4
(Badley 2010, 70)
Not that what the artist has to say about his own work should have any
hermeneutic authority, but it does seem fruitful to explore the possibility
that von Trier has some genuine insight into his “feminine” side, as he has
said he explores in these films. But this is tricky business. An analysis of his
films can perhaps be approached from multiple levels. First from the level
of how the female character can be understood to think of her sacrifice and
thereby how those people or institutions and entities think of her sacrifice;
but second, one can give an analysis of the films from the standpoint of
what it says about men (of particular men, e.g., von Trier) that von Trier’s
presentation indicates how they perceive the woman’s sacrifice. A third
layer of analysis could be done in terms of what the audience is expected
to accept and how the audience is expected to respond. I am suggesting
that a performative analysis could also be done in which we compare what
von Trier is doing with what he is saying through these female characters
who are meant to express his feminine side.
Breaking the Waves is a film about a simple-minded (perhaps develop-
mentally challenged) and devoutly religious woman named Bess, who
12 S. W. GURLEY
marries a stout and hearty oil rig worker named Jan. Bess sees Jan as the
answer to a series of prayers to God about who Bess ought to be, about
how Bess ought to behave. The conversations Bess has with God are
depicted within the film in two voices, Bess’ voice and Bess speaking in a
deeper tone, meant to be the sound of God’s voice. The most memorable
of these moments of prayer and meditation involve God’s voice chastising
Bess with statements like “Bess, you are a stupid, stupid girl!” Apparently
God echoes the sentiments and even the voices of the Presbyterian church
elders and others in her community. Bess thinks of Jan, everything about
Jan—his hunkiness, his “prick,” his manliness—as a reward for her having
finally done something that God approves of. The honeymoon scene is a
brutal combination of Bess’ physical pain in the loss of her virginity cou-
pled with the presentation of Bess’ imagining that Jan is highly titillated by
her pain. This commutes her experience of pain into Jan’s perception of
her experiencing pleasure—the movement from expressions of pain
through grimaces on Bess’ face to expressions that Jan interprets as orgas-
mic, euphoric rapture. Bess seems to respond by actually experiencing
euphoric rapture at the sight of Jan’s titillation, and so forth. Bess at that
moment begins to live, so to speak, for Jan’s physical/spiritual climax. She
cannot have her jouissance until he has his. Their jouissance, in her mind,
has become mutually constitutive. She believes this to be God’s gift to her.
Jan eventually has to go rejoin the workforce on the oil rig off the coast of
Scotland. Bess resumes her daily communiqués with God, praying that
God returns Jan to her. Subsequently, Jan is involved in an accident on the
rig which renders him paralyzed from the waist down and unable to work
any longer. He is returned home to Bess, who, as you might imagine,
assumes that this is the answer to her regrettably not-specific-enough
prayer. Jan, presumably imagining that Bess loves sexual intimacy so much
that she will not be able to go on, encourages Bess to have sexual encoun-
ters with other men and, presumably to make her feel less inhibited about
doing so, encourages her to recount her sexual escapades to him.5 Bess
interprets Jan’s titillation in response to her escapades as encouragement
to continue. Eventually it becomes clear to Bess that God is making Jan’s
physical condition better with every sexual encounter she has with others
that she recounts to Jan. Jan makes great strides at improvement. Each
sexual entanglement progressively becomes more violent and more
depraved as Bess has now begun to get “tarted up” like a prostitute for
each encounter. She is taunted by folks in the church and the town.
Eventually she becomes persona non grata in the village for the appearances
2 THE ASS I KICK TODAY MAY BE THE ASS I’LL HAVE TO KISS TOMORROW… 13
of impropriety that she exhibits. But she persists, putting up with the
taunts, jeers, and often physical affronts made by her neighbors. She is
being punished FOR her sexual escapades and BY them. But Jan’s health
keeps improving and he has come to enjoy the stories of her adventures
more and more. She is providing the occasion for a masturbatory fantasy
for Jan. Now it seems possible that he might walk again. Bess imagines
that her sexual encounters are not brutal enough (she must be punished
after all for having lust and for depending so much on Jan that she prayed
him into paralysis) to bring Jan all the way back to full functionality below
the waist. She pays the ultimate price with her life. Six months later, Jan
walks again. The diagnosis of the film is that Bess died of goodness and
that her goodness was not fit for this world.
Dancer in the Dark presents a different kind of sacrifice in the form of
a rather poor factory worker, Selma, who happens to be going blind
through some congenital defect and learns she has passed it on to her son.
There exists a procedure that will prevent her son from going blind. Selma
works really long hours in the factory in order to set aside most of her sal-
ary to pay for this procedure for her son. She seeks to save her son’s sight,
cost what it may. Selma moves in and out of some musical fantasies that are
brought about by the sounds of things, ordinary things: a dripping faucet,
a tapping pen, a cough, a sneeze. The musical fantasies seem to make ref-
erence to old Hollywood musicals. Everyone around joins in the musical
performance as she sings lyrics that indicate she may have gone a bit deeper
into reality than most folks are able to go—or perhaps she goes further
away from it than most folks dare to go. This is one of the key issues of the
film. A man, her friend whom she trusts, betrays her. Because she is saving
so diligently, when asked if her friend can borrow some money (his situa-
tion is pretty dire) she refuses even though it pains her to do so. He ends
up arranging things so that it looks as if Selma has stolen money from his
family. She ends up killing him because he begged her to, believing that
his life is over, even though he never let on to anyone else that he wanted
this fate. Selma ends up being tried and convicted of murder and is given
the death penalty. She accepts the jury’s verdict in the knowledge that at
least her son will be prevented from going blind. In this film, only women
seem to be capable, though not all of them cede to doing so, of grasping
her sacrifice and sympathizing with her reasons for doing it. They also are
the ones who understand her need for a rich fantasy life. They help her to
bring it about. The sacrificial feature of Dancer in the Dark has to do with
the sacrifice a mother makes for her son. Selma operates with a singleness
14 S. W. GURLEY
of purpose all the way to her death. Even though she notices moments of
injustice along the way, she remains focused on saving her son’s sight, on
saving her son from the fate that life has dealt her.
Grace Mulligan (!!!) is the central figure in two of von Trier’s films:
Dogville and Manderlay. In Dogville, an imaginary old mining town in
Colorado that is at the dead end of what used to be an old mountain pass,
is the site where Grace, being chased by gangsters—we’re left to assume
that they intend to kill her—ends up trapped. Tom Edison, the resident
philosopher, convinces the town folk to provide her refuge from the wolf
at the door, so to speak. Grace insists upon doing something to earn her
keep, not being accustomed to accepting charity, and the townspeople end
up using Grace to accomplish tasks that they do not need done, but that
they would like done. For instance, Grace agrees to clean the town clean-
ing lady’s house, to assist a blind man to admit that he is blind, and to help
weed the gooseberry bushes, things that are not necessary. The town
becomes dependent on having these things done. Eventually Grace is bru-
tally raped by one of the townsmen. This marks the point in the almost
four-hour story where Grace acknowledges that she is being treated as if
she were property by the people who originally agreed to provide her ref-
uge. Eventually, she becomes the town prostitute, the town scapegoat.
Grace gives a speech that lets everyone know how she feels and they end
up making arrangements for the gangsters, who were originally chasing
her, to come to town to retrieve her. The town requests that the reward be
paid to them for turning her over to them. Little did they know that
Grace’s father was the crime boss who ordered the search for her. Upon
hearing about his daughter’s adventure with them, and with Grace’s
approval who proclaims, “this town is not worth saving; the world would
be better without it,” he has everyone in town killed and the town burned
to the ground. Only the town dog remains. The sacrifice here is a bit
tricky. Grace came to the town seeking asylum, but came to be thought of
as a gift, and then came to be thought of as a slave.
After leaving Dogville with her father, Grace ends up in Alabama at the
site of an existing property named Manderlay that still practices slavery, as
if they never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grace sacrifices her
time, her money, and her self-respect to liberating the slaves from their
master at Manderlay. In the process, Grace “unwittingly establishes yet
another regime of power, reifying her position to that of the “one who
knows.” The film exposes the hypocrisy of this situation in its apparently
2 THE ASS I KICK TODAY MAY BE THE ASS I’LL HAVE TO KISS TOMORROW… 15
As if Trier were thinking of some cultural archetype in the style of Adam’s rib,
where a portion of Adam is taken out and away from him in order to reveal
something, Trier creates female characters for the sake of reflecting something
about and to himself. This is the first layer of sacrifice and is present in all of his
films. If we were to stop the analysis here, we would be justified in concluding
that Trier is a misogynist, though perhaps unwittingly, in that his imagination
sacrifices women as if they were expendable, useful only to the extent that they
help him perform an act of therapy. At the second layer, and as if he cannot be
satisfied leaving the portrayal at the level of pure imagination, Trier casts seri-
ous actresses in the roles where these sacrifices (ritual sacrifices) take place.
This is another, an almost fully material, layer of sacrifice portrayed in his films
at the production level. Not all sacrifices are of the body. Some are of the
mind. Some are of social and emotional station. Some are political. But casting
women in the roles where these sacrifices are performed makes it such that the
imaginary is embodied in the cinematic production. And, here again, Trier
does not manage to evade the charge of misogyny since he has moved from
imaginary sacrifice on paper to the sacrifice of the body of the actresses who
play the female protagonists in his films. They bring the sacrifices to life in film.
All of the sacrifices (whether emotional, physical, social, psychological, or
political) gut us and leave us lying on the floor. Yet another layer of sacrifice
emerges: the sacrifice of the audience members to the films of Lars von Trier.
And this layer of sacrifice makes one wonder to what extent we should expect
sacrifice to be the essential component of living a good life, all beginning from
the maternal sacrifice. Perhaps, however—and it is here that I think Trier
might just be able to be understood as actually calling out rather than reinforc-
ing a misogyny that exists in our own westernized cultural imaginary, existing
in the depths of our collective unconscious, supported by the various ways in
which we rewrite and rehearse the economy of sacrifice in many of the things
we do—Trier has turned misogyny against itself by way of the movement from
personal imaginary to audience. Through the journey from script to cinematic
editing, Trier has created several films that make it possible for the audience to
question, perhaps even to condemn, its own institutional practices of ritualized
sacrifice of woman. Hence, the attentive audience will realize something that
might initiate a conversation that will conclude by making embedded misogy-
nistic practices explicit. We might be able to bring an end to these practices.
However, as audience members, we must be willing to give ourselves over to
Trier’s sacrificial economy in order to achieve it. When I watch the films of
Lars von Trier, I wonder what kind of mess we’ve made of things and what we
may ever do to set things right. We surely would have to begin with the pos-
sibility that sacrifice is rarely a good thing and should only be exalted in the
particular, never in the universal.
2 THE ASS I KICK TODAY MAY BE THE ASS I’LL HAVE TO KISS TOMORROW… 17
Notes
1. Cited from the press conference at Cannes, 2011, in Butler and Denny
(2017).
2. Lars von Trier, Manifesto 1 (released to accompany The Elements of Crime),
reproduced in Bainbridge (2007).
3. My sense is that an evolution in thought can be gleaned from and within the
order in which I have articulated them here, but it is noteworthy that The
Antichrist was released two years before Melancholia.
4. Badley (2010) excerpting from the film Tranceformer—a Portrait of Lars
von Trier (1997) and Thomas (2004).
5. I am aware here of a departure from Zizek’s account according to which
Jan, in making the request that Bess have sex with other men and give a
report after each occurrence, is taken to be already aware that the effect of
such reports will be to “keep awake his will to live” (Zizek 2013). On my
account, it seems a much more complicated affair in which Jan’s “will to
live” is integrally intertwined with Bess’ perceived jouissance at sexual
encounters. It appears to me that Jan, foolishly and yet typically, has inter-
preted his introduction of sexual jouissance into Bess’ cache of desires as his
having performed some sort of spiritual task, ushering Bess beyond her
womanly limitations of modesty and prudence.
References
Badley, Linda. 2010. Lars von Trier. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Bainbridge, Caroline. 2007. The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and
Artifice. London: Wallflower Press.
Butler, Rex, and David Denny. 2017. Introduction: The Feminine Act and the
Question of Women in Lars von Trier’s Films. In Lars von Trier’s Women.
New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Plato. 1981. Apology. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Thomas, Dana. 2004. Meet the Punisher: Lars von Trier Devastates Audiences—
and Actresses. Interview with Lars von Trier. Newsweek, April 5.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2013. Femininity Between Goodness and Act. The Symptom 14.
http://www.lacan.com/symptom14/feminimity-between.html.
CHAPTER 3
Rebecca A. Longtin
Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) seems to defy the very idea of cinema—in
particular, the realism of this artistic medium. At its birth, film was seen as
more of a technological marvel than an art because of its ability to replicate
R. A. Longtin (*)
Department of Philosophy, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA
e-mail: longtinr@newpaltz.edu
Ja yleisen ilon vallitessa hän kertoi, kuinka tuo kunnon mies nyt
raivosi vuoteessaan seuranaan hierojansa. Kitaransoittaja, pieni
pyylevä mies, alkoi huolestua. Hän meni ikkunaan ja mittasi
silmillään välimatkaa. Eräs mussafireistä tyynnytteli häntä:
»Ei se ole kovin korkea! Enintään kaksi metriä. Ei vain saa hypätä
liian paljon eteenpäin, vaan on liuttava hiljalleen pitkin kallion
kuvetta. Rinteen juurelta löydätte fetsinne ja kitaranne!»
*****
»Täällä ei ole yhtä mukavaa kuin kotona, vai kuinka? Näes, elämä
ei ole vain huvia, siinä on kärsimystäkin, he, he, he!»
Ja hän sulki oven jälkeensä. Nukahdin heti. Kun heräsin, oli vielä
yö. Makasin valveilla ja itkin, muistaessani äitini verentahraamia
kasvoja. Sitten kukko alkoi kiekua, ja näin aamun sarastavan. Talo
uinui unten helmassa. Avasin nopeasti ikkunan ja irroitin hiljaa
rattaanpuolalla rautaristikon, joka ei ollut kovin paksu. Pihassa oli
kirves iskettynä puunrunkoon. Kiskaisin sen irti, otin pienet tikapuut
kainalooni, nousin toisia myöten ylös ja kiipesin yli aidan. Toiselle
puolelle päästyäni juoksin minkä jalat kantoivat pitkin satamaan
vievää tietä.
*****
»Ja nimesi?»
»Kira».
He katosivat ikkunasta.
Ah, tämän yön tunteja! Vaikka eläisin tuhat vuotta, muistaisin vielä
kuollessanikin nuo kauheat hetket…