Lars von Trier’s Women 9781501322457, 9781501322488, 9781501322464

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Lars von Trier’s Women

Lars von Trier’s Women Edited by Rex Butler & David Denny

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America in 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Rex Butler, David Denny, and Contributors, 2017 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover Image: The Young Martyr, 1855 (oil on canvas), Delaroche, Hippolyte (Paul) (1797–1856) / Louvre, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2245-7 PB: 978-1-5013-4209-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-2247-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2246-4 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  vii



Introduction: The feminine act and the question of woman in Lars von Trier’s films 1 Rex Butler and David Denny

1 Performing the feminine 15 Linda Badley

2 Femininity between Goodness and Act 21 Slavoj Žižek

3 Listening to Dancer in the Dark: Singing as recalling the world 31 Ulrike Hanstein

4 A woman’s smile 47 Rex Butler

5 Female fight club: Lars von Trier’s women and the paradox of Being 67 Sheila Kunkle

6 Cruelty and the real: The female figure in Orchidégartneren, Menthe – la bienheureuse and Befrielsesbilleder 87 Angelos Koutsourakis

vi Contents

7 What is the gift of Grace? On Dogville 103 Lorenzo Chiesa

8 Manderlay: The gift, Grace’s desire and the collapse of ideology 125 Ahmed Elbeshlawy

9 Violent affects: Nature and the feminine in Antichrist 141 Magdalena Zolkos

10 A postmodern family romance: Antichrist 159 David Denny

11 Not melancholic enough: Triumph of the feminine in Melancholia 181 Todd McGowan

12 How to face nothing: Melancholia and the feminine 201 Jennifer Friedlander

13 Lars von Trier’s fantasy of femininity in Nymphomaniac 215 Hilary Neroni

14 Mea maxima vulva: Appreciation and aesthetics of chance in Nymphomaniac 233 Tarja Laine

List of contributors  247 Bibliography  251 Index  259

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Slavoj Žižek for allowing us to reprint his 1999 essay ‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’ from Lacanian Ink. Linda Badley was generous in supporting the project and encouraging the reprint of a section of her Lars von Trier, University of Illinois Press (2011). Parreshia gave permission for us to reprint Magdalena Zolkos’s ‘Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’ (2011). Thanks to Lorenzo Chiesa for reworking his essay ‘What is the Gift of Grace? On Dogville’, first published in Film-Philosophy (2007). Many thanks to all the inspirational authors and friends of this volume, who enthusiastically came on board to help contribute to the project, a project that is simply better suited for multiple voices than it is for a single one. Finally, thanks to Katie Gallof of Bloomsbury Publishing for her support and patience.

Introduction: The feminine act and the question of woman in Lars von Trier’s films Rex Butler and David Denny

‘I understand Hitler. I can sympathize with him a little bit.’ The ‘Nazi’ remark made by Danish director Lars von Trier at the premiere of his film Melancholia at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 is infamous, but as the website Senses of Cinema reminds us it is other comments made just before this that are equally as concerning.1 Sitting in front of a crowd of journalists and photographers at the press conference with the two lead actresses of the film, Kirsten Dunst, who plays the character Justine who suffers melancholia in the film, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who plays her sister Claire who is trying to help her, von Trier begins by saying that his next film will be a porn film, starring Dunst, who immediately says no, and Gainsbourg. Dunst, then trying to make things up, emphasizes that she and von Trier are still friends, while Gainsbourg for her part admits that after three films with him she feels as though she doesn’t really know him. In response to this, von Trier then says to Gainsbourg that he ‘knows her well from every angle’, at which Gainsbourg nervously laughs. He then extraordinarily suggests that Dunst asked him for a ‘beaver shot’ during the making of Melancholia, despite him telling her it wouldn’t be suitable, before elaborating on his hypothetical porn film: ‘Charlotte is behind it. I said there would be lots of dialogue, but Charlotte replied: “We don’t give a shit about the dialogue”. So there will be lots of unpleasant sex, a hard core film.’ By this point, Dunst has her head in her hands, while Gainsbourg can be seen edging away from von Trier on her chair, trying to put as much distance between the two of them as possible. There is no shortage of controversy surrounding von Trier and women. A search on the Internet entering the two terms ‘von Trier’ and ‘women’ will produce some 42,000 hits. On the first page of entries, we have a

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website entitled ‘Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist’, which is balanced immediately after by another asking ‘Lars von Trier Doesn’t Hate Women, So Why Won’t the Myth of Misogyny Die?’ The pattern is repeated just a few entries down with the posting of an article from the New York Times entitled ‘Hard Life for a von Trier Heroine’, followed by a series of clips from his films, purporting to show that he is not a misogynist but is in fact pro-woman. Then just a click away on the next page – less popular, naturally – comes the first of the academic essays, ‘Women, Suffering and Redemption in Three Films of Lars von Trier’ by Carleen Mandolfo, originally published in the journal Literature and Theology, and then again another essay, this time not an individual posting but a feature from the long-running online politics and culture magazine Slate, which asks ‘Is Lars von Trier a Misogynist?’ before tentatively concluding ‘maybe not’. The question of Lars von Trier and women is obviously a complex and controversial one. Women fill central roles and dramatize the abiding concerns of his cinema, all the way from virtually his first film Menthe – The Blissful (1979), in which two women decide together to leave a religious order, through to (at the time of writing) his latest film, Nymphomaniac (2013), which tells the story of Joe and her sex life from adolescence to adulthood. And in between there are a whole series of important roles for women and celebrated performances by women actresses, who either become well known as a result of working with von Trier or bring to his films the prestige built up over long and successful careers. There is the Danish actress Kirsten Oleson, who plays Medea, a role previously filled by the great soprano Maria Callas, in von Trier’s film version of Euripides’ classic play. There is the now highly regarded English actress Emily Watson, who plays in her first major film role Bess, the naïve young woman who sacrifices herself to cure her crippled oil worker husband Jan in Breaking the Waves (1996). There is the cult Icelandic rock musician Björk Guðmundsdóttir, who plays the almost blind Selma, who is hanged for stealing money for her son’s eye operation in Dancer in the Dark (2000), for which she also wrote the music. And, perhaps finally, there is the American actress Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays the character Grace in Manderlay (2005), in a role previously filled by the prominent Australian actress Nicole Kidman, and who later went on to play the part of the park manager in the recent Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic World (2015). The roles these women play have been culturally resonant, prompting widespread discussion about the social situation of women in western society more generally. In this sense, von Trier can be seen to go against the commonly perceived dearth of substantial roles for women actresses – especially for those not young and beautiful – not only in Hollywood but also in independent cinema. And they are not merely roles as the complementary other half in a standard drama or romantic comedy. The roles are varied; the backgrounds and occupations of the women are richly

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sketched. They are often understood to stand alone and not simply to attain their identity as the other half of a heterosexual couple. Indeed, von Trier frequently asserts – again, further challenging the conventional sexual division – that he actually identifies more with the female than the male characters in his films, that they more truly represent him and his inner self. In this regard, we might even describe von Trier, invoking a prior tradition of especially Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, associated with such figures as George Cukor, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, as a ‘woman’s’ director, a director for whom women and not men are the central characters (and, like those other directors, von Trier often explores melodramatic constructions in his films). However, as has often been noted – hence the conflicting interpretations of his films and, indeed, the widespread criticism and condemnation they have received – for all of von Trier’s privileging of women, what often happens to them is sacrifice, suffering and hardship. Medea, of course, is left by her husband Jason for Glauce, daughter of King Creon. Bess in Breaking the Waves is eventually killed by a shipful of murderous sailors. Selma in Dancer in the Dark ends up being hanged for stealing money to save her son’s sight. Grace in Dogville is mistreated and ostracized by the citizens of Dogville, and in Manderlay is driven out by the very plantation workers she originally helped liberate. And the same fate can be seen to befall the female characters of such other of von Trier’s films as Epidemic (1987), Europa (1991), The Idiots (1998) and Antichrist (2009). It is as though, for all of von Trier’s purported identification with his female characters, he actually enjoys putting them through their torments. And whether this is a simple sadism and hatred of women or a reflected masochism and hatred of himself, it does not ultimately matter. It is certainly something that exercises his critics and leads to their accusations of misogyny. Thus, to return to those websites we looked at a moment ago, in ‘Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist’, Batya Ungar-Sargon writes of Nymphomaniac: ‘The film and everyone in it hates anything feminine. It’s porn for the 21st century man.’2 Or, in a slightly more nuanced response, David Gritten in the UK’s Daily Telegraph in a piece entitled ‘Lars von Trier: Antichrist? Or Just Anti-Woman?’ argues that, while von Trier is not straightforwardly misogynistic, he is nevertheless culpable of putting his female characters (and the actresses who play them) through unnecessary torments: ‘The Great Dane, we may deduce, seems to get a kick out of putting his screen women in jeopardy or in violent situations.’3 And it is certainly something that academic treatments of von Trier also draw attention to, with Linda Badley in her important survey Lars von Trier (2011) feeling that she has to begin by justifying as a woman the very subject of her study: ‘Prepared by my feminism for an onslaught of misogyny [in von Trier’s films], I was instead transfixed, stunned and moved to see more of his films.’4

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But then, as has also been observed, virtually the only other constant throughout all of von Trier’s films is that his suffering female characters perform a ‘transformative’ act of some kind, which might be regarded as a protest against the treatment they receive and perhaps more generally against the society that would permit and encourage such suffering. Or, if it is too simple to regard the acts by these women as a protest against the treatment they receive, they can nevertheless be understood as opening up an alternative to the world in which they have to endure this suffering. In one way or another, they gesture towards another scene and therefore occupy a political character worthy of a theoretical intervention that transcends common sense and good versus evil pronouncements. Thus, most notably or at least the instance critics most often return to in discussing this aspect of von Trier’s work, the actions of Bess in Breaking the Waves in going back to the ship where she is probably raped and certainly killed seem impossibly to lead to her crippled husband walking again and a certain feminine jouissance being restored to the oppressive, male-dominated Presbyterian community that had previously shunned her. But this kind of transformative miracle occurs in virtually all of von Trier’s films, from the actress Gitte Lind crossing the boundary between fact and fiction in Epidemic, to Grace in Dogville unexpectedly exacting revenge against the villagers who have disrespected her, to ‘She’ in Antichrist invoking an amoral nature against her controlling husband, to Joe in Nymphomaniac shooting her male and perhaps too inquisitive interlocutor, to, on a truly cosmic scale, Justine in Melancholia communing with the rogue planet Melancholy in its path toward Earth, thus doing away with the world that had depressed and oppressed her The difficult question in the interpretation of von Trier’s films is what is the meaning of these acts? How to put together what seem to be the two common factors of von Trier’s oeuvre: his heroines’ suffering and the redemptive act they end up performing? Von Trier himself speaks of the essential drama of his films in terms of a ‘clash between ideal and reality’,5 but it is obviously more complicated than this. It appears that in some sense the heroines’ suffering and betrayal is necessary so that they can perform their act. It is only at their most extreme point when they are totally excluded from society that these women are in a position to carry out that transformative act that alters the situation completely. But the question is whether this act must be understood as compensation for this suffering or in any way an excuse for it. In other words, it might be not so much that suffering is necessary for the act as that the act is necessary for the infliction of suffering. And it is ultimately this that leads – in the more elaborated accusations of von Trier’s misogyny – to the argument that it is not that von Trier directly oppresses women but that he justifies their oppression on the basis of some unlikely and indemonstrable miracle that does not effectively change the status of the woman who carries it out. Von Trier is a misogynist

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not for directly imposing suffering on these women (although he does), but for believing that some other-worldly act could somehow alleviate their suffering, and therefore in some way justify it. We see this ambiguity played out symptomatically (and even we might say programmatically) by the successive responses of one of the most important critics on von Trier, Slavoj Žižek. It is notable that in his early and influential essay on Breaking the Waves, ‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’, Žižek, despite a number of hesitations, appears to approve of the ‘equation’ made in the film between Bess’s physical suffering and exclusion and the quasi-divine miracle of her resurrection of Jan. The triumphant outcome appears retrospectively to justify or explain the treatment meted out to Bess or at least to incorporate it within a wider economy that is at once social, psychic and political: It is easy to discover in her act what Lacan has defined as the modern, post-classical tragedy: the highest sacrifice is not to remain pure, intact, for the absent (or impotent) lover, but to sin for him, to besmirch oneself for him.6 But some five years later in the Introduction to his selection of Lenin’s writings, Revolution at the Gates, Žižek is no longer prepared to justify Bess’s suffering on the basis of some eventual transformative act or necessity of artistic form. He not only does not believe in any ‘equivalence’ between suffering and redemption, but also cannot justify what von Trier does to his female characters in any sense: [Bess’s] progressive suffering and inexorable self-destruction can put us in the position of the sadistic observer secretly observing what he officially condemns: this sadistic pleasure is the obverse, the hidden truth, of compassion. And for this, von Trier should never be forgiven.7 However – and the question is whether this makes it better or worse for von Trier – it is possible that there is no direct relationship between the suffering these women undergo and the act they perform. There is no quid pro quo or any kind of material or spiritual exchange between them. That is, these women when they perform their act do not necessarily represent any wider cause, not even that of woman. There is simply nothing that comes before what they do, which transforms everything around it. The suffering they undergo is not counted, not remarked, as either the cause of or justification for the action they undertake. Again, to take the example of Bess: when she decides to go back to the boat, she does not do it in any spirit of ‘revenge’ against the way she has been treated. She is perhaps not even doing it so that her actions will be noticed and recorded on some symbolic ledger. (If she speaks to God while she is deciding whether to do it or not, her decision

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also corresponds to her realizing that she does not need God.) And she undertakes it therefore without any guarantee that it will bring about that miraculous course she desires. She does it, we might suggest, in its own terms, as though the doing of it were its own justification. This is certainly a view of the actions undertaken by the women in von Trier’s films that we see in a number of the essays here, drawing on some aspect of Lacanian theory. In Lacan, a distinction is made between the ‘masculine’ symbolic order, in which something like those acts we are looking at is understood as an exception to the social, undertaken for a reason, spoken in the name of a cause that is opposed to or higher than the existing order, and the ‘feminine’ symbolic order, in which the act is not understood as an other to the social or performed in the name of some higher cause. The ‘masculine’ act, for all of its opposition to the existing order, nevertheless understands itself as undertaken in the name of something still nameable within it, as though the values it represents were simply not yet recognized. The ‘feminine’ act, by contrast, is carried out in the name of something that cannot yet (and perhaps never will) be named and recognized, and therefore seems excessive and unjustifiable. And the success or failure of this second kind of act is not so easily assessed or evaluated, exactly because it challenges the conventional norms of assessment and evaluation. Indeed, it is this – to return once more to the question of the contrasting, indeed opposed, evaluations of von Trier’s cinema – that is the problem at stake in the construction of von Trier’s own films. For, insofar as something like this ‘feminine’ act is at stake in them, it cannot be a question of formal organization, with its assumptions of narrative causality, thematic patterning and psychological plausibility. Rather, the act – if it is to be authentic – must break with all of these. Hence the artistic challenge of all of von Trier’s films: to present this act when it is not strictly a matter of introducing it, explaining it or even following its consequences. This again is the difficulty of thinking about the question of misogyny in von Trier’s cinema. Beyond any narrative justification of it (that it is his heroines suffering that either allows or is redeemed by their act) or any psychological explanation of it (it is something either in them or von Trier that explains it), it is possible that the suffering of these women is inflicted in itself: their acts neither come out of nor justify any prior circumstance, but break with everything that comes before them, leaving it behind. In a sense, the woman who undertakes the act is simply not the same woman who suffers. Woman’s suffering is not something that her act in any way speaks to, explains or justifies. This is the constant risk von Trier’s films run in terms of conventional accounts of cinema (whose assumptions we all in part share): that the events depicted in them appear excessive, unjustified, inexplicable, that von Trier does not master the form of his films, contriving his endings, bringing

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events to a too sudden conclusion without properly preparing his audience. It is certainly this accusation that has been levelled at some of his films, for example, Grace’s sudden appeal to her Father to restore justice in Dogville by killing the townsfolk, the terrible ‘revenge’ wrought by ‘She’ in Antichrist (She crushing His testicles with a block of wood, and later severing her own clitoris) and even – despite the world-wide publicity campaign attempting to assure the success of the film in advance – the shooting of Seligman by Joe at the end of Nymphomaniac. But this is not the proper way to judge these acts and therefore not the proper way to evaluate von Trier presenting them. These acts, insofar as we might say they are ‘feminine’, are precisely not to be explained by the usual narrative, social and psychological criteria they would render invalid. The paradoxical requirement of von Trier’s films might be that it is not when he does not offer explanation for the acts in them that he fails, but when he does, or when the act ends up being able to be explained by something else. It is these considerations that we hope justify this collection of essays. Beyond each of the individual responses, what we seek to show is a range of responses, indeed, the difficulty of knowing how to respond to a von Trier film. In a sense, there is an obvious contradiction in calling this collection Lars von Trier’s Women because these women and the actions they perform do not form any kind of a collective, are not able to be generalized. We simply do not know how to respond to von Trier’s next film on the basis of those before. This is the actual experience of his films when they are ‘successful’. We are moved by a series of individual characters, who are defined by a number of general circumstances and constraints and even the narrative and formal conventions of the film; and yet at the same time they leave these behind, gesturing towards something that is not known, has not been seen before and that must be responded to without any recognized criteria to guide us: the sheer idiosyncratic uniqueness of the appearance, psychology and motivations of such characters as Katharina in Europa, Karen in The Idiots and Selma in Dancer in the Dark. And in a way this is also how we must think of the wider social concerns and even social ‘critique’ of von Trier’s films: when he speaks of the Depression trilogy as about his own personal psychology or the USA Land of Opportunities trilogy as a critique of US foreign policy, it is exactly not a matter of him responding to objective circumstances that exist before the act, but rather of what is newly visible through the acts he represents, that part of the meaning of these acts is what else they allow us to see. The criteria for this feminine act and hence the question of woman in von Trier’s films can only ever be judged in themselves. Indeed, it cannot even be properly understood as an act unless it is seen as breaking with what is around it, which is also to say that part of what makes it an act is that it brings about the very criteria by which it is judged. But are there any criteria of judgement implied by the act, and is there any way of saying

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that some of von Trier’s films are better than others? This is also what is at stake in the essays collected here. Our various contributors disagree about the success or failure of various von Trier films and the acts depicted in them. But there is something else at stake here that is just as important as these individual assessments and what they have to tell us about the impossibility of objectivity, which we might say involves a matter not so much of ‘content’ as ‘form’. It might be put this way: that even when we do make a judgement about a particular film there remains a kind of delay, a distance, a sense of the original ambiguity and un-interpretability of the film that does not go away. In a sense, that is, we would make a contrast between those websites and postings we originally spoke of that make immediate and unequivocal decisions about von Trier’s message and the essays we have collected here. And the profound question is whether this is merely a question of academic propriety or some true dimension of the act they seek to capture. Those acts we witness in von Trier’s films do finally require a response and reaction and do not exist without them – this is what von Trier means by ‘provocation’ as a shorthand – but there is perhaps a distinction to be made between a certain hysterical passage à l’acte, which is not a real act and simply believes that it succeeds, and a proper act, about which it is impossible to say whether it has fully succeeded or not, which is always in a sense incomplete. These essays attempt to capture something of the time of the experience of von Trier’s films when we do not know what we are seeing in their refusal to rush to judgement. We begin here by reprinting two essays that we see as ‘foundational’ for our exercise: the first is an excerpt from the chapter ‘Performing the feminine’ of Linda Badley’s Lars von Trier, which both of us read and admired. Badley’s book offers an excellent overview of von Trier and his range of artistic and intellectual influences (Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, David Lynch, August Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Nietzsche), but more importantly makes the point that woman is a problematic within von Trier’s films with a strong sense of the challenge this constitutes for conventional approaches to cinema. In her paper she attributes to the militant aesthetic of Dogme 95 the unexpected opening up of von Trier to the feminine, that is, to those more emotionally intense and borderline areas that women have traditionally occupied relative to patriarchy. Dogme 95’s formal procedures, she argues, have the effect of pushing the spectator past voyeurism or outright disdain and instead provoking ethical and conceptual discomfort. The other ‘foundational’ text for this collection, as for any number of other scholars working on von Trier, is Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’, originally published in the journal Lacanian Ink in 1999. If von Trier can be seen as a director of the feminine ‘act’, it is Žižek who first gives theoretical meaning to this, reading his work through Lacan’s notorious ‘formulae of sexuation’. This groundbreaking short essay inverts the popular impression that Breaking the Waves merely

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celebrates the feminine act of sacrifice as supporting male masturbatory fantasies. On the contrary, Žižek argues, it is Bess’s excessive identification with and realization of this fantasy that not only subverts the male position but also gestures to a space not contained by it – until, that is, her act is redeemed in the end via a typically postmodern obscurantist twist.8 The book then loosely follows the order of von Trier’s filmography, with the more generally thematic essays towards the front. We intentionally selected essays that covered the USA Land of Opportunities films, and chose two essays each for the members of the more recent Depression trilogy – for the good reason that academic scholarship on the later films is still catching up to the popular press, as well as the desire to provide multiple views onto this important series of films. We begin with an essay by Ulrike Hanstein entitled ‘Listening to Dancer in the Dark: Singing as recalling the world’, which draws from her book Unknown Woman, geprügelter Held: Die melodramatische Filmästhetik bei Lars von Trier und Aki Kaurismäki (2011), and which seeks to read von Trier’s work through the lens of melodrama, especially as theorized by Stanley Cavell’s influential study of Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodramas of the Unknown Woman (1996). In particular, Hanstein analyses a sequence from von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark in which the character Selma sings the Rogers and Hammerstein classic ‘My Favourite Things’, while locked up in a prison cell awaiting execution. Following Cavell’s treatment of the human voice as a way of overcoming the isolation of the human in both opera and melodrama, it is noted how in this sequence Selma communicates both with others in the prison and to the audience through her singing. Rex Butler’s essay ‘A woman’s smile’ seeks to develop aspects of Žižek’s treatment of the act, particularly in terms of what it would mean to think of the act not as any kind of statable exception to the social order (which also means within it), but as what remarks the social order as a whole from somewhere ‘outside’ of it. In what sense is the act then thinkable or, in terms of von Trier’s films, representable? How, nevertheless, might we see a whole genealogy of films, particularly from Hollywood, that similarly raise questions concerning this feminine act? Butler’s discussion of the act concludes by providing a frame by which we may consider the feminine acts in von Trier’s films as being ‘successful’ or not, ‘authentic’ or not. Sheila Kunkle’s ‘Female fight club: Lars von Trier’s women and the paradox of Being’ provides a nice compliment to Butler, in that she develops this precise question through an extended discussion of Breaking the Waves, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. By framing her discussion with regard to the well-known 1999 David Fincher film Fight Club, she re-situates the question of masochism from a masculine to a feminine register. Contrary to the men in Fight Club, who are responding to the alienating effect of the one-dimensionality of capitalism, the women in von Trier’s films are already

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out of joint, that is, this is how his women arrive on the scene. As such, they confront an impasse of Being or the Real of a contingent event and must find a way to go on from there. Far from being misogynist, Kunkle argues that von Trier explores the enigmas of love, sex and death, themes that index feminine jouissance and Lacan’s feminine ethics. Angelos Koutsourakis’s essay, ‘Cruelty and the Real: The female figure in Orchidégartneren, Menthe – la bienheureuse and Befrielsesbilleder’, provides an important study of the link between von Trier’s early student films and his later professional films. In particular, Koutsourakis foregrounds his discussion with Alain Badiou’s notion of the passion for the real, and then remarks the influence of Artaudian cruelty and the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in order to point out how these early films can help us understand recent developments in von Trier’s representation and treatment of his female protagonists. We then turn to two essays that deal with von Trier’s politically charged USA Land of Opportunities films. Lorenzo Chiesa’s ‘What is the gift of Grace? On Dogville’ and Ahmed Elbeshlawy’s ‘Manderlay: The gift, Grace’s desire, and the collapse of ideology’ argue, although differently, that the films respectively succeed in traversing the social fantasy of the gift as either a pure or simple act of giving or a way to manage symbolic exchange to offer far more political and socially charged insights that expose the conceits of power and fantasy relative to the gift (of either tolerance or freedom). Chiesa, for example, reads the stunning final sequence of Dogville, where Grace orders her Father’s men to execute the town’s people, as enacting her own traversal of the fantasy of grace as a sacrificial object. She essentially remains faithful, according to Chiesa, to the evental truth of grace – the initial, chance-like character of a gesture that marks a distinction from mere animality – by executing the inhabitants of Dogville, that is, by deciding not to become like them, as she says just prior to having them killed. The transition from Dogville to Manderlay is significant because now Grace has assumed a positive relation to power; she aims to bring freedom to the slaves who wilfully remain on their plantation after the Emancipation Proclamation. And Elbeshlawy now redirects our focus to Grace’s desire: what does she want, especially with regard to a few key scenes in which she fantasizes about, later whips, and is finally raped by, one of the black slaves. Here Elbeshlawy not only provides the context through which the typical Hollywood film treats the black body as a cinematic gift, as an object of desire and fascination, but also elaborates how freedom is always constrained and over-determined by the symbolic. By pushing Grace’s desire to the point of exposing its inherent lack, Elbeshlawy demonstrates how these scenes disturb our common-sense understanding of human freedom, which thus takes the film beyond its apparently racist discourse. The Depression trilogy provides a remarkable shift from the Brechtian austerity of the former two films in terms of cinematic form, as it is shot in

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a highly mannered style, with special effects and extensive flashback scenes. In Antichrist, we witness the She protagonist fall into a debilitating grieving process after the sudden loss of her child, a process that is never worked out, but rather devolves into a series of violent acts. Both of our essays here, Magdalena Zolkos’s ‘Violent affects: Nature and the feminine in Antichrist’ and David Denny’s ‘A postmodern family romance: Antichrist’, consider how the signifier nature functions within the narrative of the film, not only in terms of how it relates to a masculine and feminine symbolic economy, but also how it helps put into context the violence that ensues towards the end of the film. Zolkos pays special attention to how the violence affects the spectator, situating us outside of a rationalist or psychological point of identification. Zolkos goes on to make an acute distinction: while the female protagonists in earlier von Trier films became allegorical figures of divine sacrifice or the gift of love, the She protagonist marks a radical departure for von Trier insofar as ‘[her] body is situated outside the possibility of sacrificial destruction’. Denny’s essay for its part attempts to locate the violent acts in relation to a series of flashback scenes. While these flashbacks do not explain the psychology behind these acts, they do suggest a passage, that is, a movement from a feeling of unsurpassable guilt enflamed and mocked by her superego to an act (of freedom) that opens up a space from within a symbolic deadlock that not only defines her relation to her husband, but updates Freud’s notion of the modern family romance. Melancholia is set within a palatial estate that is utterly cut off from the world, and is bookended by a marriage ceremony gone comically wrong and literally the end of the world when the stealth planet Melancholia collides with Earth. The essential question that our two essays, Todd McGowan’s ‘Not melancholic enough’ and Jennifer Friedlander’s ‘How to face nothing: Melancholia and the feminine’, ask is: what does it mean to face loss and, in the larger sense, the collapse of the symbolic order, that is, the end of the world as such? McGowan takes seriously, as though it were a Freudian slip, von Trier’s public avowal at Cannes of having an affinity with a Nazi aesthetic, discussed earlier, by linking it to the way the end of the world as such is aestheticized in his film. What von Trier fails to grasp, according to McGowan, is the way subjectivity can be thought of as ‘an alternative to the suffocating life of capitalist modernity’ – rather than the elevation of a romantic pathos that ultimately affirms death. Friedlander, on the other hand, praises Justine’s comportment in relation to loss by framing her responses within Lacan’s elaboration of the ‘feminine position’ of sexuation. Friedlander goes on to argue that Justine’s final tent-making exercise represents an acceptance of the real over reality, as a way of understanding how the feminine position lives within the contradiction of a certain ‘not-all’. Hilary Neroni’s essay ‘Lars von Trier’s fantasy of femininity in Nymphomaniac’ carefully explores the double-edged sword of von Trier’s

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representation of a nymphomaniac. On the one hand, Neroni describes how Joe’s fidelity to her sex drive uncovers a radical femininity in the face of a patriarchal social order. On the other hand, Neroni points out how this radicality remains unrealized due to von Trier’s fixation on the solely destructive character of such sexual expression. Neroni demonstrates how Lacan’s notion of an internal lack or limit that constitutes subjectivity is something von Trier fails to explore or affirm, which goes contrary to his earlier film The Five Obstructions (2003). Finally, Tarja Laine’s essay ‘Mea maxima vulva: Appreciation and aesthetics of chance in Nymphomaniac’ affirms the film as a polyphonic cinematic event that places important demands on the spectator, especially as it relates to the tenuous relation between trust (needed to immerse and even lose oneself with the film’s unfolding) and chance (the cinematic space placed in time). Von Trier’s thoughtful manipulation of this relation sets up moments of resistance that intensify aesthetic appreciation and thereby complicate the controversy around his treatment of his female protagonist, allowing for a more nuanced and troubled reading. To conclude, what is evident is that throughout his career von Trier has wanted his cinema to constitute something of an act. Although deeply personal, even autobiographical, and coming out of a rich social and artistic context, there is something about it that suggests von Trier wishes to break with this context or explanation. The making of the film itself is intended to be unprecedented and self-challenging, which is why we suggest that the formal construction of each von Trier film is so different, from the documentary of The Idiots, the musical of Dancing in the Dark, the Brechtianism of Dogville and Manderlay, the special effects of Melancholia and Antichrist, to the Sadian dialogue of Nymphomaniac. But in fact – and paradoxically – the aim of this ‘form’ each time is to present something that breaks with it, goes beyond it, can no longer be contained by it. This not only is the thrust of the famous Dogme 95 Manifesto von Trier signed, but is seen in different ways in all of his films: the invocation of a ‘reality’ that cannot be contained by film (the ‘fit’ that Gitte Lind throws in Epidemic, the ‘spassing’ of the various participants in The Idiots, the sexual close-ups in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac), the way that the action so often continues after the closing credits (the tolling bells in Breaking the Waves, Selma singing in Dancer in the Dark, the cosmic rumbling in Melancholia). Again, in all of this there is the challenge of responding to von Trier’s films, the difficulty of evaluation not only of the success or failure of the events depicted in the film but of the film itself. To come back to the differences between our contributors, it is a question perhaps of whether the spectator feels part of the act depicted, for in a sense this act not only is carried on by the spectator but also would not even exist before it is recognized and responded to by the spectator. Rex Butler and David Denny

Introduction

13

Notes 1

Moira Sullivan, Senses of Cinema 59, June 2011. http://sensesofcinema.com/ 2011/feature-articles/lars-von-triers-other-comments-at-cannes/

2

Batya Ungar-Sargon, ‘Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist’, in Tablet, 28 March 2014. http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/167949/ sometimes-a-misogynist-is-just-a-misogynist

3

David Gritten, ‘Lars von Trier: Antichrist or just Anti-Women?’, Telegraph, 16 July 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/ starsandstories/5843594/Lars-Von-Trier-Antichrist-Or-just-anti-women.html

4

Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, Champaign, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, p. ix.

5

Gavin Smith, ‘Dance in the Dark’, in Jan Lumboldt (ed.), Lars von Trier: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, p. 148.

6

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Femininity between goodness and act’. http://www.lacan.com/ symptom14/?p=43

7

Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings, London: Verso, 2004, p. 217.

8

In a way, it might be suggested that Žižek is arguing with himself in ‘Femininity between Act and Goodness’ before reaching this final negative evaluation. It is perhaps for this reason that when he next comes to write about Breaking the Waves he can start by making the criticisms of it he does. Nevertheless, we would argue that he largely sets the terms for the evaluation of the female act in von Trier’s work, whether positive or negative.

1 Performing the feminine Linda Badley

Where gender is concerned, Dogme 95 represents a fascinating paradox. A ‘brotherhood’, it advocated an aesthetic Puritanism and ‘military’ discipline likened to male celibacy. Yet its purpose was to elicit an ‘authenticity’ associated with ‘borderline areas’ to which the feminine is relegated. The Idiots revels in non-normative intersubjective experience and ends as a woman’s melodrama performed with inimitable compression and rawness. Dogme was therefore pivotal to von Trier’s shift from a ‘masculine’ to a ‘feminine’ mode: from the Euro thriller to a relinquishment of genre, from (‘male’) ironic distance to (‘female’) immersion and emotion. Eventually it lent an aesthetic and performative politics to the exploration of the feminine that began as early as 1992, with the development of Breaking the Waves (1996), or even earlier, with Medea (1988). This gender shift was announced in von Trier’s manifestos over the years.1 Equating ‘politically correct’ film-making with castration, the Europa trilogy manifestos proclaimed a masculinist, individualist (autoerotic) aesthetic. ‘Manifesto 1’ (for The Element of Crime) called for ‘heterosexual films, made for, about and by men’, and the third (for Europa) ended with the ‘confession’: ‘LARS VON TRIER, THE TRUE ONANIST OF THE SILVER SCREEN’. By ‘Selma’s Manifesto’ accompanying Dancer in the Dark, however, von Trier was openly projecting himself onto female characters as if to ‘perform’ and explore ‘the feminine’. Many if not most feminists would regard this as a pernicious form of displacement. As Tania Modleski explains it, the male represses and reprojects ‘feminine’ (masochistic) aspects of himself onto a woman, who suffers for both of them, thereby reinstating stereotypes of female victimization and male dominance.2

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When asked the (loaded) question of why he makes women suffer in (and for) his films, von Trier’s answer is disarmingly straightforward: ‘Those characters are not women. They are self-portraits,’3 and his films are psychodramas in which gender roles are metaphorical projections in a roleplaying project whose core is an urgent identity politics. Vibeke Windeløv, von Trier’s producer from 1996 through 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.’4 Portraying himself as the victim of a kind of male repression, von Trier claims to be repossessing aspects of himself that his parents had discouraged – emotions, religious yearning, Guld Hjerte itself – and that the melodramatic Gold Heart trilogy, being ‘feminine’, was therapeutic. As he insisted to Gavin Smith, all his films involve ‘a clash between an ideal and reality’, and his females are stronger than his men. They ‘take the ideal all the way’. ‘My mother was strong. I think maybe that’s why’, he adds. ‘But let’s not talk in terms of men and women. I feel kind of female, myself, to some degree.’5 Von Trier of course does talk in terms of men and women, especially in his role as a moralist whose ethics, Caroline Bainbridge claims, are framed by gender ‘as a component of human nature’.6 The performance of gender is thus central to his explorations of extremes of sadism and masochism in self, culture and politics. Thus, his most dramatic career move may be approached as a shift from the distanced, cold and ‘masculine’ to the intimate, florid and ‘feminine’, and from protagonists who are failures to protagonists who are successful – if in a seriously qualified sense. While all von Trier’s protagonists follow a ‘failed idealist’ trajectory, those in the Europa trilogy become lost in labyrinthine networks of power and end up harming those they sought to help. They are victims of their own logic, limited to the discourses of power that constitute ‘Europe’ or the symbolic order, and each film ends in a figurative or literal abyss. In contrast, the Gold Heart heroines adopt an oppositional ‘feminine’ logic and ‘transcend’ the symbolic in exemplary acts of self-martyrdom, affecting witnesses and shocking audiences. In contrast to von Trier’s male failures – who simply fail at power relations – his excessively ‘good’ women oppose power, often (as Bainbridge argues) through a Christian humanist ethic based on love.7 If, from the perspective of power relations and material conditions, the ‘Gold Hearts’ re-enact the victimization and failure of women throughout history, they have the dubious consolation of transcendence … Breaking the Waves was the first of von Trier’s films to be disparaged for his now signature use (or abuse) of women to perform an extreme stereotype (of martyred femininity) in order to produce a preternaturally intense affect. While sustaining the elite tradition of Scandinavian existential melodrama, it also drew on the classical era ‘woman’s picture’ or ‘weepie’ epitomized and ironized in the films of Douglas Sirk. At one time nearly



Performing the feminine

17

alone among Hollywood films in articulating women as active subjects (rather than objects of what Laura Mulvey has described as a fetishistic or voyeuristic-sadistic ‘male gaze’), this subgenre, as Molly Haskell first noted, put a woman ‘at the centre of the universe’.8 The catch debated by feminists (Mary Ann Doane and Linda Williams) was its inherently masochistic theme (sacrifice for love) and the ‘wet, wasted afternoons’ that it produced.9 Von Trier represents the alternatives while pulling out all stops, celebrating a woman’s sacrifice for her husband (Breaking the Waves), adoptive family (The Idiots) and male child (Dancer in the Dark). As Haskell sees it, the woman’s picture was intrinsically manipulative, based on a conservative, pseudo-Aristotelian aesthetic ‘whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot’.10 Psychoanalytic approaches took this a step further. Lacking enabling ‘masculine’ distance (the male gaze’s defence/displacement mechanisms), the female spectator is vulnerable, positioned to ‘over-identify’ with the suffering heroine and succumb to deliciously passive melancholy.11 Nicole Kidman’s 2008 Entertainment Weekly article might seem a case in point. After seeing the film, she cancelled a dinner appointment, ‘went home, got into bed, curled up in a ball, and cried’, adding, ‘I don’t know why I had such a profound, deep reaction … It disturbed my spirit.’12 Yet rather than simply ‘wasting’ an afternoon, the film moved her to write about her distress twelve years later and provoked her to work with von Trier on Dogville. Unlike the typical tear fest, the experience of Breaking the Waves went beyond pleasurable emotion, provoking deep ethical and intellectual discomfort and the sort of boundary transgressing stimulation that Žižek, among others, calls jouissance. Žižek finds the key to its effect in the tension between its melodramatic narrative and naturalistic style,13 causing audiences to experience the film in all its excess as ‘real’. In contrast to the visual arena projected by the typical camera ‘gaze’, the spectator’s relation to the image is haptic, reflexivekinaesthetic or, to use Per Kirkeby’s term, ‘tropistic’.14 Plunging us into a succession of one- or two-person close-ups, invading spectators’ space to the point of inducing nausea, the film insists on proximity, restricting us within Bess’s emotional space. Images are always fragmented; faces never fill the screen, an effect enhanced by the widescreen CinemaScope format. Constant panning and harsh edits break up the already washed out, dissolving image, with the visual disorientation projecting her increasing delirium. Immersing us in her unprotected emotionalism, the film forces audiences, regardless of gender, to experience the brunt and range of her desire, pleasure and suffering. Thus converted into an unsettlingly vital experience of the world, Bess eludes fetishization. Refusing to ‘capture’ her essence onscreen, von Trier’s camera allows her to elude the frame. Or, rather, something of her is constantly moving

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outside it, suggesting, as Žižek puts it, ‘a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said’.15 Complementing this is the self-reflexive gesture in which she looks directly at the camera, breaking the frame and creating complicity with the audience. As Watson has said, ‘For an actor to look into the camera’ is a ‘great privilege’, like looking ‘into the heart of the film’.16 Thus Breaking the Waves embodies a paradox. If it forces women into a ‘feminized’ proximity to the image without refuge from the masochism of Bess’s position, it also demonstrates the image’s ability to gaze back, asserting its/her autonomy and control. One issue often taken for granted in feminist responses is the male spectator who, considering von Trier’s inspiration in Sade’s Justine, is important. A related issue is von Trier’s conception of the trilogy as a relinquishment of ‘masculine’ distantiation in an attempt to recover the ‘feminine’ in himself. The period setting reflects an era of sexual discovery and conflict between the ‘sexual revolution’ and the nascent feminist movement of which von Trier was acutely aware. While playing off pornographic clichés, the scenes before Jan’s illness insist on a female perspective, emphasizing Bess’s mixed curiosity, pleasure, pain and wonder as she initiates her own ‘deflowering’. In their hotel room, Jan performs a striptease; she, still clothed in bridal white, looks over his body, digs her fingers into his pubic hair and experimentally touches his penis. When Jan calls from the rig she delights in porn cliché transgressions (‘It’s sooooo huge!’) and pronounces words like ‘prick’ with a blend of childlike and sensual relish. Bess experiences the penis not as the Phallus, the emblem of patriarchal law/word, but as a transgression of its Puritan power, or simply as Jan’s body and a living, responsive expression of their connection. To the extent that it is a medium for her discovery of desire and pleasure enabling her to become a fuller, more expressive version of herself, Jan’s body takes on a traditionally feminine role. After his accident, which renders him impotent and suicidal, Jan’s requests for male masturbatory fantasies underscore his abject and ‘feminized’ state while also allegorizing the ‘male gaze’ as sadomasochism by proxy and a defence mechanism against castration, calling attention to the issue of voyeurism in a profoundly disturbing way. It is easy to position von Trier and the hypothesized male spectator with Jan as an unbalanced man manipulating Bess to ‘feed his sick fantasies’, as Dodo puts it, speaking for feminists in the audience. Elsewhere, the gaze is foregrounded and caricatured, as in the bar lined with bestial-looking, stuporous sailors or on the ship, where Udo Kier plays a leering sadist. What is potentially the most voyeuristic scene, in which Kier tells Bess to ‘do it with the sailor while I watch’, is overstated then abruptly truncated as she fights her way out, providing information about her final ‘sacrifice’ while keeping it off-screen. Conversely, von Trier highlights the image of the sexualized woman in order



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19

to disallow or skew it. Only Bess’s first, comically fumbled sexual exploits are shown; later intimacies are cut to reflect the ‘spiritual connection’ she claims with Jan. Attempting to seduce Dr Richardson, she lies stiffly on the bed like a medical patient, his rejection excruciating. The naturalistic awkwardness of her performance as a ‘tart’ (with borrowed clothes and make-up) is highlighted to evoke empathy. Audiences regardless of gender are forced to endure her final abjection with her and the group of empathetic characters who helplessly watch over her. Sabotaging what Mulvey calls (male, Hollywood) ‘visual pleasure’, the film offers aesthetic and ethical discomfort in spades. Given the personal, social and political aims of von Trier’s subsequent deployment of naturalism with unprotected emotionalism (in The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark), it seems designed to dispossess the male – or, rather, the masculinized – spectator who, regardless of gender, is trained in classical Hollywood-style expectations. Thus, along with Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves might be called a ‘male weepie’ of a self-conscious, therapeutic sort, a film designed to break through ‘masculine’ distance, to make men (and women) uncomfortable, to break men (in the spectatorial sense) down into transgendered beings – in short, to make the ‘male gaze’, including von Trier as hypothetical spectator and auteur of the coldly cynical Europa trilogy, cry. Detecting this, critics have called von Trier on ‘emotional pornography’,17 a label he no doubt welcomes. Soon, in reference to Dancer in the Dark, he would speak openly of trying to manipulate audiences beyond their comfort levels. Excerpt from Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2011.

Notes 1

Caroline Bainbridge, ‘Making Waves: Trauma and Ethics in the Work of Lars von Trier’, Journal for Cultural Research 8 (3) (2004): 353–5.

2

Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, London: Methuen, 1988, p. 13.

3

Dana Thomas, ‘Meet the Punisher: Lars von Trier Devastates Audiences – and Actresses’, Interview with Lars von Trier, Newsweek, 5 April 2004, HighBeam Research, 8 December 2008. http://www.highbeam.com.

4

Stig Björkman, Tranceformer – A Portrait of Lars von Trier, DVD, 2005.

5

Gavin Smith, ‘Imitation of Life: Gavin Smith Interviews the Great Dane’, Film Comment (September–October 2000): 25.

6

Caroline Bainbridge, The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice, London: Wallflower Press, 2007, p. 45.

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7

‘Making Waves’; Cinema of Lars von Trier, pp. 135–8.

8

Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 155.

9

Ibid., p. 154.

10 Ibid., pp. 154–5. 11 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 137. 12 Nicole Kidman, ‘My Favourite Year: 1996’, Entertainment Weekly, 27 June– 4 July 2008, p. 34. 13 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Death and the Maiden’, in Elizabeth and Edmund Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 215. 14 Per Kirkeby, ‘The Pictures Between the Chapters in Breaking the Waves’, in Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves, London: Faber & Faber, 1996, p. 12. 15 ‘Death and the Maiden’, p. 214. 16 Graham Fuller, ‘See Emily Play – Actress Emily Watson – Interview’, Interview, December 1996. http://findarticles.com/. 17 Jack Stevenson, ‘Lars von Trier: Pornographer?’ Bright Lights Film Journal, 43, February 2003. http://brightlightsfilm.com/.

2 Femininity between Goodness and Act Slavoj Žižek

Let us approach the central topic of Lacan’s seminar Encore – the paradoxes of feminine sexuality – through Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, a film that enables us to avoid the fatal misreading of Lacan’s notion of feminine jouissance. Breaking the Waves, a film about the inherent deadlocks of goodness,1 is set during the 1970s in a small Presbyterian community on the west coast of Scotland. Bess, a simple-minded and deeply religious local girl, marries Jan, a hearty oil rig worker, courting the disapproval of the village elders. After the sexual ecstasy of their honeymoon Bess can’t bear having Jan return to the rigs, so she begs God to return Jan to her saying that in exchange for his return she would put up with any trial of her faith. Soon afterwards, as if in answer to her prayers, Jan effectively returns, but paralysed from the waist down due to an accident on the oil rig. Confined to his hospital bed, Jan tells Bess she must make love to other men and describe her experiences to him in detail – this way, she will keep awake his will to live: although she will be doing the act physically with other men, the true sex will occur in their conversation. When after her first successful adventure Jan’s condition improves slightly, Bess dolls herself up as a vulgar prostitute and starts to consort with men in spite of warnings from her mother that she will be cast out of the church. After a series of ups and downs in her perverse pact with Jan (his occasional bouts of depression when he declares that he wants to die; her near-lynching by local kids, then being consigned to a mental hospital and escaping), she is informed that Jan is dying. Interpreting this as a sign

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that she is not doing enough for him, she returns to an offshore ship where she was once already cut by a sadistic sailor and barely escaped, well aware of what she can expect there. She is brutally beaten and, when brought to the hospital and informed that Jan is no better, dies in despair. At the coroner’s inquest, the doctor who took care of her earlier testifies that her true disease was Goodness itself. She is nonetheless denied the proper funeral service. Jan (now miraculously able to walk) and his friends steal her body and launch it to rest out at sea. Later, they are woken up by the sound of church bells resounding miraculously from high above the oil rig. This final shot of the film – the bells high in the sky – is to be conceived of as the psychotic ‘answer of the real’: the hallucinatory return in the real of the divine jouissance whose foreclosure from the symbolic is signalled by the absence of the bells from the church tower (throughout the film we hear complaints about the removal of the bells from the local church). This last answer of the real concludes the long series of exchanges and acts by proxy, which follows the Fall from paradisiacal jouissance. That is to say, in the first part of the film, during her brief marital happiness, Bess fully enjoys sex with her husband in an absolutely innocent sense (all the talk in some reviews of the film about her sexual repression is totally misplaced); it is this very excessive attachment of hers to him that induces her to commit her original sin: unable to accept separation from Jan, she has violent fits of impotent fury and rage, and then, in a desperate prayer, offers God the first symbolic exchange – she is ready to renounce anything, to suffer any deprivation or humiliation, only if Jan is brought back to her. When, as if an answer to her entreaty, Jan effectively returns, but completely paralysed from the waist down, Bess reads his accident as the first ‘answer of the real’, as God’s price for the realization of her unconditional wish. From this point onward, throughout the film, she reads even the tiniest fluctuations in his humour and health as signs addressed to her: when he falls back into depression, it is because she did not sacrifice herself enough for him, etc. Consequently, when, towards the film’s end, Jan seems to approach the final coma, she decides to accomplish the ultimate act of exchange and visits a sadistic customer who, as she is well aware, will beat her to death – and indeed, after Bess dies, Jan miraculously regains his ability to walk. This denouement, of course, is purely fantasmatic: Jan’s miraculous healing is the answer of the real to her absolute sacrifice – it is literally over her dead body that he rises up again. Sex with strangers is for Bess a humiliating and excruciating experience, and this very pain confirms her belief that she is engaged in a properly religious act of sacrifice, doing it for the love of her neighbour, to alleviate his pain, to enable him to enjoy by proxy. (One of the critics quite appropriately remarked that Breaking the Waves does for God and sexuality what Babette’s Feast does for God and food …) It is thus easy to discern in her acts the contours of what Lacan defined as the modern, post-classical tragedy:2 the highest sacrifice of love

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is not to remain pure, intact, for the absent (or impotent) lover, but to sin for him, to besmirch oneself for him. This is clearly signalled when alone in the church Bess tells God that, on account of what she is doing for Jan, she is going to Hell. ‘Whom do you want to save?’ comes the divine reply, ‘Jan, or yourself?’ In short, to save Jan, Bess accepts to betray HERSELF. The highest sacrifice of love is to accept freely and willingly the role of the other through which the subject enjoys: not to suffer for the other, but to enjoy for him. The price Bess has to pay for it is complete alienation: her jouissance is now in words, not in things, not in the bodily sexual activity itself, but in her verbal report on her exploits to the crippled Jan. Here, of course, the obvious reproach imposes itself: is thus Breaking the Waves not the utmost ‘male chauvinist’ film celebrating and elevating into a sublime act of sacrifice the role which is forcefully imposed on women in patriarchal societies, that of serving as the support of male masturbatory fantasies? Bess is completely alienated in the male phallic economy, sacrificing her jouissance for the sake of her crippled partner’s mental masturbation. However, at a closer look, things get more complex. According to the standard version of the Lacanian theory, the non-all (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of a woman is caught up in the phallic jouissance: she is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said. The first thing to add to this standard version is that the allusion to some unfathomable mysterious ingredient behind the mask is constitutive of the feminine seductive masquerade: the way woman seduces and transfixes the male gaze is precisely by adopting the role of the Enigma embodied, as if her whole appearance is a lure, a veil concealing some unspeakable secret. In other words, the very notion of a ‘feminine secret’, of some mysterious jouissance which eludes the male gaze, is constitutive of the phallic spectacle of seduction: inherent to phallic economy is the reference to some mysterious X which remains forever out of its reach.3 In what, then, does the feminine jouissance ‘beyond the phallus’ consist? Perhaps the radical attitude of Bess in Breaking the Waves provides an answer: she undermines the phallic economy and enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it, by way of renouncing every remnant of the inaccessible ‘feminine mystique’, of some secret Beyond which allegedly eludes the male phallic grasp. Bess thus inverts the terms of phallic seduction in which a woman assumes the appearance of Mystery: Bess’s sacrifice is unconditional, there is nothing Beyond, and this very absolute immanence undermines the phallic economy – deprived of its ‘inherent transgression’ (of the fantasizing about some mysterious Beyond avoiding its grasp), the phallic economy disintegrates.

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Breaking the Waves is subversive on account of its over-orthodox, excessive realization of the fantasy of the feminine sacrifice for the male jouissance. So we have two versions of the excess which escapes the (sexual) partner’s grasp: on the woman’s side, it is the feminine Mystery beneath the provocative masquerade which eludes the male grasp; on the man’s side, it is the drive which makes him stick unconditionally to his (political, artistic, religious, professional …) vocation. (This logic also accounts for the popularity of Colleen McCullough’s Thornbirds in which Father Ralph is torn between his love for Maggie and his unconditional religious vocation – paradoxically, a chaste priest is one of the emblematic figures of the non-castrated Other, of the Other not bound by the symbolic Law.) The eternal male paranoia is that the woman is jealous of this part of him which resists her seductive charm, and that she wants to snatch it from him, to induce him to sacrifice that kernel of his creativity for her (afterwards, of course, she will drop him, because her interest for him was sustained precisely by that mysterious ingredient which resisted her grasp …). Consequently, as is proven by Breaking the Waves, the woman perturbs the phallic economy precisely by way of renouncing any Mystery and of totally and openly dedicating herself to her partner’s satisfaction. It is thus crucial to bear in mind the radical asymmetry between the respective positions of Bess and Jan: Jan’s jouissance remains phallic (a masturbatory jouissance supported by fantasies of and about the Other), he acts as a kind of libidinal vampire feeding on the other’s fantasies to sustain the flow of his phallic jouissance, while Bess’s position is that of feeding him voluntarily with the blood of fantasies. The asymmetry resides in the fact that Jan’s request that Bess should have sex with other men and report on it to him is in itself ambiguous: apart from the obvious reading (to provide him with phantasms which will make his crippled life bearable for him), it can also be read as a self-sacrificing act of extreme goodness – what if he does it because he is aware that otherwise she will lead a chaste life to the end? Asking her to have sex with other men is thus a stratagem destined to prevent her from sacrificing herself, that is, to entice her to enjoy sex by way of providing her with a rationale which justifies it (she is really doing this just to please him). The film indicates that, at the beginning, Jan finds himself in the predicament of the Wagnerian hero: wanting, but unable to die, he enjoins Bess to have sex with other men and report on it to him as a supreme altruistic act – in order to enable Bess to enjoy sex. Gradually, however, he gets caught up in it and effectively enjoys it more and more, so that what began as a gesture of excessive goodness turns into perverse enjoyment. That Jan is aware of the trap he got entangled in is clear from his conversation with the priest towards the end of the film when he confesses to him that he is evil, overwhelmed by bad thoughts. Jan’s trajectory thus goes from initial goodness towards the neighbour to her perverse exploitation – with the underlying lesson that excessive goodness necessarily ends up in this way.

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In short, Breaking the Waves could be read as the inversion of the standard metaphysical opposition between pure mind and dirty body: (Jan’s) dirty mind versus (Bess’s) pure body. Bess is thus the figure of pure absolute Faith, which transcends (or rather suspends) the very gap between the big Other and jouissance, between the symbolic and the real: the price to be paid for such immediate coincidence of religious faith and sexual jouissance is psychosis. Is, then, the film itself psychotic? How can one render palpable such a direct story about miracles today, in our cynical postmodern era? The key to Breaking the Waves is provided by the tension between the narrative and the way it is shot, between content and form. Three features of the form cannot escape the attentive spectator: 1 The nervous, jerky hand-held camera shots, with the visible grains on the screen, as if we are watching an enlarged home-movie shot on video. 2 The breaks and overlapping in the continuity (shots which follow often imply a time break or render the same event from a different viewpoint; furthermore, the camera pans from speaker to speaker, rather than cutting away as in a proper studio production). 3 There is no musical accompaniment (except in the case of the long static tableaux introducing each of the seven segments of the film: these tableaux are accompanied by excerpts from the big hits of Elton John, David Bowie, etc. – popular during the time the story is supposed to take place). These features lend the film a kind of hystericized amateurish intensity reminding one of the famous early Cassavetes films, creating a sense of immediacy, of eavesdropping on the characters before the camera person has had a chance to edit the film, thereby prettying it up: at the level of form, the film relates to the standard professional film like homemade amateur pornography to professional pornography. The group of European directors led by von Trier himself recently published an anti-Hollywood manifesto that enumerates a series of rules to be followed by European independent cinema production: no special effects, no post-production manipulations, hand-held camera, no big budget, etc. Although Breaking the Waves already follows most of these rules, it does so as part of a specific cinematic strategy that exploits the antagonism between form and content: we do not get a narrative content that would seem to fit these rules (contemporary bleak realist narrative), but, on the contrary, an extremely Romantic narrative, the utmost opposite of the content implied by these formal rules. Von Trier himself emphasized that, if the film had been shot in a ‘direct’ melodramatic-passionate way, which seems to fit its content:

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it would have been far too suffocating. You would not have been able to stand it. What we’ve done is to take a style and put it over the story like a filter. Like encoding a television signal, when you pay in order to see a film: here we are encoding a signal for the film, which the viewer will later ensure they decode. The raw, documentary style which I’ve laid over the film and which actually annuls and contests it, means that we accept the story as it is.4 Therein resides the paradox: the only way for the spectator to accept the story as it is, is to encode it in a form which annuls and contests it – to submit it to a kind of dreamwork. Furthermore, the paradox which should not escape us is that von Trier’s procedure is the exact opposite of the usual melodramatic procedure in which the repressed kernel of the narrative returns in the excess of the form: the expressive pathos of music, the ridiculous sentimentality of acting, etc. Here, the narrative itself is ridiculously Romantic, pathetic, excessive, and the form understates (instead of accentuating) the excessive pathos of the content. The key to the film is thus provided by this antagonism between the ultra-Romantic content of Belief and the pseudo-documentary form – their relationship is thoroughly ambiguous. As von Trier himself emphasizes, it is not simply that the form undermines content: it is precisely by means of the ‘sober’ distance towards the content that the film renders it ‘palpable’, that it prevents the content from appearing ridiculous (the same as in conversation, where a passionate declaration of love which would appear ridiculous if enunciated directly can pass if coated in the protective shield of irony). And, furthermore, is not the same antagonism discernible within the content itself, in the guise of the tension between the ascetic Presbyterian religious community, caught in the religious ritual from which every trace of jouissance is evacuated (signalled by the removal of the Church bells), and the authentic personal relationship to God grounded in intense jouissance? What if the appearance of the strict opposition between the dry orthodox Letter of ritual (which regulates life in the Protestant community) and the living Spirit of true belief beyond dogma (of Bess) is misleading? What if – in the same way the excessively Romantic narrative is palpable only through the lenses of pseudo-documentary camera-form – pure authentic belief is palpable only against the background of – or filtered by – the closed orthodox religious community? Here, however, the problems with the film begin: today, the predominant form of subjectivity is not identification with a closed orthodox religious community (against which one could then rebel), but the ‘open’ permissive subject avoiding any fixed obligations; the paradox is that, in a way, both poles from Breaking the Waves are on the same side against this predominant form of subjectivity. In a society in which, more and more, since there is no God (Law), everything is

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prohibited, the film establishes a fundamental Prohibition, which opens up the space for authentic Transgression. The problem of the film is that this third term, the predominant form of subjectivity today, is simply missing in it: when von Trier reduces the conflict to the one between tradition (Church as Institution) and postmodernity (miracle), the properly modern dimension disappears. This dimension, of course, is present, but only in its immediate material existence (in the guise of oil rigs and platforms, the ultimate form of today’s exploitation of nature); however, it is suspended at the level of its subjective impact. It is thus all too easy to read Bess as the latest incarnation of the figure of naïve authentic feminine believer dismissed by her constrained orthodox environs as a promiscuous madwoman. The film should rather be read as a meditation on the difficulty, impossibility even, of Belief today: of belief in miracles, inclusive of the miracle of cinema itself. It doesn’t escape the usual fate of ‘returns to authentic belief’: the pure Belief inverts itself into just another aesthetic game. As to the final appearance of the bells high in the sky, a possible reading of Breaking the Waves could claim that this, precisely, is the point at which the film slides into religious obscurantism. That is to say, it seems possible to argue that the film should end with the death of Bess and Jan’s subsequent regained ability to walk: this way, we would be dealing with an undecidable Pascalean wager, a ‘crazy’ reliance on divine Will which reads in contingent events ‘answers of the real’, and which is sustained in the purity of its belief by the very fact that it cannot be ‘objectively verified’ (as in Jansenist theology which emphasizes that miracles appear as such only to those who already believe in them; to neutral observers, they necessarily appear as meaningless coincidences and contingencies). If this were the case, Breaking the Waves’s ultimate message would be that ‘each of us has a beatific vision of Paradise and Redemption inside of him or herself, without any guarantee in external reality …’. However, what Breaking the Waves accomplishes is similar to the well-known genre of paranoiac stories in which the idée fixe turns out to be true and not a mere hero’s hallucination: it finishes with a brutal and unexpected factual confirmation of Bess’s faith, somewhat like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw rewritten in such a way that, at the end, we would get an objective confirmation that the appearing devilish figures were ‘real’, not just the governess’s hysterical hallucination. At this precise point, one should introduce the distinction between modernism and postmodernism: if there were to be no direct miracle, no bells in the sky, the film would be a typical modernist work about the tragic deadlock of absolute faith; the last minutes, when the miracle does occur, are a kind of postmodernist appendix to the otherwise tragic modernist existential drama of Faith. That is to say, what characterizes

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postmodernism is precisely that one can return to a pre-modern ‘enchanted universe’ in which miracles effectively do occur, as an aesthetic spectacle, without ‘really believing it’, but also without any ironic or cynical distance. The ending of Breaking the Waves is thus to be perceived in the same way one should accept those ‘magic’ moments in David Lynch, in which persons (who otherwise often stand for utter corruption) are suddenly transported by a religious vision of an angelic bliss. In Blue Velvet, for example, Laura Dern unexpectedly starts to report to Kyle MacLachlan on her vision of a bleak universe suddenly filled by robins and their singing, to the accompaniment of religious organ music – it is crucial not to take this scene of innocent bliss with a cynical distance. Of course, in the last scene of Blue Velvet, we see a robin cruelly holding in his beak a dead bug, thus establishing the connection with the traumatic shot, from the film’s beginning, of the camera approaching the earth and rendering the disgusting crawl of life – but, again, as in pre-Raphaelite paintings, Edenic bliss and disgust at life’s corruption are the two sides of the same coin, so it would be wrong to read this last shot as an ironic undermining of Dern’s ecstatic description of the robin as the embodiment of the pure goodness. Is the supreme case of this radical ambiguity not Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, an extremely licentious girl engaging in promiscuous sex and drugs, and nonetheless elevated to the status of a redeemed innocence after her martyr’s death? In the final scene of Fire Walk With Me, the movie sequel to the Twin Peaks series, after the famous shot of her body wrapped in white plastic, we see her in the mysterious Red Lodge – this Zone of Twin Peaks – sitting on a chair, with agent Cooper standing by her with his hand on her shoulder, benevolently smiling as if to comfort her; after some moments of anxious perplexity, she gradually relaxes and starts to laugh, with a laughter mixed with tears; the laughter gets more and more buoyant, until the vision of an angel appears in the air in front of her. Ridiculous and kitschy as this scene may appear, one should insist again that, when the brutally raped and murdered Laura Palmer is redeemed, changed into a happily smiling figure looking at the angelic vision of herself, there is absolutely no irony involved. So the ultimate lesson of Breaking the Waves is that the standard Victorian male-chauvinist wisdom according to which the only way for a woman to remain sane, to avoid hysteric outbursts or perverse debauchery – is to get married, has to be turned around: the true question is, how is it possible for a woman to be married without falling into psychosis? The answer is, of course, by accepting the partner’s (husband’s) castration – the fact that the partner merely has the phallus, but is not the phallus – one is allowed to fantasize about Another Man, who would be the phallus itself. However, the consequences of actually meeting such a man would be catastrophic, as is attested to by the psychotic fate of Bess.

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Notes 1

In the interview ‘Naked Miracles’, Sight and Sound 6 (10) (October 1996): 12, von Trier says, ‘I wanted to do a film about goodness’.

2

Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert, Paris: Seuil, 1988.

3

For a more detailed account of this aspect of the feminine masquerade, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso, 1996.

4

‘Naked Miracles’, p. 12.

3 Listening to Dancer in the Dark: Singing as recalling the world Ulrike Hanstein

Through conflicting relationships, closed-off worlds, isolated and suffering women characters and highly dramatic scenarios, Lars von Trier’s films display and reconfigure all of the characteristics of classic filmic melodrama. At the level of narrative, we have melodramatic plots, bad luck and missed communications, sudden changes of fortune, circumstances of delay and fated repetitions. As a result, the narratives of von Trier’s films strike us as unlikely configurations of conflict, encounters, motives and the consequences of actions. And at the level of audio-visual form, the staging of a sensation-driven world and the physical, musical and verbal expression of the films also take us back to the melodramas of classical cinema. Films like Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003) all turn on scenarios of misunderstanding, crisis and emergency. The films present an irreconcilable conflict between the individual and the world, by providing an instance of the passive suffering of injustice. The extensive representation of the interior emotions of the characters takes the place of any outwardly changing behaviour. The passive experience of the world in affective terms forms the very mode of action and experience, as in the melodramas of classical cinema. The exhibition of specific desires, feelings and sensual impressions, rather than the rational or goal-directed real experiences of the characters, at the same time reveals an aesthetic relationship to the world in terms of cinematic form. While women’s films of classical cinema already achieve highly expressive audio-visual forms, the emphasis on the viewers’

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sensory perceptions and affects is especially manifest in the cinema of von Trier. Providing a cultural and philosophical interpretation of melodrama, Stanley Cavell has formulated, with regard to women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s, the possibility of a profound self-knowledge through the film viewers’ involvement in sensory perceptions and feelings. The stories gain their formal coherence in the process of being viewed. The perceptually – and sensually – heightened characters and models of action provide the spectator, led by affective self-experience, towards the underlying cinematic form. Thanks to this aesthetic encounter with the film, which is founded in the formal arrangement of images and sounds, viewers can confidently grant the melodramatic scenario of these alternative worlds a reality and efficacy. In the films of von Trier, the traditionally aesthetic character of the cinematic image is emphatically brought out. The melodramas of classical cinema are thus interpreted as a specific type of experience. At the same time the audio-visual scenarios of the films play out a game between a knowledge-creating detachment and a self-involved sensation. In the current context of contemporary European auteurist cinema, the taking into account of the revival of melodramatic narratives, expression and characters might be understood as commenting on classical cinema’s representational rendering of the world. If von Trier’s work reintroduces an aesthetic of expressivity in contemporary ‘reflexive’ film forms and challenges the feelings of his audience, the melodramatic heightening of affects emerges from the relationship between the subjective and objective dimensions of the cinematic image. The temporal flow of the film is organized around sudden shifts between different registers of language, gestures and music. The marshalling of sensory perceptions is joined up with narrative shifts in perspective. The image sequences stage sudden juxtapositions of an individual being’s selfaware sense in embodied perceptions and more objective representations. This disjunctive shift between perspectives produces in the viewer the alternative between the sensual experience of the self and the more objective rendering of the film’s diegetic world. With regard to this shift between the internal reclaiming of the personal and the practical world of action, I wish here to explore Cavell’s notion of the melodramatic ‘unknown woman’. The scenarios of failing expressivity in the films of von Trier can be seen against this background as aesthetically wrought representations of self-relations, linguistic references, practical actions and the ability to encounter others.



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‘Unknown woman’: The melodrama of individuality In his book Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Cavell looks for the historical circumstances and sensibilities that brought about the popularity of the classic American cinema.1 He considers each film he studies as a particular continuation of, and reflection upon, the conditions and possibility of human happiness and a purposeful existence in the interaction between the characters and the staging of their speech. He puts forward his insights as individual, not merely subjectively experiential but arising in combination with a demanding attention to cinematic style and a cultural common sense.2 For Cavell, the comedies and melodramas he studies are expressions of a continuing aesthetic and philosophical imagining of the doctrine of moral perfectionism. This implies for Cavell no particular theory or systematically cohesive group of contributions to moral philosophy. Rather, he finds in the history of western thought a particular combination of pitch, perspective and tradition in thinking about questions of morality.3 Cavell’s approach to melodrama traces each film’s particular aesthetic form and type of experience back to a specific context. The genre of the Hollywood ‘melodrama of the unknown woman’ references a small group of women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s.4 Cavell puts forward the term ‘genre’ with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘family resemblance’ in order to grasp the cross-references within a particular cycle or group of films as related explications.5 He sees in the various films he treats a form of self-referencing with each putting forward a different version of the same story or passed-down myth. In the case of melodrama, what lies at the heart of the various narrative instances is the transformative individuation of a woman. The irreconcilable differences in knowledge between the sexes shapes their respective experiences of subjectivity. At stake is an irreconcilable conflict in the central couple: this arises from their different responses to the uncertain knowledge of others, and it produces different responses to this knowledge and the specific characteristics of their doubt. The difference between the sexes in terms of what they want to know, how they recognize the other and what they acknowledge as knowledge of the other already points to the unequal demands made of this knowledge and the particular qualities of their doubt. For the protagonists of melodrama, the threat to a self-determined realized existence is understood to result from the failure of recognition by men. In the failure of the conversation between the sexes and the enforced ‘silencing’ of women by men, Cavell recognizes a sceptical uncertainty. This sceptical uncertainty Cavell does not see as an extreme epistemological position, but as likely and quite possible in the context of the

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general conditions of doubt. The Hollywood melodramas of the ‘unknown woman’ therefore envisage the possibility that our certain knowledge of the Other and of the objects in the world has a limit. The isolation of the female protagonist, the states of madness, inauthenticity and exaggerated expressivity that Cavell finds in the melodramas are all themes he finds in the sceptical thought as expressed by a particular strand of philosophical writing (especially in texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein).6 The problem of the (refused) mutual recognition between the sexes opens up the conceptual connection in Cavell’s text between the Hollywood comedies of remarriage, tragedy, opera and the melodramas of the unknown woman. A (modern) form of scepticism articulates these various epistemological questionings as a tragic experience: they are presented as the cause and consequence of doubt regarding our actions or the failure of the act. Cavell’s idiosyncratic understanding of scepticism as tragedy opens no systematic way out of this theoretical aporia.7 Rather, Cavell examines the ways in which we find the expression of this experience of separateness represented in tragedy, opera and film. The tragic – and derived from this the melodramatic – experience reflects a distance from the world. The theatricalization of expression and the exaggerated performativity of the dialogue are evidence of the ongoing attempt to regain a connection to the world. In melodrama, the conflict between the sexes leads to a kind of retreat. The woman is unable to make herself understood to the man she has married. In a self-empowering gesture, then, she decides to accept the state of unknownness. By acknowledging that she is by herself, she finds the experience of separation a sine qua non of her subjectivity. The definitive figure of melodrama is the isolation of the female protagonist, and the going-beyond of marriage, which stands in for the ordinary, everyday sphere. The self-transforming movement of women towards the situation of non-conformity or ‘self-reliance’8 takes place as a final rejection of the option of marriage. Cavell interprets the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman as a negative turn in the problematic of the recognition between the sexes. Finding one’s own voice, by means of which the protagonists of the melodramas put forward their story as an individual, means accepting a separating distance between oneself and the world.

Language and self: Lost and recovered voices The question of scepticism is the overall context of Cavell’s engagement with the philosophical and aesthetic question of the voice. To identify the place where these sceptical questions become conscious to us, Cavell points metaphorically to the voice and its singular expressiveness. The



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‘loss of the human voice’ and the task of the ‘recovery of one’s own voice’ are two central themes, which are raised for Cavell by tragedy, opera and melodrama as aesthetic configurations in which voices are listened to. Cavell contextualizes the condition of communication and the forms of speech in Shakespeare’s tragedies, opera and classical American cinema as narrative situations in which knowledge, uncertainty, doubt and unknowingness relative to each other are taken to the limit. A correspondence is evident between recurrent artistic scenarios in which we see the bond of a couple subjected to examination by the conflict between verbal communication and separated experiences. Cavell therefore looks at tragedy, opera, comedy and melodrama as related articulations of an ongoing difficulty. They are the various coping mechanisms in response to a wider crisis, indicative of the ‘sense that language as such, reason as such, can no longer be assured of its relation to a world apart from me or to the reality of the passions within me’.9 In these common conditions of aesthetic representation, Cavell refers to an uncertain knowledge that is indicated in the passage through the problem of separateness. It can be witnessed, for example, in the conflicts arising out of the uncertainty of marriage or familial bonds between the various characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies.10 In The Claim of Reason, Cavell demonstrates that in Shakespeare’s plays the threat to love touches on the question of the doubts as to what we can know of each other (with certainty) and what we assume as knowledge.11 The question of whether and how to refute doubt as the unavoidable condition of language and thought, is acted out by the characters’ bodily behaviour and expressions. For Cavell, tensions arise between the now irreconcilable provisions of separation, sense data and the power of the imagination. This ambiguous relationship between the figure, the body and the word causes Cavell to read tragedy ‘as a kind of epistemological problem, or as the outcome of the problem of knowledge – of the dominance of modern philosophical thought by it’.12 The tragic refers for Cavell to a repeated missing of meaningful expressions. This shows up in the ongoing attempts of the characters to make themselves understandable, both to themselves and others, and their struggle to convince others of the reality of their feelings. The attempt to relate to others through or in language is always haunted by the fear of a lapse, and the fear of the not entirely controllable effect of one’s own utterances. Thus, the threat to expression arises from a double entanglement of the characters: on the one hand, it is indicated by the inadequacy and limitedness of one’s own speech. This expresses itself in scenarios of suffocated or blocked speech. On the other hand, expression is uncertain because of the slippage of meaning and one’s own unbearable responsibility for one’s words, which are unpredictable in their effects on others.13 This inexpressiveness and the over-determination of utterance are the two extreme

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scenarios that, according to Cavell, circulate within the worldviews of tragedy and opera. Both configurations – either the inaccessibility or the excess of expressivity – dramatize the fear of a lost relationship to language and the world. In addition to the physical concrete connection of the body to the experiential practical world of action, a stake from beyond the visible appears in opera with its dramatic vocalization. The strange and questionable in terms of both reference and motivation convention of dramatic singing in opera is seen by Cavell as speech become problematic. He understands dramatic singing as an expression that barely resembles the interactions between speakers. Rather, the singing takes the monological form of a speaking to-oneself or for-oneself. Operatic singing, suggests Cavell, is the presentation of an uncertain expression, and this refers us in turn to Wittgenstein’s arguments about a ‘private language’. Cavell doesn’t understand Wittgenstein’s reflections as an argument. He interprets them as a fantasy, an exemplary scenario that (in the psychoanalytic sense) allows for multiple and varying repetitions. Already in The Claim of Reason this interpretation introduces links between Cavell’s readings of philosophical and dramatic texts.14 This connection is referred to in A Pitch of Philosophy, when Cavell brings to the fore the relevance of Wittgenstein’s thoughtexperiment for opera: I call it a fantasy and articulate it as ‘a fear either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown but in which I am powerless to make myself known (and to myself); or one in which what I express is beyond my control (which I go on to describe as betraying myself) – so a fantasy of suffocation or of exposure …’.15 Cavell claims a close connection between tragedy and opera because both forms point to either an insufficient or over-determined expression. Both limit-cases of expressivity restrict their figures ultimately to an unvoiced existence. The lack of clarity due to the failure of making oneself heard and known in a meaningful way or the enforced deprivation of expression (by others) is to be seen for Cavell in opera in the foundational myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. A failing connection to the other and the loss of the world both bring each other about. What remains are the repeated, unavailing voiceless attempts to relate to the world and bring it back to life, by recalling the world.16 Cavell understands the relationship of opera to film as both a continuation and a transformation. The threat of a voiceless existence arises in film from the asymmetry between the sexes in possessing and claiming a voice. The agony of speechlessness is marked for Cavell in the circumstances and motivation of the various characters’ speech. Cinematic melodrama and the comedies of remarriage invent alternative resolutions of the failure to



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communicate. Thus, they explore aberrant or alternative versions for the tragic conclusion – the physical and vocal annihilation of woman. The following features underpinning the conditions for speech in melodrama can be summarized: alongside the tragedy and comedy of remarriage, melodrama is the struggle of a central pair for a meaningful expression of a mutual recognition. In fictional form, the ratio of sensation to love and to knowledge is discussed and determined. The verbal linguistic communication takes place in tragedy and melodrama at the limit at which the couple-threatening lack of expression or over-determination of the utterance is seen. In melodrama as in tragedy, the male protagonist fails to listen to and recognize the voice of the woman. As the characteristic of the tragedy that persists in melodrama, Cavell speaks of the irony that produces inextricable ambiguities and misunderstandings of speech,17 as well as the inaccessibility of language and the determinations of an obscure past.18 In melodrama resides the ineradicable past of community-forming debates and its reapplication and reassessment by the characters. Speech in melodrama is also characterized by hyperbolic expression and the repetition of motifs. According to Cavell, the protagonists attempt to unfreeze conventional utterance into meaningful expressions of sensation and experience.19 But these attempts to make oneself heard by means of experimenting with locution fail in melodrama due to the sadistic withdrawal of words. The protagonists remain unrecognized because of the inability of the male characters to engage appropriately with the appreciation and articulation of woman. Its transformation of tragedy and opera reveals that there is no more tragic resolution in melodrama: the final figure is the negation of marriage and the female protagonist’s transformed relation to her own autonomous self, which implies a loss or refusal of sociability. Cavell skips large periods and his genre distinctions are very vulnerable in terms of any recognizable cultural or historical narrative. More convincing than his outline of a historical-thematic progression is the comparison of different aesthetic forms and media. I would want to put forward here for the study of cinematic melodrama the question of the particular conceptualization of the relationship between the visible body, the voice and speech that the aesthetic form implies.

Silence and the expressions of sound film Fundamental to Cavell’s conception of the voice and speech in film is his conception of the character or the actor. In contrast to the embodied representation of the actor in the theatre, Cavell puts forward a different disposition of physiognomy and voice, which is not so easily represented in opera and film. He compares the music and the singing voice in opera

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with the filming camera’s powers to fragment and transfigure the actor’s bodily appearance. According to Cavell, both opera and film overcome the stable connection between fictional role, corporeal body and the phonetic and linguistic expression. The relationship between the body, speech and the voice constantly keeps changing with reference to a world practically defined by action. Opera and film construct the visible body and the voice as carriers of decision and action as antagonistic forces. They act divergently in the relationship to the world or as differing means of expression, which tend to cancel out one another: ‘The connection I would go on to draw between film and opera was to analogize the camera’s powers of transfiguration to those of music, each providing settings of words and persons that unpredictably take them into a new medium with laws of its own – each as different from theatre, for example, as air from water.’20 Analogous to the question of what causes singing in opera and what effect it has, Cavell, with regard to film dialogue, seeks to understand the various forms of speech as manifestations of an increasingly volatile expressivity. While in opera the specific nature of the voice stands out independently from the fictional role, in film it is the performer or star who becomes noticeable. He or she will give a vocal image of individuality, which exceeds any connection to a fictitious person. Film viewers perceive the performer of (in) a particular role as one particular instance of the actor’s physical appearance, which might recur in further roles and different fictional scenarios. In contrast to the theatre, in cinema the actor’s physical appearance is heightened in specific ways by means of the images. Thus, film gives a picture of the versatility of a star persona, which goes beyond the imitative representation of any adopted fictitious character.21 When Cavell in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film traces the transition from silent films to talkies, he is looking at the relationship of silence to audible speaking in order to reconstruct a certain conception of photographic realism. The design of the audio track takes over the individuating movements of the succession of shots, which give framed views of spaces and bodies. According to Cavell, sound used in this way reinforces the images’ direction of visual attention through the intimacy of the overheard conversation. Cavell considers the development and implementation of audio-visual synchronization as grounded in a wish or ‘a craving for realism’.22 At the same time, however, the images and the characters’ interaction become ambiguous through the presentation of dialogue and speech on the soundtrack: ‘With talkies we got back the clumsiness of speech, the dumbness and duplicities and concealments of assertion, the bafflement of soul and body by their inarticulateness and by their terror of articulateness.’23 Cavell’s emphasis on misunderstanding and on the unpredictable, yet binding consequences of the speaker’s words relates his remarks on talkies to his consideration of inexpressiveness. He compares the sound film to the staging of voices in opera. In opera, the



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incompatibility between and mutual cancellation of body and voice are clear. The operatic singing at the same time undermines the intelligibility of speech and outbids it in its persuasiveness as well as expression of feelings. As well, the sound film exposes a conflict between physical and visual action and the order of sonorous speech. In modern cinema, the decoupling of the audible and the visible produces disparate and contradictory perceptions for the viewers. For Cavell, the theatricalization of optical and acoustic images in modern cinema points out an unobtainable blankness. Thus, the audible presentation of language confirms the limitations of speaking out: ‘It is the talkie itself that is now exposing the silence of movies.’24 Cavell’s considerations include the proposal to examine the cinematic presentation of visible bodies, narration, audible voices and references of the characters’ speech in order to understand them as aesthetically expressed theories of action and meaning. Just as in tragedy, the exploration of the problem of separation takes, in melodrama, a form which requires the responsiveness of the audience in order to be recognized as an aesthetic manifestation of knowledge.

Loving and leaving the world Monological utterances, misunderstandings, inner voices, forms of silence and non-speech, failing conversations or possible but insecure connections by means of speech are all the particularly melodramatic interpretations of vocalizing and speaking. Their importance for the filmic world of sound and hearing and a special structure of experience is provided by the address and musicality of the voice. Beyond the claimed but often denied connections between the speakers in the film, audible voices reach out to listeners in the audience. Because of this orientation, the response to the film and the judgement of the addressed audience are in question. In what follows I consider for the film Dancer in the Dark the arrangement of the visible body and the unheard vocal expression in terms of the cinematic construction of an isolated subject of sensation. Dancer in the Dark unfolds, over daydream-like images and musical visions, the intimate relationship between the inner emotional life and the expressive actions of the female protagonist Selma (Björk). The protagonist’s sensual perceptions of herself are intensified by the conflict between the visible world and her internal listening. Selma’s listening is presented as vivid and escapist. The character’s body absorbs repetitive ambient noise and synchronizes rhythmic sensations with a series of mental images, which seem to be internalized images, originating in popular movies. The entry into the world of the musical takes place through Selma’s perceptual mode of cinematically imaginative listening. Selma’s special mode of listening transforms the

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audio-visual expressions of the film. The images and sounds present transitions from passive impressions to Selma’s expressions, from the noises of the world to her voice and mostly rhymed lyrics of songs. With regard to classic Hollywood musicals, Jane Feuer sets out the various plot conventions for different levels of narrative reality.25 The dream or the stage are used as models to temporally or spatially frame fictions in the cinematic world. As Feuer remarks, this duplication of representation occurs both in the popular entertainments of the studio era and in modern art film: ‘Both the Hollywood musical and modernist cinema use dual worlds to mirror within the film the relationship of the spectator to the film.’26 In the musicals of classical cinema, it is the imaginary and fanciful world of dreams and show business that provide a narrative justification for going beyond the limits of empirical reality. In Dancer in the Dark, the cinematic world is divided into Selma’s everyday life, her fantasies and the amateur theatre’s rehearsals for a musical, in which Selma plays a part. This multiplication of narrative frames goes beyond the usual features of the musical genre and transforms them. Musicals of classical cinema usually end with the reconciliation between the everyday and the playful fantasy world. By contrast, Selma’s imaginary musical numbers are not community forming, but reinforce her isolation. Although she includes other characters in her fantasy scenarios, the musical expressions and dances remain unseen and unheard in the diegetic world. Selma’s expressions do not reach or affect the visible, practical, shared-with-others world. Her listening, her resonating body and her voice stay separated and unreciprocated. The cinematic narrative always returns abruptly from the singing and dancing sequences back to real-life situations, which were suspended only briefly. The delaying songs merely exacerbate the real-world demands on the protagonist. Due to the isolating musical experience and the retardation with regard to drama and action, the conventional dramaturgy of musicals turns out to be a melodramatic experience of heightened sensations and time pressure in von Trier’s film. The closure of the melodramatic world of action and isolated authenticity as a feature of the unknown woman genre is refigured in Dancer in the Dark in its interiorized images. In Dancer in the Dark, the not merely melodramatic but also operatically dramatic conflict between the visible world and the world evoked in song can be illuminated with reference to Cavell’s characterization of the aria, as elaborated in A Pitch of Philosophy. The background to Cavell’s interpretation here is a series of considerations on moral perfectionism. Cavell treats it as the formulation ‘before’ the decidability of the good and the (overall) possible emergence of moral consciousness and right.27 Cavell refers here to Immanuel Kant’s conception of the human as capable of occupying two antithetical positions with regard to Being. Referring to the standpoint of the autonomous legislation of reason, Cavell understands the



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song in opera as a passage between the sensory world and the intelligible reality of a world extending beyond the limits of experience.28 The aria – so Cavell understands it – completes this transition or change of perspective: Such a view will take singing, I guess above all the arts, to express the sense of being pressed or stretched between worlds – one in which to be seen, the roughly familiar world of the philosophers, and the one from which to be heard, one to which one releases or abandons one’s spirit […] and which recedes when the breath of the song ends. This expression of the inexpressible (for there is no standing language of that other world; it requires understanding without meaning) I described as a mad state, as if opera is naturally pitched at this brink.29 Cavell suggests that operatic singing is sourced in its various appearances on inexpressiveness and might be understood as a ‘state of abandoning oneself’.30 Singing announces a state in which, through the acceptance of being exposed to the uncertain meaning of each utterance, the possibility of a new – whether ecstatic or melancholy ‘perspective of the self to itself’ – opens up.31 In Dancer in the Dark, the soaring voice of Selma seeks to bring an unseen world closer, moving beyond the conciliatory utopia of the musical to the radicalized conflict between seeing and hearing as ways of experiencing the world. The reinstatement of a tragic loss of both the self and the world can be witnessed in a very reduced vocal number that can be described in operatic terms as a prison scene.32 In a brief conversation, Selma lets the warden Brenda (Siobhan Fallon) in on her secret musical daydreams with ‘You know, when I used to work in the factory I used to dream that I am in a musical because in musicals nothing dreadful ever happens.’33 This is while the convicted protagonist is waiting for the decision regarding the requested suspension of the decision to execute her. Alone in the cell Selma stands on her bed and leans against the wall, listening to the sounds of the prison chapel through the ventilation. With her concentration and focus on a grille next to which she places her ear, a quiet harmonic sequence of notes is set out on the soundtrack. Then during a zoom-in, which ends in an extreme close-up of her face with eyes closed, the volume of the music rises. The pale colours of the set are replaced with a strange luminosity. With a faltering, trembling voice interrupted by sobbing, Selma begins to sing. She moves infinitely slowly on from one word to the next and sings My Favourite Things from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The Sound of Music. In a scene at the film’s beginning, Selma and the amateur theatre group have been practising this song together. Selma leans with her hands against the wall and sings the first words up the ventilator shaft, as though she could either join in the faint chorus or answer it. The tentative and halting words gradually gain force, speed and strength: ‘Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens / Bright

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copper kettles and warm woollen mittens / Brown paper packages tied up with strings / These are a few of my favourite things / Cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels / Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles / Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings / These are a few of my favourite things / When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling bad / I simply remember my favourite things, and then I don’t feel so sad!’34 This disconnected listing of things is accompanied by a series of static close-ups of Selma and objects in her cell: her face, the shelves, the toilet, the bed, her face again, her feet on the bed and her face once more. Selma then sits down and starts with a toothbrush and plastic comb to tap out the rhythm and mimic the swirling of a chorus line of dancers. In close-ups and extreme close-ups we get to see how she jumps on her bed, turns around and finally tap dances in her cell. The song and her movements suddenly cease. A close-up shows Selma’s foot, its movement in the air stops. The bright colour withdraws in the subsequent shot. An awkward pan then follows Brenda from the cell door to Selma, who is cheerful and smiling on the bed in front of the ventilation shaft. Brenda says that the suspension of the judgement of execution was granted. A close-up then reveals the clinging embrace of the two women. The scene achieves a touching expression of lonely suffering because the limited audio-visual means and the strict cutting of the images amplify the experience of this oppressive situation. As with the preceding musical numbers, the song My Favourite Things transforms the actual room. Unlike the previously fantastic and spectacular audio-visual means, here in the sparseness and isolation of the cell they remain stilled. Only by means of the movement of hands and feet, bumping up against the wall, tapping with objects and jumping is Selma able to overcome her confined position and create a rhythm. Also here the composition of the shots differs significantly from the staging of the other musical numbers: there are no high-angle or low-angle positions of the camera, no canted framings or distortions of perspective. On display is merely the clear composition of a few objects, fragments of the character’s body and parts of scenery shot from a straighton camera angle. The colour has more luminosity compared to the more realistic episodes, but is restricted to the dark, drab colours of the set. The tonal complexity of the musical arrangement is also limited: one can hear the very low hum of voices from the ventilator shaft and Selma’s voice, whose reverberation matches the visually presented narrow space and the breaking and squeaking of material sounds. The imagery seems overwhelmingly close, with the body and objects revealed only partially. The limited movement of the figure is doubled by an oppressive immobility of the film’s imagery – that is, the presentation of minimal visual changes. The impression of a paralysis of the image arises from the slight displacement of the point of view in the succession of shots from static camera positions.



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Selma’s ecstatic, even experimental, play with perspectives threatens to succumb to this confinement. In the singing scene, the montage does not follow the rationale of continuity; rather, the succession of shots brings about spatial and temporal gaps. Thus, the optical images are arranged discontinuously through their framing and editing. Also the character’s singing initially enters only very haltingly. In the prison scene the optical and acoustic images seem like a miniature, which condenses and displays the characteristics of the film’s form. The restricting of the action and the imagination of the main character and the crushingly tight restriction of the plot are seemingly mirrored in the particular form of the image. Because of Selma’s blindness and imprisonment, the story increasingly diminishes her sensory, emotional, expressive and practical connections to a world shared with others. The extreme isolation of the protagonist reduces her capability to act effectively in or upon the world. The experience of the film viewers is inevitably bounded by the presented tragic actions, which evoke unpleasant feelings and strong emotions. The reality designated by the film shrinks to the image field and the limited sound scape. In the internal optical and acoustic images the world contracts to framed, closed-off shots. But the prison scene also urges an operatic transcendence in the vocals. The film shows this overcoming of the body through the voice by means of Selma’s musical out-of-self states, which occur also at the end of the film. The internalization of genres and cinematic perception given in the My Favourite Things scene might be understood as a particular interpretation of the relationship between the bodily image and the placeless voice that reflects on the conditions and possibilities of cinematic expression. Selma struggles in her cell to release her imagination and overcome the quotidian, in order to bring about a new perspective onto the self. In the prison scene, the oppressive limitations upon the image reveal that the two worlds implied by Selma’s voice are opposed to one another and cannot be reconciled. The unseen world, which is evoked by the song’s lyrics and thus invented again through Selma’s singing, resists the visual dimension of the image and remains absent. Her singing about – or from – this unseen world is unheard in the film’s diegetic world. The internal visual and acoustic images make it clear that this other reality cannot be rendered visible in or as an image and cannot be disclosed by vision. It is only in the melancholic abandonment of the self, in the willingness to move beyond speech and conventional meaning through singing that the character achieves a new perspective on herself. The unseen world of the song is a world that has yet to come. The film’s tragic ending – the execution of the still-singing figure of Selma – is a discomforting and shocking experience for the viewers. This fatal conclusion ostracizes the protagonist from the cinematic world. And what is more, the ending provides the grounds for the viewers’ experience of a sudden and unsettling separation, which also disrupts their connection with the film. The New World song in the credits

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transfigures the character of Selma: as viewers we hear Björk’s voice, which recurs beyond any incorporation of a fictional role or visible appearance and seemingly heralds future reappearances of the pop star. The lyrics hold out the prospect of a new beginning, a still undiscovered world to see. The credit sequence suggests that the concrete connection between Selma’s body and Björk’s voice is only one possible realization of a physical and vocal identity. This coupling of body and voice seems open to changes in the future. As the lyrics claim, there will be ‘a new world to see’. In Dancer in the Dark, the operatic duality of body and voice finds an ecstatic cinematic form. The film presents an elusive singing voice, which transcends the visible body and can be heard, although its origin cannot be located. The visible figure of Selma is a reflective surface for Björk’s voice. The tragic and ecstatic excess of the operatic self linger like a resonating echo. Translated by the editors and Ulrike Hanstein

Notes 1

See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

2

See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1981, p. 14.

3

Cavell speaks of moral perfectionism as ‘a dimension or tradition of the moral life’ in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 2. For Cavell’s interpretation of moral perfectionism, see Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 2, 13, 445 et seq.

4

Cavell mentions among others Letter from an Unknown Woman (USA 1948, Dir: Max Ophuls), Gaslight (USA 1944, dir: George Cukor), Now, Voyager (USA 1942, dir: Irving Rapper) and Stella Dallas (USA 1937, dir: King Vidor).

5

‘Genre’ stands for the recursive and innovative ways in which film as an aesthetic medium is seen. Therefore, Cavell speaks with regard to the ‘comedies of remarriage’ of a certain ‘genre-as-medium’. See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’ in William Rothman (ed.), Cavell on Film, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, p. 64. See also Pursuits of Happiness, p. 26 et seq., and Contesting Tears, p. 3 et seq.

6 See Contesting Tears, p. 39 et seq. 7

Cavell develops a reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies under this interpretation of scepticism. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. xxii.



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8 See Contesting Tears, p. 9 et seq. and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, [1841] in Essays and Lectures: Essays vol. 1, ed. Joel Porte, New York: The Library of America, pp. 257–82. 9

Stanley Cavell, ‘Opera in (and as) Film’, in Cavell on Film, p. 306.

10 See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987. For marriage as a motive of the ordinary, see Contesting Tears, p. 10. 11 See Stanley Cavell, ‘Othello and the Stake of the Other’ in Disowning Knowledge, pp. 125–42; and The Claim of Reason, p. 482. 12 Ibid. 13 Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 86 et seq. 14 The Claim of Reason, p. 343 et seq. 15 A Pitch of Philosophy, p. 138. 16 Ibid., p. 139. 17 Contesting Tears, p. 208. 18 Ibid., p. 6. 19 With regard to this Cavell takes up the example of Now, Voyager. See Contesting Tears, p. 137 et seq. 20 A Pitch of Philosophy, p. 137. 21 Ibid.; and ‘Opera in (and as) Film’, p. 309. 22 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 147. 23 Ibid., p. 150. 24 Ibid., p. 148 et seq. 25 See Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 68. 26 Ibid. 27 A Pitch of Philosophy, p. 142. 28 Ibid., 141 ff.; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 29 A Pitch of Philosophy, p. 144. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 145. 32 This scene starts 107 minutes into the film. 33 Dialogue at 106 minutes. 34 Rodgers/Hammerstein quoted from the soundtrack of the DVD.

4 A woman’s smile Rex Butler

What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting appearances – say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, THE FRAGILE ABSOLUTE1

The Swedish director Lukas Moodysson was on something of a high when he came to direct the almost career-ending A Hole in My Heart in 2004. Two years earlier, he had made the sublime Lilya 4-Ever, which despite its despairing subject matter had a powerful and redemptive ending. Lilya was the story of a teenage girl from Estonia in the failed ex-Soviet Union who, abandoned by her mother, is tricked by the false offer of a job into going to Sweden, where she is forced to work in the sex industry. Once there, she is kept imprisoned in a flat, and throughout the latter part of the film there are a series of immensely dispiriting scenes in which we see her servicing her much older clients. At her lowest point – and there are touches of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows about the film – she imagines meeting up again with her young friend Volodya, whom she had left behind when she departed for Sweden and who later killed himself. He is now an angel of sorts, and he encourages her to escape from her captors and go on the run. In the dramatic final scenes of the film, with the criminal gang that had tricked her after her and the sense that her options are running out, Lilya stands on the edge of a high concrete overpass with her arms held out and jumps. She too is now an angel, able to look on at the world from above and even able to make again her

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decision to trust her gang member boyfriend, who lied to her about the job in Sweden, and say no. There is none of this in A Hole in My Heart. The film is a depressing, chaotically shot and confusingly edited story, told in quasi-documentary style, concerning a recently divorced man with an estranged son, living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Sweden, who is somehow trying to make a living by making amateur pornography. (And there is a deliberate blurring of the lines between his hapless amateur efforts and Moodysson’s own film depicting them.2) The characters include the father Rickard, a hysterical, unattractive, self-pitying man, whom we see having sex on numerous occasions; his Goth son Eric, who spends all his time locked in his bedroom, listening to death metal through headphones; the aggressive, stupid, misogynistic lead actor in the porn film Geko; and the sad, trashily attractive and mistakenly aspirational actress Tess, who has agreed to be in Rickard’s project only because she failed to get onto Big Brother. The film depicts events gradually spiralling out of control in Rickard’s apartment, with the men performing more and more brutal and degrading acts upon Tess. We move from a scene of the two men half-heartedly having sex with Tess, to them smashing up the apartment and threatening her with a baseball bat – she leaves after that, but unable to cope with the outside world, she inexplicably returns – to an infamous sequence in which, in a ghastly parody of the usual pornographic trope, Geko and Tess greedily eat food and then Geko vomits into Tess’s mouth, before squeezing dishwasher liquid into it. The film ends with Rickard despondently crying out for his departed wife and calling upon God to rescue them all. A Hole in My Heart, as can be imagined, at least for a period, ended Moodysson’s directorial career. Show Me Love (1998) had been widely praised, and Lilya 4-Ever won several European film awards and ended up being Sweden’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards. But A Hole in My Heart bombed at the box office and was almost universally condemned by the critics.3 Indeed, it was only some five years later that Moodysson retuned to feature film making with a much more mainstream love story, as though in retreat from what had come before and seeking a new direction. But, for all of the sordid and degrading tone of the film, there is nonetheless one moment that was often singled out for breaking with its surroundings and having an almost transcendental effect. It is a moment that occurs in the chapter ‘What Happened?’ on the DVD release, in which the characters show various of their body parts: penises, breasts, mouths. At a certain point, we are shown a close-up of Tess’s flushed and shaved genitals, with her legs spread wide apart, in a shot that is held for a long time and in fact turns into a freeze frame.4 And over this shot, Moodysson plays the climactic last chorus from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The sequence produced an overwhelming effect on its original audiences, as attested to by Anthony Lane, the film reviewer for the New Yorker:



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At the exact moment we hear the last chorus from the St Matthew Passion – ‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’. It roared from the speaker, and I felt eight hundred people or more rocked back as if by a wave. From that there was no recovery. We stumbled out, and in the succeeding days I found myself playing the piece over and over, not in order to relive a noxious movie but because the Bach had regained its grave and devastating function.5 But what exactly is the meaning of this sequence? And how to account for the cathartic effect it had on at least some of its spectators? In one way, it can be understood as a matter of a simple identification with Tess, who is abused and put upon in the film and is now shown in a position of maximum exposure and vulnerability. Her pose with her legs wide open reduces her to the level of the rubber anatomical torso that Moodysson periodically shows, into which various objects are roughly inserted. We witness here the loss of Tess’s inherent dignity, of what should remain private but has been so crudely revealed. And the playing of Bach speaks of some human essence that can never be rendered visible, can never be reduced to visible appearance. But there is perhaps another reading of the sequence that is almost the opposite of this. Here what that shot of Tess’s genitals reveals is not something that is opposed to visibility, but the fact that everything can now be rendered visible. Her flushed, shaved and brightly lit genitals make clear, as opposed to the usual understanding of them as leading to some womb-like interiority, or indeed the male phallus, in which absence and presence are exchanged for each other, that all is reduced to surface, that there is nothing behind appearance.6 The Bach now speaks not of the irreducible dignity of the human but of the very loss of the human. And at this point we perhaps cry not so much for Tess as for ourselves. But we might ask where this ‘grave and devastating’ affect comes from in a world without the self? If that second reading of the sequence reveals that there is no longer any human interiority, why might we nevertheless associate it with the ‘feminine’ (as opposed to that first reading, which we would call ‘masculine’)? We would suggest that this second reading is undertaken not in the name of any particular subject within social space, but is a kind of remarking of this space itself. What is being spoken of is the fact that there is no longer any exception within space, but only this space itself without exception. And yet this itself is still being said from somewhere. Impossibly, it is as though a certain subject is speaking of the voiding of its own subjectivity. A kind of ‘excess’ is brought about, not as anything behind or outside of space, but as the very endlessness of space itself. It is as though we were looking at a certain invisibility, a certain folding or wrinkling of space, that occurs right before our eyes in the very form of those genitals before us. It is this that we call the ‘feminine’. And it is even, perhaps surprisingly, the logic of the ‘pornographic’, as we

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see in Moodysson’s film. For how is it exactly that the effect of the ‘real’ arises in pornography? Of course, pornography is par excellence a genre of filmic realism. The very justification of the form is that we see something real, something that cannot be faked. And yet, needless to say, absolutely everything about pornography is fictitious, not for real: from the terrible dialogue, the wooden acting, the artificial sets, the put-on passion, to the fact that the actors are doing what they are doing only because there is a camera watching them. However, moments of reality do nevertheless occur within pornography. And it is this that Rickard seeks with his actors (and Moodysson with his actors, as the making-of-the-film extra on the DVD attests). We see it, for example, in that scene in which the two men penetrate Tess at once, as she waits patiently or stoically on her hands and knees for them to finish. Of course, Tess attempts to perform the standard erotic look of desire, but as the sequence goes on and she passes through various stages of pain and fatigue something else is to be seen: a shy smile playing around her lips and eyes as though she is not entirely there, although she so obviously is. And it is this expression, like perhaps the shot of her genitals with the Bach playing over it, that is so moving. Again, it is not something that stands against the visible or that Tess keeps back from the camera, but something to be seen only through and because of the camera. Tess is looked at, is aware of being looked at and even looks at herself this way, making herself the equivalent of the gaze upon her. And yet in this something else is produced, some smile or grimace that is not behind space but is a kind of excess of this space itself; that is part of Tess, but also not entirely attached to her, so that it floats free, like some immaterial spot or blindness hovering before our eyes. And is not all of this close to the experience novelist David Foster Wallace reports when he visits a porn convention in Las Vegas, where he speaks to – of all people – an off-duty detective, who says he prefers porn films to Hollywood films because, if in Hollywood films the actresses are not meant to be acting but do, in porn films the actresses are acting but every so often something else breaks through, some moment when they are not acting? Wallace writes: The detective confessed that what drew him to the films was ‘the faces’, i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylised ‘fuck-me-I’m-a-nastygirl’ sneer and became, suddenly, real people. In real movies, it is all on purpose.7 We might, indeed – allowing for a moment a relationship between the culturally ‘highest’ and ‘lowest’ – compare this effect in pornography to the famous ‘mousetrap’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There too it is through a kind of artifice, the self-conscious putting of events on stage, that something



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‘real’ is produced. It is a real not opposed to illusion but to be obtained only through it. Or, to put it this way, the mousetrap is not an exception to reality that is otherwise within it, but on the contrary remarks all of reality. In a sense, there is no exception to reality, but reality as such must be seen or staged from somewhere else. And we find this mousetrap not only in Hamlet, but also in Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930), in which Sir John Menier traps Handel Fane into a confession by getting him to perform a play Sir John has written based on the actual murder that Fane has committed. We find it as well in a series of Ingmar Bergman films, such as Scenes from a Marriage (1973), After the Rehearsal (1984) and Sarabande (2003), which are either explicitly or implicitly set on a stage and in which at certain heightened moments the characters say such things to each other as ‘Don’t be so dramatic!’ or ‘You are behaving as though you were on stage!’ But this self-conscious dramatization is not at all to do away with the reality of their feelings, but on the contrary is how they are most profoundly expressed. It is a ‘mousetrap’ whose consequences are set out by the Lacanian theorist Alenka Zupančič in the following terms: The other concept of truth in Lacan [from that opposing the Real and reality] situates the truth, so to speak, in the middle of reality. The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be rendered only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and Imaginary – Lacan comes to present it as something that speaks between the lines, detectable in the disturbances, interruptions and slips of a discourse.8 *** Of course, the playing of Bach’s St Matthew Passion over that shot of Tess’s genitals cannot but remind the serious cinephile – strange as it may seem – of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964). There too it is played extensively to accompany Pasolini’s depiction of the events of Christ’s life leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection. The film is widely regarded – by the current Pope, no less – as the greatest treatment of the life of Christ on film, which is surprising given that Pasolini was Marxist, atheist and homosexual. It is also a crucial example of the movement of Italian neorealism, which is equally surprising, given its avowedly religious subject matter. The film is certainly ‘realist’ in its setting in the recognizable rocky hillsides of southern Italy, the non-actors used in central roles and the humble, Caravaggesque faces that make up the Apostles and the Roman sentries, but it is nonetheless difficult to reconcile the notion of Christ’s eventual resurrection and afterlife with any conventional ‘realist’ framework. However, when we look at the key films and film-makers of neorealism, we find a persistent religious or at least ‘spiritual’ dimension to them, for example, the well-known scene involving

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the last-minute redemption of the priest Don Pietro in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the invisible sweeping up and transport of St Francis into the air in Rossellini and Fellini’s The Flowers of St Francis (1950) and even that mysterious and unidentifiable substance that distinguishes a king from ordinary citizens in Rossellini’s The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966). Indeed, it is something like this immaterial ‘agalma’ that is the subject of Pasolini’s other great late film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). The film, based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade, but also on a true historical incident that took place in the dying days of World War II, involves a group of wealthy and decadent aristocrats, who kidnap a number of teenage boys and girls and hold them in an isolated castle, visiting upon them a series of more and more degrading rituals and performances. But, in fact – and this is Pasolini’s subtle critique of fascism in the film – these more and more intrusive actions upon their bodies are driven by their captors’ inability to get at what might be called their ‘souls’ or ‘spirit’, as indicated by the particular forms of pleasure they are seen to take. A little like the policemen looking for the letter in Poe’s short story, the torturers always miss it – and they know it, and it is this that drives them on in their perverse quest. (We see the same thing in such Sade novels as Justine and Juliette, where his libertines even eventually cut up or dissect their captives’ bodies in an attempt to find what moves them, but again always miss it. Sade thus offers a kind of critique in advance of that Lamettrian materialism that is otherwise the inspiration for his novels.) We see this in two crucial sequences in Pasolini’s film. The first is when the Duke instructs a boy and a girl to masturbate in front of a group of fellow collaborators, and when they have finished he informs those looking on that their pleasure is ‘a sign language, a code none of us can break’. The second, in a much more ominous vein, is when the Bishop shouts at a young boy he is about to execute, but again has to admit the ineffability or indestructibility of what he is trying to get at: ‘Do you really think that we would kill you? Don’t you see we want to kill you a thousand times, to the limits of eternity, if eternity had limits?’9 This complex question of the relationship between the body and soul or the material and ideal was that raised by the chief theorist of Italian neorealism, André Bazin. For a long time, it was seen as something of a paradox or contradiction that the leading advocate of filmic realism was a practising Roman Catholic. It appeared, to the cine-semiotic film world of the 1970s and 1980s, that Bazin’s religious belief was a mistake, or at least something that would have to be overlooked in making use of his otherwise progressive, materialist and even ‘Communist’ vision. However, in recent years, undoubtedly aided by another version of semiotic psychoanalysis, there has been an acknowledgement of the spiritual dimension of Bazin’s theorizing and that the realism and spirituality of his work are compatible: the spiritual is to be seen only through the material, while the material for



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its part is possible only because of the spiritual. Thus as Lisabeth During and Lisa Trahair, the editors of a special issue of the journal Angelaki devoted to this re-reading of Bazin, write: ‘For Bazin, cinema’s power to make ordinary things visible is miraculous. The spiritual in cinema cuts between the rough ground of the everyday and the giddying heights of transcendence and the supernatural.’10 And, moreover, this spiritual of which Bazin writes is to be found not just in the obvious neorealist films to which he first alerted us – Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles (1948) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) – but in all types of films and cultural formations, and those not infrequently involving females or female characters – the films Joan of Arc (1928) by Carl Dreyer, Little Foxes (1941) by William Wyler and House over the Marshes (1949) by Augusto Genina, the essays ‘The Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl’ and ‘Marginal Notes on Eroticism in Cinema’ and the book The Cinema of Cruelty.11 It is undoubtedly a complex question, the degree of connection between Italian neorealism and the Dogme 95 Manifesto, signed by the Danish film-makers Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh Jacobsen. Certainly, with the Manifesto’s emphasis on stories set in the present and shooting without sets, music, extra lighting and special effects it conforms to the generally held notion of ‘realism’ in cinema. The Manifesto was understood to be anti-Hollywood and even in a way anti-aesthetic in its implications.12 And yet, as has been noted, if the Manifesto argues for a realism or materialism on the level of content (although, in fact, the specific type of films to be made on its basis is not specified; it is not so much a particular filmic realism as reality itself that is being argued for), on the level of form the Manifesto is spiritual. Not only are its Rules or Goals modelled on the Biblical Ten Commandments numerically and Luther’s Theses in their polemical presentation against an entrenched establishment; but the Dogme film-makers then followed the Manifesto with a subsequent ‘Vow of Chastity’, in which they make a claim for a certain ‘truthful’ and ‘impersonal’ cinema. The position they are essentially putting forward – again, not so much in what they are saying as in how they say it – is that the real, reality as such, more than any aesthetic of realism, is to be attained only by a certain poverty, reduction and attenuation. There is to be nothing missing on the level of content in their films, but only in their form. Precisely the real or reality is everything, but only because ‘something’ is missing, ‘something’ is excluded, not as any exception to reality, but as reality, as what allows reality as such. It is ultimately the same claim as Bazin is making. And it is in this regard that the Dogme film-makers would be closest to the Italian neorealists. But, if we were to think the relationship of von Trier to the aesthetic of neorealism, we would begin with the Danish film-maker who was closest to the

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aesthetic and to whom Bazin devoted a number of essays, Carl Dreyer. It is Dreyer who made perhaps the only true equivalent to Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew with his Ordet (1955). And, indeed, by the time von Trier came to write the Dogme Manifesto, he had already made his Medea (1988), both based on an unfilmed script by Dreyer and inspired by Pasolini’s own earlier version of Euripedes’ play.13 In recent years, Medea has been the subject of considerable theorization by the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, with one of the main points being its contrast with Sophocles’ earlier Antigone. Antigone, as is well known, is the story of the frustrated attempts by Antigone, the daughter of King Oedipus, to obtain a proper burial for her brother Polyneices against the will of Creon, the new king, after Polyneices waged an unsuccessful civil war against his brother Eteocles. In the famous presentation of her case Antigone, while admitting to Creon that the sanctioned burial of her brother would be bad for the state, nevertheless insists that she is doing it for the honour of her family, as a recognized exception to state law. Family, in effect, is of a higher order than civic order, for which one must make allowances. There is none of this in Medea. Although again acting in the name of her family – she poisons Creon and his daughter Glauce for taking her husband Jason from her, thus dishonouring both herself and her children – she ultimately goes on to kill even her own children as a way of taking revenge on her unfaithful husband. In other words, if Antigone is willing to sacrifice everything for something – some ‘higher’ value that should be acknowledged – Medea is willing to sacrifice everything for nothing. Having sacrificed everything, she then proposes to sacrifice that for which she has sacrificed everything. There is no ‘higher’ value, no designated exception. It is not from within society that she makes her appeal. Rather, society itself – which is understood as total, as having no exceptions – is remarked from ‘somewhere else’. Doubtless, it was something like this that drew Dreyer late in his career to Medea, for his Ordet is already a perfect example of the same logic. The film tells the story of a devout Protestant farmer Morgen, who loses his beloved daughter-in-law Inger, the wife of his oldest son Mikkel, in childbirth. Morgen calls upon his local priest for comfort who urges, against Morgen’s more joyous form of Christianity, a proper respect for and reconciliation to God’s mysterious ways. Morgen’s middle son Johannes, on the other hand, after dropping out of divinity school, now walks around the house claiming to be the direct embodiment of Christ himself. Morgen looks on at him with pity and the priest with a barely disguised contempt. And yet, in the haunting concluding scene of the film, as Inger lies in her coffin waiting to be buried with her family mourning around her, Johannes, who has been wandering lost, returns and claims that if only they would believe he could resurrect her. The family and the priest react in horror and dismay. But Inger’s small daughter says that she believes, and miraculously, against the natural order of things, Johannes holds Inger’s hand and her



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eyes open and she is able to squeeze Johannes’s hand back. It is a pure, Medea-like exchange of nothing for nothing across a void. As opposed to faith operating within a wider social order that it recognizes and within which it has an accepted place, Johannes’s faith knows no boundaries. Reality itself is transfigured by his faith, which has no place, no recognizable ceremony, and comes from someone who does not believe indirectly (mediated through some other) but directly (they are this other). We see something of this ‘resurrection’ in von Trier’s cinematic realization of Dreyer’s script for Medea. (Or to put this way, von Trier shoots his Medea as though another version of Ordet.) Von Trier’s version is structured through a series of episodes set on the edge of a seashore with the tide coming either in or out. The effect of this is to make the events of the film appear cyclical or perhaps even eternal, at once determined in advance and always about to happen, something like the turning of the tide itself. This has the consequence that, if in one way Medea is always murdering her children, in another these children are always coming back as ghosts or revenants.14 And as opposed to any conception of her act as standing above or against the social from somewhere that will one day be part of it, Medea’s act becomes something like an act of unfathomable irony that implies at once that the social is all that there is and that it is underwritten by something that remains absolutely outside of it. This can be seen in a very important speech Medea delivers to Jason at the exact moment she has decided upon her revenge and is handing him the poisoned crown that will eventually kill Creon, Glauce and him: ‘Forgive my words spoken in bitterness. I see now that it was I who was hard and relentless. By marrying Glauce you gain sufficient power and wealth to secure the future of your children and me.’ And von Trier shoots throughout using an ultraviolet lens that is nevertheless identified with Antigone, so that we literally see the world through her eyes, without any ‘objective’ contextualizing shot that would indicate it as merely her ‘subjective’ point of view. And where can we see this Ordet-like act of faith in one of von Trier’s own films? It is undoubtedly with Bess in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). As is well known, Bess in that film, set in a remote, male-dominated, Scottish Presbyterian community, begins undertaking a series of unlikely sexual acts for her now crippled oil rig worker Jan, at first for his pleasure and then in order to try to cure him. These acts get her shunned from her family; and at a certain point, thanks to the intervention of the ‘good’ Dr Richardson, who is concerned for her welfare, Bess is even given up by Jan, who signs a form to have her confined to an asylum. Nevertheless, it is at this point, when like Medea Bess has given up so much for a man who has given her up, that she decides to go back to the ominous moored ship to have sex with the crew, knowing full well the fate that lies in store for her. We watch her standing at the front of the small boat that is carrying her to the ship making her decision with flushed cheeks and a subtle smile playing around

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her lips. And yet, in the extraordinary final scene of the film, we see that her sacrifice has led to the resurrection of Jan, who is shown walking clumsily up to the top of the oil rig where he is now working to look for the origin of the mysterious sound that has been heard high up in the sky. It is something like the ‘spirit’ of the now dead Bess, we are given to understand, looking down from above and whose sonorous tolling is something like the voice of feminine pleasure that has otherwise been repressed in her community. *** This Medea-like sacrifice of Bess has been understood as ‘feminine’, in the sense both that she resists a series of men and male-dominated institutions and that it manifests a different logic from the ‘masculine’ one of Antigone. That is to say, as opposed to Antigone, who undertakes her actions in the name of a higher exception to an otherwise universal social order, for Medea there is no such exception. The social order is all, only with a kind of inconsistent ‘psychotic’ principle running all the way through it. This is certainly the way Žižek understands Bess’s actions in an early essay on Breaking the Waves, ‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’, and any number of commentators have followed him in this: Bess’s sacrifice is unconditional, there is nothing Beyond, and this very immanence undermines the phallic economy, deprived of its ‘inherent transgression’.15 And, following this, Žižek begins to theorize a different conception of the act. Antigone for her part acts only within the guarantee of the symbolic. What she hopes for is to be recognized within effectively the same social order as the one she contests, as in something like a secular version of the Last Judgement. She ultimately wants to be seen as ‘good’, measured against the same standards as those she opposes. It is not like this for Medea (and Johannes and Bess), who act in the name of no known social order, no matter how transformed. Their actions are not currently recognized and potentially count for nothing. Or they might be recognized only retrospectively by the new social order that they bring about. Again, in the words of Žižek, referring to Medea in words that might also apply to Bess: ‘The subject who commits an Act maintains an ethics which can no longer be accounted for in terms of fidelity to a pre-existing Cause, since it redefines the very terms of this Cause.’16 And, once more, any number of commentators have repeated this distinction between the ultimately inauthentic actions of Antigone, which are false, hysterical, played out merely for the gaze of the other and ultimately wanting to be stopped or their grievance satisfied before they go to the limit, and the authentic act of Medea, which goes all the way and alters the symbolic coordinates by which it is measured, in that it is not ultimately wanting to be recognized or recognized only within the new terms that it would bring about.



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And yet there is a small problem or complication in this theorization of the act and consequent distinction drawn between Antigone and Medea. It is this: for all of the attempt to assert that the ‘feminine’ act takes place without any symbolic recognition, before or outside of any external guarantee, in the films in which it occurs this does not appear to be the case at all. In Medea, the circular nature of the tides makes it seem as though the events depicted have occurred countless times before. In Ordet, Johannes’s miracle does not take place until Inger and Mikkel’s daughter says she believes in him. In Breaking the Waves, when Bess decides to go back to the ship full of sailors she is in fact communicating with God: ‘Father, aren’t you with me? I am with you, Bess.’ Indeed, it appears as though there is always something of a symbolic mandate underlying these acts. All of our protagonists, Medea, Johannes and Bess, understand their acts as already looked on by, played out for the gaze of, the Other. What is this to suggest? In fact, the question of ‘temporality’, or let us say ‘causality’, is a little under-examined in uses of Žižek’s theorization of the act. For when he says that the act, the authentic act, that is, the act recognizable as such, makes symbolic reality over in its image, so that it can be judged only in its own terms, the question is raised of how we are to understand this order of events. Is there first the act and then its subsequent symbolic rewriting? This would be to make the act – the authentic ‘feminine’ act we are trying to characterize – merely that transgression that breaks with the existing symbolic order that we have called the ‘masculine’. Rather, we would say that the act and its rewriting of symbolic reality are simultaneous: we do not have the retrospective symbolic rewriting of the act unless we equally have the act coming to light only as a result of this symbolic rewriting. And this is to suggest that the properly ‘feminine’ act found in Medea, Ordet and Breaking the Waves is not transgressive. At no point – as evidenced by Medea’s ‘irony’ – does it stand outside of or is it unrecognizable in terms of social reality. Or the act both is just social reality and, even against Žižek’s contention that it will eventually be recognized within that new symbolic order it brings about, forever unrecognizable, exactly because at no point does it simply distance itself from its surrounding social reality. It is what Joan Copjec means when she says of the feminine act that it does not ‘hold open the possibility of some eventual recognition’ by making itself the ‘limit’ of the world it brings about.17 And it is this we might mean by speaking, following Copjec, of this act in terms of the Lacanian ‘not-all’: the fact that at once social reality is all that there is and there is something nevertheless missing from it; that the act does not so much break with reality as double it, becoming its impossible and in a way ‘transcendental’ condition; that the act as much as anything else is the very realization of the impossibility of thinking this ‘transcendental’ outside, that something is missing from our social reality but we cannot say what it is.

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This is why again the ‘mousetrap’ might be understood as the essential form this feminine act takes. Think, again, of the actions of Medea, Johannes and Bess. In all three, there is something ‘theatrical’ about them, as though they were aware of being seen and, indeed, playing out a script that is determined in advance (but, as we will see in a moment – and this is the deepest truth of the mousetrap – this script is determined only as it is played out).18 Johannes’s manner is dramatic, over the top, even exaggerated for effect. It is as though he were behaving this way for the gaze of God, to make up to that God whom he had previously disappointed by dropping out of divinity school. In Medea too, Medea’s actions – this is undoubtedly the meaning of carrying over the theatrical staging of Euripides’ play into film – are mannered, deliberate, self-conscious, enacted as though before an audience. (This is the much commented-upon ‘Brechtian’ aspect of von Trier’s treatment there, which is not at all some way of distancing the actor from their role but on the contrary a way of making the actor the equivalent to the role they embody.19) And, finally, in Breaking the Waves, at the moment of her highest decision Bess acts as though she is doing what she does for the gaze of God – and her smile and blush, as seen also in A Hole in My Heart, are a sign of her awareness, whether conscious or not, of a gaze upon her. But, in fact – and this is the crucial aspect of this ‘feminine’ act – if these acts are all played out for the gaze of the other, it is also the case that this other is themselves. The two cannot be separated: if it is true that the act cannot proceed unless as though following a symbolic order, it is also absolutely the case that this act immediately is or brings about without any mediation this new symbolic order.20 Johannes in Ordet through his theatrical self-identification with Christ actually becomes Christ. Medea in fact comes to carry out the horrific actions she first announces to her Attendant, undoubtedly for effect. Bess immediately after appealing to the intervention of God then realizes that she does not need him, that she is God herself: ‘Do you need me? No, that’s all right.’ But again we might ask of these ‘feminine’ figures where are they located if not of the old symbolic order and yet not of some obviously different symbolic order? What might it mean to say that these acts double the existing social order, providing it with a new ‘transcendent’ condition for which it stands in, but that this condition cannot be thought except in the form of that which stands in for it? We might attempt to answer these questions by looking more closely at the end of Breaking the Waves and a number of other films, by both von Trier and others, where we see this ‘feminine’ act. At the end of Breaking the Waves, when Bess is dead and Jan is walking again, we suggest that that ‘heavenly’ point of view shot from above, which at once is in the world and outside, audible but not visible, is that of Bess, and perhaps more generally of woman. And if we were to think of a precedent for such a shot it would be the final shot of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where at the end it is Judy who must be understood to be



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looking down from above the belltower at Scottie standing over the edge (and, importantly, like Bess, Judy is unable simply to be located in reality, for we never get that shot of what Scottie is looking at, which would be the fallen Judy at the bottom of the belltower). We might also recall that scene at the end of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1938), in which Stella watches the high-society wedding of her daughter Laurel from out on the street along with a crowd of other onlookers, when a policeman arrives and with a swish of his nightstick tells them all to move on. Stella exits screen left, out of both the audience’s gaze and more than likely her beloved daughter’s life, with an ecstatic grin on her face, which appears suddenly illuminated by some inexplicable light. In each case here, these women occupy a ‘liminal’ or ‘interstitial’ space within the film. Each of them is excluded from the symbolic world of the fiction – Bess is given up by her husband and betrayed by her doctor, Judy is abandoned by Gavin Elstir and left to fall by Scottie, Stella is divorced by her husband and only fitfully remembered by her daughter. There is no place for these women, there is no exception made for them. And yet it is they who bring about and make possible this social order, or to put it otherwise it is they who are the makers of their own destiny. Each performs a Medea-like gesture of self-sacrifice that exactly in being lost and unrecognized has its desired effect, bringing about the world that it wants. Although it is seen by no one, visible on the radar but not to the human eye, it is Bess’s sacrifice that allows Jan to walk. Although Scottie does not realize it at the time, it is Judy offering her jewels to him that allows him to cure his vertigo.21 Although neither her husband nor her daughter are aware of it, it is Stella who has got both him married to upper-class Mrs Morrison and her engaged to Mrs Morrison’s son.22 The world is just as it is, but this is only because of these women. Nevertheless, in a way – and this is the miracle of these films, the real act they embody – the male characters in these films do belatedly come to recognize that their entire existence owes everything to their actions, which otherwise cannot be acknowledged: Jan upon hearing the tolling of the bells grasps that it was Bess’s sacrifice that has allowed him to walk; Scottie as he looks over the abyss understands that when Judy handed him her necklace she was at once confessing to a crime and offering him her love; Mrs Morrison as she looks out of the window of her mansion towards the crowd gathered outside to see her son’s wedding intuits that Stella is out there somewhere, even if she cannot see her. What then are these women’s acts? Where are the women in these films finally to be found? In a sense, these three women, Bess, Judy and Stella, will their own self-erasure. They become indistinguishable from the ‘normal’ course of events, which is in fact possible only because of them. But we can think them only as what comes to take their place, as that which they make possible. And the act is precisely what allows us to think this, to think that we cannot think them.23 Bess merely follows the word

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of God, but only because she becomes him. Judy is abandoned by Scottie, but only because she allows him to. Stella is left behind by her daughter, but only because of her actions. The transgressive ‘break’ of the feminine act is this symbolic matching up, this making possible of the eternal fate of the world. And we see all of this – to take another example from von Trier – in Melancholia (2011). In that film the distinction between masculine and feminine is that the men attempt to escape their destiny, somehow to prevent the planet Melancholia from crashing into earth, and the women do not. The men eventually kill themselves insofar as they cannot change the course of events, as does Claire’s husband John, while the women embrace their fate, so much so that the whole collision between planets occurring on a cosmic scale can seem to be the effect of an individual act of will. That is, more than it being a mere coincidence between the lead character Justine’s personal state of melancholy and the planet Melancholia arriving, it can appear as though it is her melancholy that impossibly – but in the same way as Bess causes Jan to walk, Judy causes Scottie to be cured of vertigo, Stella causes her daughter to get married – summons the planet to earth, even though this can be explained for objective, scientific reasons. And it is this ‘impossible’ position of Justine at once inside and outside of the world, willing those universal physical forces that entirely explain the appearance of Melancholia, that is indicated in what we claim is the final ‘shot’ of the film, in which, after the last surging chords of the Wagner have died away and the world is completely destroyed and along with it all human consciousness that would record this, we hear a deep echoing rumble over a black screen that is not merely a sigh of post-coital jouissance but the sound of that empty ‘space’ from which both the world and its disappearance are remarked. Perhaps we might even draw up a typology of von Trier’s films around this question of ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’ acts, which would cut across the usual classification they are given (the Europa trilogy, the Gold Heart trilogy, the Depression trilogy). However, instead of regarding these as opposites, or embodying a kind of choice or strategy on von Trier’s part, we might consider the ‘male’ films a kind of failure or falling short of the ‘female’ ones. In the ‘male’ films, there is a certain dramatic or hysterical passage à l’acte, not only by one of the characters to bring events to a head (Grace in Dogville), but also by von Trier himself to bring about a conclusion to a narrative that threatens to go on forever (the decision to have Joe shoot Seligman at the end of Nymphomaniac Volume II). Thus we have at the end of Dogville Grace calling upon her father like a deus ex machina to impose law upon the inhabitants of Dogville after what she sees as their insufficient respect for her. Or in Antichrist the character played by Willem Dafoe attempts to cure the depression of his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, through psychiatry; and even she understands the ‘feminine’ as some kind of higher, exceptional principle that stands outside



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of the rational order of things. Or in Nymphomaniac Joe at the end pulls out a gun and shoots Seligman, the asexual scholar who rescued her, as a way of refusing to understand that feminine desire that has driven her all of her life. In all of these cases, we have the sudden imposition of an external ‘masculine’ order (the father of Dogville, the psychiatric and cultural theory of Antichrist, the violent shooting of Nymphomaniac), which sees the feminine as a higher (or, indeed, a lower) order that breaks with the existing order of things, for which special exception must be made. But, ‘against’ this, there is another series of von Trier films in which the ‘feminine’ is not seen as a transgressive exception, that which breaks with the symbolic order, both in the world of the film and in the narrative that creates this world. Rather, it doubles this world as that secret smile that occasionally breaks through appearances but is usually hidden among the things of this world. We might think here of von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), which begins in quasi-documentary style with what appears to be a group of mentally disabled people behaving strangely in a restaurant, alternately upsetting people or calling upon their (and the audience’s) sympathy. It is soon revealed, however, that they are in fact a group of middle-class rebels deliberately ‘spassing’ or pretending to be disabled as a form of protest against social norms. Into this group comes Karen, a shy, diffident, early middle-aged woman, looking for answers to life’s problems. As the film goes on, the group gradually disbands. Most return to their usual occupations, glad of the opportunity to momentarily escape from their humdrum existences, including even their charismatic leader Stoffer, who in a dramatic scene is confronted at work with the choice between keeping his job or continuing his anti-social activities. In the end, it is only Karen who remains true to the group’s ideals when in the final scene of the film she ‘spasses’ out at home in front of her shocked and unknowing parents. And the distinction here is that, as opposed to the men, for whom their activity is a kind of acknowledged exception, for Karen it is shown both to underpin and undermine family life, not to break with her normal self but how she might discover her authentic self. And we see the same thing in von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), the story of Selma, who steals money for her son’s eye operation but who kills the policeman who arrests her and ends up being hanged insofar as she cannot tell anyone why she did it (and her son’s blindness – the film in many ways is a remake of the Chaplin film, City Lights (1931), which also features a great scene of recognition – is a metaphor for his lack of knowledge as to why his sight is restored). The film is structured as a musical, whose numbers accompany the action, and perhaps the real question is whether it is Selma who follows the music or the music that accompanies Selma, that is, whether she follows the symbolic score or the score follows her. And at the end of the film – for the real meaning of her actions is not recognized, either by the at first sympathetic policemen, her son or society at large – after she is hanged and her body

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falls through the trapdoor with the rope around her neck, the camera tracks up the scaffold and into blackness and, exactly as Bess in Breaking the Waves and Justine in Melancholia, Selma (played by the Icelandic rock musician Björk) is heard singing over the credits, at once inside and outside the film, recognized and unrecognized, excluded and the very author of her fate, thinkable only as what comes to take her place: ‘If living is seeing / I’m holding my breath. / In wonder – I wonder / What happens next? / A new world, a new day to see. / I’m walking softly, on air, / Halfway to heaven from here.’

Notes 1

Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000, p. 128.

2

For this see the making-of-the-film extra on the 2004 DVD release of the film.

3

See, for example, Wendy Ide, ‘A Hole in My Heart’, The Times, 15 January 2005, p. 9; and Ryan Gilbey, ‘A Hole in My Heart’, Sight and Sound, February 2005, p. 53.

4

In fact, this shot is not in the DVD release of the film (undoubtedly for censorship reasons), instead being replaced by a black screen.

5

Anthony Lane, ‘Feelings’, New Yorker, 11 April 2005, p. 86.

6

On this flush or blush and the way it is inseparable from the gaze of the Other, see Peter de Bolla, ‘The Blush of the World: Bonnard’s Nudes and the Disembodied Look’, public lecture delivered at the University of Queensland, 19 July 2013; and Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘Portraiture as Encounter’, Oxford Art Journal 37 (2) (June 2014): 213–15.

7

David Foster Wallace, ‘Big Red Son’, in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005, p. 16.

8

Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Two, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, p. 119.

9

Of course, this ‘immanent’ limit to Sade was the point made in Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbour, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991, which is cited by Pasolini in the credits to his film. We also see something like this in such works by Damien Hirst as Jesus and the Disciples (1994), in which the ‘souls’ of the Apostles are revealed through the scourging of their flesh, and For the Love of God (2007), in which ‘art’ is the mysterious excess that arises over and above any reduction of the work to its material constituents. (Hirst was famously able to sell the piece for more than the literal cost of the diamonds that made it up.)

10 Lisabeth During and Lisa Trahair, ‘Revisiting Themes from Bazin’, in special issue ‘Belief in Cinema’, Angelaki 17 (4) (2012): 5. A number of the essays there address this new reading of Bazin, for example, James Phillips, ‘Cinematic Realism Following Bazin and Mizoguchi’ (pp. 9–22), and Robert



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Sinnerbrink, ‘Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick’s Tree of Life’ (pp. 95–117). Also recommended in this regard is Dudley Andrews (ed.), Opening Bazin: Post-War Film Theory and Its Afterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 11 For ‘Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl’ and ‘Marginal Notes on Eroticism in Cinema’, see André Bazin, What is Cinema?, Vol. 2, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 169–75, 158–62. The posthumous collection The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock, New York: Arcadian Publishing, 2013, can also be read very interestingly in terms of the logic of the ‘mousetrap’. Bazin in fact wrote about Shakespeare’s Hamlet in ‘Theatre and Cinema’, in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 93–113. 12 For good treatments of the Dogme 95 Manifesto, see Jack Stevenson, Dogme 95: Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and the Gang that Took on Hollywood, Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, 2003; Birger Langkjaer, ‘What was Dogme 95?’, Film International 4 (1) (February 2006): 34–43; and Scott McKenzie, ‘Dogme 95 and the Future of the Film Manifesto’, in Mette Hjorth and Scott McKenzie (eds), Purity and Provocation: Dogme 95, London: British Film Institute, 2013. 13 On Dreyer’s, Pasolini’s and von Trier’s respective versions of Medea, see Kyriaki Frantzi, ‘Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth’, in Gerhard Fisher and Bernard Greiner (eds), The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007; and Mike King, Luminous: The Spiritual Life of Film, Jefferson: McFarland, 2014, esp. pp. 229–30. Importantly, Bach’s St Matthew Passion is also something of a ‘mousetrap’, with the action of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection itself set on a stage, commented on by a Chorus. See on this Uri Golomb, ‘Liturgical Drama in Bach’s St Matthew Passion’, Bach Cantata website: www.Bach-Cantatas.com/Articles/SMP-Golomb.pdf. Von Trier’s Europa trilogy is often called ‘meta-cinema’ in this sense and is in fact based on the ‘mousetrap’. Perhaps the most celebrated instance of it is the hypnotized ‘actress’ Gitte Lind in von Trier’s Epidemic (1987), who crosses the line between past and present and fact and fiction, bringing with her the ‘epidemic’ that begins to infect reality there. 14 For an example of this circular temporality in von Trier’s film, in which events have already happened and are always about to happen, see the sequence in which the birds and horse set off by Medea act as both a warning to Glauce about to prick herself on the poisoned crown and a sign of the fatedness of events. Indeed, it is as much as anything the birds outside of her window, warning Glauce about the crown in her hands, that cause her to prick her finger on it. It is in this regard that we might begin to think von Trier’s long-term fascination with Nietzsche and his doctrine of Eternal Return, as evidenced by Antichrist and his screenplay for The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part I (2007). 15 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’, Lacanian Ink 14, Spring 1999. www.lacan.com/symptom14/?p=43. See also Slavoj Žižek,

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‘Death and the Maiden’, in Elizabeth and Edmond Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. For an early commentary on Žižek’s essay, see Christopher Craig Brittain, ‘“That is a Strength He Does Not Possess”: Slavoj Žižek and Breaking the Waves’. www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo99. papers/Brittain99.htm. 16 The Fragile Absolute, p. 155. 17 Joan Copjec, ‘More! From Melodrama to Magnitude’, in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, Berkeley: University of California, 1999, p. 265. 18 Notably, Žižek compares this aspect of Breaking the Waves to the logic of amateur pornography: ‘These features [of Dogme reductionism] lend Breaking the Waves a kind of hysterised amateurish intensity, reminding one of the famous early Cassavetes films, creating a sense of immediacy, of eavesdropping on the characters before the camera person has had a chance to edit the film: at the level of form, the film relates to the standard professional film like homemade pornography to professional pornography’ (‘Femininity between Goodness and Act’). Žižek, like Copjec in ‘More!’, will also speak of the way that, although von Trier’s films originally appear ‘hysterical’ and ‘melodramatic’, they eventually move through these to something else. 19 See on the relationship of von Trier to Brecht Angelos Koutsourakis, Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. For an important collection of essays, both historical and contemporary, on the connection between performance and realism, see Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 20 Žižek will write of the Hegelian conception of the relationship between Old and New: ‘Hegelian dialectics is the science of the gap between Old and New, of accounting for this gap […] It simultaneously describes the gap within the Old itself; between the Old “in itself” (as it was before the New) and the Old retroactively posited by the New’, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2013, p. 273. But this is also to say that in Hegel (and in the feminine conception of the act) there is no such gap; that the gap within the Old and between the Old and the New is merely a retrospective effect of the New, of what arrives to fill this gap. 21 On the possibility that Judy deliberately hands Scottie her jewels, knowing full well that this risks exposing her to the accusation of murder, see William Rothman, ‘Scottie’s Dream, Judy’s Plan, Madeleine’s Revenge’, in Katalin Makkai (ed.), Vertigo, London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 45–70. 22 On Stella deliberately driving her daughter away from her so that she can marry Mrs Morrison’s son, see Stanley Cavell, ‘Stella’s Taste: Reading Stella Dallas’, in Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 197–222. 23 Copjec in ‘More!’ will describe Stella Dallas as more a ‘mode of thinking’ than an ‘object of thought’ (p. 268). Indeed, she will distinguish the film from



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melodramas conventionally speaking, making the point that, as opposed to those melodramas in which the central character stands outside the world – and we would relate this to the exceptionalism of the masculine act – in Stella Dallas Stella ‘acts in the world’ (pp. 267–8). She does not finally seek to be recognized, that is, thought as exceptional, but is content to remain unrecognized. Nevertheless, even through Copjec suggests that the feminine act does not need to be recognized, it is perhaps the case that it must first be recognized – melodramatic – before it can be unrecognized, precisely so that we can realize that we cannot properly recognize it. It is in this sense too that we might think the relationship of Copjec’s feminine act to Michael Fried’s notion of ‘absorption’ (p. 252): as in Fried, the state of absorption – non-recognition, non-self-consciousness – is not to be attained directly but only through the overcoming of a prior ‘theatricality’, the constant threat of ‘theatricality’ and even we might say only through ‘theatricality’.

5 Female fight club: Lars von Trier’s women and the paradox of Being Sheila Kunkle

There is a scene in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II where Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sits outside of a room with a closed door, alongside several other women, passively waiting for her turn with the man who will bind and whip her to help her achieve, if not sexual satisfaction, then at least sexual arousal. At this moment we can, without too much trouble, imagine Bess (Emily Watson) from Breaking the Waves, Grace (Nicole Kidman) from Dogville, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) from Melancholia, Her (Charlotte Gainsbourg) from Antichrist, or indeed any of von Trier’s female characters sitting alongside Joe, waiting her turn to be tortured in some manner or other. Taken together we might say that the women in Lars von Trier’s films make up a kind of female ‘fight club’ with their self-inflicted torment, beaten bodies and tortured psyches. But unlike David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club, there is no satisfying connection we can draw between the women’s torment and a causal explanation for their behaviour. Whereas ‘Jack’ (Edward Norton) in Fight Club splits into a sadomasochistic double of himself as a response to an alienated life under capitalism, the women of von Trier’s films seem to arrive on the scene as already out of joint; their suffering is singular and cannot definitively be traced to an originary cause. If von Trier’s women and their behaviour cannot readily be explained in a causal way, however, it is not because these figures represent some kind of essential form of feminine angst, but rather because they confront the impasse of being, or the Real at the core of the symbolic.

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As Slavoj Žižek’s dialogic analysis of Hegel and Lacan reveals, the constitutive void of the subject (the Real) draws a parallel with Hegel’s void of being (or rather, one illuminates the other). In Lacan, the fundamental paradox of the relationship between the symbolic and the Real is not that the signifier ‘can never reach the Real, but rather that it can never reach itself’; the Real coincides with its own impossibility because the subject in its constitution is non-coincident with itself.1 And in Hegel, a similar gap or ‘nothing’ is our access to the truth of being. With Hegel we can never attach a predicate to being: ‘We are never dealing with a simple descent toward an increasingly deep and concrete essence. The logic […] is always that of a reflexive realization of the failure’, and the void, ‘the “nothing” as the “truth” of being, is only this impossibility given substance, realized’.2 Von Trier’s women, I argue, are portrayed as occupying this impossible place of a paradoxical self-referentiality, a place where an Other fails to define them, and where their Acts reset not the relationship between a subject and others, but the very structure through which their Acts can be read. And on a deeper level, we might say that what these women confront is the deadlock of causality itself and what they enact is freedom, not over and against a moral law, but a freedom that points only to itself. Or, as Alenka Zupančič puts it in her study of Kantian ethics and Lacan’s ethics of the Real, the freedom of the subject is not located somewhere beyond causal determination, because ‘there is in causal determination a “stumbling block” in the relation between cause and effect […] the subject as such is the effect of causal determination, but not in a direct way – the subject is the effect of this something which only makes the relation between the cause and (its) effect possible’.3 Von Trier’s women traverse a paradoxical path where they confront the impasse of a traumatic and contingent Real, where they retroactively posit their cause, which simultaneously exposes the subject’s autopoiesis and opens a space for us to question how freedom and autonomy come to be recognized as such. If, as I claim, von Trier’s women arrive ‘on the scene’ as out of joint, it is only because the scene itself is already out of joint, or, as Joan Copjec puts it: [W]e are born not into an already constituted world that impinges on our senses to form perceptions, but in the wake of a primordial loss; it is not, then, our relation to the order of things, but our relation to das Ding [which is roughly equivalent to the lost enjoyment that the maternal body once provided] that decides the objectivity of our reality or its collapse […] In short, psychoanalysis does not take reality or the world for granted, but asks how the subject comes to constitute and thus ‘have’ a reality or world.4 This psychoanalytical insight helps us understand the connection between constitutive loss and the bodily and psychic pain that plagues the women

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of von Trier’s films. Each one of them faces a loss, an abject loneliness, the abyss of freedom, and must go on from there; as they suffer the loss of the object, they submit their bodies to the painful enjoyment, the jouissance, of a disciplinary (sometimes redemptive) drive. In this sense, von Trier’s women act according to a self-torture that parallels the self-beating in Fincher’s Fight Club, or, as Žižek puts it, the self-inflicted pain is ‘a violent reformation of the very substance of the subject’s being’.5 But, unlike the jouissance of the men in Fight Club, the self-inflicted torture of von Trier’s women reveals the logic of Lacan’s feminine ethics. While a masculine ethics, according to Lacan, posits a Law and its exception as a structural component of the (universal) whole, feminine ethics reveals that the structure itself is not-All encompassing; it reveals a paradox where the system includes everything, yet there is something within the system that contains an ambiguous element and that serves to undermine it. As Joan Copjec argues in Imagine There’s No Woman, Lacan’s proposal that there is no whole, or ‘all’, of woman is fundamentally an answer to the question of being as such, and does not only apply to females. She writes: ‘If it is woman who is privileged in Lacan’s analysis this is because she remains closer to the truth of being, while man obfuscates the truth through a nostalgic, secondary operation that allows him to maintain a belief in the plenitude of being to come.’6 In order to explore this connection between a feminine ethics and feminine jouissance, we trace the fates of three of von Trier’s women, who in three different narratives are confronted with the paradoxical impasse of being. Bess in Breaking the Waves encounters the Real, both of her own desire and in the event of an unexpected trauma, and psychotically submits to the painful humiliation and sacrifice of her body to save her beloved husband; Justine in Melancholia goes through (in the sense of traversing) the paralysing jouissance of a depression that affects her entire body before her ultimate acceptance of death as freedom from an evil world; and Joe in Nymphomaniac: Volumes I and II uses her body to repeatedly experience the drive of an insatiable sexual lust. In von Trier’s cinematic universe the world itself may be unjust, oppressive and filled with unpredictable nightmares, like the loss of a child, a near-fatal accident on an oil rig or impossible coincidental occurrences, but his tortured female characters do not so much react to these contingencies of life as act according to a necessity that puts a cause in place retroactively. And while they all allow us to trace the paradoxical feminine ethics of the not-All, the endings of these films reveal three different turns that open onto something enigmatic about the way a subject’s world (reality) is constituted. By the end of each film narrative nothing remains the same, a certain tectonic shift has taken place. Bess’s Act of sacrifice serves to call into question the structural logic of belief itself; Justine’s final acceptance of the end of the world is the Act that unhinges our certainty that life has ultimate worth and needs to perpetuate

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itself; and Joe’s final act of shooting the man whom she has finally come to consider her first real friend presents an ironic turn that, as I will claim, is an unaccomplished Act in that it ultimately fails to point out the limits of the universal. It is only Justine’s Act of accepting the cataclysmic end of the world that illuminates the stark difference between the feminine ethics (and freedom) of women in von Trier’s films and the more masculine ethics wedded to a ‘plenitude of being to come’, that is hinted at by the men in Fincher’s Fight Club.7 From the start it is important to see that von Trier is not so interested in depicting the way the sexes differ in terms of their biological attributes and masculine or feminine identifications on an imaginary level. Nor is he interested in advocating an ideology of equality in the symbolic dimension of exchange. It would also be a mistake to take Lars von Trier’s women as representative of real live women in the world or as symptomatic of his own personal misogyny; rather, they serve the director in his own exploration of both the paradox of being and what a world without a Law and limits would call forth. Further, these female characters are not so much representations of von Trier’s personality, as he has stated, but rather can be taken as illustrative of his orientation to lack, and the subject’s ex-timate status vis-à-vis a big Other. That is, his women traverse a path where they seek neither to fit into nor resist a symbolic tradition or norm, but rather act so as to be included paradoxically by exclusion. Von Trier’s own provocative behaviour in public forums, at award ceremonies and in interviews about his films renders this paradox.8 That is, we sense that he has no wish to fit in under the rubric of an Other (in this case, the Hollywood establishment), but rather to be recognized and included by his very exclusion from the club.9 If there is any identification that von Trier shares with his female characters, it is their relationship to the objects a, the bits of Real or the parts of non-being that are experienced in a jouissance (an excess enjoyment), in the repetitive motion of the drive. In the three films under review the director explores the enigmas of death, sex and love through women who endure all kinds of torture and pain, as he flirts with the notion of something transcendent, but a transcendence that is paradoxically located within an immanence of the women themselves. And this helps us to see that the seeming contradictions of von Trier as film-maker can be considered as two sides of the same coin. In his interview with Stig Björkman (1999), for example, von Trier was asked about the recurrent theme in his films of female protagonists who, like Bess in Breaking the Waves, fall victim to their own beliefs, and who in the end sacrifice themselves for this belief. Von Trier’s response was as follows: So what can we say about sacrifice? I can’t stop myself thinking at least ten times a day about how pointless life is. You make your entrance, then

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bow and disappear […] someone who sacrifices himself or herself is at least giving their existence some sort of meaning […] The characters in these films are struggling to bring meaning to their time on earth. It must feel easier to die if you’re doing it for something you believe in.10 Yet, as we know, in the ensuing years the director continued to make films that not only resisted clear meanings, but further presented female characters who even embraced meaninglessness. This portrayal, I would argue, finds its apotheosis in the women of his Depression trilogy, and in particular Justine in Melancholia, who disavows any transcendent purpose for life and accepts both her own and the planet’s cataclysmic end with an eerie calm. This antagonism between what the director sees as his characters’ need to find purpose and his simultaneous depiction of women, in particular, who act outside of the realm of readily-recognizable meaning, illustrates the underlying duality found throughout von Trier’s oeuvre: the director’s ‘romantic’ impulse to measure meaning against finitude and, concurrently, his positing of something that cannot be expressed within the realm of the temporality of the symbolic order. In his films we find von Trier confronting the enigma of death by searching for the meaning of life, but in doing so, he always inevitably shifts onto another terrain outside of the finitude– infinitude matrix. To put it another way, von Trier sets out to explore the enigma of death (and life’s meaning and/or meaninglessness), and ends up confronting the enigma of sex, or to be more precise, the Lacanian non-existence of the sexual relation. He searches for what might transcend finitude and, instead of positing something infinite, he locates what is indestructible, which is always found in the jouissance of a woman. This duality of the director is also rendered in his formal film elements, in his unique style and attention to the framing of the narrative, including the disorienting hand-held camera, the stark close-ups, the lighting, his use of Brechtian allegory, Sadian characters and a certain music meticulously placed, all of which have been given a great deal of attention by both critics and scholars.11 Von Trier himself has discussed the use of his ‘filters’ as he is aware that his narratives require some type of mediation, which not only allows us a safe distance from something we, as spectators, would find ‘too suffocating’, ‘too ridiculous’ or ‘too violent’, but that also draws us into a certain proximity to the Thing to which feminine jouissance is attached. The relationship between the form and content of von Trier’s films remains thoroughly ambiguous, but is the key to understanding his films because, and as Žižek has noted in the case of Breaking the Waves (and I would argue in all of von Trier’s films), ‘the content is only rendered by way of a form that annuls and contests it’.12 In Nymphomaniac especially, the selfconscious overly ridiculous narrative and unbelievable character of Joe are rendered through a kind of illusory effect that positions us, the spectators,

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in a place that hovers between utter disbelief and improbable acceptance in the veracity of events. The formal device of Joe’s affect-less narration, along with her interlocutor Seligman’s (Stellan Skarsgård) historical references and attempts at explanations act as veils that mediate the excessive content itself. Here the form doesn’t so much annul or contest the content but rather works to render something ‘impossible’. Spectators are forced into the narrative through hyperbolic unrealism, which is accomplished through the lighting, the split screens and stark settings while they listen to Joe’s emotionless voice.13 I would only add to Žižek’s analysis, then, that von Trier’s ‘filters’ (his formal film elements) perform the paradox he ends up illustrating about feminine ethics, which is that the only way to depict and convey the women’s feminine jouissance is through a distorting lens – a lens that filters our proximity to the Thing, but that is also our only way of apprehending it at all. Even with his filters, however, von Trier’s women undergo a torment and suffering that appears as excessive to the spectator and is akin to how Alenka Zupančič conveys the Kantian sublime, that is, as ‘an incarnation of chaos (the eruption of a volcano, a turbulent ocean, a stormy night …). It appears as pure excess, as the eruption of an inexplicable jouissance, as pure waste.’14 Yet there is a logic to the women’s suffering, and in the film analyses that follow I explore what happens in the place of the not-All, where each woman confronts an impasse of being and enacts a singular necessity that reconfigures causality, freedom and autonomy retroactively. At the heart of the narrative of Breaking the Waves is a love story between Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), an oil rig worker and Bess (a naïve, ‘simple’ and religious young woman), which takes place in the 1970s in a small, devout Presbyterian community off the coast of Scotland. Shortly after their wedding, and after Bess enjoys her first sexual experience with her husband, Jan is called back to his oil rig. Unable to withstand the separation, Bess makes a wager with God: return Jan to her and she will endure any test of her faith required. Her prayer is answered, but she is devastated when Jan returns in a paralysed state, the victim of a terrible oil rig accident. What her God has done is to test her faith ‘through’, not in exchange for, Jan’s return, a kind of inversion that points out the narcissism of Bess’s original request. From his hospital bed Jan commands Bess to have sex with other men and then tell him the details of these experiences in order for him to continue to go on living. After Bess does as Jan requests there is a slight improvement in his condition, and from then on Bess reads everything as a response from God that she is doing only what is required. So when Jan’s condition worsens she takes it as an instruction to commit the ultimate painful sacrifice of giving her body over to sadistic sailors who rape and beat her to death. Linda Badley, in her work Lars von Trier, offers a thorough and often illuminating analysis of the many responses to this film from academic,

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religious and feminist quarters, with the most conservative reaction coming from those who see von Trier’s character Bess in many ways equivalent to Sade’s Justine. These feminist critics see von Trier as a misogynist because he portrays Bess, like Justine, as a type of Christ figure. Bess’s martyrdom, although it works outside the Law of a patriarchal religion (a religion that forbids women to speak), nonetheless ‘consigns Bess (and all women who attempt self-authorization) to hell’.15 Yet what these critics miss is the paradoxical ethics within which Bess’s Act is configured and which is illustrated by Žižek’s analysis of this film. He elucidates several crucial points as follows: Bess’s feminine jouissance and her feminine ethics undermine the phallic economy and call into question the ‘good’ of the church elders; her act is properly religious in that it entails sinning for the sake of her beloved (she tells Jan that she will even go to hell for what she is doing); and ‘Breaking the Waves is subversive on account of its very “over-orthodox”, excessive realization of the fantasy of the feminine sacrifice for the male jouissance’.16 Žižek refers to Bess’s psychosis as that which allows faith to transcend everything; her faith suspends the very gap between the big Other and jouissance, between the symbolic and the Real: ‘The price to be paid for such immediate coincidence of religious Faith and sexual jouissance is psychosis.’17 Here, however, I would say that it is Bess’s psychosis that becomes both cause and effect; it is what allows her to follow a logic that puts her Act in the realm of feminine ethics. In her talks with God we see her answering herself (exchanging a soft feminine voice for a stern, more masculine voice), in a kind of self-reflexive logic where she already knows what God will ask of her and what she must do to save Jan. And in her Act of self-sacrifice she will reveal (retroactively) a God and a husband who are both perverse, and who require of her certain similar perversions, which she readily undergoes to prove her faith and save her husband. Not unlike the psychosis of the famous German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, studied by both Freud and Lacan, who experiences his body growing breasts in preparation for becoming the bride of God, Bess’s psychosis requires that she read Jan’s directives literally, where there is no room for metaphorical interpretation or uncertainties, where jouissance must be felt as a pain directly on her body. In this film, Bess’s pathology ‘works’, in the end; her self-sacrifice allows Jan to get up from his hospital bed and walk in a miraculous recovery. Although to some viewers the final scene appears as irony, and to others it becomes a postmodern shortcut, I see the ending as reaffirming Bess’s autonomy, but an autonomy that paradoxically confounds the borders between freedom and servitude and thus points out the limits of the ‘universals’ accepted by the patriarchal Presbyterian Church. The ringing of the non-existent bells heralds Bess as her own creator and creator of the Other as well. Rather than anything reconciliatory, I would argue that with this final shot we are left with a deeper enigma about faith, sacrifice and belief, all of which Bess has rendered more out of joint than before, through

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a transcendence that is paradoxically immanent in her Act.18 The feminine not-All is conveyed through a painful jouissance when Bess posits a God who is both good (he carries out his side of the bargain) and evil (exacting perversions along the way). When confronted with an unexpected moment of the Real (both Jan’s near-fatal accident and her very own desire to have her husband with her), Bess’s psychosis configures a God and a world where the Other paradoxically needed her and her Act of sacrifice. Her Act simultaneously opens a space for sacrifice and accomplishes the sacrifice; like Antigone, she gives up her life, but sustains the truth of her being.19 Through a painful jouissance (experienced with the body that once also felt the ecstasy of sex), Bess enacts the cause of herself retroactively.20 The contrast between Bess and Justine in Melancholia could not be more stark, for while the former sacrifices herself for her beloved and experiences a jouissance commanded by a perverse God, the latter has no need of sacrifice, as there is no transcendent meaning we can attribute to human existence; the world in Melancholia is designated as evil and no one should mourn over its loss. This narrative, like Breaking the Waves, starts out with a wedding, a ritualistic ceremony that is meant to express happiness and the promise of everlasting love in the public union of two people. But, very quickly, it becomes apparent that something is very wrong and the disjointedness that pervades events is conveyed already in the long prelude where uncanny images and figures move in slow motion, like dead birds falling from the sky, static electricity glowing from Justine’s fingertips and images of planet Melancholia moving ever closer to Earth. These images, along with the music of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, portend a doom that lies ahead, and the strangeness continues in the beginning of Part I (entitled ‘Justine’) as the stretch limousine carrying Justine and her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) to their wedding reception navigates a narrow, windy road, making them over two hours late. Already these elements signal that time, everyone’s sense of temporality, is out of joint in this film. For the purpose of this film analysis, I will focus on how Justine’s jouissance, her out-of-joint melancholic orientation to the world, only finds its connection to its object in retrospect. In fact, I would say that we can only really say anything about Part I (which centres on Justine’s depression) after we have watched Part II, ‘Claire’ (which focuses on the two sisters and planet Melancholia’s impending collision with Earth). Part II allows us to retroactively decipher not only Justine’s depression, but also the way her depression is indicative of something deeply rotten in human affairs. Justine’s abject depression in Part I disturbs everyone, including: her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who responds to her sister’s exasperating behaviour by telling her that at times she really hates her; her brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland), who has ‘paid an arm and a leg’ for the reception that takes place on a palatial estate; her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgård),

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who is frustrated with her for not producing a tag line for his advertising campaign; and her husband Michael, who eventually leaves the reception because his new wife has grown distant and they will not be consummating their marriage on their wedding night. But all these people have also failed Justine in return, and she shuns their rituals and their demands. She tells her boss Jack that he is a ‘despicable power-hungry little man’, she is abandoned by her father (John Hurt) who fails to take seriously her pleas to talk about something distressing and her mother (Charlotte Rampling) responds to her declaration of fear by telling her to ‘get out while you can’, because marriage is a trap. Von Trier slowly and carefully signals that something is temporally out of joint in the realm of the Other (the symbolic order); and as the inevitable, contingent and violent end toward which they are all headed becomes apparent, it is only Justine who knows on an intuitive level that humans are doomed and there is nothing they can do to change this. This disjointed temporality is noted in several scenes where things or events are directly rendered ‘out of place’: when Justine receives the gift of a photograph from Michael (a symbol of their future happy life together), and says she will keep it forever, but quickly leaves it behind as she leaves the room; after refusing to make love to her husband on their wedding night, Justine instead initiates aggressive sex with the ad-assistant Tim (Brady Corbet); in her rearranging of the art books in the library, Justine exchanges abstract modernist art images with sublime scenes of Romantic and pre-modern works. According to David Denny, this scene illustrates the director’s desire to replace themes of abstraction with the figurative motif of emotional depth and meaning, which along with Wagner’s Prelude ‘haunts the entire film with a compulsively driven romantic pathos’ and juxtaposes the ‘cynical postmodern depressive’ alongside the ‘authentic poet who shares his private language with the public’; a rendering that ultimately signals the state of our end times in late capitalism.21 It is only in Part II where things seem to fall into an alignment; that is, as planet Melancholia draws nearer to Earth, the abject depression loses its grip on Justine. And if there is a moment of ‘changeover’ similar to the end of Fincher’s Fight Club where Jack realizes that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and he are one and the same person, it occurs when Justine internalizes the romantic ethos, which paradoxically allows her also to accept the apocalyptic end of the world. After an incident where she violently whips her horse for refusing to go across a bridge, and after it is becoming clear that the end is near, in the middle of the night Justine walks into the woods and lies naked basking in the eerie light of planet Melancholia, referencing John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia that we encountered earlier in the library. After this, Justine is completely changed; she is able to shower, have breakfast and talk to her sister and nephew in a way not accessible to her before. Here we could say that not only her orientation to the world has changed, but death now comes to ‘fit’, comes to be in sync with what she

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sees as an evil world and its ultimate just deserts. As Justine calmly accepts the inevitable end, her sister Claire becomes more unhinged, lamenting the loss of the world and any hope of a ‘plenitude of being to come’ for her son. And here we find the primary difference between the self-inflicted violence depicted in Fincher’s (and Chuck Palahniuk’s) male Fight Club and von Trier’s ‘club’ of women who experience a self-torment that is singular. In Fight Club the superego’s command of self-beating is not for the purpose of gaining back a manhood lost by feminine consumerism, but rather to re-position death in terms of finitude and meaning. In Fincher’s film death has become meaningless, and one of Tyler Durden’s primary deeds is to force Jack to accept that one day he is going to die, to give meaning to life (by positioning it against real death), and not to treat it simply as an acceptable ‘ratio’ of loss (a reference to Jack’s job in the corporate world where he is responsible for calculating acceptable death rates in terms of insurance payouts caused by faulty automobiles). By contrast, the torture that the women experience in von Trier’s films is not so as to provide a meaning for their lives, but rather to see death as a form of freedom itself: death for Bess was the price she readily paid for love, and death for Justine is a welcome end to an evil world. If Bess commits the ultimate Act in sacrificing her body in a divine jouissance of the Real, and Justine goes through (in the sense of traversing) her jouissance in Melancholia to welcome the end of the world in an Act of freedom, with Joe in Nymphomaniac we encounter an unaccomplished Act, in the sense that her being never transcends her life as a nymphomaniac; her Act does not achieve something ‘impossible’, since it does not expose the limits of the universal ethic. Joe is driven to satisfy her insatiable lust with an endless parade of partners, each taken as a part object (never adding up to One).22 The director orients us to the all-engulfing void that structures Joe’s world in the first frames of the film where we follow the camera along a dreary alleyway to enter the depths of a black, square hole in a brick wall and emerge in the apartment of Joe’s future interlocutor Seligman on the other side. In Joe’s long narration of her story to Seligman, she recounts how throughout her life her sexual lust drove her to seek out all types of encounters in all kinds of situations: sex as a counting game, sex with immigrants who cannot speak English, sex according to the random throw of the dice, sex through sadomasochistic contract, and so on; her lust seemed to have a life of its own, exceeding and nullifying any vestige of ‘normalcy’ and destroying marriages, families and relationships, including her own, without any remorse along the way. In his analysis of the self-beating that occurs in the film Fight Club, Žižek explains that while a person dwells in a body, a subject’s correlate is the object a, an organ without a body: ‘The subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object.’23 While the organ that resists its inclusion in the Whole of the body

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in Fight Club is Jack’s fist, the organ that resists its inclusion in the Whole in Joe’s case is her clitoris, or more accurately we might say that instead of an organ without a body, Joe’s entire body is the organ of pleasure. The conflation of organ onto body here also means that Joe is not yet a subject (in the Lacanian sense); hers is not a world of identifications, self-reflection or guilt, and of all von Trier’s women she is, perhaps, the most unrecognizable, the most difficult to take. But in this film and once again, if we see that what von Trier is exploring is not simply the sexual perversion of a woman, but a certain orientation to loss, enjoyment and limits, then we can see also that this film narrative continues the director’s exploration of the not-All of feminine ethics (the impasse of being), and the singularity of feminine jouissance.24 The way to decipher Joe’s extreme sexual perversion (although, again, not in a causal way) is to see that her serial sexual encounters, although destructive to herself and to others, are the only thing holding her world together, and the biggest threat to this world is not death, but love. If the secret ingredient of sex is love, as her promiscuous teenage friend tells her, then this secret ingredient is the one thing that will not only kill every sexual pleasure for Joe, but also disintegrate her very sense of being. The club she forms with her friends, which mirrors the logic of Fincher’s Fight Club from the perspective of a feminine ethics and jouissance, sets up rules not to have sex with the same man more than once, not to take a boyfriend, and not to submit to feeling shame or guilt over their sexual pleasures; but these rules are quickly and easily broken. When Joe falls in love with Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) years after losing her virginity to him, she is thrown completely off kilter – as she recounts to Seligman, ‘Erotics is all about saying “yes” but love is all about lies; in love “no” means “yes” and “yes” means “no”.’ ‘Love’, as she states, ‘distorts everything; it is something you never asked for’; and with this idiotic love, she says, ‘I felt humiliated … love is just lust with jealousy added.’ Here is von Trier’s first of many ironic reversals – the shame that we usually associate with promiscuous sexuality is located instead in the dimension of falling in love. But following Lacan, and as Zupančič relates, Joe is right to refer to love as something excessive; it is something added that you haven’t even asked for: ‘As in comedy, not only do we not get what we asked for [in a love relation], on top of that (and not instead) we get something we haven’t even asked for. The nonrelation is supplemented by another nonrelation, which can then use the thing that obstructs the relation as its very condition.’25 However, Joe is not in sync with the temporality that love requires, so that when Joe does actually start to desire and fall in love with Jerôme, she refers to this love in an objective way: ‘I wanted to be one of Jerôme’s things; treated by his hands, picked up and put down’, as he does to the things on his desk. Falling in love for Joe meant having to expose herself to an Other who might be too enigmatic, too untrustworthy, and who

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might make her feel like she was not in charge of her own enjoyment. With sexual jouissance in nymphomania she could demand that her sex partner ‘fill all her holes’, and constitute her without lack. But, threatened with the vulnerability that love required, and the possibility of opening herself up to the shattering jouissance of love in exchange for the sustaining jouissance of mechanical sexual orgasm was all more than Joe could bear. The central irony here is that when Joe finally moved in with Jerôme, and they professed love for each other, her libido completely shut down. And this created a panic that echoed in the very depths of her being. Joe’s response is to take on even more lovers, with Jerôme’s tacit acceptance, and then, finding it harder and harder to achieve sexual satisfaction, to secretly contract the services of a sadist she calls ‘K’ (Jamie Bell), who beat and bloodied her several times a week. Although she defended her right to lust by disavowing all limits against all laws, and in particular psychology’s definitions of pathological behaviour and society’s disapproval of her sexuality, Joe’s life itself disintegrated – losing her lover and her child to her extreme lust, she tells Seligman, ‘My nymphomania was callousness’, and after so many years of physical abuse, her entire groin became ‘one big sore’. She is compelled to give up everything – Jerôme, her son and any semblance of a ‘normal’ life for her insatiable lust and repetitive sexual encounters with object-men.26 In psychoanalytical terms we can say that Joe never goes through the castration needed to join the symbolic world of exchange, to detach herself from the primordial enjoyment of das Ding, so that she had no desire or ability to seek symbolic recognition in any way, neither as a wife and mother, nor as friend and worker.27 She refers to her clitoris by likening it to the mundane inanimate object of an automatic sliding glass door. In her relationship to her own flesh, to the libido it encased, she shares something with Bess. But unlike Bess and more like Justine, Joe refuses any sacrifice; instead, she put her being in the same dimension as her jouissance, which proves lethal not only to the subject, but to any symbolic relation she might attain. As Žižek reminds us, the partial object ‘is the proverbial “piece of flesh”, the part of the subject that the subject had to renounce to subjectivize itself, to emerge as subject’.28 Joe, however, never renounces anything and never establishes a limit to her painful and excessive pleasure, her jouissance; rather, she arranges her life according to the circular movement of the drive. In the words of Joan Copjec, the drive has no goal but only an aim, and thus ‘the object is no longer a means of attaining satisfaction, it is an end in itself; it is directly satisfying. It is not a means to something other than itself, but is itself other than itself.’29 Joe’s sexual drive is used as her last resort of resistance against the terrifying enigma of love and the paralysing uncertainty of desire. This self-reflexivity of Joe’s world is noted in her recounting to Seligman that when she was twelve years old on a school outing while lying in a field

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she had a spontaneous orgasm, which lifted her off the ground while the apparition of two women appeared in the sky. She has no knowledge of who these women were, but as Seligman tells her from her description they were Valeria Messalina, the most notorious nymphomaniac in history, and the Whore of Babylon. But these visions seem like static talismans that serve no real purpose, telling us nothing about why Joe is the way she is or even what she should do as a response to their appearance – their appearance affirms only, I argue, to validate Joe’s paradoxical freedom to be enslaved by her libido. So although the opposition is set up between the western ‘church of suffering’, and the eastern ‘church of happiness’, the binary veils the complexity of pleasure that might be found in suffering itself: the repetitive and self-inflicted jouissance Joe experiences through her body reduced to organ/clitoris. Joe’s autonomy as a paradoxical figure who is enslaved by her sexual jouissance seems to be affirmed in a pivotal scene (one of many in this film) when Joe during a mandatory session in a group therapy of sex addicts, gets up to admit that she is indeed a sex addict and that she will work to overcome her addiction. Instead, as she begins to speak she glimpses only for a second an image of herself in a mirror as a twelve-year-old girl, the very age she was when she had her spontaneous orgasm in the field. Instead of using the mirror image to experience a detachment of herself from an Other, to become a split subject of lack, she takes this mirror image as a sign that she is autonomous and complete in and of herself, a sign that forces her, without shame and defiantly, to call herself a nymphomaniac. She declares aloud: ‘I’m not like you who fuck to be validated or to be filled up – your empathy is a lie, you are society’s morality police […] I am a nymphomaniac and I love myself; most of all I love my cunt and my filthy dirty lust.’ After this scene there is one more chapter that Joe relates to Seligman, telling of her descent into becoming a sadist collecting debts through verbal extortion, which exposes people’s sexual perversions. And although there is much more to Joe’s story and much more to say about this film, I want to conclude my analysis with a consideration of how such an impossible feminine jouissance relates to temporality and necessity, and how the final ironic turn becomes not an Act that succeeds in exposing the limits of a universal, but rather remains within a static self-reflexivity (and which in the end is also revealing of how von Trier relates to the themes in his own films). Joe’s sense of temporality is experienced as a circular drive, where her repetitive sexual encounters move her from one partner to the next. Joe puts her necessity of sexual satisfaction in the dimension of contingent encounters, where paradoxically necessity is only experienced through contingency; that is through a long string of successive sexual partners that never ceases, but in a kind of inverse to that of Don Juan, who found enjoyment searching for the Thing in each successive woman he seduced

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one by one. In contrast, Joe never relates to even one man as equal to One, and she seems to lose libido with each new sexual encounter. She can’t find the ultimate Thing that would satisfy her, no matter where and with whom she has sex, and in this sense her self-reflexivity fails in a way that Bess’s did not; that is, if Bess was ready to sacrifice her life for her being (maintaining her wager with God), then Joe never transcends her life as a nymphomaniac and the compulsion of experiencing the painful jouissance of her body as organ of pleasure. But, if her necessity is out of her hands (and in her clitoris), and if she accepts this as the source of a painful jouissance in endless perverse sexual encounters, as a defiant self-loving nymphomaniac, then there is still something that is out of her grasp and unable to be explained even with all the explanations (often idiotic) that Seligman tries to provide. How von Trier conveys this is through the odd references throughout the film to something mystical going on in the backdrop of our world, for example, the references to Fibonacci numbers, which appear on the screen for the spectator in scenes where Joe has sex with Jerôme for the first time (two thrusts from the front plus three thrusts from the back equal five thrusts – a Fibonacci sequence); numbers that appear later when Jerôme has sex with P (Mia Goth) in the last chapter as Joe lies bloodied and beaten in the alleyway. Numbers, letters, coordinates and measurements appear in references to Bach’s fugues (likened to three of Joe’s most notable sex partners), and in a scene where Joe parks Jerôme’s car in a small space, while the camera shot from above imprints a matrix of dotted lines on the angles, so that for a moment we, the spectators, can see that, despite what humans do, there’s a hidden matrix or measurement in place that we cannot apprehend in our everyday lives. Indeed, in this film, as in the ‘staging’ of Dogville, these two-dimensional fabrications suggest that there’s a hidden, three-dimensional world somewhere beyond. That is, the suggestion of mystical measurements and the replacement of names with letters ‘stand in’ for the missing three-dimensional symbolic Order, a realm of ambiguity and enigmatic relations between people. And here is where I place the significance of von Trier’s ending to this film – it seems to catch us off-guard but it is presaged by a series of ironic moments placed throughout the film, which provides the backdrop against which we are to read Joe’s sexual lust. These ironic twists and uncanny coincidences are noted in the following scenes: when Joe writes and delivers her first love-letter to Jerôme on the day that he has run off with and married his secretary; when Joe mentors a young girl (in the business of sexual extortion), who later becomes Jerôme’s lover; when at the moment of falling in love, Joe loses all sexual desire; when she goes to shoot Jerôme and his lover but has forgotten to rack the slide of her semi-automatic pistol; and finally, in the last scene. After telling her story she has gained a new perspective on everything and she tells Seligman that she vows to overcome what she now sees as a sex addiction; against all odds of success, she will, like a deformed

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tree on a hill30 and thanks to her ‘new and maybe first friend’, vow to rid herself of her sexuality. After they have said goodnight and she has gone to sleep Seligman stealthily approaches her wanting to have sex, and as she awakens to realize his intent the screen goes dark and we hear her shoot the gun. This final irony seems to be saying: no matter your decisions in life or your most heartfelt intent, something (nature, evil, chance, whatever) might come along at any moment to derail everything. As Zupančič’s incredibly astute analysis of Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ reveals, irony can indeed open a gap that ‘proves’ an impossibility (an internal contradiction) of a universal statement of truth; but unlike comedy, irony ‘does not recognize the possibility of a “concrete universal” (as well as the possibility of an “abstract particular”), and remains within the parameters of the opposition between abstract universality and concrete particularity’.31 In other words, in Nymphomaniac the irony fails to cut across this opposition (which mirrors the oppositions built up throughout the narrative, of either believing or not believing in Joe’s story). Joe’s act of murder at the moment of her pivotal ‘changeover’ is a contingent event that remains, I claim, an unaccomplished Act, but it is nonetheless one of the ways a von Trier woman can end up: without a higher purpose, derived through an Act of freedom that might (or might not) reset the coordinates of the world and determine her ultimate fate. At the end of Fincher’s Fight Club Jack is able to relate to Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) for the first time as a lover, only after he has gained a certain freedom from the meaninglessness of his life and by way of a sadomasochistic and psychotic double. Here we might ask what it would take for an actual love relation to take place in one of von Trier’s films. Žižek, in his analysis of Bess in Breaking the Waves, posits the question as follows: ‘What would it take for a woman to be married without falling into a psychosis?’32 We could extend this to ask, in the case of Justine: How could one live in an out-of-joint world without falling into abject depression, or how might we face the end of our world without considering it a tragedy? And in the case of Joe: How might she learn to live with the enigma of desire and uncertainty of love without losing her libido and falling completely apart? Žižek’s answer in the case of Bess is that she would have to accept that her partner merely ‘has the phallus, but is not phallus himself’, and she would have to rely on fantasizing about ‘Another Man who would be phallus itself’, while recognizing that the actual encountering of such a man would be catastrophic.33 But somehow I think von Trier’s depiction of the women in his female ‘fight club’ is saying something important about the disjointedness of our world (and not just about the women who could change their psychic economy in terms of their orientation to lack). A world in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in meaningless rituals while there is so much abuse and exploitation going on; a world where the acceptance of real death is replaced by a living

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death in so many instances of our daily lives; and a world where the Law is exposed as impotent (paradoxically and especially in its increasing excessiveness, as in its demands for political correctness and other nonsensical mandates) – in such a world of idiotic phallic jouissance it would seem that the jouissance of von Trier’s women is pointing to a kind of answer (from the Real) of how we might not only see the world and life itself as out of joint, but further be able to orient ourselves and our experiences of excess enjoyment differently.34 Von Trier’s ultimate question is one that arises repeatedly in his films: What do we do with the knowledge that there is no safe harbour, and how do we go on in the face of abject loneliness without an Other (parent, religion, God) or others (lovers, friends or even beings someplace else in the universe) to save us (a question that echoes in his repeated scene of the cosmos opening up onto a void). The answer comes back from the Real: Bess both opens a space for sacrifice and then sacrifices herself in an Act of autonomy and freedom, one that gives purpose to her being in the face of incomprehensible loss in love; Justine in an Act of freedom puts her psychic pain in alignment with the end of the world without mourning the loss that death brings; and Joe’s attempts at freedom remain ironically within the limits of an autonomous circuit of drive in her experience of a self-inflicted bodily jouissance. Being ‘ex-ists’ only because it contains a split or hole within itself. It is this space, this non-coincidence that makes possible any Act of freedom and autonomy, while it simultaneously calls into question how the very notions of freedom and autonomy are being framed. Von Trier puts this philosophical quandary in his own words when he states: ‘The subject of everything I have been doing has actually been the clash between nature and the mind, if you will.’35 Yet, if this is true, it is a ‘nature’ that is constantly being de-naturalized, and it is a ‘mind’ that is always attached to a body that experiences the indestructibility of a feminine jouissance.

Notes 1

Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014, p. 57.

2

The Most Sublime Hysteric, p. 89.

3

Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso Books, 2000, p. 29.

4

Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 192. Das Ding has no existence before it is lost: ‘At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find not just an impossibility of thought, but a void of Being. The problem is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being’, pp. 35–6.

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5

Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 174.

6

Imagine There’s No Woman, 7.

7

While many critics and scholars have written about the comedy of von Trier’s films, I contend that because of the highly stylized cinematic form, his films never really attain the ‘singular universality’ that comedy achieves in Zupančič’s sense. So, the women’s Acts border on exposing something about the comedy of life, without, I argue, fully achieving what we could put under the category of humour.

8

As Linda Badley claims, the director’s provocations find their source in his dilemma about Hollywood. ‘Trier often makes Hollywood the backdrop against which he projects that dilemma in elaborate games and rules or in auteurist psychodramas set in allegorical and politicized frameworks […] Trier’s body of work is designed to lend an image and a context to the blank space he fears is truly “Lars”’, Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011, p. 13.

9

The reference here, of course, is to Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

10 Stig Björkman (ed.) Trier on von Trier, translated by Neil Smith, London: Faber & Faber, 2003, p. 221. 11 See Chapter 1, ‘Making the Waves: Cinema as Performance’, in Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, pp. 1–15. 12 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Death and the Maiden’, in Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999, p. 217. 13 See Filmslie.com, ‘Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Analysis: Volumes I and II Brechtian Alienation Effect’, available at: http://filmslie.com/lars-von-triernymphomaniac-analysis/. 14 Ethics of the Real, p. 157. 15 Badley, Lars von Trier, p. 84. 16 ‘Death and the Maiden’, p. 214. 17 Ibid., p. 215. 18 Whereas Žižek feels that the film’s ending makes the mistake of moving into religious obscurantism (presenting a postmodern miracle in the ringing of the non-existent bells), I see the ending as unveiling the constitutive disjointedness of reality itself. And so I only partially agree with Žižek when he writes that, unlike in Hitchcock’s scene in The Birds (1963), where we see the birds perched at a point in the sky from a God’s-eye view, which conveys a kind of ‘malevolent indifference of the obscene superego divinity of human affairs’, in von Trier’s final scene we have ‘the benevolent, reconciliatory aspect of the Real of divine Jouissance’, ‘Death and the Maiden’, p. 220. 19 Zupančič’s analysis of Sygne in Claudel’s The Hostage is instructive here. As she writes, ‘Life counts among the things that one has and might consequently give; while the reason for living, honour, belongs not to this

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register, but to that of being. Life is situated not in the register of being, but in the register of having’, Ethics of the Real, p. 231. 20 Here Bess’s logic follows the story of Oedipus, who retroactively creates the conditions of his symbolic debt. The lesson of his story is not that ‘everything is already decided’ (by the big Other), and that whatever the subject does, he is lost in advance; on the contrary, the story of Oedipus shows us, rather, that it is the big Other who is lost without the subject’, Ethics of the Real, p. 166. 21 David Denny, ‘Melancholia, an Alternative to the End of the World: A Reading of Lars von Trier’s Film’, in Sheila Kunkle (ed.), Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings, New York: SUNY Press, 2016. 22 Joe’s sexuality is the opposite of Don Juan’s; in the latter’s case he seduced and made love to women, in the instant (in a 1+1+1 logic), while in Joe’s case no one man could be counted as adding up to one himself. Thus, Joe’s enjoyment was not the same as Don Juan’s – and with every different configuration of a sexual encounter, she seemed to grow more and more distressed. 23 Organs Without Bodies, p. 175. 24 With his signature formal film elements the director draws the spectator’s fascination through the ‘filtering’ device of the narration itself; it is only in Joe’s recounting of her life (mirroring a type of psychoanalysis), and the often absurd replies and comments by Seligman that move us forward in any sense; that and the director’s providing of moments that allow us to take part in the self-referentiality of the film, for example, when Joe responds with disdain to Seligman’s often nonsensical historical, literary and cultural allusions to explain her nymphomania, or when Seligman responds to Joe’s impossible coincidences with utter disbelief. 25 The Odd One In, p. 135. Joe, however, doesn’t use the non-relation as the Thing that would obstruct (and make possible) a love relation. Instead of love operating as a parallel to drive (as Zupančič’s analysis suggests love does), the drive in Joe’s world is used (inversely) to guard against love. The logic of desire has the subject look to maintain the desire of the Other with the constant open question ‘che voi?’; but the logic of drive in Joe’s world runs on the decreasing satiation of enjoyment as she finds no one man adds up to even one. Hers is a life of endless, bottomless lack; her enjoyment coincides with her Being and this is lethal for the subject. 26 The formal film elements that von Trier uses to convey the distortions of Joe’s world are found throughout the film, for example, in the distorted face (as seen through the convex lens in the delivery room) of her newborn son, who appears to her – just for a second – as an alien, or in the metaphor of a barren tree standing alone on a hill. 27 The possible exception here is Joe’s relationship with her father (Christian Slater) and in the devotion she shows him during the end of his life in the hospital, but even in this instance Joe’s drive to experience a painful sexual jouissance is conflated with her grief as she quickly seeks out sex with a hospital orderly while her father lies dying. She can experience no human emotion, like sadness or grief, without also experiencing extreme sexual lust.

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28 Organs Without Bodies, p. 177. 29 Imagine There’s No Women, p. 38. 30 The reference of a deformed tree on a hill reveals Joe’s connection to her father who related to his daughter through metaphors of nature, especially in his tutorials to her of how trees in winter, without leaves, can reveal the soul. But the name of the father fails in this film, and indeed in most of von Trier’s films. Fathers, husbands, bosses and almost all males are figures who cannot live up to their symbolic mandates: they are weak, ineffectual, demanding or overly strict and fail in their relationships with women. In this regard, and in response to feminist critics of von Trier’s depiction of women, we could say that women in his films are privileged for they are the more complex figures negotiating loss and changing the coordinates of their worlds. 31 Alenka Zupančič, ‘The “Concrete Universal”, and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Lacan: The Silent Partners, London: Verso, 2006, p. 196. 32 ‘Death and the Maiden’, p. 220. 33 Ibid. 34 Žižek, however, points out that what the film lacks is any commentary on modernity; and indeed this is the one feature that Fincher’s Fight Club performs that von Trier’s films do not. Žižek’s claim is that ‘the predominant form of subjectivity […] is simply missing’ in Breaking the Waves (Death and the Maiden’, p. 217). But I would claim that von Trier’s conflation and replacement of modernism with images and music of romanticism, pre-modernism and postmodernism has the effect of conveying a ‘disjointedness’ that allows us to question our ‘temporal’ present, or the modern subject, already from a different coordinate. 35 As quoted in David Ehrlich, Dissolve, ‘Nymphomaniac’: https://thedissolve. com/features/exposition/483-nymphomaniac-and-the-infinite-lonelinessof-lars-v/.

6 Cruelty and the real: The female figure in Orchidégartneren, Menthe – la bienheureuse and Befrielsesbilleder Angelos Koutsourakis

In his 2005 book The Century, the French philosopher Alain Badiou pays a belated homage to the twentieth century and its literary avant-gardes, arguing that the defining characteristic of that period in history was its desire for the real. Both in the field of art and politics, the twentieth century was not satisfied with the clichéd universalist abstractions of the past; it desired instead to enter the real by acknowledging conflict as the necessary strategy for getting access to it. In a chapter titled ‘Cruelties’, Badiou goes so far as to acknowledge that in the twentieth century cruelty ‘is accepted as a figure of the real’.1 What does Badiou mean here? As he explains, the twentieth century with its plethora of historical traumas, the two World Wars, the dream of a socialist revolution and its eventual collapse, suggested that truth and the real are to be located in the ‘historical body’, and the dialectic between the body that suffers and the ‘impassive body’, in which the pathos of the former stands for the wound of history and the latter refers to the ‘impassiveness’, the objective conditions of a historical situation.2 At some point Badiou conducts a close reading of Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Maritime Ode’ and goes on at length to analyse this complex dialectic between ‘passivity and transgression’. As he explains, passivity should not be misunderstood as resignation, but as the dissolution of the

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subject, and its absolute embracing of the revolutionary event. In a passage worth quoting, Badiou concludes: Passivity does not mean resignation. I’m speaking of an almost ontological passivity, one that changes your being as you are dragged away and come to depend upon an absolute elsewhere. It is striking that Campos [Pessoa’s heteronym] lays out this passivity – creative as well as corrosive – under the emblems of femininity. Over time, I have come to notice that women attune themselves more profoundly than men to this uprooting abandonment, just as, inversely, they are terser and more obstinate when it comes to caution and conservatism. The feminine is that which, when it ceases to be the domestic organization of security and fear, goes furthest in the termination of all cowardice.3 Following Badiou’s lead, I want to suggest that the parallel between the feminine and radicality is something that can be identified in the majority of Lars von Trier’s films, with the exception of the hyper-masculine The Element of Crime (1984). In Epidemic (1987) it is the female medium who gets hypnotized and goes deep into the wounds of the European past only to discover that they can be located in the present. In Europa (1991), Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa) plays the role of the femme fatale, who manipulates Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) so as to serve the interests of a Nazi terrorist group against the Allied occupation. Despite her portrayal as a manipulator, she is the one to pronounce in a somehow didactic way the film’s core argument: ‘One cannot not take sides in moments of historical crisis, or neutrality is the worst form of complicity.’ When Leo explains to her that he only wanted to be neutral she responds sardonically: ‘The way I see it you are the only criminal.’4 In Breaking the Waves (1996), Bess (Emily Watson) alienates herself from her community in order to pursue the pipe dream of helping Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) recover from his condition; this pipe dream is also a desire to bring back Jan and recapture the sexual pleasure she has lost following his accident. Towards the end, in one of the film’s more emblematic moments, she even dares to challenge the church rules that do not allow women to speak during the sermon and questions their conservative perception of love as something immaterial. In The Idiots (1998), it is only the workingclass Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) who takes the group’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric seriously and – to use Badiou’s terminology – consciously abandons herself to the revolutionary event. In Dancer in the Dark (2000), Selma (Björk) in a somehow perverted way refuses any form of sexual relationship and has as a life target to help her small son cure his eyesight. Learning to ‘see correctly’ becomes a key theme in the film, since Selma comes to realize that the image of the USA she had from the American musicals was far from being the truth. It is only in the incomplete USA trilogy, that the feminine



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is not paralleled with radicalism, since in both Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), Grace (Nicole Kidman, Bryce Dallas Howard) stands for the hypocrisy of American liberal democracy. In both films, Grace ends up embracing the law of the father (who happens to be a gangster), so her temporary martyrdom in both towns demonstrates only her strong desire to force the communities to accept her own moral standards. But in Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013), the female characters demonstrate aversion to domesticity, and it is this aversion that brings them into conflict with their social milieu. To this, I should like to add that von Trier’s fascination with transgressive female characters goes hand in hand with a commitment to a polemical formalism that frustrates unequivocal affective responses on the part of the audience. As the Danish scholar and von Trier expert Peter Schepelern rightly points out, von Trier’s films skip psychological realism and narrative causality. Allegory, meta-cinematic effects and art cinema fables ‘with both didactic and ambiguously ironic statements’ are instead some enduring stylistic traits throughout his oeuvre.5 Furthermore, even when manipulating a number of familiar genres, e.g. melodrama in Breaking the Waves, the musical in Dancer in the Dark, the horror film in Antichrist, the films cannot be fully assimilated into the generic patterns they evoke. Instead, they destabilize the generic categories and shatter generically formulated expectations. The films’ ability to complicate the audience’s emotional responses is also heightened by what Rosalind Galt names as ‘the logic of the trap’.6 They invite the audience to identify with a number of positions e.g. Seligman’s (Stellan Skarsgård) liberalism in Nymphomaniac, only to frustrate them. Normally, these positions are liberal clichés that can be easily digested by everyone, only to be exposed as clichés and illusions. Additionally, the polemical aspect of the films in terms of form and content is reinforced by the film-makers’ refusal to separate mind from body, the visceral elements from the intellectual ones. On this account, von Trier’s films encourage us – in Eugenie Birkema’s terms – to read for form. Taking issue with the affective turn in contemporary film theory, Birkema suggests that this school of thought has valorized questions of spectatorial affective responses and seduction but without regard for reading for the contradictions, inconsistencies and uncertainties that formal affects can produce. At times, the affective turn in film studies employs canonical readings of certain formal and thematic elements in films, as if they are ‘intentionalist’ per se, and suggesting that certain strategies produce unequivocal effects. Here von Trier’s films with their tendency to destabilize canonical spectatorial responses provide a good case in point in light of Birkema’s critique, because one cannot separate the affective from the ‘reading response’ in his films.7 A good example is Nymphomaniac, in which the representation of sex in the film rarely accommodates spectatorial feelings of arousal, and instead it provides the opportunity for a number

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of Sadian dialogues that explore the interconnection between sexuality, power and social oppression. Slavoj Žižek makes an analogous point with reference to Breaking the Waves, arguing that the film’s poetics of negation are strengthened by the irreconcilable dialectic between form and content. Citing von Trier’s own comments on the film, Žižek concludes that it is this irreconcilable dialectic of a form – hand-held cameras, pseudo-documentary realism and lack of extra-diegetic music – that seems to negate rather than reconfirm the content.8 This irreconcilable dialectic frustrates unambiguous interpretations and forces the viewer to question her emotional responses, and it is by means of such a strategy that one cannot separate the affective from the reading response. It is my contention that von Trier’s fascination with transgressive female characters and his refusal to distinguish the visceral from the intellectual in the films’ form and content is grounded upon strategies of cruelty as a means of revelation. This returns us to Badiou, whose main argument in The Century is that the modernist avant-gardes to which he pays tribute were characterized by an affirmative negation and excess with the view to recovering the ‘real’. The process of getting access to the real is a violent one; Robert Buch succinctly synopsizes Badiou’s argument and suggests that: ‘It [the real] is inaccessible, an absence or a void that defies representation, yet it is also characterized as excessive and violent. Where it appears, it is said to erupt or to break through, shattering representation and reality. Its impact is as intolerable as it is undeniable. Its “eruptions” cannot be ignored.’9 Buch’s argument is that Badiou’s polemical return to the twentieth-century avant-gardes demonstrates a desire to recover their lessons in a period of depoliticization and postmodern innocuousness. It is precisely within these terms that we can understand von Trier’s cinema, whose dialogue with the modernist cinema of the past cannot be reduced to a postmodern pastiche but betrays a will to reanimate conflict. Conflict and cruelty are the avenues through which one can get access to the real, at the point where representational and social certainties shatter. Some of the figures of the past that belong to this tradition and can help us contextualize von Trier’s poetics of negation are Rainer Werner Fassbinder, August Strindberg and Antonin Artaud. Von Trier has repeatedly referred to the first two as being among his heroes during his youth and as continuing influences in his oeuvre.10 Briefly, some of the similarities that one can identify between von Trier and the enfant terrible of the New German cinema are the interest in strong female figures, the destabilization of generic categories, and the desire to investigate the micropolitics of everyday life by means of narratives that focus on sexual relationships. To this we should add Fassbinder’s insistence that cinema is a medium that needs to produce equally affective and intellectual responses; in a repeatedly cited interview he stated ‘I let the audience feel and think.’11 But one of the key aspects of Fassbinder’s cinema that applies to von Trier’s oeuvre



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is the refusal to accommodate hermeneutic expectations based on political correctness or over-simplistic portrayals of oppression structured upon black-and-white binaries. It is not accidental that like von Trier Fassbinder, whose work is now acknowledged for its radicalism in its depiction of gender inequality and social oppression, faced in the past accusations of misogyny, homophobia and anti-Semitism, precisely because of his desire to show oppression beyond moralistic simplifications. In Fassbinder’s words: When I was systematically making films on minorities, I used to show the oppressor as a mean, unsympathetic person and the victims as good and kind. It became clear to me that this was not the right way to portray the oppressor/victim relationship. The really terrible thing about oppression is that you can’t show it without showing the person who’s being oppressed and who also has his faults. For example, you can’t talk about the German treatment of the Jewish minority without evoking the Jews’ rapport with money, but when you do that it seems as if you’re explaining or accounting for this oppression. Now, oppression allows very few possibilities of reaction, survival. There’s very little choice. I stand firmly behind this thought: you must show the victim with his qualities and his faults, his strengths and his weaknesses, his mistakes. And for this I’ve been called an anti-Semite!!! And when I show the mistakes made by the woman living with this fucking man, they say I am a misogynist! And when I made a film about homosexuals and showed the mistakes that, within their social context, they are forced to make […] because if they didn’t commit any errors, then they might just as well die. They must save themselves through their mistakes and, in showing this, you point out just how awesome and powerful the oppression has been: you show that the victim is compelled to do this or that because he’s been oppressed.12 Fassbinder manipulates social stereotypes and clichés so as to create an atmosphere of excess that forces the spectator to detach themselves from the ideological banality that he seems to espouse. It is exactly this cruel aspect of his films – and I name it cruel because it frustrates unequivocal empathetic responses – that is applicable to von Trier, who has also faced charges of misogyny for the depiction of women in his films. This idea of cruelty as revelation is also coupled with ironic elements that encourage this sort of detachment. Jonathan Leary has shown how irony has an uncanny quality due to its potential to present something that one takes for granted in an unfamiliar way that disrupts one’s certainties and convictions.13 Consider for instance the ethical reversibility in Antichrist, where we get to witness how the man’s desire to ‘cure’ the woman of her trauma by means of cognitive therapy demonstrates a desire to control her and, as Robert Sinnerbrink aptly explains, ‘unleashes a latent misogyny

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that leads him to act out yet another historical repetition of the cycle of persecution, conflict and violence that is the history of western culture’s (masculinist?) attempts to rationally master and control (internal and external) nature’.14 But to recall Fassbinder’s abovementioned comment, the power of oppression is also revealed in the ways that She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) ends up feeling guilty, as if justifying the misogynistic clichés she has been researching. With Strindberg von Trier shares a Scandinavian radical pessimism dedicated to the investigation of the machinery of interpersonal and social relationships that produce repression. For Strindberg, drama that captures the everyday moments of cruelty turns into a learning process about life. Moreover, the investigation of gender politics as a route to exploring everyday politics was consistently one of the main themes in his plays, and as he says in his preface to Miss Julie: ‘For the problem of rising or falling, of higher or lower, better or worse, man or woman is, has been, and always will be, of lasting interest.’15 What comes into critical focus in Strindberg’s dramaturgy is also the dialectical complexity of oppression as well as a dismissal of strictly psychological motivations in the depiction of characters. Characters’ motivations are much more complex in his plays and are the outcome of multiple causes rooted both in the social environment as well as in the psychological complexity of the individual. Finally, a key motif in his dramaturgy is that good and evil are interchangeable, and this is the reason why he prioritizes social situations at the expense of dramatic intelligibility. Finally, Artaud is another modernist figure in the von Trier universe. Artaud’s writings on theatre and cinema were passionate statements in defence of a different representational paradigm that would be able to intellectualize representation through an emphasis on the corporeal at the expense of the dialogic elements. In his writings favouring a theatre of cruelty he dismissed psychological drama and argued for a type of theatre that pushes ‘drastic action’ to the limit. This dismissal of coherent dramaturgy in favour of physical actions permeates also his writings on cinema, where he argues for a cinema of action rather than a psychological one. For Artaud, cruelty is a somehow didactic strategy that serves the purpose of involving the audience in more direct ways, so as to shake them from their passivity and reveal something about the present reality. It is not by chance that in his critique of psychological drama, he stated that ‘rarely does the debate rise to a social level or do we question our social or ethical system’,16 while in his writings on cinema he vehemently supported a polemical formalism that could act as a means of demystification.17 To an extent, Artaud’s project is in line with a perception of art as insult/provocation and, as Susan Sontag explains, such an insult is directly interrelated to a will to protest against artistic triteness.18 Von Trier’s films have at their innermost core a similar desire to take issue with representation and shatter ideological certainties as well as the ideology of ‘good taste’. In the next



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section, I trace the continuities in von Trier’s oeuvre by looking at the link between demystificatory cruelty and the female figure in three student films that can help us identify the ways in which he recycles recurring thematic and formal tropes.

Visibility, cruelty and power Orchidégartneren and Menthe – la bienheureuse are two early films by von Trier that contain some themes that reappear in his later works. The first one was actually submitted as part of his application for the film school in Copenhagen. Orchidégartneren has an oneiric quality and tells the story of a Jewish artist Victor Marse (Lars von Trier) who falls in love with Eliza (Inger Hvidtfeldt); the latter has sexual relationships with a nurse (Karen Oksbjerg), who looks after Victor. The narrative is communicated via autonomous tableaux with little diegetic continuity between them. As Peter Schepelern explains, the film’s story is perplexing, focusing on individual situations accompanied by a voice-over that rarely clarifies what takes place on screen.19 The film bears some of the hallmarks of his subsequent films and in particular the connection between sexuality, structures of looking and power, but also an exploration of alternative sexualities. Rosalind Galt mentions with reference to Antichrist and Nymphomaniac that patriarchal structures seem to be stifling for von Trier’s heroines, and this is also the case in this early film that focuses on transgressive women, albeit from the point of view of a male character. Importantly, even Victor himself seems to transgress pre-defined gender and sexual identities, since at some point in the film he appears in drag, while elsewhere he appears in a Nazi uniform and excessive feminine make-up. The fragmented style of the film has a suggestive character focusing in an Artaudian manner on ‘situations that emerge from the simple collision of objects, forms, repulsions, and attractions’.20 In one of the first tableaux, Victor and Eliza are framed next to a young kid as if they are part of a family and the camera captures Eliza’s dissatisfaction with constructions of domesticity. In the following tableau, Eliza looks after the sick Victor in the shower. In the voice-over Victor offers some information on the former’s sexual relationship with another woman. Later on another woman whom the voice-over also mentions as Eliza (though it is obviously played by another actress) is shown masturbating while in the background one can hear a baby crying. These unconnected tableaux offer suggestions not only of alternative sexualities, but they also draw attention to questions of vision and sexual politics. For instance, there is an emblematic moment in the film, where we get to see Eliza and her girlfriend engaged in sexual activities (there is

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an innuendo of oral sex). The scene appears as if shot from a third person point of view, but at some point the sexual encounter is interrupted by Eliza’s girlfriend, who acknowledges the presence of an off-screen voyeur. She approaches the camera and slaps him but the camera does not cross-cut to the voyeur, who we assume is Victor. By the end of the sequence, the woman shuts the door. Eliza’s girlfriend here does not simply assault Victor, but the spectator as well. This sequence is exemplary of von Trier’s interest in attacking – in an Artaudian way – the audience, a strategy that characterizes the whole corpus of his work. But what is also of interest here is the director’s acknowledgement of the gender structures of looking in the cinema – particularly in a film whose story is told from the point of view of a male character – and the ways film’s reflections on life are simultaneously reflections on the medium itself. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on cinema and visual pleasure is particularly relevant when viewing this sequence, precisely because of the film-maker’s ability to showcase the connection between vision and gender politics. Mulvey argued in her essay that in cinema a woman plays a double role and appears as a sexual object both for the characters within a film’s narrative universe as well as for the spectators in the auditorium.21 In the aforementioned sequence, this double structure of cinematic vision is thematized, while von Trier does not hesitate to ‘feminize’ the image – after all even the male character’s sexuality seems to be unfixed. But the connection between representation and gender as well as with the battle of the sexes is also strongly suggested in a scene in which Eliza combs her hair and gazes at the camera in an off-screen mirror. Behind her we can clearly discern Victor who gestures in a way reminiscent of a filmmaker who tries to frame his subject. Meanwhile, Eliza is humming ‘Lili Marlene’, while Victor’s hyper-gesturality communicates in a somehow violent way a desire to control the female character. The sound of the famous fascist song in the background intensifies this association between representation and control, something also communicated via strategies of excess, a hyper-conscious stylization and theatricality that foregrounds excess even in the most mundane interactions between the male and the female characters. Later on, this strategy of excessive ‘arch-theatricality’22 – a term employed by Adrian Martin to describe a number of film experiments in the 1970s and 1980s by film-makers such as Fassbinder, Duras, Rivette and de Oliveira – is also employed to explore gendered structures of looking. Eliza is threatened by Victor at gunpoint and begs him to give her a second chance. She gazes directly at the camera while Victor remains off screen, since von Trier avoids the employment of shot-reverse-shot. Instead, images of Victor’s gun interject, making a clear connection between representation and the phallic gaze. Eliza on her part is shot in static frames and she repeatedly exits and enters the frame as if entering a theatre stage, gazing at the camera without clarifying whether her look is directed at



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the off-screen Victor or at the audience. In one of the last tableaux within this sequence, we can clearly see Eliza hiding a whip behind her back with which she is ready to flagellate Victor when he throws his revolver. These scenes can be considered as exercises in style or semi-academic tableaux concerned with questions of representation, gender and spectatorship. In a Fassbinderian way, the tableaux’s anti-naturalism has implications both on the diegetic and on the meta-diegetic level, and here we can appreciate Rosalind Galt’s argument that there is a connection between sadomasochistic experience and von Trier’s understanding of the medium ‘as the site for an intense disarrangement of normative ways of being’.23 Drawing on Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, Galt suggests that these films’ manipulation of extreme sexuality becomes a parable for the medium and the act of spectatorship itself. For Galt, von Trier’s references to sadomasochism can be seen through feminist film theory’s interest in the gendered construction of cinematic experience. As she says, ‘sadistic and masochistic affects are at once central to cinema’s ideological work of subject formation and a set of roles or positions that are open to contestation and revision’.24 Orchidégartneren’s tableaux that connect the cinematic gaze with questions of gender, power and domination serve an analogous purpose and, interestingly, von Trier’s latest films seem to return to a number of topics that he explored in his early experiments with the film medium. The figure of the Strindbergian crippled Victor Marse towards the end of the film prefigures the crippled male in Antichrist. Menthe – la bienheureuse is another film that explores the interrelationship between the gaze, cruelty, sadism and spectatorship. Heavily influenced by the cinema of Marguerite Duras, the film is a free adaptation of Pauline Réage’s novel Story of O (1954). Like Orchidégartneren, the story is told via autonomous tableaux which do not succumb to rules of diegetic continuity, while a minimum dialogue between the characters and the narrative is communicated solely via voice-over. The main character is a nameless woman (Inger Hvidtfeldt) who recalls her sexual relationship with Menthe (Annette Linnet). Menthe had been submitting to men’s desires like O in Réage’s novel, but she also had an erotic relationship with the nameless woman with whom she dreamt of travelling to exotic countries. As Schepelern observes, the film’s composition is elaborate and following Resnais and Duras the connection between images and sounds is arbitrary. Furthermore, the film has a loose connection with Orchidégartneren, since it also follows the theme of lesbian instead of heterosexual sexuality, while von Trier plays a minor role (the driver). An obvious intertextual reference is Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), which focuses on the micropolitics of power and abuse in a lesbian relationship between a rich fashion designer and a young woman who wants to become a model. Menthe – la bienheureuse is also concerned with questions of manipulation and desire for control within a homosexual relationship. Throughout the film

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one has the impression that the nameless woman played by Inger Hvidtfeldt is trying somehow to construct an image of Menthe that conforms to her desire. Significantly, Menthe during the film does not say a word with the exception of the last sequence where we can hear her in voice-over reading a letter she has sent to her former lover telling her that she must have mistaken her for someone else, because her name is not Menthe. In one of the first interactions between the two characters, the camera frames Menthe from her lover’s point of view. When the former tries to pronounce a word, the latter prevents her from doing so and starts fondling her face in a clinical way; meanwhile Menthe consistently looks at the camera for a prolonged period of time without cross-cutting to the character from whose point of view the scene is shown. This extended emphasis on the female face and her persistent look at the camera brings together the sexual aspect of the cinematic vision with the philosophical one since, in what initially appears as an objectification of the female character, the image is eventually de-objectified by means of the scene’s formalism. The film-maker invites one to take a different look at sexuality and the female body by defamiliarizing the audience’s association of a number of formal elements, e.g. the close-up in the aforementioned scene with a clear-cut sexual gaze. This familiar formal strategy of framing is defamiliarized, and one recalls here Viktor Shklovsky’s argument that ‘defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found’.25 Shklovsky gives as an example the novelist Leo Tolstoy and his ability to describe things as though seeing them for the first time. Something analogous takes place here in the ways that the cinematic gaze is aligned with psychological cruelty, sadism and power. In the scene that comes immediately after this one, the nameless woman is framed in a static tableau and she addresses Menthe who is off camera. The camera remains immobile and the character repeatedly enters and exits the frame addressing her lover. It cross-cuts only once to Menthe in a scene that again emphasizes the power of the gaze, since she is initially framed with her back to the camera only to turn around and gaze at it. In the scenes that follow, Menthe’s lover repeatedly reminisces about the past in an effort to make the former acquiesce to her own visual fantasy. In another cross-cutting sequence, she gazes at Menthe and her voice-over comments: ‘They offered you these blessed chains that took you away from yourself.’ The camera cuts to an image of a female vulva in chains only to be followed by an unconnected icon of a Christ figurine on the cross. It then returns to the nameless woman who stares at it and says: ‘You have difficulty in interpreting what one tells you – Always.’ This is a comment that again refuses a facile distinction between the diegetic and the meta-level. But this bizarre combination of stylistic calculation and audio-visual anarchy lends a different depth to the film’s implications combining questions of sexual desire with broader political and philosophical ones, something not far from Artaud’s call for an aesthetics of cruelty that challenges the banality of the well-made theatre play and film script.



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Such a practice has recently become standard in European art cinema. Asbjørn Grønstad refers to a number of film-makers such as Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl and Lars von Trier, and argues that the challenge posed by their films is their tendency to screen the unwatchable. As Grønstad convincingly argues, what is at stake in their films is a desire to use images of extreme sexuality, nakedness and violence not in order to fetishize them, but to offer an alternative decommodified aesthetic that challenges the predictability and dullness of our circulated visual representations.26 This aesthetic project can be identified from these early films of Lars von Trier that combine pathos with Logos, sensual images with philosophical questions and, more importantly, a desire to explore complex issues beyond a facile liberal universalism. At the end of the film, Menthe refuses the domesticity of the relationship and does not succumb to the fantasized and fetishized image of herself projected by her former girlfriend. Von Trier’s graduation film Befrielsesbilleder (1982) is also committed to a similar process of formalist experimentation and decommodification, and as he said after the completion of the project: ‘What’s important to me with a film is that you use an impeccable technique to tell people a story that they don’t want to be told.’27 The film’s narrative takes place on the first day of the Danish liberation from the Nazis and focuses on Leo (Edward Fleming), a Nazi soldier betrayed by Esther (Kirsten Olesen), a Danish woman with whom he had a relationship during the occupation. The film’s dramaturgy follows similar techniques to the aforementioned films, such as the stylized tableaux narrative and the excessive use of voice-over. There is an oneiric quality to it, similar to Strindberg’s experimental plays like A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, since the narration is motivated by the excessive pathos communicated by the mood of the film. Temporal and spatial transitions follow the logic of the dream rather than narrative causality, while characters in a Strindbergian fashion ‘split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, converge’.28 Static stylized tableaux and the filmmaker’s tendency to employ sound not in an additive way but as counter to the image reduce the characters to visual constellations and linguistic quotations. The film’s visual complexity is also reinforced by the fact that its expressive formalism is interrupted by documentary footage of violence and retaliation against German soldiers and Nazi collaborators. Von Trier collected this footage from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and defended its inclusion in the film on the grounds that it acts as a metacommentary on the fiction.29 Much of the discussion on the film has focused on von Trier’s sympathy with the German soldier, something that he has also justified on the grounds that the losers of history are always more interesting.30 To this, one should add that the sympathetic view of the German soldier is problematically combined with the parallel narrative of female betrayal. Yet one of

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the interesting parts of the story is how both characters are implicated in historical conditions beyond their control and how the changes in history change their own behaviours and attitudes. Equally important is to highlight the ways the revengeful female character in the film brings to attention again issues of spectatorship and history, thematizing once more the cinematic gaze.31 In the first encounter between Esther and Leo this is made abundantly clear: in a static tableau, we get to see Esther kissing an African American soldier. This prolonged scene is shown from the point of view of Leo, and at some point Esther turns her gaze into the camera as if sensing that she is being looked at. The interconnection between the gaze and power is also brought to the surface via von Trier’s decision to employ prolonged tableaux that are eventually followed by cross-cuttings that highlight questions of gaze and spectatorship. The two main characters are rarely shown in the same tableau, something that hyper-analyses changes in point-of-view shots and adds an aggressive tenor to the composition. Interestingly, Esther is the character who draws our attention to questions of looking. At some point she accuses Leo of having tortured a young partisan boy by poking his eyes out. When the latter responds, ‘it was the SS, not me’, she turns her gaze to the camera and asks, ‘don’t you see that you have a responsibility too’? The camera does not cross-cut to Leo and the implication is that Esther addresses simultaneously the diegetic character and the audience. This is a strategy that characterizes later films, such as the Europa trilogy, Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, where the idea of spectatorship as complicity is also explored. Later on, Esther sets Leo up and takes him to the forest, where a group of partisans are waiting to capture him. In an excessively stylized scene, she is given a knife by the partisans and stabs him in the eyes. We do not get to see the act, but we can hear the knife stabbing the flesh and this adds a shocking effect to the scene. Despite the sympathetic portrayal of Leo, what deserves special comment is that Esther performs an act that has broader historical implications. Leo is one of those people who, as Katharina Hartmann says in Europa – to another character also named Leo! – has witnessed the worst crimes but never reacted. In this respect, Esther’s act is a castigation of the passivity associated with particular modes of looking – and the idea of looking here refuses to make distinctions between art and social life. At the end of the film Leo, like a postmodern Oedipus, is elevated into the sky in a semireligious scene; but the film finishes with Esther looking persistently in the camera, once again drawing our attention to the act of looking and our own spectatorial complicity. In conclusion, these student films encapsulate some of the basic ideas and themes that we encounter in the whole corpus of von Trier’s work. But, most importantly, the female characters as well as the manipulation of gender conflicts within the narratives are committed to an exploration of the real – as per Badiou – that is, the desire to reanimate conflict and



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somehow suggest that the lessons of the twentieth-century avant-gardes are still germane. If, according to Badiou, the feminine becomes synonymous with political radicalism when it refuses to participate in a disciplined domestic organization that renders security as the highest priority and value, then cinema according to von Trier can serve its role only when it refuses to submit to institutionalized subject and object relationships. Paraphrasing Artaud’s writings on Vincent Van Gogh,32 we can conclude that von Trier’s films attack institutional conformity, and this is one among many other reasons why the female characters in his films are so interesting.

Notes 1

Alain Badiou, The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, p. 116.

2 Ibid. 3

Ibid., p. 126.

4

I would refer the reader to Joshua Foa Dienstag’s brilliant analysis of this scene. Dienstag says that ‘in Katherine’s (sic) judgement, to take no side is itself a sin. To be blind to evil is at least as bad as, if not worse (and this is the part that is hard to swallow) than, evil itself. Katherine (sic) does not really defend the justice of the Nazi cause – she only defends choosing a side and indeed when Kessler points out that bombing the train would have killed many Germans, she says: ‘What people? Everybody on this train has been through the war just like me. You can’t compare yourself to us. Everybody here has killed or betrayed, directly or indirectly, hundreds of times, just to survive. Look into their eyes and you’ll see what I mean.’ Joshua Foa Dienstag, ‘Evils of Representation: Werewolves, Pessimism, and Realism in Europa and Melancholia’, Theory and Event 18 (2) (2015). http://muse. jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/theory_and_event/ v018/18.2.dienstag.html.

5

Peter Schepelern, ‘Forget about Love: Sex and Detachment in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac’, Kosmorama 259 (11 March 2015). http://www.kosmorama. org/ServiceMenu/05-English/Articles/Forget-about-Love.aspx.

6

Rosalind Galt, ‘The Suffering Spectator?: Perversion and Complicity in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac’, Theory and Event 18 (2) (2015). https:// muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/theory_and_event/ v018/18.2.galt.html.

7

Eugenie Birkema, The Forms of the Affects, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

8

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Death and the Maiden’, in Elizabeth and Edmond Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 216.

9

Robert Buch, The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 9.

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10 Peter Schepelern has acknowledged how influential both Strindberg and Fassbinder were in von Trier’s oeuvre. See Peter Schepelern, Lars von Triers Film Tvang Og Befrielse, København: Rosinante, 2000, pp. 31–2, 89. See also Linda Badley, ‘Antichrist, Misogyny and Witch Burning: The Nordic Cultural Contexts’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 15 (1): 15–33. See also Stig Björkman, Trier on von Trier, translated by Neil Smith, London: Faber & Faber, 2003, p. 90. 11 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘I Let the Audience Feel and Think’, in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein (eds), The Cineaste Interviews, London: Pluto Press, 1984, p. 183. 12 Ibid., p. 185. 13 Jonathan Leary, A Case for Irony, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 19. 14 Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images, London and New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 173. 15 August Strindberg, ‘Preface to Miss Julie’, in Egil Törnqvist and Birgitta Steene (eds), Strindberg on Drama and Theatre: A Sourcebook, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007, p. 62. 16 Antonin Artaud, Artaud on Theatre, Claude Schumacher and Brian Singleton (eds), London: Methuen, 2001, p. 106. 17 Ibid., p. 58. 18 Susan Sontag, ‘Artaud’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. xxii. 19 Lars von Triers Film, p. 28. 20 Artaud on Theatre, p. 58. 21 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (3) (1975): 11. 22 Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art, London: Palgrave, 2013, p. 82. 23 ‘The Suffering Spectator’. 24 Ibid. 25 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, p. 18. 26 Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema, London: Palgrave, 2011. 27 Ole Michelsen, ‘Passion is the Lifeblood of Cinema’, in Jan Lumholdt (ed.), Lars von Trier Interviews, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2003, p. 10. 28 August Strindberg, ‘Author’s Note to a Dream Play’, in Strindberg on Drama and Theatre, p. 95. 29 ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 7.



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30 Ibid., p. 6. For discussions on the film, see Lars von Triers Film, p. 59; Caroline Bainbridge, The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice, London: Wallflower Press, 2007, p. 8; Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier, London: British Film Institute, 2002, p. 28. 31 I have also discussed this issue of voyeurism and history in my Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading, London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 30. 32 Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, p. 484.

7 What is the gift of Grace? On Dogville Lorenzo Chiesa

A state of excitement takes hold of my partner / A state of excitement takes hold of his dog / A state of excitement takes hold of his belt. SPELL CAST OVER THE ‘PARTNER-CANDIDATE’ OF THE KULA BY THE TROBRIAND PEOPLE

The possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: the industrial development of the entire world demands of America that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tyre […] Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tyre. GEORGES BATAILLE, THE ACCURSED SHARE

Now / You gentlemen can wipe that smile off your face / ’Cause every building in town is a flat one / This whole frickin’ place will be down to the ground. BERTOLT BRECHT & KURT WEILL, ‘PIRATE JENNY’

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I The term ‘grace’ designates a key notion of Christian theology. ‘Grace’ derives from the Latin ‘gratia’, which is the translation of the Greek term ‘charis’ as used in the New Testament. In the Bible of the Seventy, ‘charis’ renders in its turn a similar notion which is already present in the Old Testament in the guise of the Biblical term ‘hén’ / ‘chén’. In his philological review of Lars von Trier’s film Dogville,1 Charles Baladier reminds us that this Hebrew term has three different intertwined meanings: it refers to the abstract favour that is awarded by a high rank personality to one of his subjects, the concrete witnessing of this benevolence on the part of the benefactor who thus fait grâce, as well as the charm that the beneficiary receives from the fact of being in the benefactor’s good graces. Grace can never be attributed to just one person. The dialectical character of this notion is even more evident in the Latin term ‘gratia’, which can signify both generosity in giving and gratitude for having received. To put it simply, both the Biblical and the Roman pagan grace are ultimately based on a continuous exchange of favours, or gifts, in which what Marcel Mauss named the gift-exchange of primitive societies still resonates. More precisely, Mauss describes the gift-exchange as the ‘exchanges and contracts [that] take place in the form of presents […] given and reciprocated obligatorily […] a “total” social phenomenon [that gives expression to] all kinds of institutions at one and the same time – religious, juridical, moral, […] economic’.2 From this standpoint, the whole social fabric, the symbolic order as such, however complex, is born out of and constantly relies on the gift. Jacques Lacan fully endorses this, as shown in Seminar IV, when he relates the mythical emergence of primitive symbolization in the child to the transformation of the virtual object into a gift. After the mother has neglected the child’s appeal, objects – first of all the breast – that up to this point were, for the child, virtual objects that satisfied a biological need, are transformed into gifts that may or may not be donated by the real mother as a power. What is more, the real object of need can be perceived as such only after the child has confronted himself with a lack of object, after having realized that the object may not be donated: the relation subject– object is clearly based on the productive nature of the lack. The virtual Real precedes the Symbolic, but it can be ‘given’ as actual only by the symbolic dimension of the gift.3

II In Dogville, something definitely goes wrong at the level of the giftexchange. And this for two main reasons: first, the gift of the charming



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fugitive named Grace (Nicole Kidman), the gift of Grace – who gives herself away to the townspeople, as Lars von Trier remarked in an interview4 – is not reciprocated, or better, stops being reciprocated. As we have just seen, following Mauss, the gift, and the symbolic order it sustains, is nothing but reciprocation. Second, the unconditional way in which Grace offers herself to Dogville is as such dangerous: the pure gift soon turns into a poison,5 a dis-grace. On this point, von Trier states the following: ‘The idea behind Grace’s treatment at the hands of the townspeople was that if you present yourself to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them.’6 And yet, as Baladier cleverly suggests, it is this very excess of giving on Grace-Kidman’s part, the fact that, at a certain stage, her unilateral favours interrupt the to-and-fro of Biblical and pre-Biblical grace as exchange, that makes of her a perfect allegory of Christian Grace. As Giorgio Agamben explains in The Time That Remains, the Maussian gift is not the Pauline grace insofar as the latter involves a real element of gratuitousness, which the former stages only in the name of ‘an absolute indissolubility between the gift and obligation’.7 Furthermore, this ‘other’ face of Christian Grace, one permeated with mysticism, also entails a Christ-like ‘deliberate rejection of power’: as Baladier has it, this ‘goes as far as fostering, or at least not refusing, abjection, helplessness, humiliation, dereliction and what is called kénose – a Greek term which designates the fact that one ‘empties oneself’.8

III Baladier’s reading of Dogville fails to account for the film’s finale. How should we interpret Grace’s final violent act, the extermination of all Dogvillians? Is it simply a matter of sheer revenge? In his interviews, von Trier repeatedly emphasizes this element:9 yet at the same time he admits that, insofar as she ‘does not turn the other cheek’10 – or better, unlike the other female protagonists of his earlier films, she stops doing this – Grace ‘has to possess a capacity for something else’.11 While Baladier remains strangely silent about the value we should attribute to Grace’s final violence, most lay reviewers on the Internet concentrate their comments on it. The overwhelming majority of them tend to defend, if not praise, Grace’s act. I think we should agree with Pisanoid, from ‘somewhere in the U.S.’, when he says that ‘so complete is [Grace’s] humiliation that the twist at the end leaves the viewer very little sympathy for the fate of Dogville’s citizens’. More specifically, isn’t it the case that Grace’s violence is precisely that which avoids the imminent threat of an apocalypse triggered off by the detachment of the unilateral Christian gift, pure grace, from the circuit of dialectical gift-exchange? In stark contrast

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to some readings of von Trier’s film,12 I am inclined to suggest that the final massacre is precisely what stops the perverse biopolitical economy of ‘the time that times takes to finish’ – Agamben’s definition of Messianic time – and that, for this very reason, it should not be regarded as an apocalyptic revenge. Grace-Kidman’s violent act should not be seen as an ‘arrogant’ Armageddon; it is not arrogance – one of the key notions of Dogville – that causes the final carnage. Quite the contrary: the carnage is the unavoidable product of the overcoming, on Grace-Kidman’s part, of perverse Christian arrogance, whose more familiar name is ‘forgiveness’.

IV In Seminar VII, Lacan suggests that the discourse of science that nowadays dominates the world is engaged in an ambiguous relationship with the Thing. Although it ‘repudiates the presence of the Thing insofar as from [science’s] point of view the ideal of absolute knowledge is glimpsed’, this same ideal is ‘something that equally posits the Thing without accounting for it’.13 In other words, the mythical achievement of absolute knowledge would be perfectly equivalent to the real-ization, the demise, of the Symbolic: science ‘posits the Thing without accounting for it’ in the sense that the more it repudiates its presence as real lack of the symbolic order, the closer it comes to returning to the primordial Real by means of a self-saturation of the Symbolic. This is the reason why, elsewhere in Seminar VII, Lacan can rhetorically ask: ‘Have we crossed the line […] in the world in which we live?’14 He believes that the possibility of the death of the Symbolic has become a tangible reality for us: one need only think of the impending threat of the atomic holocaust and ‘an anarchy at the level of chromosomes’.15 Furthermore, the discourse of contemporary science – which ‘forgets nothing by reason of its structure’ and reveals for the first time the power of the signifier as such – is ideologically inextricable from what Lacan names the discourse ‘of the general good’.16 The general good should be understood as a ‘bourgeois fancy’,17 Lacan says, a post-revolutionary18 ‘politicization’ of happiness which involves an enormous distortion of the Aristotelian service of the good: indeed, precisely insofar as it relies on the premise that ‘there is no satisfaction for the individual’s desire outside of the satisfaction of all’,19 it is by no means compatible with Aristotle’s elitist morality of the master. Here Lacan is primarily interested in showing how the epistemological paradox of the discourse of science is echoed by a simultaneous ethical paradox: ‘The good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose consequences are fatal.’20 We thus obtain what Lacan names ‘criminal good’.21 In other words, the discourse of science



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considered as the discourse of the general – or better, potentially universal – good22 refuses to carry out any destruction of goods – in the widest sense of the term – ‘consciously and in a controlled way’. A clear example of these practices may be recovered in the ritual ceremony of the potlatch, Lacan says, in which a variety of goods (consumer goods, luxury goods, goods for display) are destroyed as gifts in order to favour ‘the maintenance of intersubjective relations’.23 Such a refusal on the part of science makes it impossible to ‘discipline’ desire insofar as desire ‘requires as its necessary correlative [controlled] destructions’, and consequently leads to ‘massive destructions’.24

V As Marcel Mauss reminds us, the potlatch was widely practised by Native Americans who lived ‘between the Rocky Mountains and the [west] coast’.25 Interestingly enough, it is precisely in this area that the fictional US town of Dogville was later built. Taking our cue from such geographical coincidence and historical succession, aren’t we entitled to associate the discourse of the general good described by Lacan, the discourse that forecloses lack and institutions such as the potlatch – and thus turns into a ‘criminal good’ – with the discourse of the Dogvillian Thomas Edison Junior? Can’t we say of Tom what Lacan says of Antigone’s Creon, namely that he wants to ‘promote the good of all as the law without limits, the sovereign law, the law that passes the limit’ – that is, the Pauline law that ‘fulfils’ itself?26 No doubt Tom pursues the good. He has the best possible intentions. Right from the beginning of the film, the omniscient narrator informs us that Tom ‘felt obliged to benefit the town’ and organized meetings on so-called ‘moral re-armament’. It is he who understands that the people of Dogville have a ‘problem’ with acceptance, and hence that they need something to accept, ‘something tangible like a gift’. It is he who makes the first active move to initiate the dialectic of gift-exchange upon Grace’s arrival. Recall the following scene: Grace and Tom have just met; Grace has stolen the bone of Dogville’s dog, Moses, because she is hungry. (In passing, we should note that, at this early stage, Grace has already been animalized.) Tom offers her some bread: grace  I don’t deserve that bread; I have to punish myself; I was raised to be arrogant.27 tom  In this town, in these times, it’s very impolite not to eat what’s given you. Grace accepts Tom’s intrusive initial gift since, as Mauss points out, the gift entails an obligation to accept it and to return it later. The dialectic of

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gift-exchange is thus started. However, Grace is clearly aware of the fact that she does not have anything to offer in return: ‘No, I think you have plenty to offer Dogville’, Tom replies. Grace takes Tom’s words at face value and, from that moment on, she will give herself away without constraint in order to punish herself masochistically: this is Grace’s supreme Christian arrogance. Last but not least, it is again Tom who convinces Dogvillians to accept Grace, even if they do not need her. His point is that she can do everything they do not need done, a clear indication of the purely symbolic status of Grace’s services. Initially, this seems to be a very enlightened argument. For a while, Grace’s duties are perceived as an unnecessary surplus, which is, as such, disposable and consumable, not reducible to a logic of accumulative profit. So why does Dogville later come to include Grace’s services in an expanded economy of enterprise and sadistically demand of her always more unnecessary gifts, as if they were necessary? Chapters Three and Four of the film are said to depict a ‘happy time’ in Dogville: the entire community votes for Grace to remain in town; they even give her some useful gifts in case the result of the vote was not unanimous and she was compelled to leave. As the narrator says, ‘Grace had friends in Dogville, that was for sure’; ‘Grace had bared her throat to the town and it had responded with a great gift, with friends’. We are also told that ‘she had left a trace’ on Dogville and, conversely, that her stay in town had had a great positive impact on her. What is the reason underlying the termination of such an idyll? One could simply argue that the major threat against the perpetuation of friendship and the gift-exchange comes from the outside: law enforcers arrive in Dogville and put up a notice; Grace becomes officially a ‘missing’ person. Shortly after, the police visit the town again: literally embodying the two basic characteristics of the symbolic object, Grace is now also ‘wanted’. There is a reward for her capture, and Dogvillians feel they are in danger. Yet, in opposition to this interpretation, I would rather argue that the real threat to Grace, and Dogville, is an internal one: after, the first note has been affixed, it is Tom who convinces Dogvillians not to turn Grace in to the police. Grace herself does not seem to be particularly glad at Tom’s impressive ability to persuade others: grace  I think you should vote again. tom  Why? We can’t resort to plebiscites all the time.28 A similar dialogue takes place after the second arrival of the police: grace  I think I should leave; enough is enough. tom  No! I suggest the opposite!



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It is Tom who wishes to keep Grace in Dogville at all costs: for him, enough is never enough … Why? First of all, because, as the narrator observes early on in the film, Grace ‘fitted Tom’s mission of educating Dogville for acceptance, like a glove’. Tom cares only about his ‘mission’, he does not care about Grace herself: his mission involves the attainment of the universal good. He is not content with the partial good Dogville has successfully achieved by following his advice. In other words, as he will admit shortly before he is killed by Grace, Tom ‘uses’ her, and this is his ‘arrogance’. Secondly, Tom wishes Grace to stay in Dogville because he desperately wants to ‘decipher’ her – to use his own words – precisely insofar as there is in Grace something that always eludes him, something that is in her more than herself. This is the reason why Tom is unable to love. Grace falls in love with him, but he does not fall in love with her. In this sense, Tom perfectly embodies the scientific discourse of the general good as that which ‘repudiates’ lack – ‘the presence of the Thing’ – in the name of absolute knowledge and, in so doing, paradoxically evokes the Thing without being able to control it. The consequences of such an evocation are truly catastrophic. In this regard, psychoanalysts should not fail to examine Tom’s magnificent slip of the tongue at the moment when Grace declares her love for him: tom  When I come to decipher you, I get absolutely nowhere. grace  Are you trying to say you’re in love with me […] I think I’m in love with you too. tom  Very interesting … Psychological […] They … they are calling you. grace  I didn’t hear them [expects to be kissed]. tom  You should get back anyway … See you at the wedding, hum … celebration. The celebration in question is the Fourth of July and the citizens of Dogville who have up to now been hospitable merrily sing ‘America, America, God shed his Grace on thee’. But for Tom this very celebration is nothing less than a wedding, one in which he marries Grace to the cause of the general good of the American community, a good that will soon inevitably turn into a criminal good. Lacan is absolutely right: ‘There is no satisfaction outside of the satisfaction of all’ for those who engage in the discourse of the general good, and Tom is surely one of them. Needless to specify, this scene, quite literally the Last Supper, with Grace’s two betrayers sitting at her side – Tom and Chuck, the cynical idealist and the incurable fatalist; Peter and Judas, the only two Dogvillians who are left untouched by the evental gift of Grace – is immediately followed by the beginning of Grace’s passion.

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It is thus significant that when Grace – as she herself says – finally decides to ‘solve the problem of Dogville’ by way of a final massacre, she mockingly adopts Tom’s very terminology. At this stage, Dogville’s ‘problem’ has grown disproportionately. What Tom mistakenly believed to be the ‘problem’ of Dogville (the difficulty, but not, as proved by facts, the impossibility of accepting) is replaced by Tom’s much more serious problem (the pursuit of the universal good). After all, Dogville’s actual problem is that it follows Tom blindly just as Thebes’s problem was that it followed Creon. Most importantly, we should emphasize that, in opposition to Tom, Grace painfully decides to solve the specific problem of Dogville in order to make the world a ‘little better’, as she says. Against all appearances, Grace’s violence is limited and does not partake of the discourse of the general good.

VI The scientific universal good for which Tom self-destructively strives has clear ethical and economic implications. His vainglorious ideals are not sufficient to account for what corrupts Dogville. As we have seen with Lacan, there is a strict connection between the ideological imposition of an ethics of the universal, criminal good, and the foreclosure of any ‘controlled’ destruction of economic goods, aimed at preserving intersubjective relations. Suffice it to recall how, in Dogville, it is Tom who proudly coordinates the increase-your-productivity phase of Grace’s ordeal, not to mention the fact that it is he who jealously saves the Father/gangster’s calling card in his drawer, and his promise of a reward for turning in Grace along with it. Three times Grace refers to the reward, and three times Tom, like Peter, assures her that he would never betray her. Significantly enough, the first thing he says when welcoming the gangsters he himself has called is ‘None of us feels well about accepting money for just helping people.’ Tom understands his economically lucrative betrayal as part of the discourse of the general good.29

VII In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille develops his notion of ‘general economy’, according to which ‘the “expenditure” (the “consumption”) of wealth, rather than production, [is] the primary object’.30 General economy focuses on the global circulation of energy on Earth and thus underlies what we normally call ‘economy’. Everyday economic calculations belong to a ‘restrictive economy’, whose principles of scarcity and utility inevitably



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overshadow the basic principles of general economy, namely excess and exuberance. For Bataille, this status quo is a complex and dangerous one. On the one hand, man’s disregard for the material basis of his life is somehow structural: humanity sticks to the resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters – ‘a resolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal’,31 Bataille specifies. On the other hand, in so doing – i.e. adopting exclusively the standpoint of restrictive economy – humanity assigns to the forces it employs an end that they cannot have. In other words, from the standpoint of general economy, it is necessary to lose the excess energy that cannot be used for a system’s growth, but man denies this necessity. As Bataille writes: ‘If the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit, gloriously or catastrophically.’32 In terms of general economy, I think Dogville’s ‘problem’ lies precisely in its inability to lose the excess, Grace, without pursuing profit, after it can no longer be absorbed in Dogville’s growth. This has catastrophic consequences. Grace is, from the very beginning, an excess for Dogville. Grace allows the system-Dogville to grow but, when the time comes for the excess to leave the system, Dogville is persuaded by Tom that this excess is still profitable. Grace’s passion is a perfect example of how a society ruled by what Bataille calls the ‘economy of enterprise’ is nothing other than a sadomasochistic accounting machine, vowed to self-destruction. All Dogvillians learn to become good managers. Grace’s salary is first cut, then annulled. The bell rings twice an hour to regulate her labour. Vera ‘counts’ her anger in the number of figurines to be broken in compensation for Grace’s alleged flirting with Chuck. Ben is in the ‘freight industry’ and a lift on his truck costs ten dollars plus a ‘surcharge for dangerous load’ – i.e. consenting to be raped. The children themselves ring the bell each time there is a sexual encounter between Grace and Dogville’s male population. Needless to add that Tom is the town’s über-accountant. Grace’s passion begins with these words of his: ‘From a business perspective’, that of restrictive economy, ‘your presence in Dogville has become more costly’. More precisely, Tom unashamedly deploys the most obscene side of accountancy, the bureaucratic logic according to which profit lies more in counting than in sheer profit: ‘They wanted you to work longer hours. What I proposed is that you just pay a visit to folks twice. It would seem like you’re willing to contribute more without actually lengthening your day.’ On the other hand, it is interesting to observe how the ‘happy’ phase of growth, the establishment of friendship between Grace and Dogville, seems already to be governed by what Bataille calls ‘glorious’ economy. Yet, glory and growth are not incompatible in Dogville. As we have seen, everything works out well as long as Grace’s duties are perceived as an unnecessary surplus: she does what does not need to be done; she is positively ‘expended’. This is the economic aspect of the glory of Grace.

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VIII According to Bataille, if man refuses useless consumption or loss – as he is constantly urged to do since ‘separate beings […] are nothing but eternally needy individuals’33 – his refusal does not change the final outcome of general economy in the least. What is not expended gloriously, by means of man’s awareness of the dynamics of general economy, is then expended ‘catastrophically’ through wars. Lacan makes the very same point in Seminar VII: the only real alternative that man – as a being of language whose essence is desire – has is between ‘conscious’ destructions, which are thus ‘controlled’, and ‘massive’ uncontrolled destructions. Violence is thus necessary but, as Bataille specifies, ‘it is subordinated to the concern for uniting and preserving the commonality’, for saving the community from ruination.34 Lacan and Bataille tacitly seem to agree on two other related issues: 1 ‘Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering.’35 That is to say, in spite of the fact that history must structurally deny general economy to different degrees, capitalist economy forecloses it tout court: this corresponds to the passage from a neurotic to a psychotic civilization which is accompanied by an increase of catastrophic disasters. The two World Wars are evident proof of this.36 2 The potlatch, considered as a gift that is immediately expended, and whose destruction is often reciprocated with interest by another more generous destruction, is a fine example of a practice – and a civilization – that is aware of the importance of general economy. As Bataille writes, ‘it would be futile […] to consider the economic aspects of potlatch without first having formulated the viewpoint defined by general economy’.37 In opposition to capitalism’s endless accumulation – as Lacan points out in Seminar XVII, a good capitalist ‘never pays’; even if he spends to enjoy, he never loses – the potlatch really consumes the surplus, it enacts a consumption without counting.38 Bataille is also interested in the openly ethical dimension of general economy: he proposes that ‘changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of […] ethics’.39 On the one hand, we could go as far as suggesting that Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis – an ethics primarily concerned with the preservation of lack as a precondition of the symbolic order – represents an initial tentative elaboration of such a new ‘general’ ethics.40 On the other hand, we must nevertheless emphasize a fundamental



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difference in Lacan’s argument, one that makes his overall stance far more convincing than Bataille’s. While, for Bataille, general economy applies first and foremost to the ‘living organism’, for Lacan this notion relates only to symbolic constructions. Lacan is concerned with the general economy of the Symbolic. General economy is not a matter of ‘energy’. Man as a being of language needs to carry out useless symbolic expenditures in a controlled way in order to avoid an uncontrolled symbolic catastrophe. In saying that, according to Lacan, general economy applies exclusively to the symbolic order; I am obviously not suggesting that, for him, general economy does not have concrete effects at the level of lived everyday reality. Quite the contrary, in being necessarily symbolized, everyday reality is entirely governed by general economy. What Lacan refuses to accept is the existence of a pre-symbolic ‘meaning of general economy’.41 To put it differently, general economy is solely a matter of ethics, not of biology. Contradicting Bataille on this point, we could well say that, for Lacan, ‘incomprehension’ of general economy on the part of man does change the final outcome.42 If, for Bataille, the real living organism perpetuates its existence according to the laws of general economy independently of man’s decisions – what Bataille calls his ‘consciousness’43 – for Lacan, general economy – which is a symbolic general economy – can ultimately subsist only by means of man’s singular ethical decisions concerning his desire. In other words, for Lacan, the symbolic order does not regulate itself automatically and, for this reason, can even wipe itself out.

IX In The Accursed Share, Bataille naïvely assumes a priori the transcendent status of a ‘desire’ of life as such, a ‘pressure’ to grow, to expand and, when this is no longer possible, to ‘enter ebullition’.44 Life can never ‘explode’45 for him because it is always-already posited as One being, either growing or boiling. Bataille’s general economy thus tacitly presupposes an underlying eternal ‘construction’ – the ‘desire’ of life as such – that sustains both growth and destruction. Bataille himself realizes that gift-giving, even in the apparently non-profitable form of the potlatch, ultimately relies on a paradox. In his own words, ‘gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing’, that is to say, ‘he regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses’.46 By way of practices such as the potlatch, man places ‘the value, the prestige and the truth of life in the negation of the servile use of possessions, but at the same time [he] makes a servile use of this negation’.47 However, Bataille does

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not acknowledge that this ambiguity of gift-giving is paralleled by another more crucial ambiguity, if not a contradiction, in his very notion of general economy – especially regarding its ethical implications – one which, in my opinion, he is not able to overcome (at least not in The Accursed Share). More precisely, is the new ethics that Bataille has in mind, an ethics that should only take into consideration general economy – or does it coincide with an ethics of general economy tout court? On the one hand, Bataille calls for a subjective stance able to practise ‘acceptable’ losses by way of gift-giving; these ‘conscious’ losses are ‘preferable’ insofar as they avoid catastrophic losses.48 On the other hand, he also clearly suggests that ‘the gift does not mean anything from the standpoint of general economy’.49 These statements produce an antinomy. Either the new ethics of ‘controlled’ destructions ultimately remains at the useful level of restrictive economy in spite of the fact that it takes into consideration general economy – and this is something Bataille denies; he refuses to acknowledge any compatibility between the new ethics and utility (‘acceptable loss [is] a question of acceptability, not utility’50); or, he is promoting an ethics of general economy tout court, in which case it is not clear to me why he should care about gift-giving in the first place. Whatever comes out of man’s restrictive economy, including massive, uncontrolled destructions, is always already ultimately dependent on general economy and consequently should always be endorsed. In this case, the ethics of general economy would be nothing other than an ethics of fatalistic passive nihilism. Once again, I believe that the principal cause of this antinomy is Bataille’s idea that general biological economy somehow transcendently contains restrictive human economy, that the ‘living organism’, life as One, precedes symbolic constructions. In opposition to this stance, according to Lacan, the gift means everything from the standpoint of general economy; simply put, the gift ‘saves’ the symbolic order, considered as general economy. For Lacan, the gift definitely transcends the restrictive servicing of the good: it is anti-utilitarian insofar as one does not expect any reciprocation. And yet, for this very reason – the fact that the symbolic structure as such needs lack and ‘controlled destructions’ in order to subsist – the gift is ultimately useful. General economy is strictly intertwined with restrictive economy: the latter is not merely a subset of the former; it does not simply follow it.

X The common source of Lacan’s and Bataille’s elaborations on the potlatch is Marcel Mauss’s seminal 1923 essay The Gift. Mauss himself effectively delineates the paradox of gift-giving and, like Lacan, emphasizes its ultimate utilitarian aim: ‘Even pure destruction of wealth does not signify



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that complete detachment that one might believe to be found in it.’51 During the potlatch one may ‘even destroy for the pleasure of destroying’, but this consumption ‘is in no way disinterested’. Since giving is showing one’s superiority and hence asserting one’s power, ‘through such gifts a hierarchy is established’.52 Elsewhere in the essay, an important footnote informs us that this is particularly the case in societies whose hierarchy is ‘unstable’.53 The potlatch ‘saves’ the stability of the symbolic order through controlled destructions. However, in spite of its fundamentally conservative function, the potlatch could never be reduced to the logic of ‘pure interest’, which, according to Mauss, originated among Greek and Semitic populations and finds its most developed formulation in today’s capitalism and its ‘constant, icy, utilitarian calculations’.54 Having said this, Mauss’s sociological considerations about capitalism remain after all dangerously optimistic and thus have no bearing on Bataille’s and Lacan’s condemnation of the foreclosure of lack operated by the ‘society of enterprise’. While Mauss warns us that ‘it is not in the calculation of individual needs that the method for an optimum economy is to be found’,55 his demagogic social-democratic stance nonetheless makes him enthusiastically propose that ‘the themes of the gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity […] are reappearing in […] society, as a dominant motif too long forgotten’.56 Mauss believes that the validity of this grand statement is sufficiently corroborated by a ‘few new principles of [French] law’ concerning ‘social insurance’, the ‘family assistance funds’, ‘insurance against unemployment’ and the ‘right of succession’ given to an artist and his inheritors ‘over the series of additional gains made during the successive sales of [the artist’s] work’.57 These are for Mauss all indications of the fact that ‘a whole section of our law that is now emerging […] consists of turning back the clock’, and that ‘this reaction […] of our system is perfectly healthy and well founded’.58 Bearing in mind that The Gift was written in the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome, Mauss’s passionate call for a return to ‘a group morality […] honour, disinterestedness [and] corporate solidarity’59 sounds exceptionally dubious. Leaving aside this matter, it is nevertheless the case that in the anthropological part of his essay Mauss offers us many interesting hints concerning the relation between gift-giving, the maintenance of the symbolic order and violence which were not fully developed by Bataille’s and Lacan’s more theoretical elaborations. From the beginning, Mauss defines the potlatch as a ‘total service of an agonistic type’60 that mainly differs from other forms of gift-exchange in the violence it entails;61 such violence goes as far as ‘the killing of chiefs and nobles who confront each other’ in the potlatch.62 Some forms of gift-exchange require violence. Furthermore, Mauss stresses that, even in the case of forms of giftexchange that do not necessarily entail the use of violence, ‘to refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept is tantamount to declaring war;

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it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality’.63 Similarly, retaining the gift for too long is dangerous and potentially fatal,64 insofar as the gift itself contains a force capable of destroying those who have accepted it but fail to observe the obligation to reciprocate.65 Acts of reparative violence against those members of a community who interrupt the dialectic of giftexchange may also be carried out directly by other members of the same community. Mauss refers to a ritual in which such a reparative violence is commemorated by the Kwakiutl people. In the so-called Ceremony of the Dogs, a number of men masked as dogs force an entrance into a house: ‘This commemorates the time when the people of the three other clans of the Kwakiutl tribe […] omitted to invite the most high-ranking clan among them, the Guetala. The latter did not wish to remain “profane” and, entering the house where dances were going on, destroyed everything.’66

XI Why does Moses, Dogville’s prophetic dog, materialize only at the very end of the film after Grace has exterminated all Dogvillians? Why can’t we see it even though we can hear it barking upon Grace’s two arrivals67 – her first appearance in town as well as her forced return following her failed attempt to escape Dogville hidden in Ben’s truck? Is it because the first two and a half hours of Dogville take place in an ‘ultra-historic’ time, the time that it takes for time to finish, considered both as the Messianic time of Christian Grace and the late-capitalist biopolitical time that overcomes the dichotomy human/animal and thus literally renders the animal realm invisible for man? If this were the case, following Agamben on this point, aren’t we allowed to suggest that we cannot see Moses because it is possible to separate animal life from human life only within man, and this separation is precisely what is revoked by the biopolitical animalization of man? Yet, doesn’t Dogville go a step further and brilliantly indicate the unresolved tension underlying Agamben’s own work, namely the fact that the time of Messianic Christian Grace and that of biopolitics are one and the same insofar as they partake of an identical perverse sadomasochistic libidinal economy? And, most importantly, doesn’t Dogville’s finale depict a Ceremony of the Dog in the precise Kwakiutl sense, a reparative violence that interrupts the interruption of the dialectic of gift-exchange and thus averts the apocalyptic disintegration of society as such? Dogs appear to have an important function in Mauss’s The Gift: he refers to them a second time in the context of his description of the kula, a Melanesian form of potlatch. Dogs are the protagonists of a formula of enchantment used by those associated in this ritual, whose function is to ‘enumerate all that the kula proscribes, all the things relating to war



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that must be exorcized in order to be able to trade between friends’. This formula goes as follows: ‘Your fury, the dog turns its nose up at it / Your paint of war, the dog turns its nose up at it, etc.’68 Or, in another version: ‘Your fury takes off like the tide. The dog plays / Your anger takes off like the tide. The dog plays, etc.’ Mauss suggests that this should be understood in the following way: ‘Your fury becomes like the dog who is playing’. Malinowski’s original interpretation of the formula is more detailed: ‘The dogs are playfully nuzzling one another. When you mention this word ‘dog’, the precious things also come to play […] We have given bracelets, necklaces will come.’69 I think we should oppose diametrically this ‘pretty parable’, the image of the reciprocal sniffing of dogs considered as friends who exchange gifts, to the image of Grace being chained up like a dog and sexually abused in Dogville. Literally, Grace takes up the place of Moses, Dogville’s invisible dog. The animalization of man that replaces the dichotomy man/animal is nothing else than the direct consequence of the ‘entrepreneurial’ logic of accumulation that perverts the gift-exchange, and perversely ‘takes hold of man’s belt’. As Dogville’s narrator says: ‘Since the chain had been attached things had become easier for everyone. The harassment in bed did not have to be kept secret anymore because it could not really be compared to a sexual act’; ‘These acts were embarrassing, as it is when a hillbilly has his way with a cow, but not more than that.’ Grace-Kidman is animalized by Dogvillians; and yet, insofar as she embodies Christian Grace, she fosters, or at least does not refuse, her humiliation. As she says right at the beginning of the film, holding Moses’ bone in her hands, she deserves to be punished. We could well suggest that, paradoxically enough, Grace-Kidman consents to be raped. It is thus only her final act of purely subjective violence that allows Grace-Kidman to overcome her earlier allegorical embodiment of Christian Grace, and transform grace into something completely different.

XII In one particular instance, Dogville’s narrator’s apparent omniscience seems to be refuted by his very own words. When Grace’s Christian passion reaches its climax, he informs us that ‘it was not pride that kept Grace surviving but the trance-like state that descends on animals whose life is threatened, a state in which the body reacts mechanically in a low, tough gear’. Grace is here reduced to what, with reference to his Auschwitz experience, Primo Levi calls a Muselmann. However, this statement is blatantly contradicted shortly after: ‘The generous God had given Grace one gift; the gift of being able to look ahead, only ahead.’ We must conclude that there are two kinds of grace after all. The film’s finale can be interpreted correctly only if we

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take into consideration the oscillation between these two meanings of grace. The gift of Grace, as subjective genitive, is her ability to always look ahead, to start all over again, from scratch. The gift that the subject-Grace was endowed with must therefore be opposed to the sadomasochistic Christian gift of Grace, to be understood as objective genitive. The passage from the latter to the former can be accomplished only by way of an act of violence. Once again, Dogville depicts a society in which the dialectic of giftexchange has come to a halt due to a perverse will to accumulate. Grace-Kidman’s final act overcomes this impasse through a unilateral reparative potlatch, following which the gift-exchange can start all over again. In spite of its unmercifulness, Grace’s final act still lies within the domain of ‘controlled’ violence. Indeed, its ultimate objective is the preservation of the symbolic order as such, in opposition to the sadomasochistic tendency of the capitalist discourse of the good that, as Lacan notes, ultimately leads us to ‘the point of apocalypse’.70 If we wish to identify a positive objective dimension of the gift of Grace, we may well propose that the gift that the finally subjectivized Grace gives us all consists of saving society through ‘controlled’ violence.71

XIII In a 1997 interview with Peter Hallward, Alain Badiou defines ‘laicised grace’ as that which raises man above his animality.72 He further specifies that grace is ‘an evental giving, based absolutely on chance, and beyond any principle of the management or calculation of existence’. Grace offers us a ‘chance of truth, a chance of being a little bit more than living individuals’.73 Adopting Badiou’s own terminology, we could thus further suggest that, if Dogvillians reduce themselves and Grace-Kidman to animality in the name of the ‘principle of management’, this happens because they are not ‘faithful’ to her evental giving, or, in the narrator’s own words, they are not able ‘to look ahead’. (Let us leave aside here the fact that, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the unconditional giving of Christian Grace is itself problematic; let us suppose for a moment that Grace-Kidman is, right from the beginning, a laicized gift of grace, what Badiou names an ‘event’ …74) According to Badiou, a lack of fidelity can also be defined as a ‘betrayal’. One betrays an event when one gives up on what Badiou calls the ‘disinterested-interest’ that makes a subject for the sake of one’s ‘ordinary interests’, the human animal;75 in other words, one betrays an event when one returns to the ‘service of the goods’.76 Badiou goes as far as concluding that betrayal is nothing less than one of the forms of Evil as such. Following on this, we may suggest that if, on the one hand, Dogville is initially just a normal



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community of scoundrels, on the other hand, its treatment of Grace finally turns it into a paradigm of Evil as betrayal. The only social link that keeps Dogvillians together in the time that time takes to finish is its unanimous betrayal of Grace. The main street of Dogville, Elm Street – a reference both to a celebrated place of collective cinematic nightmares and to the thoroughfare in Dallas where President Kennedy was assassinated – is a street for serial killers, not just scoundrels.

XIV What should we do with traitors? This is a question that the relatively moderate political stance of Badiou’s recent writings prefers to avoid altogether. However, the early Maoist Badiou of books such as Théorie de la contradiction and Théorie du sujet insisted on the following politicophilosophical maxim: ‘It is right to rebel against the reactionaries.’ At what point in Dogville does Grace-Kidman herself adopt this view? I believe that Dogville’s narrator perfectly summarizes this key moment with the following words: ‘Would Grace not have done the same as all other Dogvillians? No, if she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of their actions.’ The crucial idea we should grasp here in order to interpret the film’s finale correctly is that it is only at this stage that Grace is able to answer ‘No!’ … Throughout her passion she invariably answered ‘Yes!’, and that was her arrogant forgiveness. The subject-Grace decides to exterminate all Dogvillians when she realizes that their reactionary betrayal – their foreclosure of the gift as lack – is an unforgivable evil, against which one must rebel.77 In doing so, she overcomes her earlier masochistic forgiveness, that is, Christian Grace. From a Lacanian standpoint, we could propose that it is only after Grace answers ‘No!’ to the aforementioned question that she traverses her fundamental fantasy. Initially, we see how the protagonist’s tragic ‘No!’ to her gangster-Father78 and his lifestyle unexpectedly goes hand in hand with her becoming the sacrificial object of the Other, the town of Dogville.79 The protagonist traverses her fundamental fantasy only later on, when she sacrifices her own sacrificial fantasy, her being the object of the Other’s enjoyment, precisely by exterminating all the inhabitants of Dogville (the moment of subtraction) and by establishing a new Master-Signifier (the moment of symbolic re-inscription; what in the film Grace herself calls ‘assuming power’). In other words, Dogville shows us how the most fundamental fantasy to be traversed is, in the end, the one in which the tragic fantasy of an inflexible ‘No!’ to the existing Father/Master/Other becomes indistinguishable from the perverse fantasy in which the subject sacrifices himself for another allegedly alternative Other.

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XV Isn’t the film’s finale a perfect example of what is at stake in the notion of active nihilism? In this sense, we could well regard it as a worthy spiritual heir of Brecht and Weill’s song ‘Pirate Jenny’, Lars von Trier’s avowed main source of inspiration for Dogville. (As Grace says, quoting Jenny, if things are pushed too far, ‘nobody is gonna sleep here tonight, nobody’.) It would definitely be wrong to confuse active nihilism, revolution, with passive nihilism, the apocalypse. In the last chapter of Théorie du sujet, Badiou defines active nihilism as ‘inapplicable confidence’:80 This is what the gift of Grace-Kidman is all about, ‘inapplicable confidence’, being capable of ‘always looking ahead’. According to Badiou, ‘the essence of confidence lies in having confidence in confidence’, and ‘this is why it is right to revolt’.81 Badiou then proceeds to offer a very convincing characterization of the active nihilist: ‘Vigorous active nihilism is in search of a form of confidence and, if we no longer convey one to it directly, we can [only] wait with … confidence. […] Active nihilism valorizes only itself. This is always better than to end up tolerating the world. […] The active nihilist inherits nothing. He never believed, and there lies all his strength. Unless he joins religious sects, through which he will leap to the most rancid products of belief, he is a traveler without luggage, whose only future is courage’.82 In relating it to Dogville, one should bear in mind two things. First, Grace-Kidman is literally a ‘traveler without luggage’ and Lars von Trier repeatedly invited his audience to consider Dogville as a metaphor for the current debate about immigration.83 Second, Grace-the-immigrant risks succumbing to the ‘most rancid products’ of Christian religion.

Notes A slightly different version of this article was published in Film-Philosophy, 11 (2007), pp. 1–22. 1

Charles Baladier, ‘À propos de Dogville “Grâce”’, available at http://www. oedipe.org/fr/spectacle/grace.

2

Marcel Mauss, The Gift, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 3.

3

See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre IV. La relation d’objet (1956–1957), Paris: Seuil, 1994, especially the first five lessons.

4

Lars von Trier, ‘About Dogville’, available at http://www.electricparc.com/ webdesign/dogville/.

5

See, for instance, The Gift, pp. 62–3.



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6 ‘About Dogville’. According to psychoanalysis, the mother as a power capable of dispensing gifts must be able to say ‘No!’ if she does not want to pervert her offspring: to put it with Lacan, a healthy dialectic of exchange begins with a ‘dialectic of frustration’. 7

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 123.

8 ‘À propos de Dogville “Grâce”’. In his last unfinished autobiographical novel Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini captures effectively the erotic implications of such a signification of Christian Grace. While developing an implicit rewriting of the Lacanian dictum ‘There is no sexual relationship’, he proposes that, from a ‘cosmic’ standpoint, being possessed by the penis and its violence is that which is furthest from Evil, or, ‘the only possible experience of Good as Grace’; on the other hand, possession is, for him, by definition, ‘THE Evil’, Petrolio, Turin: Einaudi, 1992, p. 319. 9

See, for instance, Jan Lumholdt (ed.), Lars von Trier: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, p. 207.

10 Ibid., p. 210. 11 Stig Björkman (ed.), Trier on von Trier, London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p. 252. 12 See Marc De Kesel, ‘De hondin van het dorp. Over Lars von Triers Dogville’, De Witte Raaf 107 (2004): pp. 11–15. 13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 131 (my translation). 14 Ibid., p. 231. 15 Ibid., p. 232. 16 Ibid., p. 236 (my emphasis). 17 Ibid., p. 303 (my translation). 18 See ibid., p. 292 (in relation to the French Revolution) and p. 318 (in relation to the Russian Revolution). 19 Ibid., p. 292. 20 Ibid., p. 259. 21 Ibid., p. 240. 22 See ibid., p. 318. 23 Ibid., pp. 234–5 (my emphasis). 24 Ibid., p. 235. 25 The Gift, p. 6. 26 The Seminar. Book VII, p. 259. 27 Grace was educated as the daughter of a Depression-era gangster, something against which she is rebelling. Grace’s encounter with Dogville is caused by her attempt to rebel against her father. 28 This is a clear indication of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the alleged democracy of the general good …

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29 The misadventures of the real Thomas Edison Junior are rather instructive with regard to those of his fictional homonym. A website dedicated to his memory (http://members.aol.com/taedisonjr/) – whose tone is very reminiscent of Dogville’s narrator – informs us that Junior greatly differed from his illustrious father, the supreme American inventor of the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and the movie camera. (Recall that Dogville opens with a discussion between Tom and his father – a respected retired doctor – that focuses on the best possible use of the radio …) A life of notoriety fuelled Junior’s false feelings of greatness: he proceeded to fabricate all kinds of outlandish ideas none of which came to fruition. In spite of his addiction to alcohol, a disastrous marriage and the fact that his father legally prohibited him to use his surname, Junior managed to become the ostensible head of industries such as the Thomas Edison Junior Chemicals, makers of ‘the Wizard Ink’ medications and the ‘Magno Electric Vitaliser’, a cure for everything from rheumatism to deafness. Junior also ‘create[d] an improved automobile carburettor through the indulgence of family friend Henry Ford’. Unfortunately, the latter did not think much of the carburettor in question, a fact that pushed Junior back to alcoholism to the end of his days … The following dialogue from Chapter Two of Dogville is therefore possibly more significant than it may initially appear: GRACE: Excuse me, I would like to offer my help. Is there anything you need? BEN: Hum … not really … A carburettor that doesn’t leak. 30 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume I, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 9. 31 Ibid., p. 21. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 23. 34 Ibid., p. 59. 35 Ibid., p. 38. See also p. 40. 36 See, for instance, ibid., pp. 24–5. 37 Ibid., p. 68. 38 Ibid., p. 59. 39 Ibid., p. 25. 40 I have analysed in detail the way in which Lacan relates ethics to the maintenance of the Symbolic in Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, esp. pp. 167–82. 41 This is the title of the first section of Part One of The Accursed Share. 42 See The Accursed Share, p. 23. 43 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 44 Ibid., p. 30. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 69. 47 Ibid., p. 73.



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48 Ibid., p. 31. 49 Ibid., p. 70. 50 Ibid., p. 31. 51 The Gift, p. 74. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., p. 97. 54 Ibid., p. 76. 55 Ibid., p. 77. 56 Ibid., p. 68. 57 Ibid., p. 67. 58 Ibid., pp. 66–7. 59 Ibid., pp. 68–9. 60 Ibid., p. 7. 61 Ibid., p. 35. 62 Ibid., p. 6 (my translation). 63 Ibid., p. 13. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 10. 66 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 67 To quote the spell cast over the ‘partner-candidate’ of the kula by the Trobriand people, it is definitely the case that ‘a state of excitement takes hold’ of Dogville’s dog … 68 Ibid., p. 25. 69 Ibid. 70 The Seminar. Book VII, p. 207. 71 Responding to my paper, Johan Schokker has argued that it is unnecessary to divide Grace into two kinds of graces: ‘This is my point: if you want to take seriously the act of Grace, as a subjectivized act, then you also have to take masochistic Grace seriously. If a subject is capable of such a radical act, he is also capable of radical forgiveness. […] Radical Goodness exists, but in the end it is not different from radical Evil.’ Schokker focuses on a dialogue between Grace and Chuck to illustrate his point: ‘We are with Grace and Chuck in the apple garden […] Chuck wants her and he tries to kiss her […] but, well, Grace turns away. Chuck is a rejected lover: “Sorry, you made me so happy”, he says, and wants to cry. But then Grace says: “I should ask you for forgiveness”. What is this? How to understand this? In my reading, Grace knows perfectly well that Chuck passed the limits of friendship. There is a traumatic attempt to kiss her. But Grace is not saying: “You tried to rape me and, in my Goodness, I forgive you.” No. Her response is more refined. She says: sorry that I misunderstood this friendly gesture as a sexual attempt. That is, she does not forgive Chuck explicitly for his act, which would mean

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that Chuck, while forgiven, would also be marked by his failed attempt. Grace knows perfectly well that Chuck tried to rape her, but she says: “I misjudged you”. In other words: we know perfectly well that you tried to rape me, but let us say that it was just a friendly gesture that I misinterpreted; in this way we can still be friends as before and you are not guilty. So what is this act of forgiveness of Grace? “Being able to look ahead, and only ahead”. The two Graces are One! The radical forgiveness of Grace is a continual attempt to wipe out what happened, it is the death drive which makes a new start possible, and this is the SAME Grace that destroys Dogville.’ (Private communication.) 72 Alain Badiou, ‘Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou’, in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, 2001, p. 133. 73 Ibid., pp. 122–3 (my emphases). 74 Dogville would have most probably acted in the same way even without Grace’s ‘fostering’ of her passion. Given Tom’s leadership, Dogvillians would have anyway attempted to recuperate her evental giving within the economy of the service of the goods. 75 Ethics, p. 78. 76 Ibid., p. 80. 77 Note that Grace realizes this before discussing with her father. 78 Grace’s father is an evident exemplification of the fact that the Father is always – or, better, is always thought to be – an obscene jouisseur, not only an agent of prohibition … 79 This is a perfectly Lacanian-Žižekian lesson. Saying ‘No!’ to the Father – opposing the Oedipus complex with an only supposedly emancipatory Anti-Oedipus – is not, as such, a sufficient guarantee that one will avoid different and more perverse forms of subjection/enslavement. 80 Alain Badiou, ‘Further Selections from Théorie du sujet’, Positions 13 (3) (Winter 2005), special issue Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution, p. 655. 81 Ibid., p. 652. 82 Ibid., p. 655. 83 Lars von Trier: Interviews, p. 209.

8 Manderlay: The gift, Grace’s desire and the collapse of ideology Ahmed Elbeshlawy

Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, as a European film which deals primarily with American racism, takes what it perceives as America’s democratic ideal – that which is taught to the slaves of Manderlay by Grace – and reveals it as a ‘social fantasy’, which is a notion that Žižek designates as a ‘necessary counterpart to the concept of antagonism’. What illuminates this social antagonism, however, is Grace’s personal experience with Timothy – her sexual fantasy fixing the racist divide in America’s social structure, ‘masking its constitutive antagonism by the fullness of enjoyment’.1 The enjoyment in (watching) Manderlay is precisely the enjoyment of the black body as a (cinematic) gift, as an object for the gaze. In this particular regard, von Trier’s film seems to be more or less in line with several Hollywood productions content-wise, regardless of its minimalist stylistics. What is different about Manderlay, however, is that it takes the black body, through Grace’s desire, on a Lacanian detour from sublime to soil, from fantasy to faeces, in other words, from the Lacanian objet petit a to the gift. And, as a gift, the same black body loops back and transforms itself again into the objet petit a. It is at this point that the film goes beyond its racist discourse, even beyond gender difference. Manderlay, over and above dealing with the history of slavery in America and the black/ white division, uses Grace’s desire to reconsider the concept of human freedom through disturbing the viewer’s common sense of the term in three particular scenes: the scene of Grace’s dream, in which we have no access

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to the dream images except through the narrator’s voice; the scene in which Timothy rapes Grace; and the scene in which Grace whips Timothy near the end of the film. In analysing these three scenes, three notions will help to radically revise what we take as the common sense of freedom. These three notions are the gift, the object cause of desire and fantasy. Accused of both misogyny and racism, it is particularly in the whipping scene that Manderlay paradoxically goes beyond both accusations, depicting the figure of Grace as ultimately a genderless subject that is perpetually hanging from an illusion that Lacan calls the objet petit a. Initially, it can be argued that Grace’s sexual fantasy does not seem to be about Timothy in particular. In the scene in which she passes by the public bath, Hurt’s narrator exposes her secret thoughts about ‘black skin, male and black manhood’ in its generality. It is precisely this generality that marks the phantasmal relationship between Grace and her object of desire as an imagined object. The situation is not simply that of an individual white woman admiring a ‘proudly nigger’ who displays a freedom of spirit usually attributed to free men, but that of a subject, in a Lacanian sense, and the objet petit a as the object-cause of desire. The subject, in Lacanian discourse, ‘has nothing to do with the subjective […] nor does it have anything to do with the individual. The subject is in a strict sense an effect of the signifier.’ Grace’s sexual fantasy is not only the site of an imagined object of desire but also, more importantly, the site of a subjectivity whose very condition of existence is determined by nothing other than a linguistic gap, a void, that is there ‘before the individual, even before it exists as a living being’.2 A look at Grace’s dream can help to elaborate this point. In her dream, where her unconscious and the sexual urges of her lower body stratum take control, the viewer gets an interesting narrative description of her fantasy. Hurt’s narrator tells us that Grace sees herself in ‘Southern climes’ among listless men and women in exotic costumes and turbans and a ‘flock of Bedouin’, who were ‘satisfying her with their noses’. Even when Timothy appears in her dream, he is doubled; he is at once the ‘slave bearing wine, hands shaking’, and the ‘Sheikh himself, whose authoritative hands tested the size of Grace’s most intimate orifices’. In a sense, Timothy appears in Grace’s dream as both ‘Mansi’ and ‘Munsi’; the slave who should properly tremble while serving his master, or ‘cry, shout and beg for mercy’ while being flogged, and the authoritative Sheikh or master of the tribe whose authority, quite appropriately, does not and cannot exceed its only perceived function in Grace’s dream, which is to ‘test the size of her most intimate orifices’, in other words, to give her sexual pleasure just like all the other listless Bedouins and their noses. Somehow, the phantasmal picture – made all the more powerful by narration without showing any part of Grace’s dream on the screen – seems to be overwhelmed by exotic big hands and prominent noses. There can be either smudged faces or no faces in it. Even Timothy’s face cannot but fade



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away in the presence of his shaky/authoritative hands. The Sheikh may be master in his own Oriental tribal world, but he is definitely no master in Grace’s white and Western consciousness, even though the situation in the dream suggests that her desire is to be enslaved by a black Sheikh. For fantasy is not about the objectification of the Other; on the contrary, it is a ‘way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the Other’.3 This Other, in Grace’s fantasy, assumes the place of the objet petit a in all its elusiveness and unattainability; hence, it has to be pinned down to something tangible yet not particular, personal or detailed enough to assume an identity for itself and spoil the whole fantasy; it has to be somewhat general, somewhat undefined and unidentifiable. This ‘something’ in Grace’s fantasy is ‘black skin’, meticulously and elaborately framed as ‘black manhood’. The split in Timothy’s image, slave and Sheikh, chameleon and proud, serves to illustrate Grace’s unconscious perception, which does not really care to distinguish between a slave and a Sheikh, provided both are black. The ridiculous phonetic closeness between the two supposedly oppositional words, ‘Mansi’ and ‘Munsi’, seems to stress the point even further. Dr Hector, the cynical card shark, whom Grace greatly detests, appears to describe Grace’s experience with Timothy in a ‘motto’ that encapsulates it all: ‘They say the Mansi are better hung than the Munsi. Or, the Munsi are so up-stuck, but the Mansi, how they fuck!’ It is as if Hector sees through her fantasy. It would be erratic to suggest that Grace desires Timothy, so she starts to fantasize about black manhood. It is her fantasy, in accordance with Lacan’s definition of the concept, which ‘dominates the entire reality of desire’.4 For the subject, insofar as he is dependent on the Other, ‘doesn’t know what he wants, and it is the role of fantasy to tell him that, to “teach” him to desire’.5 In parallel with all the gifts that her unconscious presents to her in her dream – the exotic costumes, the dates, the hands and the noses – Grace’s waking life experience in Manderlay is clearly marked by her perception of herself as a gift. She seems to ‘perceive herself as a gift to this Godforsaken place’.6 But one of Manderlay’s main questions is what to do exactly with a gift. Even the most basic of human rights, if perceived as a gift, immediately loses real value on account of assuming it to be something that it essentially cannot be. The gift is not just impossible; it is, according to Derrida, ‘the impossible’ itself, ‘the very figure of the impossible’, as it assumes a position in which it ‘must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle [of economics], a relation without relation of familiar foreignness’.7 When Grace gives the blacks of Manderlay their freedom, they do not know what to do with it. They do know, however, how to express thanks, properly, by giving something in return, offering her to be their new Mam – a gesture that means only rejecting the gift of freedom, which, we can properly assert, is not there from the start.

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The gift of freedom is not there from the start because, given and received as a gift, it is annulled by both the giver and the receiver. As soon as the giver ‘intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to approve of himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically, the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give’ annuls the gift. As soon as the receiver ‘perceives or receives it, if he or she keeps it as a gift, the gift is annulled’.8 The gift cannot be innocent; it cannot reside outside of the law of symbolic exchange. That is why even Manderlay’s blacks’ rejection of the gift of freedom is expressed only through its return, that is, by offering Grace to be their new Mam. So, whereas the gift is rejected, something is given in return as if it was accepted. The symbolic exchange in this particular case makes the very acceptance/rejection of the gift of freedom indeterminable. The acceptance of it, which is evidenced by giving something in return, is immediately voided by nothing but the return gift itself that carries the very rejection of the gift. To Lacan, all gifts are ‘already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact, and they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact they constitute as the signified; this is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange […] are all destined to be useless’.9 That is why every gift in Manderlay seems to be functionless. Mam’s notorious book as a ‘weighty written evidence’ on the survival of slavery in the plantation is a useless gift. Freedom is a useless gift to Manderlay’s blacks. Offering Grace the gift of being the new Mam only maddens her. In fact, Grace’s problem with the concept of gift giving starts earlier than Manderlay; it starts at the end of Dogville. Her ultimate problem is that she does not really know what to do exactly with her father’s gift of shared power. She is too anxious to use that power in a righteous way but discovers that she simply can’t. Being the antithesis of the pragmatic gangster her father is – the antithesis of a politician on a larger scale – Grace does not know that the secret of power is to know that ‘power does not exist’, as Baudrillard puts it. It is a secret that, according to Baudrillard, ‘also belongs to the great bankers, who know that money is nothing, that money does not exist; and it also belonged to the great theologians and inquisitors who knew that God does not exist, that God is dead. This gives them incredible superiority.’10 Grace’s problem is that she recognizes the gift but does not recognize its emptiness, its nothingness, the fact that one can never use it satisfactorily either in a righteous or abusive way. The logic of the gift is extended further when the lawyer, Joseph, enforces it on the whites by drawing up ‘deeds of gift’ for them to transfer the property to the former slaves in joint ownership. Joseph, literally, takes the gift from its pretentious position as something given outside of the law of symbolic exchange or outside of economic reason, which is impossible, to an exchange that is imposed. The assumption in all this is that the gift means or signifies sharing power, while



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in fact what Manderlay aims at from this work’s perspective is to show that offering a gift and accepting a gift means that one is not at all questioning the assumed structure of power. The question of what to do with a gift seems to reach even beyond the film’s content to Manderlay itself as a cinematic production that leaves viewers at odds as to what to do with it exactly and how to react to it. Grace at one point declares with definite resolution: ‘Manderlay is a moral obligation’, which means that ending slavery in Manderlay, teaching the former slaves the principles of democracy and putting whites and blacks on an equal footing constitute a moral obligation to her as one of the whites. Von Trier once said that ‘my main [female] characters are also built on my own person […] this is my female side’.11 Andrew Gordon even takes von Trier’s identification with his female characters to the point of ruining the premiere of Melancholia at the Cannes Film Festival, in which his identification with the melancholic Justine compelled him to humiliate himself publicly by confessing to ‘sympathizing with Hitler’ and declaring that he is a Nazi.12 Therefore, adhering to the logic of the gift, it can be argued that von Trier himself also seems to claim that Manderlay is a moral obligation. While Grace wants to end slavery, he obviously wants the viewers to rethink America’s history of black slavery and whether it still relates to its present. John Hurt’s narrator at the end of the film says, ‘America was a many-faceted place, no doubt about it. But “not ready” to accept black people? You really could not say that. America has proffered its hand, discreetly perhaps, but if anybody refused to see a helping hand … he really only had himself to blame.’ Yet, Manderlay is done in such a way as to destabilize any contented definition of what constitutes the moral as well as impair the viewer’s common sense about certain master signifiers like freedom, power, democracy and civilization. The questions of ‘What to do with freedom?’, ‘Who is free?’ and ‘Free from what?’ are all problematic questions in Manderlay, no matter from which main character’s perspective they are posed. These questions apply to power as well. With all the power given to her, whatever changes Grace made in Manderlay only led her back to Mam’s law, which miraculously survived all of her civilizing projects and finally transformed Grace herself into a new Mam, with a whip. Her relationship with Timothy, from admiring his pride to fantasizing about him to letting him rape her in his own ‘traditional’ way to flogging his black body mercilessly, only seems to establish her father’s view that ‘however much [women] go on and on about civilization and democracy, sexy they ain’t’, and that, ‘deep down inside, there isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t nurture these fantasies, whether they involve harems [or] being hunted through the jungle by torch-bearing natives’. The father’s discourse, which gives no particularity to any ‘native’ as an individual, is obviously rejected by Grace, but it is also unconsciously

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repressed, entailing a Freudian return of the repressed in Grace’s slips of the tongue, mistakes, fantasies and dreams. As Žižek puts it, ‘in our daily existence, we are immersed in “reality” (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this immersion’.13 Thus, Grace enthusiastically gives Jim a gift – another one of those Manderlay gifts – to advance his painting talents but, embarrassingly, mistakes Jack for Jim, giving Timothy a chance to see through her white unconscious, which does not really care to differentiate much between the two brothers who are both black. Even though Grace seems to expect words of thanks from the freed slaves in return for her gift as her father shrewdly perceives, she does express her perception of freedom as no human given gift, or, as common belief would put it, as a gift from God. Yet, freedom as a God-given gift still seems controversial if looked at from a Lacanian point of view. Perhaps the maxim of being ‘born free’ needs to be reconsidered. Is Man born free? And free from what? Isn’t he born into a complete symbolic system that effectively shapes his destiny, as Lacan asserts?14 Doesn’t nothing but ideology raise him thereafter? In her attempt to establish freedom, justice and democracy in Manderlay, Grace frees the slaves, imposes a communist ideal of wealth redistribution by drawing up ‘deeds of gift’ for the whites to transfer the property to the former slaves in joint ownership, under the gun, and follows that with her lectures on the ideal of democracy. The two major political systems of modern history are applied, one after the other, in a rapid, righteous and, in a way, innocent manner to secure the founding principle of freedom. The two political systems have precise definitions in Lacanian theory: Communism is ‘a desire of/for the Other based upon justice in the redistributive sense of the word’, and it requires ‘putting the desire of the Other in charge of a regime’, while liberal democracy is ‘a desire of the Other based upon what they call freedom, resulting in talk with no effect’.15 The result of ‘democracy’, or, the ‘talk with no effect’ is clear enough, and it is criticized in writings as early as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, whose hero defines political democracy as a ‘double worship […] where gentry, title, wisdom, cannot conclude but by the yea and no of general ignorance’, resulting in a situation in which ‘nothing is done to purpose’.16 It is, needless to say, that both systems base themselves on principles that seem to be historically irreconcilable, namely, justice and freedom. What is interesting, however, is Lacan’s implication by ‘what they call freedom’, which clearly points to being governed by a certain regime still. Freedom is not only opposed to materialist, redistributive, authoritarian and communist justice; freedom itself is not free enough. Grace, for example, teaches the blacks how to vote as the first lesson in democracy’s freedom of choice. It goes without saying, however, that the freedom of



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choice does not include choosing to be a racist, or, as actually happens in Manderlay, choosing to be a slave. As Žižek puts it, freedom of choice in liberal democratic societies is about ‘going on making our small choices, “reinventing ourselves” thoroughly, on condition that these choices do not seriously disturb the social and ideological balance’.17 Reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, in which the freed blacks are shown as misfits in garments not their own at the height of their power in the South, Manderlay portrays the former slaves as people who do not know how to use the democratic ideal, they can only abuse it by literal identification with its general rules; thus, they vote for executing old Wilma for stealing Claire’s food at night basing the death sentence on an assumption that, if it was not for the lack of food, the pneumonia-stricken child would have lived. They have gone from being slaves lacking control over their own lives to free ‘decision makers’ in the Adornian sense of the word. Criticizing Heidegger’s ‘freedom of decision’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘right living’, which are ‘defined entirely in terms of decision’ as what testifies to humanity or what constitutes its ‘authentic completion’ in existential philosophy, Adorno shows how ‘the speakers for existence move toward a mythology, even when they don’t notice it. Self-possession, unlimited and narrowed by no heteronomy, easily converges with freedom.’18 At its best, freedom, in a ‘Deleuze-Hegelian formulation’ suggested by Žižek, ‘is not simply a free act that, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but rather a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me’.19 The execution of Wilma is precisely that ‘retroactive act’ by which the blacks of Manderlay ‘choose’ or make a ‘decision’ under the new democracy established by Grace and her father’s gangsters in order to determine who they are or forge for themselves a new identity. An early scene in Manderlay illustrates the importance as well as the ludicrousness of gift giving and symbolic exchange as such. After freeing the slaves, Grace waits in the car, and her father correctly guesses that she is expecting to be thanked for her gift of freedom to the slaves – implying that since she expects something in return, it means that she does not really believe that freedom is their natural right and that no gift is a free gift. The dialogue that follows between her and Timothy, however, is marked by his ingratitude and absolute coldness: timothy  When we were slaves, we were not required to offer thanks for our supper and for the water we drank and the air we breathed. grace  Nobody needs to say thank you, but … timothy  But what? You mean there is something you think we are to be thankful for? grace  I didn’t mean ‘but’, I meant ‘and’ … There is no reason to be thankful to anything as natural as your freedom … I am the first to

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apologize for everything you and your people have been subjected to … See those gates: they should have been unlocked seventy years ago. timothy  Only seventy years ago? But before that, of course, they were completely justified. grace  No … no, no, no, you misunderstand me … Hmm … What can I say? timothy  You need to say nothing at all. This is a dialogue that shows the impasse that takes place when one participant in it does not adhere to the rule of symbolic exchange, which decrees that ‘the symbolic debt has to be repaid’.20 Grace’s first unfinished sentence is meant to say, ‘nobody needs to say thank you, but we have to keep the appearances of exchanging gifts, or empty words’. Its equivalent in America’s political discourse with regard to freeing the Iraqis from their dictatorial oppressor is ‘there is no reason to be thankful to anything as natural as your freedom but just give us the oil for free’. Grace’s position in this dialogue is that of the subject of symbolic exchange, whose symbolic act, in Žižekian thought, is ‘best conceived of as the purely formal, self-referential, gesture of the self-assertion of one’s subjective position’.21 Timothy, clearly seeing how her position and the exchange that she expects from him is meant to ‘conceal […] the abyss of the Otherness that no sacrifice could appease, i.e. with which no relationship of exchange is possible’,22 does his best to cut it short. When she stammers ‘no, no, you misunderstand me … What can I say?’ he tells her ‘You need to say nothing at all’. Symbolic exchange is precisely about the human ability to mis(understand), to use the gift of pretence, which humans, in fact, cannot communicate without. As Lacan puts it: ‘You are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and does – they’re the same thing – can be supposed to have been said and done to deceive you, with all the dialectic that that comprises, up to and including that he should tell the truth so that you believe the contrary.’23 The problem that Timothy’s last sentence poses for Grace in this ‘dialogue’ – if one can still call it that – is not human graceful silence when one realizes that the wrong done cannot be in any way corrected, i.e. silence that still carries a certain message, but the inhuman demand that nothing at all should be said or communicated in any form. Perhaps even colour has nothing to do with this if one equates Timothy of Manderlay with Chuck of Dogville. In spite of the differences between the two characters, they seem to share the disbelief in gifts and symbolic exchange. They both believe only in the master–slave zero equation of power. Out of Manderlay’s characters, however, it is Dr Hector who sees clearest through the pretence of symbolic exchange. He tells Grace: ‘I do more than play, I cheat.’ Dr Hector is also a racist cheater; he cheats the Negroes to



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keep them indebted to the whites. His statement is said in such a matterof-fact way as if cheating is the most normal business, since this is what humans do every day just by communicating via the medium of language. This is precisely why Lacan once stated that he prefers the word ‘colloquium’ to ‘dialogue’ since he saw that ‘being in dialogue is one of the most enormous pretensions of our times’.24 Grace, however, comes to the epitome of her personal repayment of the symbolic debt when she apologizes for ‘everything you and your people have been subjected to’. This is the most ridiculous of all of her statements. It is as if the experience she went through before in Dogville is repeating itself and, again, she makes herself responsible for a collective guilt – a Christ-like sacrifice that her father sees as sheer arrogance or as a sacrifice of herself primarily for herself in order to maintain some sort of ethical standard unattainable by others. In spite of accusations of both misogyny and racism, which cannot but be true to a certain extent, von Trier’s Manderlay problematizes both notions. Grace, unlike in Dogville, is in a position of power from the start to the end. Even though she ends up as a prisoner in Manderlay as she was in Dogville, this does not last for long and she manages to escape after giving Timothy a heated flogging. The flogging scene that stages the denouement of the film is by far more erotic than the one that stages its climax, the scene in which Timothy makes love to or, perhaps, rapes Grace. The latter seems to stage more of a cultural racist encounter than a sexual one. The encounter in fact illustrates nothing but the disappointment in the exotic black body and black manhood as an imagined objet petit a. At the heart of this disappointment, lies the problem of culture as a characteristically neurotic25 phenomenon, as the major sign that dominates the scene is nothing but a cultural message. Timothy’s white handkerchief becomes that sign, indeed, the cultural message – formerly unintelligible and now appalling – carrying love and rape at once. Covering her face is not only supposed to prevent her from seeing her object of desire – the black body – but it also protects him from her gaze to cut off the possibility of any communication with her as another human being and deal with her only as a dehumanized white body to be penetrated with a vengeance. Whether her subsequent screams mean great pleasure, pain, fear or all three of them is left for the viewer’s speculation. What is certain, however, in this scene, is that Grace got what she wished for, what she fantasized about, which is precisely to swap roles with Timothy and become a black man’s sex-slave, or, to be enslaved by none but someone who is perceived as a slave, in other words, to offer her body as a gift or, more precisely, to return the gift that she perceives as the black body being always already offered by default as an object for the gaze through the effect of slavery. Yet, the problem of her sexual intercourse with Timothy is that she comes face to face with the core of her dream; the real of her own desire to

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become his slave, and, as Lacan teaches, coming face to face with the real of one’s own desire is traumatic.26 ‘The core of our fantasy is unbearable to us’27 because at the core of fantasy is the utter voidness of the subject, or, that which the subject cannot deal with on the level of consciousness, which is a domain marked by ideologies and political correctness. The wish to become a sex-slave to Timothy is not only in discord with Grace’s project of eliminating slavery, but it also touches upon the Žižekian idea that ‘fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject; it is this inaccessibility that makes the subject “empty” ($)’.28 Fantasy’s inaccessibility is based upon its being an answer to the anxious ‘Chè vuoi?’29 question by which the subject finds a way to relieve itself from the anxiety of the question, in other words, by creating a fantasy around the desire of the Other with regard to the subject; what the Other wants from the subject, or what it wants the subject to be. Grace’s fantasy inscribes ‘male and black manhood’ as the unattainable objet petit a. She is unable to attain Timothy as her sexual partner, who is the Other to her, except inasmuch as ‘Timothy’, in the strict sense of ‘male and black manhood’, is the cause of her desire. It is appropriate, convenient and poetically just to imagine that the desire of the Other, who happens to be a slave in this case, is to enslave the subject, who will of course gladly play at being the slave of the Other, since this seems to be a realization of the subject’s fantasy, in other words, the Other’s imagined desire (mis)read as the subject’s own desire. The complication is that once the subject comes close to the realization of desire, it comes face to face with the real of that desire, which is not only utter disappointment by the reality of the Other as devoid of any sublime traits, but, over and above this disappointment, the realization that the desiring subject himself is a barred subject, a subject whose very intangibility is made out of the same fantasy that inscribes the Other as the object cause of desire, a fantasy whose Lacanian formula, according to Žižek, clearly illustrates the ‘relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject’.30 Black slavery is taken to its ultimate limits by showing a black man being whipped by a white woman. While Dogville ends by wiping out the mostly white inhabitants of the township, Manderlay ‘properly’ ends with flogging a black man. On the surface of it, while both American whites and blacks are demonized respectively, the whites seem to at least get the respect of getting killed by live ammunition, while the black slaves are portrayed as not even worth killing. It is enough to flog one of them and make an example out of him. No matter how much reviewers and critics praise Manderlay as thought-provoking art-house cinema, no matter how much its discourse can be argued to work against Hollywood’s ideological racism, it remains an obvious fact for the common viewer that the ultimate ‘gift’ that Manderlay presents to the viewer is the black body itself as



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cinematic material, as an exotic body made different by cinema, or as a sexuality made either too monstrously potent or too impotently supine, or, figuratively speaking, as a massive yet semi-erect penis (‘the lesser of two evils’31). What to do with it? The scene, which stages the film’s ‘apocalyptic denouement’,32 seems to provide the only available answer from an acutely Hollywood-like position: flog it! This fits precisely with not only the history of slavery in America but also the history of American cinema itself, which produced countless scenes in which a black body gets flogged. Manderlay’s flogging, however, seems to disorient the torturer much more than the tortured. Playing Mam, or actually being a Mam, Grace decides to finally put the blacks of Manderlay where they seem to prefer: Timothy, you can stop being proud and silent. Cry and shout, and beg for mercy. Let the Mansi you are, be the Mansi who you despise so much. And it is that hatred, Timothy and the rest of you, that hatred against yourselves, that you will never make me accept. You are a cheat of the lowest kind, and Wilhelm and all of you who follow him are nothing but traitors to your race. I hope that your fellow Negroes one day discover your betrayal and punish you for it. You make me sick. She drops the whip at this point and starts to leave. Timothy, however, ultimately dissatisfied with this conclusion, tells her: ‘Sure you got it right, Miss Grace? Most likely, it is impossible to revile us Negroes enough. But what I don’t get is why it makes you so angry … Aren’t you forgetting something? You made us.’ This last statement, in which Timothy quotes what she herself says at an earlier stage in the film, infuriates her, so she picks up the whip again and starts lashing his black body frantically. It is clear that it is at this moment – and not at any other, either in Manderlay or in Dogville – that Grace’s power and self-confidence totally and unequivocally collapse, taking down with them all the ideological fantasies of freedom, equality, democracy and sacrifice. Timothy’s affront is in its essence a Baudrillardian challenge, a ‘challenge to power to be power, power of the sort that is total, irreversible, without scruple, and with no limit to its violence’. Baudrillard states that ‘it is in facing this unanswerable challenge that power starts to break up’.33 In fact, power begins to break up already earlier when she orders Timothy to ‘cry and shout and beg for mercy’, like Verdi’s Egyptian princess, Amneris, giving her Ethiopian captive, Aïda, the impossible order to tremble as the slave she is: ‘Trema! o rea schiava! (Tremble! O thou slave!)’,34 which is categorically an impossible demand. Grace’s physical answer to Timothy’s ‘unanswerable challenge’ to power; her violent whipping of him, which gets watched by her smiling father and mistaken for a real change in her nature that finally enabled her to put the gift of power to some use, is clearly powerless.

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Her frantic acting-out seems to foresee another equally important scene in von Trier’s Melancholia, in which the heroine mercilessly yet helplessly beats her horse in order to vent her anger over trying to change a situation that cannot be changed. This outrageous acting-out should not be understood in terms of ‘Grace transgressing over her own ethics and belief in the equality between the races’. If that were the case, the scene of whipping Timothy would have been shot differently, with a different attitude (perhaps more like inflicting punishment with a matter-of-fact abandonment like, for example, when she shoots Tom in the head in Dogville). Grace, in Manderlay, does not undergo the kind of elemental change she undergoes in Dogville’s final chapter. Her transgression here is effectively a demonstration of her inability to transgress. Timothy exposes her because he is the one slave who showed her, practically, that she, like other whites, is incapable of really loving black people. What she loves in him is his pride, the fact that he already acts like a free man. Marc De Kesel writes, ‘What Grace loves in Timothy is first of all that he is, so to say, of her kind. He is free like she is free. And he, too, is willing to fight for it.’35 She did not love him as one of the blacks. It is not only that Grace’s earlier perception of Timothy was distorted by her desire to see him as number 1 (proud and admired) while he was never actually anything but 7 (chameleon and despised). Numbers 1 and 7 are precisely the same in her unconscious. Her dream clearly shows that. What happens in the flogging scene, therefore, is much more disturbing to her, the torturer, than to Timothy, the tortured, since it is at this moment that her dream comes true for the second time, that she actually sees out there what is hidden in her unconscious, namely, that Timothy the Mansi and Timothy the Munsi are one and the same; the moment he is exposed as a chameleon is the moment in which he demonstrates real pride and takes the whipping stolidly without any trembling. It is not surprising that out of Mam’s, or more precisely Wilhelm’s, seven descriptive categories of slaves, it is the chameleon, who can transform himself into exactly what the beholder wants to see, that describes the human condition as such, since the ideal ego is based on nothing but anxiously posing and imaginatively answering the ‘Chè vuoi?’ question with regard to the desire of the Other (what does the Other want of me?), which signals an incomprehension on the part of the subject as to the desire of the Other. In short, the moment of Timothy’s exposure as a chameleon exposes Grace as a chameleon. Over and above her desperation, which comes out of knowing too well that her flogging of Timothy only throws her own failure in Manderlay into sharp relief, Grace’s flogging is at a deeper level directed to the phantasmal object cause of desire that, in a moment of clarity, seems less than what she previously imagined it to be. As a slave, Timothy’s only truth, in Grace’s unconscious, corresponds with that of the hysteric in Lacan’s discourse, who ‘has to be the object a in order to be desired’.36 What Grace is angry



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about – to risk an answer to Timothy’s question – what she is helplessly whipping, is the very inaccessibility of her own fantasy, the un-attainability of the objet petit a; the black body symbolizing male and black manhood, a different kind of sexuality as she imagined it, in other words, something that does not exist. The scene can in fact be seen as a visual transliteration of Lacan’s famous statement: ‘I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.’37 And, because fantasy ‘does not only conceal the horror of the real, it also creates what it purports to conceal’,38 what is at stake for Grace is not only an unattainable object, but her own subjectivity, since it is around that elusive object that the subject always seeks to know itself beyond what is mandated by the symbolic order, beyond being an ‘effect of the signifier’.39 Grace, in the flogging scene, may be punishing one of the blacks who flatly rejected her gift of freedom and democracy but, more importantly, she is also hitting at the very nothingness of her own subjectivity. It is a moment in which she realizes that her previous sexual fantasy about Timothy was not only simply her personal scenario by which she imagined fixing America’s historical social antagonism. It was not even her personal scenario by which she imagined attaining an unattainable or non-existent object. It was always already what she as a subject is made of, the very core of her being as non-being, namely, a scenario that inscribes the Other as the object cause of desire. In this scenario, it is not simply that the objet petit a is the subject’s elusive creation; it is the subject itself, in all its fictitiousness, that hangs perpetually from the illusion that the petit a is; therefore, the subject’s very existence becomes questionable. The creator diminishes in front of her creation and perceives herself as a mere side effect to it. It is precisely at this moment that von Trier’s Manderlay  goes beyond its own racist discourse and that the figure of Grace herself, as a desiring genderless subject, becomes the very collapse of ideology. Like Dogville, which ends with a series of photographs presumably pointing to America’s social injustices, Manderlay ends in the same way with photographs particularly about Black American misery. The series of images ends beautifully with an image of a black man cleaning the gigantic white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln that fades out with the last sound. Commenting on the first scene of Chaplin’s City Lights, Žižek writes: The tramp assumes […] a role of stain in the picture: in front of a large audience, the mayor of the city unveils a new monument; when he pulls off the white cover, the surprised audience discovers the tramp, sleeping calmly in the lap of the gigantic statue […] the tramp is thus an object of a gaze aimed at something or somebody else […] as soon as the audience becomes aware of the mistake – he turns into a disturbing stain one tries to get rid of as quickly as possible.40

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The last image of Manderlay shows a black man in a more or less similar situation as the tramp. Here, however, he is overshadowed by a gigantic white statue that particularly connotes American ideology, symbolizes America’s greatest moral turning point, its abolition of slavery, the modernization of its economy and assassinated tolerance all at once. But, whereas Chaplin’s tramp sleeps calmly in the lap of the statue, offering nothing to society and tarnishing its ideological image with his ‘disturbing’ presence, the black American worker adds a new dimension: he cleans the very image that he stains with his presence. Without his presence, this black ‘stain’, American ideology would immediately lose its bearings and collapse. The legacy of Lincoln himself would be less significant. The black body, as an American cinematic gift, functions in the same way. Gazed at, often admired, often humiliated, occasionally flogged, oversexed and undersexed all at once, it is just as imagined and ‘impossible’41 as the gift.

Notes 1

Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 254.

2

Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, translated by David Macey, London and New York: Verso, 2008, p. 79.

3

Interrogating the Real, p. 58.

4

Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, translated with notes by Russell Grigg, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007, pp. 128–9.

5

Interrogating the Real, p. 280.

6

Adnan Mahmutovic, ‘Lars von Trier’s Gift’, Under the Midnight Sun – Reviews. http://undermidnightsun.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/lars-vontriers-gift-by-adnan-mahmutovic.

7

Jacques Derrida, Given Time. I, Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 7.

8

Ibid., 14.

9

Jacques Lacan. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006, p. 225.

10 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, translated by Nicole Dufrense. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 63–4. 11 Karin Badt, ‘At War with Myself: A Word with Lars von Trier at Cannes 2005’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 49, August 2005. http:// brightlightsfilm. com/ 49/ trieriv.php#.UzrATUewrDc. 12 Andrew Gordon, ‘The Bride of Melancholia’, Psy Art., 7 September 2012. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/gordon-the_bride_of_melancholia.



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13 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, London and New York: Verso, 2009, p. 329. 14 In what seems to be his most fatalistic statements, Lacan asserts that symbols ‘envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh” before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny’, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, p. 231. 15 My Teaching, pp. 48–9. 16 William Shakespeare, Three Roman Plays, edited by Norman Sanders, Emrys Jones and G. R. Hibbard, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1994, p. 567. 17 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 122. 18 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003, pp. 104–5. 19 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2012, p. 100. 20 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, New York and London: Routledge, 2001, p. 16. 21 On Belief, p. 84. 22 Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 58. 23 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997, p. 37. 24 My Teaching, p. 59. 25 By displaying a cultural code, the subject sends a message to the Other, which means that he turns himself into a signifier. Based on this, it can be argued that human culture is by definition neurotic, or, even more precisely, that neurosis is in fact the very condition of culture. Lacan says that the neurotic subject not only identifies himself in language, he loses his own being in the signifying chain; he transforms himself into a signifier and becomes language, ‘On the Rejection of a Primordial Signifier’, The Psychoses 1955–1956, p. 155. The neurotic phenomenon thus seems to be inherent in culture since the ‘normal’ human subject does transform himself or herself into a signifier on a daily basis. Transforming oneself into a signifier maintains the whole system of symbolic exchanges that define one’s daily life and regulate all his or her relations with others. 26 For the dream, to quote Lacan, is ‘essentially […] an act of homage to the missed reality – the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening’. A dream, thus, is a compensation for that which cannot be articulated or symbolized in waking life thanks to the metonymic structure of desire. Lacan discusses the dream of the ill-fated father who recounted to Freud seeing his burning

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child in his dream to illustrate this point, ‘Tuché and Automaton’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 58–9. 27 Organs without Bodies, p. 88. 28 Interrogating the Real, p. 108. 29 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002, pp. 345–6. 30 Interrogating the Real, p. 108. 31 Wilhelm, one of the main black characters in Manderlay and the actual writer of Mam’s law, which guaranteed the prolongation of slavery on the plantation for seventy years after its official abolition, describes the blacks’ choice of slavery over freedom in a society that is ‘not ready’ to accept them as free men as the ‘lesser of two evils’. 32 Philip Cunliffe, ‘Manderlay: The Danger of Do-Gooding’, Spiked-culture. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAFF9.htm. 33 Forget Foucault, pp. 60–1. 34 Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Ghislanzoni, Maria Callas, Elvira Galassi, Fedora Barbieri, Richard Tucker, Franco Ricciardi, Tito Gobbi, Giuseppe Modesti, Nicola Zaccaria and Tullio Serafin, Aïda, Hayes: EMI, 1987. 35 Marc De Kesel, ‘Journey between Mirrors’. http://marcdekesel.weebly.com/ uploads/2/4/4/4/24446416/made_-_on_lars_von_trier_manderlay.pdf, p.15. 36 The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 176. 37 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, p. 268. 38 Slavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999, p. 92. 39 My Teaching, p. 79. 40 Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 4. 41 Given Time, p. 7.

9 Violent affects: Nature and the feminine in Antichrist Magdalena Zolkos

[Of all my films] Antichrist comes closest to a scream. LARS VON TRIER

Antichrist, affect, philosophy Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist, produced by the Danish company Zentropa, tells a story of parental loss and the mourning and despair that follow, and ostensibly result from, the tragic death of a child. The film stars two protagonists, identified only as She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe). This sparse economy of naming suggests that Antichrist, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its eschatological titular signification, is a story of origins. Antichrist stages an Abrahamic quasitheological return to a lapsarian space where the myth of the female agency of the originary transgression,1 and the subsequent establishment of human separateness from nature, are told by von Trier as a story of his own psychic introspection. In the words of Joanne Bourke, professor of history at Birkbeck College who has researched on sexual violence and the history of fear and hatred, Antichrist is a re-telling of the ancient Abrahamic mythology framed as a question: ‘What is to become of humanity once it discovers it has been expelled from Eden and that Satan is in us’.2 This mythological trope grapples with the other-than-human

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presence, as a demonic or animalistic trace, found at the very core of the human.3 At the premiere of Antichrist at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, von Trier cryptically welcomed the audience with the words: ‘I would like to invite you for a tiny glimpse behind the curtain, a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination: into the nature of my fears, into the nature of Antichrist.’4 What is at play in this invitation is the effect of ambiguity set off by the polysemic play of the word ‘nature’. The operation of the figures of nature in Antichrist is ambiguous both in the sense of double signification, and as a mark of uncertainty or dubiety regarding the protagonists’ motivations and identities. First, nature means a character, an essential disposition or appearance of a subject (both human and non-human), as in the proverbial phrase ‘female nature’. Second, nature refers to the category of the physical world which includes animals, plants and landscapes and which is conventionally contrasted, often in binary terms, with the symbolic of the man-made world (‘civilization’ or ‘culture’). In Antichrist, this latter meaning of nature is also synonymous with wilderness: the world of nature includes other-than-human phenomena and living beings that the female protagonist invokes through a collective metalepsis. She names it, in a fearful whisper, ‘the woods’. The symbolism of nature is doubled as, prior to their departure to a cabin in a forest, in a grief therapy session She identifies ‘the woods’ as an object of her anxiety. What is interesting about how the polysemy of nature operates in Antichrist is that it establishes a set of complex (though non-homologous) semantic connections between the discourses of gender and the discourses of species. The interplay between the multiple sociocultural idioms of gender and species in the film inspires a post-humanist reading of the subjective constructions in Antichrist in the light of its affective and performative impact, which is, perhaps, nothing short of ‘traumatizing’. By this reference to the psychoanalytic concept of trauma I don’t mean to reduce the interactions between the protagonists to the effects of the shock of their child’s death. Rather, I suggest that the ‘violent affects’ in the film fuel its traumatizing effects, insofar as its depiction of physical, psychological and structurallinguistic violence resists its transformation into a consumable product of cinematic entrainment.5 In other words, von Trier’s film is ‘traumatic’ insofar as it forces its viewers to confront their own derivation of pleasure from the sight of another’s pain,6 as well as their identification with the desire, personified by the male character, to perceive and relate to the world in accordance with the economies of rationality and calculation. As Nina Power has aptly suggested, Antichrist undermines ‘the unthinking acceptance of modern rationality’ and the (‘masculine’) facades of ‘caring liberal humanism’, by depicting scenes of ‘cosmic misalign[ment]’ between its hierarchically ordered categories – man and nature, and woman and man.7



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The European reactions to Antichrist were a curious mixture of outrage, scandal and open dismissal. Nothing demonstrates better this sense of public indignation and apprehension than the infamous press conference at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, when von Trier was asked by one of the journalists to explain and justify (or, in von Trier’s interpretation, ‘to apologize for’) Antichrist. At stake in this interpellation, and in numerous subsequent critical discussions of the film, has been the alleged lack of clarity of ‘message’ and of ‘authorial intentionality’, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a way of questioning the ethics of this film. This criticism has been articulated in particular from the standpoint of the gendered identification of von Trier’s cinematic production as misogynist, and as such involved in ‘psychically and socially normative genderings’8 that legitimize sexual violence and cruelty, and that stage the spectacle of debasement and destruction of women’s bodies. Such critique points to the deliberate elimination of critical distance in von Trier’s films, as well as to the lack of clarity around the questions of political responsibility in his work.9 For example, contributing to a collection of opinions about Antichrist published in The Guardian, journalist and feminist activist Julie Bindel said, rather tersely: ‘[w]atching this film was like having bad sex with someone you loathe – a hideous combination of sheer boredom and disgust’. For Bindel, Antichrist makes no contribution to the understanding of why sexual ‘cruelty and brutality is inflicted by some people on others’, but, rather, stages it, in a pornographic fashion, for ‘the purposes of gruesome entertainment’ and Sadian enjoyment.10 Nevertheless, emphasis on the film’s sexually explicit and violent images, including the infamous scene of the self-inflicted clitoridectomy, fail to shape an understanding of what is at stake in the public outrage, unease and anxiety caused by Antichrist. I suggest that such interpretative engagement with this cinematic text must account for its performative and, in turn, affective aspects. In this context, Antichrist is a testimony to the continuing influence of the Dogme 95 Manifesto on von Trier’s film-making (even if it constitutes also an obvious departure from, or reinterpretation of, the tenets of Dogme 95). Dogme 95 was formed as an artistic and political protest against what its creators, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, considered cinematically unreal, such as ‘technologically advanced film editing and Hollywood ideological, economic and aesthetic representations’.11 The manifesto proposed instead a turn from the ‘fictional film narrative towards the framings of documentary film within traditional cinema’ in a search for an ‘authentic’ cinematic experience. As Linda Badley suggests, referring to J. L. Austin’s theory of illocutionary and perlocutionary functions of language, the Dogme 95 Manifesto created a ‘performative space’ for the achievement of cinematic effects of ‘“pure” … emotion and provocation’.12 Badley situates the manifesto in the context of

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wide-ranging cultural and artistic responses to postmodern ‘irony, regress and dispersal’, which, under the heading of ‘the return of the Real’,13 seek to produce ‘an affect, “an aesthetic experience of transcendence” in which subject, sign and thing come together’.14 By ‘bracket[ing] off the space for an ostensive narrative act’, von Trier has thus ‘encouraged … identification with the character’ in the pursuit of a cinema that ‘resists deconstruction’.15 In ‘Making Waves: Trauma and Ethics in the Work of Lars von Trier’, Caroline Bainbridge argues for the centrality of affect and trauma both as a subject and as a form in von Trier’s cinema.16 More controversially, numerous critics have pointed out that trauma has been von Trier’s primary aim in urging a particular response from his audiences by ‘inducing emotional, ethical and intellectual distress’.17 Focusing on the Europa trilogy and on the Gold Heart trilogy, Bainbridge suggests that the tropes of trauma and affect enable in von Trier’s cinema the critical interrogation of the ‘ambiguities and ambivalences around [any binary formations] of good [and] evil, guilt [and] innocence’. Rather than being rendered as oppositional and clearly separated categories, they function in von Trier’s work as excessive, mutually penetrating and reciprocally contaminating spaces. Von Trier’s post-Dogme 95 cinema flags the inter-connection between the ‘ambiguities and ambivalences […] central to his narrative forays and the gender of his protagonists’.18 In Antichrist this is perhaps most striking with regard to its depiction of the intricate interrelation of love and violence in the figuration of the female character – in contrast to the Christianic imaginary of love as a redemptive or sacrificial site that resists and counters violence, for Her, violent acts become an expression of the erotic (and perhaps, as it is suggested towards the end of the film, also maternal) attachment. The approach to a cinematic image as a ‘performative space’ is highly pertinent to Antichrist. Instead of offering a narrative engagement with the subject of grief and mourning, the film seems to enact it at the level of affective transmission, impression and permeability.19As Gillian Wearing poignantly observes, Antichrist is a deeply ‘visceral film’, almost ‘suicidal’, which shows ‘how depression, dislocation and desperation feel’, rather than what they are.20 For Wearing, this subjective experience of intense affectivity makes Antichrist ‘close to painting’, in the ways that it ‘plays with the abstract, the real, and the unreal’. These sensuous and affective operations in Antichrist are highly gendered, which, as Wearing and Bourke agree, is not synonymous with strategies of feminization. Rather, the mournful affects of parental grieving are ‘articulated [both] through violence (female) or close sterility (male)’.21 A few commentators have in fact suggested that, contrary to the dominant line of feminist criticism, Antichrist is a misanthropic, rather than misogynistic, film.22 These suggestions lead me to draw a connection between, on the one hand, the affective figurations of femininity and masculinity and the



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provocative (traumatizing) effects of the film and, on the other hand, von Trier’s accompanying disclosures of his personal and psychic life. Von Trier has revealed that he embarked on the production of Antichrist after a two-year-long severe depression. He has also explicitly acknowledged the therapeutic psychic effects of the process of film-making.23 In a statement titled ‘Director’s Confessions’ von Trier discloses: The work on the script did not follow my usual modus operandi. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I’d had earlier in my life. Once again, the subject was ‘Nature’, but in a different and more direct way than before. In a more personal way. The film does not contain any specific moral code and only has what some might call ‘the bare necessities’ in the way of a plot … I can offer no excuse for Antichrist.24 How does the idea of an artistic work that one cannot offer an excuse, or apology, for frame von Trier’s enigmatic ‘welcoming words’ at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival (to ‘a tiny glimpse behind the curtain … into the nature of [his] fears’)? At issue here is the suggestion that in the process of offering a testimony to a psychic collapse and destruction, Antichrist also makes a secretive and highly intimate self-disclosure.25 As a type of speech act, this disclosure self-identifies as ‘confession’, where the uttering subject makes oneself known in the act of avowal or acknowledgement, as well as, notably, professes some unknown culpability, or transgression. Von Trier’s ‘welcoming words’ at the film’s premiere are a gesture of invitation, predicated not as an option, but as a forceful and ineluctable condition of engagement with Antichrist. Through this welcoming speech act, von Trier indicates to the viewer that he or she has left the privileged site of cinematic spectatorship and is being interpellated into a position of a subject that ‘glimpses’ secretly, and, perhaps, not without shame, into what is necessarily hidden from the public view. The audience is thereby challenged to break with the economy of the rational and the calculated, or what von Trier codifies in the male protagonist of Antichrist as the ‘neatness of rationality’.26 In an interview with the Danish Politiken, Charlotte Gainsbourg confirms that ‘it was my character that Lars has personally identified with. He was very close inside the life of my character and my feelings, my vulnerability … my anxiety attacks were his. It was him that was her.’27 It is in this context that I read Antichrist as a very personal and revealing film – interwoven with idioms and images that document von Trier’s struggle with serious psychic disorder, and highly informed by his experience of cognitive behaviour and exposure therapy, shamanism and

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Jungian psychoanalysis. What approximates best that cinematic experience is perhaps a figure of a retrogressive journey, which parallels the journey that She and He undertake in the film: it is a simultaneous movement backwards (into the prelapsarian space) and inwards (into the psychic world structured by grief). Many of von Trier’s earlier works have been discussed for their invocation and construction of complex gendered allegories, including films in the Europa trilogy (The Element of Crime/Forbrydelsens element, 1984; Epidemic, 1987; Europa, 1991), the Gold Heart trilogy (Breaking the Waves, 1996; The Idiots/Idioterne, 1998; Dancer in the Dark, 2000) and the incomplete USA trilogy (Dogville, 2003; Manderlay, 2005). Incorporating a rich register of literary, mythological and theological allusions and references, and often centred on figurations of the feminine, von Trier’s post-Dogme 95 films have inspired philosophical and theological readings, and met with the critical response of feminism. A question that arises with Antichrist is whether it also provides grounds for philosophical discussions. It is, after all, a testimony to private suffering and struggle with mental disorder, which demands the transformation of the viewer’s reflective gaze into an ephemeral and secretive glimpse; and that deliberately situates itself outside the platform of public dialogue and critique. What are the semantics of von Trier’s new female figuration – so different from his earlier self-abnegating and self-sacrificial Christlike heroines? As I argue, von Trier’s female protagonist in Antichrist initiates a radically different gendered imaginary register, and marks a departure from his soteriological preoccupations in a direction of non-redemptive, non-sacrificial and non-transcendental violence. At issue here is a construction of non-homologous idioms of gender/nature that reinforce each other in a tale of violence, which focuses in both a prelapsarian and apocalyptic sense on the formation of a subject that resists ‘all forms of victimization’.28

Gender/nature in Eden Against those interpretations of Antichrist that have, often quite productively, positioned von Trier’s film at the background of the genre of horror films,29 my reading relies on strategies that throw into relief its pornographic aspects. The reason is that it is the affects of lust and desperation, rather than fear, that become operative in the film and thematize its subject of parental loss and grief. In her essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, Susan Sontag investigates the transgressive spark in pornography through a well-known dissociation of the pornographic from the erotic or the sexual. Instead, she purports an intimate connection between pornography and death, which she finds in Georges Bataille’s ‘erotics of agony’. In exploring



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a sexual expression morbid in its tonalities, Bataille ‘exposes in extreme erotic experience … its subterranean connection with death’, which is being conveyed not through ‘devising sexual acts whose consequences are lethal, littering his narratives with corpses’, but by ‘invest[ing] each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically “mortal”’.30 For Sontag, in its conflation of the ‘self-transcending’ with the ‘selfdestructive’, transgressive literature is indebted to religious vocabulary inasmuch as it operates within the dichotomy of the sacral and the profane. It points to ‘something more general than sexual damage’, namely ‘the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness’. The pornographic ‘poetry of transgression’ testifies to a certain truth ‘about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about despair, about limits’, and engenders knowing insofar as ‘he who transgresses not only breaks a rule, [but also] goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something that the others don’t know’.31 Notably, the inscription of the plot of Antichrist within the horror genre collapses incessantly throughout the movie, subverted as if from within. First, the horrific effect disintegrates as it drifts towards the comical, or the grotesque, as is the case of the figure of a talking fox. The fox is one of the three ‘animal-messengers’ in the film: he appears to utter the line ‘chaos reigns’. When asked about the (intended) comical function of the fox, von Trier not only insisted that ‘we take the fox seriously’, but associated it with attributes of intentionality and agency – the fox comes into the film from the psychic space of a dream, or a trance, by its own demand: interviewer  Is the fox a joke? von trier  No, it comes from these Shamanic journeys that I did. You have a drum beat and you go into a trance that takes you into this parallel world. And there, I talked to this fox and it demanded to have a line. interviewer  Did he say anything else? von trier  Well, the first fox I met was a red fox. And it started to split itself to pieces. And afterwards, I met a couple of other foxes. Silver foxes with little cubs. And they said to me, ‘Never trust the first fox you meet.’ So it was interesting. The shared characteristic of the three ‘animal-messengers’ in the film is their cross-species appearance in that they acquire features that carry them beyond the specificity of their genus: the talking and self-consuming fox, the undying raven and the prancing deer with an attached dead fawn. The figures have a strong symbolic gravity as they stand for three organizing affects of the film: grief, pain and despair (these are also the names

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of the figures of three beggars in the son’s room, as well as the titles of three chapters in the film). The figures are dreamlike creatures of nature. Insofar as the animals are ‘messengers’ that signify knowledge inaccessible to the masculine subject, they throw the epistemological privilege of the human into question.32 At the same time, they all contain a disturbing reminder of their un-nature-like-ness. They are characterized by an idiosyncratic symbolic surplus in that their cross-species appearance exceeds any representational function, and seems to serve as a pure demonstration, as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it in a different context, of the ‘irreducible plurality and otherness of nonhuman or posthuman life forms’.33 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen suggests that the animal figures in Antichrist are strongly totemistic as they suggest a link between the human subject and cosmos, or ‘the forces of nature’.34 Notably, their cross-species formation and their symbolic excess structure an encounter with what cannot be contained within the episteme of the human universe. Their sight becomes an unbearable spectacle, suggesting His dangerous proximity to the repulsive or the abominable.35 Next, the horrific effect of the film collapses by the force of sublime aestheticization. One striking scene in the film depicts She and He making love next to the undergrowth of a tree with roots and branches transfiguring into human hands and arms. In this scene, the naked female body remains hidden from the audience’s view behind the male. Then, as the camera retreats, a sudden transformation becomes apparent: the roots and branches change into arms in a hybrid and dynamic constitution of a human dendrological form. The connection between the arms and the roots is both metonymic and metaphoric – i.e. it invokes a primal relation of proximity (shared space) and a relation of resemblance (shared ontic grammar).36 It points to a within-ness or inside-ness of the human and the other-than-human (as Thomsen argues, at issue is an ‘experience of nature as something “within”, and not only as something situated beyond our own corporeality’).37 The naked bodies of the couple and the naked arms/roots are cross-coded within the economy of alienation of the scene. In spite of its representation of intimate connectivity and permeability of bodily boundaries (in sexual penetration and in the hybridic incorporation of human and dendrological forms), the scene also communicates a failed gesture of connection with another in the subject’s desperate grasping, or holding on to, or encountering, another’s body. To use a term from the formalist study of folk tale morphology, Antichrist starts with a moment of ‘absentation’, which ruptures the space of safety of the homely environment. It is the ‘traumatic point of departure and […] the turning point of the film’.38 In an opening slow-motion blackand-white series of images, accompanied by an aria from George Frideric Handel’s Rinaldo (Lascia ch’io pianga mia cruda sorte, ‘Let me weep over my cruel fate’), the toddler son of She and He climbs out of a window



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and falls to his death, while his parents, inattentive to their son’s whereabouts, are indulging in sexual intercourse. Referring to the black-and-white images, Thomsen has suggested that the viewer encounters here ‘how haptic visual organization dwells with modulations on the surface of the image’ (following Deleuze and Guattari, Thomsen understands the haptic as the ‘specific sensation of how it feels to touch what is [being looked at]’).39 In the wake of the child’s death, She becomes overwhelmed with sorrow (and is sedated by medications), and He, who, as it happens, is a cognitive behavioural therapist, takes upon himself the task of healing his partner. He ‘tackles’ her anxiety and fear in sessions of exposure therapy. He is a rational, calculated and disengaged man, who forces her to give up the sedatives, and to subject herself to the therapeutic regime of habituation (repeated exposure to her anxiety-inducing objects) and cognitive dissonance (confrontation with her conflicting feelings). In a pivotal therapeutic moment, She names ‘the woods’ as her anxiety object: he  Let’s make a list of things you are afraid of. she  The woods. he  What scares you about the woods? she  Eden. She and He own a cabin in the woods, which is called ‘Eden’. This is where they spent the previous summer with their toddler son, while She was working on a postgraduate dissertation on medieval witch-hunts and on the demonization of women in the Middle Ages. Following the critical moment of identification, She and He travel from the urban space of their (now traumatically disrupted) home into the wilderness of their cabin Eden. In a formalist morphological vernacular, this initiates a stage of ‘interdiction’ – a warning addressed to the protagonists (‘don’t go there’, or ‘don’t do that’), which is what is being ignored and violated. The couple’s entry into the woods initiates the cinematic restaging of the myths of origins. Spatially removed from civilization, society and its laws, She and He enter the place of Eden, which constitutes another pivotal ambiguity in the text of Antichrist. Within the gendered parameters of the Abrahamic myth of originary transgression, Eden demarcates a prelapsarian space of perfect relations and communication between the human and the other-than-human (both divine and animalistic), as well as a stage for a destruction of that halcyon coexistence. But there is also another signification of the paradisiacal space in Antichrist, which points to the Greek notion of paradeisos, from an Old Iranian source, pairidaeza, meaning ‘the enclosure of nature’, or ‘garden [park] surrounded by walls’. The destination of the couple’s journey – Eden in the woods – is a place that operates upon a figure of a double ‘enclosure’. The space of the ‘woods’ depends on the demarcation of the border between nature and

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the human realm of civilization, society and law and, analogously, the space of the cottage is carved out for the human subject within (and thus as an enclosure from) nature. Just as the Abrahamic myth of originary transgression presupposes a spatial category of the outside (the place of humanity’s banishment), the couple’s cottage, Eden, operates upon a doubled figure of the wall. Importantly, though, the enclosing and demarcating wall appears fractured and pervious, which, at the ontological level, suggests profound incongruities and ‘contaminations’ of the categories at hand and, at the political level, problematizes any tidy separation between the human and the other-than-human subjects as a work of, to use a term from Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open, the ‘anthropogenic machine’.40 To continue with the Agambenian vernacular, the various and multiple implosions of these demarcations, or separations, in Antichrist create curious ‘zones of indistinction’ between the human and other-thanhuman, which in turn produce an effect of disorientation and dislocation. While Sontag’s modernist and aestheticist essayistic preoccupations are not aligned with my mythic reading of Antichrist that draws to the surface its post-humanist capital,41 it is interesting and potentially productive to note that Sontag attributes that disorienting and dislocating effect to the pornographic genre (as well as to science fiction literature). As Sontag writes (in a way that bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the contemporary conceptualizations of affect), ‘the singleness of pornography’s intention is spurious [since] the physical sensations involuntarily produced in someone reading [a pornographic] book carry with them something that touches upon the reader’s whole experience of his humanity – and his limits as a personality and as a body’.42 Wayne Tunnicliffe, the curator of an exhibition, Wilderness: Balnaves Contemporary Painting at the New South Wales Art Gallery, suggests that in being constituted as an ‘outside’ of the human realm, the figure of wilderness in the western imagination has been ‘a place in which the known world gave way to unmapped and uncultivated land, terrain that offered […] the benefits of discovery and transformation and the risks and fears of the hazardous and the unknown’.43 Wilderness inhabits also the edges of our consciousness, ‘a world where disorder rather than religious, royal or secular law might reign’. This ‘potential lawlessness and bestial wildness’ enables ‘ways of thinking outside the everyday and of giving imaginative form to the previously inconceivable’.44 In Antichrist, the other outside of the cottage (Eden) is instituted as a site of protection from nature provided by the cottage, which is, however, profoundly compromised. The cottage appears to be under the relentless pressure (if not siege) of nature: acorns fall with a disturbing noise on the veranda; the roof leaks; He wakes up one morning with his hand covered by thistles. There is a relation of homology between, on the one hand, the construction of Eden through its separation from wilderness (compromised by the centripetal force of nature) and, on



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the other hand, the mechanisms of psychic defence that She displays, and which are akin to an ultimately porous dam, stopping the flood of her visceral response to the death of the child. One of the therapeutic exercises devised by the male protagonist is to make her touch certain items associated with nature, and thus experience its unprotected and unmediated immediacy and tangibility. In the final and most confronting exercise, He makes her visualize her own surrender to, and dissolving into, nature. This obliterates not only the protection offered by the walls of Eden, but the most personal boundary of all, that of her own skin. She is lying in grass, which splits and separates at the touch of her body. The positioning of her body bears a striking resemblance to a corpse in a coffin, as well as to Christianic (pietistic) figures of saints that surrender to the divine. With both references, the proximity to death and dying (either as a transitional or unifying figuration of the body) re-inscribes the feminine subject through a relation of submission or capitulation to nature (wilderness) to the point of inseparability and indistinction from it. It is that scene of her bodily surrender and, in a Deleuzian language, ‘becoming nature’ that within the framework of the therapeutic and rationalistic discourses is also a moment of a breakthrough. Viewing the scene from the perspective of the male protagonist, it appears to signify an overcoming of psychic indisposition. However, the scene also operates as a surprising narrative hinge: it is when the interdiction is violated – the villain enters the story. The first identification of the villain is made in a subsequent therapy session when She makes a demonic reference in an unanticipated constative sentence: ‘Nature is Satan’s church.’ What is interesting about this statement is its unclear intentional status. Within the cognitive therapy discourse, by unlocking her suppressed memories, She is accessing, at the level of consciousness, a triadic nexus of nature, demonic force and the death of a child. This nexus forms a connection between three, thus far separate, psychic events: the inscrutable and threatening surroundings of the forest; her readings in the history of religious misogyny; and an accident when She loses the child in the woods a year before his death (a traumatic event that foreshadows and prefigures his demise). However, this inconclusive and ambiguous signification introduces into the cinematic plot a new possibility: contrary to the beliefs of the male protagonists, the odd statement ‘Nature is Satan’s church’ might also be an instance of disclosure of a secret (demonic) knowledge which, as with Sontag’s ‘pornographic knowledge’, gestures beyond, and thus disrupts, the rational therapeutic discourse. Rather than being constative or representative of a certain traumatic entanglement, her speech becomes a linguistic performance, which creates an immediate change of status of (her) subject. As such, the statement resembles a magical speech act as it brings into existence a new reality by the force of linguistic appearance. It remains unclear how She has gained access to this knowledge, or what is the source

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of its revelation, and what exactly is the position of epistemic power that she comes to inhabit in the act of magical utterance. The unresolved or cryptic status of this single statement in the film institutes an ambiguity regarding her cosmological status vis-à-vis the natural and the demonic realms, which coincide in the statement ‘Nature is Satan’s church.’ What is enacted and established, rather tentatively, and what spurs violent events in the subsequent part of the film, is thus the nexus of indistinction between the natural, the demonic and the feminine. In other words, both nature and the demonic are found within the gendered corporeality of the female protagonist. From the perspective of how the male subject operates in Antichrist (i.e. as representative of myopic and reductive ways of perceiving and ordering the world), this gendered indistinction between the human and the non-human acquires significance insofar as von Trier’s coding of the masculine topos in the film must ultimately capitulate vis-à-vis the powers and threats of femininity – that is the uncompartmentalized realm of nature, gender and/or sacrality. At one level, von Trier reinvests in a theme already explored in the Gold Heart trilogy, which demonstrates that gendered relations reflect particular ways of ordering and disciplining profoundly incompatible worlds and are framed by historically situated forms of violence. At another level, however, Antichrist drives further this exploration, which was initiated already in Dogville with its female figuration of an apocalyptic and justice-oriented violence.45 The violence that She experiences is not unlike the Benjaminian ‘divine violence’, as it rebels against any forms of gendered victimization, and seeks to intercept and cancel the rationalizing powers of masculinity.

Demonic ambiguities What makes Antichrist quite unlike a conventional ‘horror film’ is, inter alia, the lack of clarity about the villainous intent, or demonic agency, of the female protagonist. There is only an accumulation of hints, insinuations and possibilities. She can always be otherwise – always also a grieving and traumatized mother. This aporetic coexistence of (seemingly) incompatible scenarios is maintained even in moments that position her as the character of the ‘evil mother’. First, in a scene taken almost directly from folk tales about the evil stepmother, He discovers in the pictures of their toddler (taken approximately a year before the accident) that She might have been deliberately mixing his right and left shoe, which had led to his tarsal disfigurement, causing discomfort and instability, and ultimately compromising his ability to walk (which might have contributed to his fatal accident). The autopsy



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report indicates that the bones in the toddler’s feet were deformed. Second, towards the end of the movie there is a flashback to the initial slow motion and black-and-white scene – the simultaneous scene of the parents’ lovemaking and the child’s death – in which (now) an additional element is supplied. Engaged in a sexual act, in a supine position on the floor, She turns her head and is not facing the partner (who is oblivious to the toddler climbing the window), but turned to the side. Gazing straight at the camera, through the open door she sees the child climb out of the window and fall. Thomsen argues, in reference to that opening scene, that: This endlessly beautiful series of virtual time, which is presented to the spectator at the beginning of Antichrist, is shown as mythical time towards the end. It is a non-individual time, a non-anchored, non-materialised, anti-sensory-motorical time … As the two pictures of the woman’s being – possessed with her eyes closed or aware of what is happening with her eyes open – exist side by side, Antichrist makes it impossible to know what is true and who is guilty.46 In that scene there remains, Thomsen argues further, a ‘built-in doubleness: because all peaks of the present cannot be true at the same time but, on the other hand, they remain intertwined to a degree that makes it impossible to make a distinction between them’.47 She oscillates between the possible identifications, or interpretations, of the evil mother and demonic vehicle – witch or maenad; a promiscuous woman, who remains unrestrained and uncontrollable in her sexual and aggressive allegorization of nature and wilderness (‘she puts her own lust before her feelings as a mother’);48 a woman mad with uncontrollable grief for the loss of her child and with anxiety for being abandoned by her partner; and a self-punishing, self-abnegating and self-mutilating person. The significance of this new gendered figuration of ambiguity in von Trier’s cinema, or, as Thomsen puts it, its ‘virtuality’ or ‘potentiality’, is that it articulates a dogma that She must ultimately remain uncategorized and unstripped of that virtual multiplicity of possibilities. She must remain undisciplined by the linear ordering forces of masculinity which, perhaps, the viewer recognizes as integral to one’s own desire vis-à-vis her pornographic ‘non-identity’.49

Conclusions Read as von Trier’s re-telling of the myth of originary transgression and the founding operations of violence, Antichrist forms an interesting dialectic with the gendered thematics of power and otherness in von Trier’s earlier films,50 especially with regard to the sacralized femininities in Breaking

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the Waves and Dogville. Both Bess and Grace are ‘idealist outsiders’, who are also indicative of a striking ‘excess of virtue’, and who are ‘summoned into being as the fundamental invention that consolidates group identity’.51 These female figurations have a key place in communal relations of power, which, gradually, ‘shade, or even explode, into sadism’. In Breaking the Waves, the Christlike Bess, in her loving surrender to another, transgresses the community’s law and practices of self-sacrificial giving and patriarchal devotion to the point of her abnegation and death. In Dogville, Grace ultimately defies the vortex of self-sacrificial love and undertakes an ‘enigmatic and excessive’ gesture of divine violence – as Costica Bradatan suggests, she becomes an embodiment of Deus ludens.52 Through her enactment of apocalyptic violence, Grace ‘breaks the cycle of envy, hatred and inequality [perpetuated in] all stable and regulated social exchange’.53 Here Bess and Grace encounter the Antichrist of Her. Through an ‘untamed erotic and aggressive aesthetic without redemption’,54 von Trier creates a radically different heroine, which is, partly, due to her strong connectivity to – indeed, momentary indistinction from – the other-thanhuman subject. Located within the prelapsarian space of wilderness and Eden, She remains outside of the law of patriarchy. She evades the powers of masculine discipline, thus remaining untouched by its work of structurallinguistic violence and ‘fails’ to internalize and exhibit (Nietzschean) ‘bad conscience’. Notably, She remains beyond the possibilities of the sacrificial destruction of the body for the ‘preservation, protection, and healing [of] the body of another’,55 which was so central to von Trier’s earlier renditions of femininity and its redemptive and salvific promise. The reading of Antichrist offered in this chapter as a performance and a narrative transcoding gender and species within the larger economy of anthropocentric domination dovetails with Gordon’s attempts to complicate the feminist critique of von Trier’s cinema as ‘oppressive’, by questioning whether there can be any ‘easy distinction between objects that are either “good” or “bad” for feminism’.56 Gordon shows that in the case of Bess from Breaking the Waves, just as love and violence form non-oppositional spaces but are interconnected and cross-fertilizing, so do gendered subjectivity and gendered dispossession mutually sustain each other. As Gordon argues, in Breaking the Waves Bess’s ‘love can barely conceal the violence and aggression that sustains it’, as ‘the film depends as much on Bess’s belief in her destructive powers as on her powers of reparation’.57 In his demonizing and animalizing figurations of female subjectivity in Antichrist, and in his provocative rendition of the transgressive origins of the human subject, von Trier makes an artistic and, I suggest, politically significant gesture, which could be described, with some intended exaggeration, as an experiment in countering an anthropocentric cinematic perspective. This chapter has interpreted Antichrist as a product of non-anthropocentric cinematic imagination not because of any sacral,



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mysterious and metaphysical conjunction between the human and the other-than-human in the figure of She, but because of its poignant demonstration of what is at stake – subjectively, ethically, politically – in drawing a separation between these two. The significance of the female figuration in Antichrist rests on her uncompromising resistance to any forms of violence and victimization implied in this separation. Notably, the acts of destruction and mutilation that She undertakes (and undergoes) in the film do no redemptive work and offer no salvific promise, but they also point beyond (by a way of confronting) the Sadian pleasure of the viewer. These acts of violence do not signify any outside of themselves, or outside of the immediacy of their execution. She becomes an ethical agent in a different sense than the female characters in von Trier’s earlier films, insofar as She asserts herself free from the forms of self-victimizing and self-destructive love that were co-constitutive of the ‘Christ’ of Bess. She is an Antichrist not in being an adversary or oppositional relation to Christ,58 but in a literal sense of coming ‘in the place of’ Christ. If Bess is an emancipatory promise, She is its fulfilment. She subjects herself to violence, makes violence here a site of resistance and love, and undergoes transformation through violence, while denying femininity as a place of redemption.

Notes 1

For (critical) theological readings of von Trier’s cinema, see, for example, Linda Mercadante, ‘Bess the Christ Figure?: Theological Interpretations of Breaking the Waves’, Journal of Religion and Film 5 (1) (2001), pp. 221–39; Michael P. Murphy, ‘Breaking the Waves’, in Michael P. Murphy, A Theology of Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 91–126; and Carleen Mandolfo, ‘Women, Suffering and Redemption in Three Films of Lars von Trier’, Literature and Theology 24 (3) (2010): 285–300.

2

Joanna Bourke in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema?’ The Guardian, 16 July 2009.

3

Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites. American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 17 (my paraphrase).

4

Lars von Trier, ‘Director’s Confession’. http://www.antichristthemovie.com.

5

I thank one of the reviewers for pointing out this representational dynamic in von Trier’s film. The argument that von Trier’s films raise questions about the stakes of the contemporary medialization of violence in all its diverse genres and forms suggests their proximity to what has been at the heart of, for example, Michael Haneke’s cinema. For an in-depth exploration of the ‘traumatizing’ quality of Antichrist, see Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘“Chaos Reigns”: Anti-Cognitivism in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’, in Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film. Thinking Images, New York: Continuum, 2011.

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6

See, for example, Angela Tumini, ‘Eros and Thanatos: The Murderous Struggle of Pain and Desire in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death and in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’, in Jane Fernandez (ed.), Making Sense of Pain: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010, pp. 165–72.

7

Nina Power in ‘Antichrist: A Discussion’, Film Quarterly, 22 May 2011. www.filmquarterly.org/2009/12/antichrist-a-discussion.

8

Suzy Gordon, ‘Breaking the Waves and the Negativity of Melanie Klein: Rethinking “the Female Spectator”’, Screen 45 (3) (2004): 206–25.

9

Gordon, ‘Breaking the Waves’ (my paraphrase).

10 Julie Bindel in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’. 11 Natasa Govedic, ‘What a Wonderful Fascism: Claiming the Real in Lars von Trier and Dogma 95’, Filozofski Vestnik 23 (3) (2002): 167–78. 12 Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011, p. 6. 13 Foster Hal, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 14 Badley, Lars von Trier, p. 15. 15 Ibid., p. 16. 16 Caroline Bainbridge, ‘Making Waves: Trauma and Ethics in the Work of Lars von Trier’, Journal for Cultural Research 8 (3) (2004): 353–70. 17 Badley, Lars von Trier, p.6. 18 Bainbridge, ‘Making Waves’, p. 353. See also Gavin Smith, ‘Imitation of Life’, Film Comment 36 (5) (2000): 22–6. 19 For the theoretical cross-coding of affect and transmission on which I draw conceptually, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 20 Gillian Wearing in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’. 21 Joanne Bourke and Gillian Wearing in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’. 22 Joanne Bourke in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’; Badley, Lars von Trier, p. 149. 23 Numerous authors have noted the connection between von Trier’s cinematic work and his (often mythologized) public identity in narratives of psychological damage, anxieties, moments of crisis and traumatic personal history. Badley notes in particular the importance of therapy and psychoanalysis in the ‘myth of Lars von Trier’ as he ‘uses therapeutic language to explain himself to himself and to others’, Lars von Trier, p. 6. 24 Lars von Trier, ‘Director’s Confession’. 25 The statement also makes reference to Strindberg’s creative psychosis as von Trier’s artistic inspiration. 26 Joanne Bourke in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’. 27 Charlotte Gainsbourg, ‘De overlevede Antikrist – og von Trier’, Politikken, 23 May 2009 (my translation, emphasis in original).



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28 ‘Women, Suffering and Redemption’, p. 290. 29 See on this Robert Sinnebrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images, New York: Continuum, 2011. 30 Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, London: Picador, 1969. 31 Ibid., p. 37. 32 Cary Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, in Cary Wolfe (ed.), Zoontologies, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2003. 33 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Preface’, in Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites. 34 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, ‘Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: The Event of Violence and the Haptic Image in Lars von Trier’s Film’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 1 (2009): 3. 35 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting reference to the idea of abomination. 36 Cf. Nina Power in ‘Antichrist: A Discussion’. 37 Thomsen, ‘Antichrist’, p. 9. 38 Ibid., p. 1. 39 Ibid. 40 Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 41 Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for helping me to articulate the dialectical connections and tensions between these two interpretative approaches. 42 Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, p. 47. 43 Wayne Tunnicliffe, Wilderness, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 March–23 May 2010, p. 1. 44 Ibid. 45 Mandolfo, ‘Women’. 46 Thomsen, ‘Antichrist’, p. 9. 47 Ibid., p. 8. 48 Ibid., p. 9. 49 Ibid. 50 See Brian Michael Goss, Global Auteurs. Politics in the Films of Almodovar, Von Trier and Winterbottom, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2009. 51 Global Auterurs, p. 122. 52 Costica Bradatan, ‘“I Was a Stranger, and Ye Took Me Not In”: Deus Ludens and Theology of Hospitality in Lars von Trier’s Dogville’, Journal of European Studies 39 (1) (2009): 58–78. 53 Dany Nobus, ‘The Politics of Gift-Giving and the Provocation of Lars von Trier’s Dogville’, Film Philosophy 11 (3) (2007): 23–37. 54 Bourke in Xan Brooks, ‘Antichrist’.

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55 Becky Mcloughlin, ‘Playing Ball with God: Breaking the Law in Breaking the Waves’, Textual Ethos Studies 26 (2005): 85–100. 56 Gordon, ‘Breaking the Waves’, p. 207. 57 Ibid., pp. 211–12. 58 Nina Power in ‘Antichrist: A Discussion’ even suggests that ‘in some respects, Antichrist is a misleading title, implying a simple reversal of the Christian opposition between good and evil’.

10 A postmodern family romance: Antichrist David Denny

… the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. FREUD, FAMILY ROMANCES (1908)

In the prologue of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2010), we see the primal scene of Mommy (Charlotte Gainsborough) and Daddy (Willem Dafoe) having a passionate sexual encounter from the point of view of a young boy of about two years old (Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm). The son crawls out from his bed, witnesses the scene, climbs onto a table to a window that has just blown open and falls to his death. It is one thing if the film were simply about the infernal depth of grief and how such grief can tear to shreds the matrimonial couple after the fact. But it is much more than this. Not only is the film framed by and ultimately troubled by the mish-mashing of three genres – pornography, horror, melodrama – more importantly, it unfolds within the context of a series of important flashbacks that detail some events that took place the summer before the son’s death, and which, as I will argue, provide some context for the outrageous violence that takes place towards the end of the film. It is this violence – She (the generically named) torturing Him (also generically named) by crushing his testicles with a block of wood at the precise moment she thinks he is about to leave her; She performing genital mutilation on herself by cutting her clitoris off with a pair of scissors; and finally He strangling her to death – that causes such distraction, becoming the dominant topic leading, in most cases, to the critical rejection of the film. 1

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The importance of these flashbacks cannot be ignored; for what we discover is that her reaction to her son’s death is in part framed by a previous traumatism. In this precise way, the son’s death does not inform the centrifugal motion of the film; rather it merely dramatizes a pre-existing scene. We know from these flashbacks that the She protagonist was putting her son’s shoes on the wrong feet all along; that her dissertation project about gynocide had run amuck; and that she had been visited by a partial object, the wailing cry from her son that emanates from the woods. Specifically, then, I am interested in a certain trajectory, from the initial scene in which her son falls to his death to one of the final scenes, the scene just prior to her self-inflicted genital mutilation, where we see a flashback of her witnessing her son climbing up to the window. It is not clear if this flashback is being induced by her feelings of guilt or if she indeed witnessed this and did not do anything to prevent her son’s fall. From my point of view, it does not really matter. The important thing, for my argument, is that this final scene represents a movement from narcissism to freedom, or from the alienating affect of the imaginary to a divine violence that shatters a symbolic deadlock. My reading argues that the film is about the transfiguration of a feeling of guilt caught up in the superego logic of individualism (enjoy, enjoy more, better, etc.) to that of precipitating an act of freedom, one that invokes Kant’s notion of radical evil. Further, it is about mourning when there is nothing to mourn except a spectral object that lays claim to the unbearable lightness of an atonal symbolic world. While it is easy and perhaps not wrong to dismiss the She protagonist as being besieged by some chemical disorder, like post-partum depression, or to simply dismiss the film as being a display of von Trier’s sadomasochistic fantasies towards women, I will argue to the contrary that what the She protagonist performs at the end of the film when she self-mutilates is, in Lacan’s terms, an authentic act.

Gaze as lure They have eyes that they might not see.2 The prologue of the film proves to be a rather stunning cinematic start, mostly because of the way it layers a series of juxtaposed images and sequences onto each other; from the rich hues of the black-and-white frames captured in slow motion to the haunting melodramatic soundtrack from Handel’s aria Laschia Ch’io Piango, to the artsy pornographic depiction of She and He having sex in the bathroom, to the point of view of the young child who climbs onto a table and then falls out of a window, all the way to the Tarkovsky-like attention to the materiality of the surroundings: close-ups of the clothes in the dryer, a bottle of water kicked over and Nic’s



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teddy bear.3 Specifically, the camera angles take the viewer from a close-up of vaginal penetration and orgasm to the seeming indifferent point of view of a machine dryer effortlessly tossing and turning the laundry, which then sets up for the mechanical indifference of the God’s-eye camera shot that impossibly looks down at Nic while he descends from the window.4 It is as if the link between the two perspectives – the spectator looking at the swirling laundry and then sharing the perspective of the impossible Godlike gaze – acts as a harbinger of all that follows, namely, the automation of the symbolic order and the impossible gaze of the real. The violence that ensues is a consequence of facing the horrible fiction that the lost object5 can be restored, or, in the bigger sense, that man can return woman to a prelapsarian world (the generic He and She as Adam and Eve recreating the origin myth by returning to Eden [their cabin in the woods] in an act of understanding and redemption). Von Trier’s flirtation with the pornographic scene of penetration is worth pausing on. We know from Lacan that the visual field is sustained by something amiss in the field itself, a certain blind spot or even peephole that looks at one from the side of the object but which one cannot actually see. As Lacan writes, ‘this is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them.’6 This visual structure of absence and presence – an object that looks at us but which we cannot see for what it is – is what sustains desire, indeed causing an irritating surplus of enjoyment that forms the logic of the scopic drive. The intentional staging of porn, however, is a rather odd phenomenon in its obviousness; it wants to show it all; it wants to provide us with the unstained thing itself – the fantasy of sexual pleasure without the baggage. In other words, porn tends to function as a pleasure, as a screen that neutralizes jouissance – hence the proliferation of subcategories that invites the viewer to go one step further in their viewing, indeed inviting fetishistic attachments that go one more rung down the ladder of pleasure. Slavoj Žižek says it well: ‘Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes at us. It is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all”.’7 To repeat, what is so effective in the opening sequence is how the spectator’s gaze is taken in by the deeply stylized melodramatic content. The prologue, therefore, performs a kind of dreamlike invitation to see all – to see the sequence of penetration, orgasm and death, all wrapped in the melodramatic sorrow of the Handel aria. But the invitation is suddenly shattered by the sequence that follows, which is also the first chapter: Grief. We see the funeral procession, led by She and He, from the point of view of the back window of the hearse. It is as though Mommy and Daddy are now being observed by the dead son, an image that evokes the childlike fantasy

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of observing one’s parents mourning one’s own death – indeed a striking fantasy when juxtaposed to the primal scene. Here, we the spectator are ripped from the pleasurable point of view of the opening soft pornmelodrama sequence and put into the place of the lost object. While we observe the Father sobbing and the Mother fainting, we now look through the window darkly (especially given the voyeuristic pathos of the prologue): the stain before us is precisely that of grief, the impossibility of working through or making sense of the lost object, the dead child. When Lacan says, ‘I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’,8 he could be referring to this scene: not the fantasy of watching your parents mourn your death, but the act of mourning itself; that is, the looking at or for a lost object that can never be empirically accounted for.9 Rather than this scene being integrated (by way of the working through of mourning) into the narrative to come, it provides the proper frame for all that follows. The real gaze before the infernal abyss of mourning cannot be integrated into the circuit of the symbolic. This calls attention to the second genre convention that von Trier uses; namely, horror. Not unlike pornography, horror films provide a safe format to experience the heightened emotion and tension of bodily pleasure – whether it is, to cite Linda Williams, in the case of pornography of being on time (I’m ready!) or, as with horror films, being too early (not ready!).10 In porn films, we are provided with the immediate gratification of voyeuristically encountering the sexual relation without the obstacles of narrative or time. In horror films, however, the bodily pleasure anticipates what we imagine or fantasize about but we do not consciously want realized. Williams uses Laplanche and Pontalis’s essay, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, to make the following point: ‘fantasies which are myths of origins address an insoluble problem of the discrepancy between an irrecoverable original experience presumed to have actually taken place – as in the case, for example, of the historical primal scene – and the uncertainty of its hallucinatory revival’.11 The irrecoverable original experience is precisely the lost object that, henceforward, is fated to the space of fantasy. It can never be re-stitched to the fabric of symbolic meaning via any psychological procedure. In fact, the desire to re-integrate the lost object seems equal (if we simply take into consideration the mass popularity of the horror genre) to the desire to experience or re-experience its continued disintegration. According to Williams, via Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration as if to “explain” by repetitious mastery the original problem of sexual difference’.12 The fantasy between the original trauma of sexual difference and the way it is codified within the socio-symbolic circuit of exchange ‘corresponds to a temporal structure of anxiety of not being ready’. Importantly, the victim of the attack is usually the sexualized young woman, who is clearly being punished for being the obscure or unpredictable object of phallic jouissance. At play



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here is sadomasochism: the male viewer passively engages in the active fantasy of sadism, all the while protected from a more complex temporal and narrative arrangement: the girl is innocent, but she must nonetheless pay the price for her position within the sexual relation. So even though she is being tortured, she is also, a priori, subject to masochism – for this is the very plight to being a woman. Of course, alarms should go off here: does this reading not implicate von Trier with the same flagrant misogyny of which he is accused? Does he not simply take the genre coordinates of horror and stylize them in a way that protects him from such a judgement? Is he not the young boy in the theatre, now blessed with the tools of filmmaking, and thus of seduction? These are all fair questions. But just as Antichrist is not a porn flick, neither is it a horror flick. The genre conventions are used precisely for what Williams wants to claim: to heighten the bodily pleasure of a sensational affect, but with an added dimension. Where bodily pleasure screens out the real of the perversion, bodily jouissance rips through the screen, unsettling the distance between spectator and the action. My claim is that von Trier’s use of the genre conventions of horror, pornography and melodrama function as a device to draw the spectator in, to essentially set us up to confront our own complicit and voyeuristic participation with these genre conventions. The crux, of course, is the minimal difference between cinematic pleasure and jouissance, or the effectiveness of the violent affects that come late in the film to expose our own sentimental or pathetic identification with the events that unfold. It is for this reason that we have to move beyond these genre conventions to see what further mysteries the motifs of sex and horror have in store.

The politics of sexuation The motifs of horror and sex haunt nearly all of the sequences that follow. What persists between these two affects – the real of symbolic castration and the impotence of the sexual act to confer meaning – is the attempt of He to rescue She from what her doctor admits to be an atypical grief pattern. From the start, one gets the sense that something is awry within the matrimonial nest, regardless of the loss of Nic. She is completely devastated, bedridden for six weeks past the event, aware of neither the day nor the time. He, on the other hand, happens to be a therapist, though of the pseudo variety (he admits to being proud of not being a doctor). His attentiveness to healing his wife reminds one of Thomas in Dogville who took such an interest in using Grace (Nicole Kidman) to help re-educate the townsfolk of Dogville. Von Trier has a knack for lampooning the male character who is wrapped up in the will to a truth whose object lesson is that of a woman. Just as Grace ends up turning the table on Thomas,

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forcing him to assume the destination of his own letter,13 She and He are fated from the get-go to encounter a horrible end. When he dismisses the young doctor for prescribing too many drugs, she disparages him by saying, ‘Trust others to be smarter than you.’ The next time they see each other the following dialogue occurs: she  Dr Wayne says he wants me back home. You couldn’t leave it, could you? You had to meddle. he  This place leads nowhere. On the contrary, grief … It’s not a disease, it’s a natural, healthy reaction. You can’t just remove it, you mustn’t. she  Wayne knows you’re a therapist. He says you shouldn’t treat your own family. he  In principle I agree, but … she  But you’re just so much smarter, aren’t you? he  I love you. Nothing hurts more than to see the one that you love subjected to mistakes and wrongs. No therapist can know as much about you as I do. The camera then cuts and slowly fades to a close-up of flowers becoming putrid in a vase of water. The cut is accompanied by a low-grade, dissonant, grinding sound that reminds one of David Lynch’s use of the same technique: a close-up of the teeming decay and death of nature that exist just beyond the postcard perception of a domesticated nature. The film persistently shifts between sharply conflicting formal contrasts, creating the sense of psychic confusion and impotence that befalls the depressed subject. In fact, the diegetic space of the film oscillates between three fairly distinct poles: the husband trying to cure the grieving wife (He speaking in a patronizing tone that doubles as the New Age version of the subject who is supposed to know); She most often responding with an intense display of sexual aggression (that is, fucking the pain away in the hysterical gesture to silence the symbolic once and for all); and scenes invoking the horrific (grotesque images of animals or the combination of dissonant, grinding music and hyper close-ups). Linda Badley nicely sums up the many frames: ‘Contrasting sections produced dissonance, as it shifted from the hypnotic, hyper-stylized black-and-white prologue (and epilogue) to the Dogme-style naturalism and deep blues and greens of the contemporary drama; this was fragmented by degraded close-ups (a pulsing throat, trembling hands) to express anxiety in haptic terms, distorted, high contrast static images for hallucinatory “visualizations”, and vérité body horror.’14 These formal juxtapositions could be summed up as the Enlightenment meets the horror of sex. In other words, the motifs of sex and horror throughout the film lead to an essential question that informs and even exceeds the problem of mourning, indeed rendering the work of mourning itself unworkable. The



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question goes to the heart of Lacanian psychoanalysis: what is human sexuality, or, by extension, what constitutes sexual difference and the possibility of the sexual relation? In order to frame the question as it pertains to the film, I quote at length from Lorenzo Chiesa’s compelling essay entitled ‘Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex’: My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects of the direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions, which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realization that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts.15 The key to Chiesa’s reading is precisely the question he poses, namely, what if the man and woman fully identify with ‘such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature’? In other words, what happens if He completely identifies as the One who assumes the exception to the rule of castration, allowing him to say what he means, and thus to become the all of the symbolic – to speak with assurance about the objects that define nature and humans? If this is the case, then he will not relinquish his part in healing her, of reintegrating her into the symbolic, of turning her minus into a plus. On the other hand, what if She completely identifies with the not wholly whole, with a minus that can never be transcribed into a positive, thus identifying with all that she is accused of – hence literally becoming the symptom of man, which, in this case, means that she fully assumes the guilt that man has saddled her with: ‘false in legs, false in thighs, false in breasts, teeth, hair and eyes’? It does not matter that her husband wants her not to identify with this logic; the point is that she is resisting him as a supplement to the One, his sublimation of her minus into something functional, like being a wife or mother.16 In this precise sense, She represents the exact opposite of Medea. Rather than identify with how woman is named or placed within nature by man, Medea identifies with the rule and thus understands the coordinates of the game; as such, she sees through the arbitrary position of the exception as marked by her husband, Jason. Her gesture of killing that which is most precious to her husband, and which represents the order and regeneration

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of the law, is ethical, in the Lacanian sense, because it has the effect of exposing the ‘not-all’ of the symbolic order. In other words, her sacrifice is not seeking something from the Other that would redeem or make sense of her act. Her act exposes the lack in the Other – which she does by sacrificing what cannot be sacrificed, that which is most precious (what Lacan calls agalma) to her husband. Medea does not identify with what women are accused of; rather, she exposes the lie that informs that judgement.17 Unlike Medea, and according to Chiesa, because the She protagonist identifies with what He (or Man) accuses her of, and because she fails to sublimate her identification with the abstract universality of her gender, she literally sees herself as becoming evil – as that blind and nihilistic fury that sees him, the man, her husband as nothing more than a bastard. In their case, the impossibility of the sexual relation becomes literal, and thus sets the terms for a mortal battle to the very end. And from here, the lens is in place for Chiesa to make sense of the many horrific, if not bizarre, scenes to follow: She sadistically tortures/punishes Him because of the way He continues to try to purify her of her attachment to self-destruction, to reintegrate her into the symbolic, while always insisting in paternalistic tones that she is doing good, making progress. Because of this, however, she later masochistically severs her clitoris with a pair of scissors in order to fully embody her worthlessness, her nothing. Chiesa writes, ‘Such a passage to the act also stresses her complete identification with the phallus and incapacity to dissociate from it, no matter how much she attempts to eradicate its power.’18 Finally, according to Chiesa, her partner’s offer of help becomes interchangeable with her son’s admiration, to the point where they become interchangeable in terms of so many phallic supplements which ‘[interfere] with her own attempts at getting rid of difference’.19 This explains her putting the boy’s shoes on the wrong feet and the important flashback scene at the end of the film, which, in Chiesa’s line of argument, confirms that she could’ve hopped up and saved him.

Nature Nature can counsel nothing but crime. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE, 1864

So why is Chiesa’s reading ultimately unsatisfactory? Again, to say that He and She are caught up in the abstract universality of their gender is compelling in the sense that it seems clear that all was not well in the matrimonial paradise, that indeed they were already too self-absorbed and disconnected before the loss of their son. But the crux, for me, is whether she identifies her guilt with him, and by extension the law of patriarchy,



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or does she assume the guilt as her own, which then opens up a space for something other than the dictates of the symbolic, including, of course, his exposure therapy lessons? There are clues that suggest the latter. There is the idea of nature linked to Christianity, specifically to the Garden of Eden, and the subsequent fall from grace by the hand of temptation. The women whom She refers to late in the film as being ‘false in legs, in thighs, in breasts, teeth, hair and eyes’, point to this origin myth. And when She agrees to participate in His exposure therapy programme, she reveals that the one thing that she fears are the woods and, by extension, Eden – their summer retreat in a secluded forest. Predictably, he takes her back to Eden so that she can confront her fears and be cured of her anxiety. But there is also the notion of nature that is associated with Greek tragedy and the concept of tuche, or luck, which of course can be either good or bad depending on two forces that supersede human will: necessity and contingency. Here, nature does not represent an Eden that man forfeits and holds dominion over; rather, nature is indissociably related to the human, and thus an outside/inside that is in excess of human will. Think of His relation to nature vs. Her relation to nature. While at Eden, he takes her through a visualization exercise whose purpose is to prompt her mind to let go of its habitual associations with fear so that she may sink effortlessly into the maternal embrace of nature. He says, ‘I want you to melt into the green. Don’t fight it. Just – turn – green.’ After she accomplishes this no small feat, he blathers on with an exaggerated condescension: ‘No matter what happens: you were there. You did it. Let fear come if it likes. Remember: what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.’ For Him, nature is seen through the lens of a Cartesian worldview; it is an object that is governed by its own rules. For Her to become green is to become one with this rational order, putting to rest the phantasmagorias produced by an anxious mind unwilling to name or accept the object for what it is. By the same token, mourning is the process by which we recuperate and redeem the lost object by accepting that it is gone, dead meat, not unlike Gertrude’s advice to Hamlet. Hamlet’s response echoes von Trier’s vision: ‘tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.’ For the He protagonist, there is a nature out there, a nature in which we blow thistles and melt into the green of grass to erase our worries, and a nature from within, a nature that governs by way of reason and deduction; in distorting the one the other becomes a self-destructive theatre of obsession gone wrong. Good and evil have nothing to do with nature or human psychology; they are mere terms we use to manage our confusion with things as they really are. For the She protagonist, nature is something that should not be underestimated: like the indifferent nature from without that has no regard or relation to humanity at all, the nature from within also has this capacity to be radically indifferent to what Nietzsche called the all-too-human, the human realm defined

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by sentiment and self interest. Indeed, nature is a metaphor, but one to be taken very seriously for the precise way it functions as concealment of the Thing named. From Her point of view, we see the possessive potential of the rank and gross in nature. From the dying flowers sitting in putrid water while she is in the hospital, to the dissonant sound representing the other side of anthropomorphic nature, all the way to the three animals (the fox, deer and raven) symbolizing a hyper-anthropomorphized nature, we see how the gap between nature and the human persists as a surplus that haunts the simple exchangeability of terms or values. As an illustration, recall the significance that She places on the metaphor of crying acorns: she  Oak trees grow to be a hundred years old. They only have to produce one single tree every hundred years in order to propagate … The acorns fell on the roof then, too … kept falling, and falling, and dying, and dying. I understood that everything that used to be beautiful about Eden was perhaps hideous. Now I could hear what I couldn’t hear before. The cry of all things that are about to die. he  It’s all very touching if it was a children’s book. Acorns don’t cry. You know that as well as I do. That’s what fear is. Your thoughts distort reality … not the other way around. For him, crying acorns is a metaphor that distorts reality; it signifies a mind embellishing in order to cope with fear. For her, it is a metaphor that cuts to the fictionalized core that suspends the human over and against nature, exposing our ultimate meaninglessness before our own self-importance and health. Nature is radically indifferent to the project of humanity; and so it is not nature that haunts man, it is precisely his own imaginary relation to nature. If nature is Satan’s church, as She says, she is merely acknowledging the quote from Baudelaire above. And it is here where von Trier turns the table on the sexual relation through the use of horror to accentuate the limit of the visual frame for He, She and us. Man’s mis-adaptation from nature not only necessitates fantasy as a way to suture the gap between man and nature, but it also produces fragmentation and fissure within fantasy itself. What the male protagonist sees when he encounters the three animals is precisely the distortion of his own frame, one that no doubt invokes the horror of the supernatural, an affect that he cannot rationally contain. In other words, when he witnesses the unnatural sights of a doe gnawing on her aborted foetus, or the fox declaring to him that chaos reigns, or the raven refusing to be killed so that he could hide from Her, we, in turn, witness the fissures and cracks within the fantasy of a phallic jouissance. Von Trier uses the supernatural to mock man’s pretentious relation to nature and, therein, gestures to a gap within the human and nature relation that cannot be sutured.



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Oedipus before Christ … there is much that is strange, but nothing stranger than the human being. SOPHOCLES, ANTIGONE

The figure who best represents this mis-adaptation and unfathomable gap or cut at the heart of the human being is Oedipus. It is Oedipus, therefore, and not the Antichrist, whom we should turn to in order to grasp the actions that unfold. The figure of Oedipus precedes that of Christ not only historically but also ontologically by way of the grounding gesture of symbolic castration – a gesture that links the Word to a violent and tragic act. Let us quickly cite the many Oedipal themes that appear in the film: the primal scene as a dramatic staging of the triangulation of desire that is brutally resolved by the death of the son; the images of Nic with his boots on the wrong feet as restaging the Oedipal drama wherein Jocasta is ordered to kill her son but instead pierces his feet and has them bound to a tree out in the desert; the scene of vengeance where She rejects the paternal metaphor by castrating it, by literally binding his thigh to a grindstone; and the final image of She castrating herself, an act that calls to mind Oedipus tearing out his eyes. From Lacan, we know that resolution of the Oedipus complex is never final or complete, that there is reminder and remainder that forever haunts the process of coming to language, and that neurosis and perversion function as a process to sublimate the real of symbolic castration. From here, one could see a reading of She and He that is not as dramatically staged as Chiesa’s reading. She can be seen as the sympathetic hysteric who sees through the pretension of the master’s discourse to its fundamental non-existence, and who, therefore, makes sense of his affections and concerns only at the level of her symbolic existence. Her refusal of his help is more in line with the hysteric who understands that she has nothing to give the Other, nothing that will fill his lack.20 Meanwhile, he comes across as the annoying and stubborn pervert, disavowing his lack and the castrating affect of the law in order to get off on She as the object to know and fix. She literally becomes his fetish. She says to him early in the film, ‘I never interested you … until now … that I am your patient.’ And in the previous scene he breaks the cardinal rule of psychoanalysis when, after dissing her therapist, says, ‘Nothing hurts more than to see the one that you love subjected to mistakes and wrongs. No therapist can know as much about you as I do.’ There is a truth here: no one knows one’s fetish better than the fetishist. Nonetheless, as I remarked earlier, what is so striking about how events play out after Nic’s death is the degree to which our two lovebirds seem caught up in the alienating and aggressive capture

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of their imaginary, even autistic, self-worlds. To put this in crude psychological language, they both are extremely self-absorbed and disconnected, regardless of Nic’s death. So if both She and He share traits of a typical hysteric and pervert in relation to symbolic castration, there seems to be something atypical, or, better, something amplifying and exaggerating not only in their relation to the loss of their son but to each other. The key for my argument is how we understand the Oedipal or antiOedipal figure. Does the resolution of the Oedipus complex install the repressive regime of the law, as Deleuze would say, or does the resolution put the human being in touch with finitude, with a fundamental lack that enables a critical distance from the superego’s command to enjoy? In other words, is Oedipus always already the negative or the anti that exposes the lie of the big Other, and which enables a degree of distance before the overbearing proximity of an Other’s desire? Žižek, in his book on Deleuze, and channelling the She protagonist of Antichrist, writes, ‘Castration designates the violent bodily cut that enables us to enter the domain of the incorporeal. Indeed, this concept (of castration) tries to answer a more fundamental “arche-transcendental” question, namely, how do we, humans, experience finitude in the first place?’21 The point is that the real of castration is always screened by fantasy so that we never have to assume its full weight. And it is precisely and paradoxically this abstraction, what Deleuze would call the virtual, that provides a certain weight to the symbolic, a certain distance that provides words with gravity and consequence. In this way, the figure of Oedipus is virtual, a necessary fiction that functions as a veil, concealing the thin line between psychosis and the law. The question today is what affects and symptoms are produced when the veil becomes pervious, when the experience of finitude gets caught up in the unbearable lightness of being in a postmodern consumer and atonal world? Put differently, what comes of the hysteric or pervert’s relation to the law before an overbearing solipsism and the corresponding waning or demise of symbolic efficiency? Indeed, what does this mean for the figure of Oedipus? It means that his status or place within the metaphoric and metonymic play of signifiers becomes confused; no longer the figure for the tragic cut at the heart of words, and that which marks us with finitude, but the name of many, and thus of no one; the agent that normalizes the perverse universe of solipsism, in which the law becomes undifferentiated from the universal equivalent of the commodity. The postmodern family, therefore, becomes less a theatre of overcoming the exaltation of the father figure, and more the feeling of suffocation before the command to be free, better and oneself. Here the big Other, always a point of stress in the modern age due to the questionable origin of its symbolic mandates, becomes even more stressful, both in terms of its overproximity (overbearing because undifferentiated) and because its authority has become less recognizable (hence the proliferation of tribes,



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cults, fads, self-help and New Age spiritualism). The oppositional structure that informs the Oedipus complex and which prepares one for negation and substitution becomes dissolved in a sea of non-circumstantial opinion. In a word, the name of the Father becomes one of so many names within the undifferentiated circuit of capital, such that what appears beyond the constellation of recognizable names is the obscene Father of the superego who implores us to enjoy. The logic of demand drains the subject of desire, of any nameable tension, therein exacerbating cognitive stress, and thus creating more everyday aggression and frustration. The postmodern family suffers under this logic; the child’s demand for love is returned by so many obligatory supplements, and the parent’s demand for their own time, or individualism, never hits the mark. The consequence of this scenario is at best dissatisfaction and at worse an uptick in ‘acting-out’ – that is, random acts that react in direct response to the feeling of having no sense of gravity, finitude or purpose.22 In a paradoxical twist, the tendency to act out – either in the mode of a hysterical acting-out (staged for the Other in order to ask for what it wants) or a psychotic passage to the act (meaningless destruction so as to suspend the Other) – solicits precisely the ‘violent bodily cut’ that Žižek argues above. Indeed, for Freud and Lacan, Oedipus is the figure that represents the split subject, a lack in being, which enables some distance and respite from the overbearing proximity of the Other’s presence. The postmodern family romance, therefore, falls in on itself, becoming incestuously confused and troubled by the strange signage around succession and regeneration, indeed becoming the inverse of what Oedipus signifies. Žižek, arguing against the temptation to celebrate this fall, writes, ‘Undergoing “symbolic castration” is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network – Oedipus, the operator of deterritorialization.’23 It is in this sense where I think von Trier succeeds in this film (as with all of his films in the Depression trilogy) and where he comes up short in Breaking the Waves. It has to do with the way he resolves the relation of his two female protagonists – Bess (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves and the She protagonist in Antichrist – to feminine jouissance. Žižek, in his excellent essay on Breaking the Waves in ‘Death and the Maiden,’ writes: The predominate form of subjectivity is not identification with a closed, orthodox religious community (against which one would rebel), but the ‘open’ permissive subject avoiding any fixed obligations … The problem of the film is [that] Trier reduces the conflict to that between tradition (Church as Inquisition) and postmodernity (miracle), and the properly modern dimension disappears.24 More so than any of von Trier’s earlier films, it is his Depression trilogy (Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac) that zeroes in on the affective

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fall-out of the permissive subject void of obligations. The affective fall-out is, of course, depression, specifically the affect of a certain though dominant symbolic stress that makes it near impossible to create and form symbolic bonds. Where the Gold Heart films (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) focus on the perils of a feminine goodness that extends beyond certain gendered norms, but with a seeming lack of attention to their respective historical setting; and the USA Homeland films (Dogville, Manderlay) use feminine goodness, in part, as a proxy to interrogate post 9/11 US foreign policy and cultural norms; the Depression trilogy films turn their attention to the feminine subject caught in a privileged, postmodern bourgeois malaise. So, if Antichrist is about the death of the familial bond, Melancholia is the death of the matrimonial bond.25 The consequence is an abortion of symbolic succession and regeneration, indeed a symbolic deadlock that can only be resolved by way of an authentic Act.

Radical evil Reverence is properly an awareness of a value which demolishes my self love. KANT, GROUNDWORK FOR THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS

What does all of this have to do with the She protagonist? Is it too easy a leap to say that the link between the flashback scenes (putting her son’s shoes on the wrong feet, hearing his cry echo from afar in the wilderness while at Eden, seeing him crawl up to the window) and the violent scenes at the end of the film is, in part, symptomatic of a postmodern family romance gone horribly awry? My claim is that the gap between these two temporalities, a gap punctuated by the traumatic event of her son’s death – an event, no doubt, that renders the affect of finitude in a terrifyingly proximate way – is what connects the dots. To repeat the terms, is her act a psychotic passage to the act where she lashes out at him and then herself because she cannot tolerate her complete identification with him, that is, the phallus, and therein neutralizes the Other so that she can finally become nothing – as Chiesa argues? Or is her act an authentic one that reveals a deadlock within the symbolic order, and therein exposes a split from within this order, this so-called reality that is so precious to her husband?26 If I am guilty of overthinking the flashback scenes, it is because I wish neither to reduce her actions to some chemical disorder nor to reduce her to an evil woman, that is, a woman who assumes the projection of the patriarchal subject who sees woman ultimately as a destiny of her body. There is a crucial dialogue that takes place towards the latter part of film, and which functions as a hinge that leads to the violent sequence:



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he  I’d like to do one more exercise. It’s like role-playing. My role is all the thoughts that provoke your fear. Yours is rational thinking. I am nature, all the things that you call nature. she  Okay, Mr Nature. What do you want? he  To hurt you as much as I can. she  How? he  How do you think? she  By frightening me? he  By killing you. she  Nature cannot harm me. You’re just the whole greenery outside. he  No, I’m more than that. she  I don’t understand. he  I’m outside, but also within. I’m nature of all human beings. she  Oh, that kind of nature. The kind of nature that causes people to do evil things against women. he  That’s exactly who I am. she  That kind of nature interested me when I was up here. That kind of nature was the subject of my thesis. But you shouldn’t underestimate Eden. he  What did Eden do? she  I discovered something else in my material than I expected. If human nature is evil, then that goes as well for the nature of … he  Of the women? Female nature. she  The nature of all the sisters. Women do not control their own bodies – nature does. I have it in writing in my books. he  The literature that you used in your research was about evil things committed against women. But you read it as proof of the evil of women? You were supposed to be critical of those texts, that was your thesis. Instead you’re embracing it. Do you know what you are saying? she  Forget it. I do not know why I said it. It is clear what he is doing: he is trying to locate, via his exposure therapy pyramid grid, the source of her fear and has concluded that it is not Eden (nature) but herself. Thus, he baits her into connecting her fear of nature to something immanent to human beings. Of course, he believes evil is a man-made concept that has the effect of hypostasizing fear as something that is merely deficient and which could then be righted by reason or the good. Her reply is crucial because it implies an ambiguity. She first says, ‘If human nature is evil, then that goes as well for the nature of …’ He fills in the absent space by saying ‘Of the women? Female nature.’ I read her to be saying something more akin to Kant than to the deficient argument concerning evil; namely, that evil (like freedom) is part of human nature. She then goes on to say, however, ‘The nature of all the sisters. Women

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do not control their own bodies – nature does. I have it in writing in my books.’ This, of course, affirms his thesis and makes her seem complicit with this identification. But what if her research into the history of witches and gynocide helped her realize that these women were not simply victims of patriarchy; what if they may also have been exercising their own will, that their resistance to patriarchal law was not pathological, but something more autonomous? To take the She protagonist seriously and even literally, it compels us to consider her notion next to Kant’s understanding of radical evil, rather than the patriarchal, Cartesian or Biblical notions of evil as something deficient. For Kant, it made no sense to think of evil as something empirically verifiable and thus as simply a negative phenomenon, for this would give content to a law that, for him, is without content. Kant’s crucial insight in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is to understand that evil comes from the same place as the good, namely, from a will that is autonomous, and which thus has the capacity to act on its own behalf, for its own sake. The upshot of this is twofold: first, it places ultimate responsibility on man for his actions, thus problematizing the political conceit of cultural relativism – in a word, it makes the moral law, including evil, a political and social problem, not a religious one; second, it makes possible a notion of evil that is radical for the precise sense that it can be done for its own sake; it can follow a maxim, but one that is misaligned to a selfinterest. And it is here where Kant views diabolical evil as an impossibility because for him, such a maxim would contradict the idea that a good will is always good without qualification. Regardless of this important detail, Kant opens up the space to rethink evil alongside freedom, of situating both within the logic of a will that can will for its own sake, and which becomes the very condition for the possibility of so many empirical situations. Of course, it is here where Kant is associated with Freud for the precise reason that what provides proof of a moral law is conscience – more specifically, the feeling of guilt. Joan Copjec says ‘moral conscience is certain of only one thing: its guilt … and the voice of conscience, while indubitable, utters neither prescription nor proscription; it says nothing to us because it speaks to us in our singularity, as free and autonomous subjects’.27 The crux is the way the voice functions as an affect without a recognizable object or cause, and which thus provides insight not only into the relation between moral conscience and the superego, but also into how an understanding of freedom is limited to the feeling of its failure: ‘Our moral experience reveals to us not our freedom so much as our failure to be sufficiently free; or, better, our capacity for freedom is suggested to us only through our moral chastisements.’28 So why does She castrate herself? The only way she can feel something other than her current tortured relation to the event of her son’s death is to move to an act that breaks the impossible hold of a symbolic impotence



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and deadlock. It is in this sense that she calls to mind Oedipus tearing out his own eyes. Oedipus takes responsibility for something he was not entirely responsible for. His sacrifice is not redemptive; rather, he is reduced to an abject-object, completely unsupported by the symbolic coordinates that made him who he was. While I think there is some truth to this comparison, I think it does not go far enough. The She protagonist is actually more like Hamlet, in that, unlike Oedipus, both suffer from the tragic fate of knowing. What she knows, after the fact of the intrusion of the real of Nic’s death, is that She and He live enmeshed in a self-absorbed, disconnected and solipsistic self-world. What Nic’s death produces is a total breakdown of the already meagre symbolic coordinates that had been holding her world together. In effect, she comes face to face with the cut of finitude, with a certain gravity that puts into perspective the no-thing of the Other. Indeed, I read her act of putting her son’s shoes on the wrong feet more as an impotent acting-out. In Oedipus the King the symbolic mandate is relatively clear; it comes from the gods and instructs Creon and Jocasta to be rid of their child lest ruin fall upon them. The binding of Oedipus’s feet is a defiant act of resistance and portends a future where the will grows more prominent in its relation to destiny. With the She protagonist, there is no symbolic mandate from the big Other, other than the commandment to enjoy. The tension between the cry of demand/love from Nic, as brilliantly captured as a partial object in a flashback scene from Eden, and that of her own command to enjoy leads to intense frustration and cognitive stress, such that the act of binding Nic’s feet represents the inverse of the oracle concerning Oedipus. In both instances, the message from the big Other is enigmatic, but where Jocasta capitulates and then resists (she recognizes a certain wisdom from outside but also exercises defiance against the gods by showing pity for her son), the She protagonist acts out in an impotent gesture of incomprehension (perhaps hearing only an obscene command to enjoy combined with a lack of pity towards her son). Thus, they are similar in that they receive a message from the Other that makes little sense to them, but are diametrically opposed in how they respond. The brilliant flashback scene where she hears her son’s wailing cry echo out across the undifferentiated landscape of the forest only adds to this line of thinking. The sound is Nic’s cry, but it is disembodied, haunting in the way it persists beyond a point of location or causation – and when she finally locates him, he is sitting quietly in the work shed. It is as if the cry draws a link between voice as partial object (object a) and psychosis; that is, Nic’s cry literally becomes for the mother the kernel of the real, or the gap within the symbolic that cannot be accounted for. While the cry is that of Nic, the voice that accompanies it is somehow not Nic’s; it emanates from her own psychic confusion and stress – which, of course, predates the actual death of Nic. From here, I would suggest that the gradual illegibility of the She protagonist’s dissertation represents less a realization that a crying woman

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is ‘a scheming woman, false in legs, false in thighs, false in breasts, teeth, hair and eyes’, and more that there was something rotten in Eden. This rot is not the patriarchal rewriting of the Fall that links woman to nature/evil and man to reason, but that of an institutional rot, one that is symptomatic when evil is disavowed from within or instrumentalized from without. Her freedom is less the recognition of guilt and more the radical gesture of assuming it. Remarkable is not that she feels guilt for what has happened, but that this guilt leads her to an act of freedom in the precise way it assumes and then expiates the solipsistic loop of her guilt. Copjec describes this movement, in another context, that I have been trying to establish: The only way that we can act freely – that is, that we are free – is through the voice of conscience, which tells us that we ought to free ourselves from our slavery to external motives … This is also what Kant means when he claims that the moral law never presents itself as such, has no content other than the negative experience of our failure to comply with it. Guilt, our sure sense that we have transgressed the law, is the only phenomenal form in which the law makes itself known to us.29 The flashback scene where She sees her son climb up to the window occurs just prior to her cutting herself. The look on her face is not the one of ecstasy that we see in the beginning of the film; it is rather a look that ‘sees all’, that takes in fully what is about to happen, that registers the ‘phenomenal form in which law makes itself known to [her]’. Also, when She places His hand on her vagina in what appears to be yet one more attempt to get off so as to distract her from the real of castration, that is, the cut of finitude that Nic’s death represents, it does not work; she has come up against the limits of her own relation to phallic jouissance. There is no symbolic point of mediation or understanding that can rescue her from herself, from the abyss of her mourning. So, while overly dramatic and ripe with Oedipal images, I read the gesture of castrating herself as moving from an impotent acting-out (for example, forcing Nic to wear his shoes on the wrong feet or trying to screw her way out of a debilitating grief) to an act that frees her from a symbolic deadlock, and which opens up a different relation to the law.

No future Just after Her brutal act of self-mutilation, He awakens to a starry night. Von Trier then superimposes the constellation of the three beggars, a drawing that She had up in her study and which she refers to in a rather esoteric way, onto the starry night. He mutters to himself, ‘there’s no such constellation’. He then has a flashback of Nic falling from the window with



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the doe in the background, as if to suggest, in his own mind, that there was a correlation between the son’s death and his wife’s esoteric and irrational ideas. She then enters the room and says, ‘but none of it is of any use’. It is an ominous moment in that her tone evokes the tenor of horror, indeed the stark revelation that the symbolic is ‘not-all’ relative to his investigative and scientific approach to recuperating the lost object. The fox, doe and raven then enter as if affirming her earlier claim that someone will die when the three beggars arrive. Her prophecy then comes true, as he hears the raven beneath the floorboards, retrieves the wrench (she had earlier tossed it under the cabin), frees himself from the weight drilled into his thigh and proceeds to attack her, strangling her to death. This sequence is not without significance. It is as if an oracle has been realized, one which predicts the return of the repressed with a properly phallic response to the real of castration, or one that, in the end, must remove any obstacle seeking to affirm the irredeemable logic of the lost object. Her esoteric theories of animal totems and mystical constellations coincide with his exposure therapy programme, both no more than placebos to stave off or help name the one affect that never lies and which renders mourning unworkable – anxiety. To put it bluntly, the properly phallic response to a feminine jouissance, especially when the latter presents itself as an immovable obstacle to progress or recognition, is to remove it.30 It is no coincidence that Her act of castration is followed by the restoration of patriarchal law. As He limps out of Eden, we see hundreds of dead and naked women littered throughout the forest. In the epilogue to the film, we return to the same rich hues of the black and white that we see in the prologue as well as to the music of the Handel aria. He calmly eats berries and observes the three animal totems that have now become simply animals communing in nature. The function of Eden as metaphor has been restored. But her act is not lost, in fact it resonates and returns in the form of hundreds of faceless women raising up to forever haunt the One that has survived.

Notes 1

For an excellent overall reading of the film – its making, reception and historical antecedents – see Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, Chicago: University Illinois Press, 2010, pp. 140–51.

2

Quoted in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981, p. 109.

3

Von Trier dedicated the film to Andrei Tarkovsky.

4

For an excellent reading of the prologue of this film, one that develops

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this perspective in great length, see Ger Killeen’s ‘Grace without Gravity: The Prologue to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’ in the blog Headlandia, http:// headlandia.blogspot.com/2014/02/gravity-without-grace-prologue-to-lars.html. 5

For the most part the way I use the term the ‘lost object’ coincides with Lacan’s notion of the object a. The slight difference is that the object a does not mark an original object which was then lost; rather, it marks a loss or lack that is constitutive of being as such, of the subject.

6 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 109. 7

Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 110.

8 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 72. 9

A main premise in the new children’s film Big Hero 6 (2014) is that the lost object, first the death of the main character’s older brother and then of his robot buddy Big Hero, is that the object is never lost; it is always with you, animating you, as long as you believe it. This, of course, underscores the popular and insipid logic of the interchangeability of all objects – human, robotic, information, etc. – and reifies the centrality of belief in our post political world.

10 Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess’, in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohen, 7th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 615. 11 Ibid., pp. 612–13. 12 Ibid., p. 614. 13 For such a reading see my ‘Signifying Grace: a reading of Lars von ‘Trier’s Dogville’, International Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (3) (2007). http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/63. 14 Linda Badley, Lars von Trier, p. 144. 15 Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex,’ Film-Philosophy 16 (2012): 199. http://www.film-philosophy.com/index. php/f-p/article/view/877. 16 This is the one consistent thread throughout all of von Trier’s films: the female protagonist represents not only a figure that resists the domestic scene, but, in doing so, becomes the figure of a political event. 17 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 68–78. 18 Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman,’ pp. 205–6. 19 Ibid., p. 207. 20 Though her hysterical acting-out clearly indicates that she is wanting something substantial from the Other, or law, as opposed to so many empty gestures, I will argue how the acting-out itself finally achieves an act that assumes a position outside of the law. 21 Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 85–6.



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22 See Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, London: Verso, 2015. 23 Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 83. 24 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Death of the Maiden’, The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 217. 25 In other words, the horror elements of the film should not distract from the way the film levels a fascinating critique and study of our end times; that is, a de-symbolized, atonal world in which the universal equivalent of the commodity has realized what Marx says about the family in the Communist Manifesto, ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family to a mere money relation.’ The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, edited by Robert Tucker, New York: W. W. Norton, 1978, p. 476. 26 For a concise explanation of the Lacanian act see Sheila Kunkle’s entry ‘Act’ in The Žižek Dictionary, edited by Rex Butler, London: Acumen, 2014, pp. 1–5. 27 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 143. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 144. 30 We can see how this response gets mapped onto a historical and political return of the repressed: the (−) minus, insofar as it refuses its naming and captivation, becomes the figure of evil, hence evil woman, and, by extension, a whole chain of minuses that are deemed evil, from witches in the twelfth century and fascists in the twentieth century to the Muslim terrorist of today.

11 Not melancholic enough: Triumph of the feminine in Melancholia Todd McGowan

The unique disaster As a genre, the disaster film always flirts with fascism. By depicting destruction on a massive scale as a spectacle for the audience’s enjoyment, the disaster film threatens to take up the fascist project in the realm of aesthetics. In the famous conclusion of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin notes that humanity’s ‘self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism.’1 Even though fascism is above all a political movement, it functions through a denial of politics, through the transformation of politics into aesthetics, a process that reaches its apogee, as Benjamin suggests, in the spectacle of self-destruction. In this light, the disaster film seems doomed to serving as a species of fascist politics. But there is a countervailing tendency in the disaster film. The enjoyment of the emergence of a public world competes with the pleasure of the spectacle of destruction. Destruction provides the basis on which a genuine public world can arise, a public world not controlled by private interests and littered with commodities. The disaster has the effect of bringing disparate people together and revealing the public bond that always already underwrites their relations with each other, and this pubic bond is what

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fascism refuses to recognize. For fascism, every relationship, even that of a large group, is inherently private and particular rather than public and universal. It is a national and not a universal bond. In this sense, the public world that forms in the disaster film represents a countercurrent to the aestheticization of politics that occurs in the spectacle of destruction. Most disaster films limit the destruction that they depict, and this limitation appears to attest to their conservative politics. The earliest entries in the genre tend to confine their destruction to a single location (an airplane, a skyscraper, an ocean liner or a city). But even the films that push destruction to the planetary scale envision a limit that leaves a portion of civilization remaining. The most extreme, like Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), which shows the destruction of all civilization on Earth, permits a group of humans, including most of the film’s stars, to survive and start anew. The limitation on the destruction in a film like 2012 allows for the ideological promise of the new, which assures the audience that disaster ultimately had a productive effect. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) is a disaster film unlike any other. Rather than limiting himself to the destruction of a city or even of civilization, von Trier presents the audience with the destruction of the entire planet. Other than a film showing the heat death of the entire universe, it is difficult to imagine a disaster film taking disaster further than von Trier does in Melancholia. The film opens with an eight-minute prologue that includes a series of largely static shots that connect the depression of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) with the destruction of Earth. The first image depicts Justine in a zombie-like state, and the final one shows the stray planet Melancholia begin to collide with Earth. Richard Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde plays throughout this opening sequence and constitutes almost the only non-diegetic music (in addition to another brief portion of the opera) in the film. The musical background unites the various scenes of the prologue, but it is not clear from the sequence what sense of causality we can infer from the images. We don’t know if Justine’s depression causes the disaster, results from it or simply occurs in parallel with it.2 After presaging the eventual destruction of Earth, the film cuts to Part One, titled ‘Justine’, which depicts the catastrophe of her wedding reception at the mansion of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and only hints at the upcoming danger. Part Two, named ‘Claire’, takes place some time later at the mansion and shows the aftermath of Justine’s depressive breakdown. During this part, everyone has become aware of the approach of Melancholia, though Claire’s husband John (Keifer Sutherland) assures the rest of the family that there is no danger. Part Two concludes with the disaster of Melancholia colliding with Earth and causing the planet to explode, a disaster that, obviously, leaves no survivors. The absence of survivors takes von Trier’s film beyond any of its generic counterparts and, for some critics, it separates the film definitively from the



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genre. According to Christopher Peterson, for example, ‘the destruction of Earth is not disastrous in accordance with Hollywood convention, which requires that the scene of destruction, no matter how devastating, cannot equate to the absolute termination of all life’.3 Melancholia dispenses with the survivors that other disaster films require in order to provide a point from which we can take pleasure in the destruction. Von Trier goes where the conventional disaster film fears to tread. And yet, it is my contention that this is precisely the failure of the film: by going too far, von Trier doesn’t go far enough. When it depicts the destruction of the entire planet, Melancholia displays its inability to imagine a negation of capitalist modernity other than total destruction, and in this precise sense, it aligns itself with fascism’s aestheticization of politics. The film departs from the genre of the disaster film not by breaking with the genre’s flirtation with fascism but by moving beyond mere flirtation. Capitalist modernity privileges the unimpeded flow of capital and of life, and the effect of this flow is the elimination of all value. When the production of goods and life continues to accelerate, the interruptions that create value in the world become invisible. Fascism responds to capitalist modernity by introducing death into its endless promulgation of life. Despite its ideology of biological health and purified life, fascism is a politics of death. It responds to capitalist modernity’s insistence on untrammelled life with a deadly interruption designed to make life meaningful. This is why fascism can seduce otherwise insightful thinkers like, most famously, Martin Heidegger. But the fascist insistence on death not only results in corpses; it also fails to mark a fundamental break from capitalist modernity. It is rather a hysterical provocation to modernity that ensures that the structures of the system remain in place. Fascism is not revolutionary but hysterical. Hysteria incessantly questions the ruling order but what it seeks is not an end to authority but a fully authorized authority, a figure of authority that no longer evinces any impotence. Fascist discontent with modernity is discontent with the modern figure of the authority, and the elaborate displays of force that we associate with fascism are attempts to stimulate an authority capable of adequately responding to them. As a provocation of capitalist modernity, fascism cannot be a fundamental challenge to it. The fascist insistence on death in response to modern life emerges in the stead of a more disruptive response – the recognition of death in life or subjectivity. The subject, which emerges in the underside of capitalist modernity, is not simply a living being but a life mortified by the signifier. It does not exist like other living beings or as something inanimate: it is unable to embrace life fully or to opt simply for death. This contradictory identity defines subjectivity, and it creates an inherent mismatch between the subject and the capitalist modernity in which it exists. In response to this contradiction,

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subjects attempt to align themselves with life or death in order to escape the spectre of the subject’s perpetual death in life. Those who choose life, like John (Keifer Sutherland) in Melancholia, invest themselves in capitalist modernity, while those who choose death, like Justine, decide on the fascist alternative to this modernity. Von Trier’s film depicts both of these alternatives. What Melancholia doesn’t show is a third way, the possibility of insisting on subjectivity itself, which avoids both of these dissatisfying choices. Because von Trier cannot grasp subjectivity as an alternative to the suffocating life of capitalist modernity, he opts for an insistence on death, which locates Melancholia within the universe of fascism, a universe in which politics disappears beneath the beautiful spectacle of apocalyptic destruction.4

The third woman The structure of Melancholia shows female subjectivity as divided. The two parts of the film – named for Justine and Claire respectively – indicate the division of female subjectivity. Whereas Justine constantly challenges paternal authority (in the first part through hysterical provocation and in the second part through a retreat into depression), Claire works to uphold it, even as she often doubts its efficacy. Through these two characters, von Trier depicts two opposed feminine responses to paternal authority. Justine defies it, while Claire adheres to it. But this is the primary instance in the film where von Trier fails to take the disaster far enough. Female subjectivity is a disaster for paternal authority, but the radical negation that this subjectivity perpetuates has no place in Melancholia. Though it discomfits the father figures in the film, Justine’s rebellion remains fundamentally on the terrain of their authority. In this way, von Trier misses the possibility of another form of femininity that goes beyond the options that he presents. Justine’s hysterical or depressive defiance of paternal authority and Claire’s panicked effort to prop it up are not distinct positions but rather two sides of the same coin. The genuine alternative that female subjectivity opens up is one of indifference to paternal authority, the recognition that this authority has no substantial existence. When he describes female subjectivity, Jacques Lacan locates in this subjectivity a potential radicality relative to paternal authority that the male subject does not have (though he suggests that men have the ability to recognize that they too can inhabit the feminine position). This is because the division of female subjectivity is apparent in a way that it isn’t for male subjects: this subjectivity doesn’t suffer from the illusion of being whole but is explicitly what Lacan calls not-all.5 Whereas the illusion of wholeness confines male subjects to a single mode of satisfying themselves in relation



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to the ideal of paternal authority, female subjects have an alternative form of satisfaction in addition to the form that authority sanctions. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XIX, ‘If the woman is not all, it is insofar as her enjoyment itself is dual.’6 The other form of satisfaction available to female subjects – what Lacan calls ‘feminine jouissance’ – exhibits an indifference to paternal authority, but it is precisely this form of indifference that is missing in the female opposition depicted in Melancholia. While Claire clearly finds assurance and satisfaction through paternal authority, Justine appears conspicuously as the femininity that challenges this authority. But Justine’s challenge to paternal authority is all too conspicuous. Rather than embodying the feminine enjoyment that simply doesn’t define itself in relation to paternal authority, Justine incessantly provokes it. She remains securely within the orbit of the father through the series of ostentatious provocations that she authors throughout the first part of the film. Through the portrayal of Justine as the mode of femininity that does not submit to the reign of the father, Melancholia exhibits its reticence relative to disaster. Justine provokes the figures of authority in the film not because she rejects paternal authority altogether, but because she seeks a genuine authority to rescue her from the division of her subjectivity. In the opposition between Justine and Claire, von Trier displays the difference between the hysterical questioning of paternal authority and its anxious support. But the problem with this opposition is that neither position represents a genuine alternative to paternal authority. The constant questions and challenges that hysteria poses to the father do not signify the hysteric’s fundamental break from paternal authority but rather a complete investment in it. Unlike other subjects, the hysteric refuses to be satisfied with a weak or inadequate father, and this subject’s challenges to existing authorities stems from the desire for an authority that would finally be sufficient to save the hysterical subject from its division. From the moment that Justine arrives at her own wedding reception taking place at her sister’s mansion, von Trier highlights her inability to fit into the prescribed paths that the established order lays out for her. Her stretch limousine is too long to navigate the narrow and curved driveway that leads to the mansion. The film lingers over this failure, as it shows first the limousine driver, then Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), and finally Justine herself attempt to steer the limousine around a tight corner. When the corner ultimately proves impassable as Justine hits one of the posts that line the path, the film cuts from her apologizing for her failure to a shot of Michael and her walking toward the mansion. Justine’s choice of the stretch limousine provides the first marker after the film’s prologue that she doesn’t fit into the universe of capitalist modernity represented by her sister’s mansion. When she and Michael finally make their way to the reception, they are hours late, but Justine engages in a series of delays that further retard the

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ceremony, eventually prompting the wedding planner to proclaim that she ruined his wedding. The first of these delays is revelatory because it shows Justine’s connection to the natural world, and this connection defines her character. Von Trier presents the feminine alternative to the modern capitalist order as a natural alternative. Femininity, for von Trier, is in touch with the natural world in a way that masculinity is not, and this is the source of its potential radicality. The feminine doesn’t fit in because it retains a connection with nature that the paternal authority has forsaken. The problem with this image of female radicality is that it accepts fully the patriarchal myth of the feminine. As Simone de Beauvoir points out at length in The Second Sex, the association of women with the natural world is a male association. She writes, ‘Man finds shining stars and the moody moon, sunlight, and the darkness of caves on woman; wildflowers from hedgerows and the garden’s proud rose are also woman. Nymphs, dryads, mermaids, water sprites, and fairies haunt the countryside, the woods, lakes, seas, and moors. This animism is profoundly anchored in men.’7 Beauvoir recognizes that the supposed connection between nature and women doesn’t threaten male dominance but is rather the result of it. As von Trier has it in the film, Justine’s rebellion is that of nature against the planetary dominance of capitalist modernity. But to frame rebellion in these terms is already to grant victory to the other side. Justine’s sensitivity to the natural world manifests itself just after she greets her sister and John. As she looks up at the twilight sky before going into the reception, Justine notices the brightness of a particular red star. This impresses John, an amateur astronomer, who, despite his irritation with Justine for coming late to the ceremony, says to her, ‘I’m amazed that you could see that. It’s Antares, the main star in the Scorpio constellation.’ Not only does Justine have a special ability to perceive the stars; she also picks up the specific star that will later signal the impending destruction of Earth. At the end of Part One of the film, before anyone else on Earth is alert to the potential danger (as far as we know), Justine recognizes that Antares has disappeared from view, that some object blocks the view of it from Earth. She senses the imminent danger that life on Earth faces in a mystical way that evinces a connection with the natural world rather than an alienation from it. The natural world provides connections for Justine that the social order does not, and this is why, immediately after identifying the red star, she opts to visit her favourite horse in the stables instead of entering the reception, which further aligns her with the natural world. As the reception goes on, it becomes clear that the strict rules of wealthy and polite society suffocate Justine and that she feels more at home outside in the natural world. At one point, she leaves the ceremony and walks onto the golf course on the grounds. As she looks up again at Antares, she squats in her wedding dress to urinate on the green of one of the course’s holes. This act shows at once her connection to nature and her rebellion against



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the ruling order (which forbids urinating on the green to such an extent that it never mentions this prohibition). Later, when the planet Melancholia nears the Earth, Justine displays absolute certitude that the two planets will collide, despite John’s assurance that the scientists have worked out that there is no danger. At the same time, she tells Claire that she is certain that there is no life elsewhere that will survive. Humanity is alone, Justine claims, and it will perish in a short time. In order to support her claim, she says, ‘I know things.’ The proof that Justine does indeed ‘know things’ is her ability to know the correct amount of beans in the jar in the bean lottery at her wedding reception. She tells a sceptical Claire, ‘678, bean lottery, nobody guessed the amount of beans in the lottery’. Though Claire still has faith in John’s rationalistic explanation of the absence of danger, she nonetheless does not contradict Justine’s account of the bean lottery. The fact that Justine could know the number of beans by simply running her hands through the beans indicates the mystical form of knowledge that she has, and it establishes a clear contrast between her way of thinking and John’s scientific rationalism. During the course of the wedding reception, Justine’s failure to fit within the confines of the social order becomes evident at every turn. When she begins eating the dinner, the butler (Jesper Christensen) tells her that she is passing the plate of food in the wrong direction. This minor and unwitting transgression of the rules of social decorum foreshadows the major transgressions that follow, but its very triviality reveals the significance of the event for establishing Justine’s character. Von Trier includes this moment to show that she moves against the flow of life within the ruling order that surrounds her. Justine’s unthinking actions – like passing a plate clockwise instead of counterclockwise – run contrary to the social law. As the reception progresses, Justine’s rebellion becomes increasingly overt. She takes a bath when she is supposed to be cutting the cake, and refuses to throw her bouquet, as all the single women stand ready to receive it. Her actions throughout the reception, beginning with her late arrival, have the effect of delaying the proceedings and this thwarts the efforts of John, who wants to keep things moving. The contrast between Justine and John becomes most evident in their approach to Melancholia, the planet that threatens to collide with the Earth. John views the planet Melancholia as the greatest show he will ever see, a spectacle to be enjoyed through his telescope. The telescope signals John’s alienation from what he sees – his failure to see it properly – while Justine is able to recognize the total destruction that the oncoming planet represents. John constantly has recourse to the telescope in order to see Melancholia properly, but Justine never once uses it. She communes with Melancholia directly. But just as much as for John, the planet is for Justine a source of aesthetic enjoyment. For her, however, this enjoyment is inextricable from the destruction that Melancholia promises to bring.

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Justine reads the impending disaster not as a contingent event but as the judgement of the universe on humanity. In a conversation with Claire, she pronounces her verdict on humanity. She says, ‘The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it … All I know is that life on earth is evil.’ This judgement, which Justine delivers with total certainty, moralizes an ontological situation. It also indicates the status that the upcoming disaster has for her. Justine is the only character we see in the film who retains her equanimity in the face of extinction. In fact, the extinction seems to revitalize her and to bring her out of her depression. This is because nature, unlike every other authority that Justine has encountered, has the ability to relieve her of the burden of her subjectivity. By wiping out all life on Earth, nature reveals itself not as a caring maternal figure but as a punitive father, and this is exactly what Justine seeks. Her rebellion finally discovers an authority adequate to its demand. Unlike Justine, Claire presents no challenge to paternal authority. Though Claire and Justine are sisters, they represent different modes of female subjectivity. Claire understands the weakness of paternal authority, but rather than trying to expose this weakness, she assists in obscuring it. Claire’s investment in the ruling order is clear from her very first line in the film. As Justine and Michael walk up the driveway to the reception, we see Claire in a long shot from behind the couple. She walks toward them and says, ‘I won’t even bother saying how late you are.’ After we have just seen Justine fail to fit the limousine into the proper path, this initial condemnation establishes Claire as a contrasting form of femininity associated with the paternal law. When she sees Justine looking slightly depressed at the dinner, she takes her up into a bedroom to reprimand her, despite the fact that, as Justine points out, she hasn’t yet made a scene. Claire then consults secretly with Michael about Justine’s behaviour, and she criticizes Justine for failing to enjoy the ceremony. When Justine objects that she constantly smiles, Claire exclaims, ‘You’re lying to all of us’ and storms out of the room. Claire accuses Justine of lying not in what she says but in what she does. Her smile is not genuine. For Claire, obedience to the social rules is not enough; one must also enjoy doing so, and this is exactly what Justine cannot do. The film shows the difference between the two forms of femininity most clearly when Claire proposes an image of how she wants to spend their final moments. Even as her life ends, she wants to create a socially authorized moment. She imagines dying according to the law that has governed her entire life. But this is exactly what Justine refuses. Their exchange makes their opposition clear: claire  I want us to be together when it happens – outside on the terrace. Help me, I want to do this the right way. justine  You better do it quickly.



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claire  A glass of wine, maybe? justine  You want me to have a glass of wine on the terrace? claire  Yes, will you do it, sis? justine  How about a song, Beethoven’s 9th, something like that? Maybe we could light some candles? You want us to gather on your terrace, sing a song, and have a glass of wine, the three of us? claire  I was hoping that you might like it. justine  Well, I think it is a piece of shit. claire  Justine, please, I just want it to be nice. justine  Nice? Why not we just meet on the toilet? Claire enrages Justine through her insistence that they participate in the end of humanity ‘the right way’. She believes that following the dictates of the social order will stave off the horror of extinction. Her investment in keeping things going without any disruption trumps even that of John. The problem with the opposition between Justine and Claire that the film establishes is that it is no opposition at all. Justine wants to tear down the paternal authority that Claire wants to prop up, but Justine’s rebellion requires an authority to attack just as much as Claire requires an authority to support. By depicting this opposition as definitive, von Trier shields the spectator from a real alternative – a female subjectivity that embraces the dividedness of subjectivity, its recognition of the insubstantiality of all authority. Though the film presents a challenge to paternal authority, it does so from the perspective of a fundamental investment in it.

The failed fathers Justine’s hysterical provocation has the effect of exposing the failure of every paternal figure in the film. No male figure’s authority withstands her refusal to go along with its dictates, and the most that the male figures can do is silently flee from her or impotently act out. There are four primary fathers in the film: John, the father of Justine’s nephew; Jack (Stellan Skarsgård), the father of the company where Justine works; Dexter (John Hurt), Justine’s own father; and Michael, the would-be father of Justine’s future children. Each of these fathers tries in some way to respond to Justine’s desire, but they all leave her increasingly dissatisfied.8 By showing the inadequacy of every figure of contemporary paternal authority, Melancholia advances a critique of capitalist modernity and the figures of authority that it incarnates, though it does so from the perspective of the desire for a fully potent authority. The film’s critique of capitalist modernity thus remains invested in the possibility of discovering an adequate authority, even as it depicts the extinction of all humanity.

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John is the first to manifest authority in the film. Though John has inordinate wealth and stages an elaborate wedding reception for Justine, he nonetheless constantly displays his impotence throughout the ceremony, and Justine plays the central role in exposing him. When she retreats to a bedroom and further delays the celebration, John seeks her out in order to explain the huge amount of money he has spent – ‘an arm and a leg’ – on the reception. He can accept this expense as long as Justine accepts the deal that in return she will be ‘happy’. Even though she accedes to his request for this promise, her subsequent words and actions announce John’s failure. After he tells her that he has tried to throw Justine’s mother out for her misbehaviour, Justine says, ‘Yes, you usually do.’ This response throws John off, and von Trier pans the camera from Justine to him in order to reveal him looking taken aback before he admits, ‘Yes, I usually do.’ By forcing John to admit that his show of paternal authority was nothing but a show and not a real instance of it, Justine undermines this authority, which depends on the illusion of its efficaciousness rather than practical results. She adds a final blow in the guise of a compliment, when she says, ‘Thank you. It’s a wonderful party you’ve given for me.’ As she says this, it is clear that Justine performs this statement, and she barely veils the contempt that she has for John (which von Trier reveals to the spectator when Justine drops her fake smile and grimaces after John leaves). The punctuation of John’s weakness as an authority comes toward the end of the film, after Melancholia passes Earth. He pours a glass of wine for Claire and himself, and he offers a toast to ‘life’. This immediately arouses Claire’s indignation because it indicates that John had only feigned his previous assurance that the planet would not destroy Earth. This chink in his armour foreshadows his future total collapse hours later when it becomes apparent that Melancholia will slingshot around Earth and return to collide with it. When John realizes that all human life will soon be catastrophically annihilated, he retreats to the stables and overdoses on the sleeping pills that Claire had purchased for the family in anticipation of this eventuality. John not only fails to confront the truth of annihilation, but he doesn’t even consult with Claire or his young son Leo (Cameron Spurr) about his decision. His act of cowardice is nothing if not a dereliction of parental duty. He leaves Leo to confront the apocalypse alone with only his uncertain mother and depressed aunt. John is the spokesperson in the film for scientific rationalism, and his suicide in the stables highlights the failure of this approach to the world. But there is no other form of paternal authority that is successful. In the modern capitalist order, the weakness of the father is ubiquitous, and this is what the film unrelentingly points out. Justine’s boss Jack represents the most widespread form of this weakness since the film marks him as an unabashed capitalist who identifies fully with the imperative to



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accumulate. He so thoroughly takes up his position within the capitalist order that he refuses to grant any respite from it, even at Justine’s wedding. As Michael’s best man, he gives a toast to the newly married couple at the reception. But he doesn’t simply praise them or wish them future happiness, as is customary. Instead, Jack uses the opportunity to announce that he is promoting Justine to the position of art director in his advertising firm and that he wants a tag line for an image (which he projects for everyone to see) by the end of the evening. Though the guests seem to laugh off Jack’s inappropriate toast as the expression of an overeager boss, it nonetheless does not function as humorous in the film. Instead, it reveals that Jack has nothing in his existence other than the accumulation of capital. He must manipulate every event toward the capitalist imperative, and he permits nothing to remain outside of it. What he can’t see is that advertising and capitalism are themselves based on nothing, that they have no value in themselves. He imagines that he creates substantial products and that he establishes a substantial identity for himself, but he sells nothing and ultimately is, as Justine tells him when she finally confronts him, nothing. Toward the end of the evening, Jack announces that he is firing Tim (Brady Corbet), the employee that Jack assigned to get the tag line for the advertisement from Justine, for his failure to accomplish his mission. This prompts Justine to expose the impotence of their boss. She tells Jack that she has thought of a tag line, and it is ‘nothing’, a term that describes Jack himself. But then she reconsiders and adds, ‘Nothing is too much for you, Jack. I hate you and your firm so deeply; I couldn’t find the words to describe it. You are a despicable, power-hungry little man, Jack.’ Justine delivers this rebuke without any visible agitation and simply walks away when she finishes. Jack, in contrast, explodes in anger and throws his plate against the wall of the catering truck. But the plate falls to the ground unbroken, requiring a second effort from Jack to break it, which confirms the weakness that Justine’s commentary points out. Justine’s hysterical rebellion thoroughly lays bare the absence of authority in the capitalist bent on nothing but accumulation. Justine’s father Dexter appears to be the one father capable of satisfying her. Unlike the other fathers in the film, he shares Justine’s dissatisfaction with the ruling order. This dissatisfaction manifests itself in the petty revolt that he stages during the wedding reception, which occurs just after the butler reprimands Justine for passing the plate in the wrong direction. He picks up the spoon at the table setting for the two women sitting next to him (both named ‘Betty’), and places the two spoons in his front coat pocket. Dexter then calls the butler over and tells him, ‘Neither of the ladies sitting next to me has been given a spoon, and they’d very much like to have one.’ As he says this, the butler looks at his coat pocket, where the spoons are conspicuously visible, but nonetheless goes to the kitchen in search of

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two additional spoons. When the butler replaces the spoons, Dexter repeats the gag again. Dexter’s behaviour at the reception shows that he is not a traditional paternal authority. He and Justine are partners in rebellion. And yet, he fails her just as the other fathers in the film do. Justine asks Dexter to set aside some time to talk with her, and he puts her off until the next morning. But when Justine goes to his room later to speak with him, she finds nothing but a letter jokingly addressed to ‘Betty’. Though Dexter hasn’t actually forgotten his daughter’s name, his substitution of ‘Betty’ for ‘Justine’ shows straightforwardly his inability to recognize her. It is the marker of his failure as a father relative to Justine’s desire. Michael’s failure is more readily apparent than that of any of the other paternal figures in the film. At every point during the wedding reception, he pathetically tries to arouse Justine’s affection for him, but she has no patience for his weakness. His inability to satisfy Justine comes to a climax when they retreat to a bedroom in the mansion. He gives Justine a picture of a plot of land that he has purchased containing empire apple trees and offers the future apple orchard as a panacea for her depression. Michael tells Justine that she will be able to sit under the trees and find the contentment she lacks. He says, ‘If you still have days when you’re feeling a little sad, I think that will make you happy again.’ Throughout the exchange, Justine’s face registers polite appreciation, but she never articulates her unqualified approval, as Michael (and the spectator) might expect. She pledges to Michael, ‘I’ll always keep it with me.’ But after she leaves the room and the camera shows a satisfied look on Michael’s face, it pans down to a shot of the picture crumpled on the couch – a clear indication that Justine took no solace in Michael’s purchase for her. A few hours after leaving the picture behind, Justine defies Michael much more substantively. She leaves him behind in the reception and goes walking on the golf course, where she has sex with Tim. Tim is not especially appealing to Justine, and she seems to have sex with him simply to express her dissatisfaction with Michael. But Michael’s response is simply to leave, which further highlights his impotence. Though the film depicts Michael as the kindest of the fathers with whom Justine interacts, it also mercilessly reveals the impotence that is the foundation for this kindness. Justine cuckolds Michael after the reception has gone on for hours, but she begins to undermine him almost from the moment that they arrive. When Justine visits her favourite horse just after arriving at the reception, she immediately showers him with affection and confesses that she is now married. She introduces Michael to the horse as her husband, as if he had taken the horse’s place in her life. But when she describes the horse to Michael, her description suggests an extreme intimacy. She says, ‘I’m his mistress. I’m the only one who can ride him.’9 Just after Justine speaks the first sentence, an extreme cut that violates the 180-degree rule



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occurs. As a result, her position within the frame moves from one side to the other, and this draws attention to the peculiarity of Justine’s statement. Justine’s apparently bizarre choice of words – labelling herself the horse’s ‘mistress’ – indicates a familiarity that goes beyond the relationship that an owner or rider has with her favourite animal. There is a suggestion that the relationship has a sexual dimension, and this lies in the background of Justine’s introduction of Michael as her husband as well. Justine’s behaviour relative to the horse hints at the role that it plays for her subjectivity, but the horse’s name removes all doubt. In one of the real strokes of genius in the film, von Trier gives him the name ‘Abraham’. The horse that has Justine as his mistress has the name of an unequalled father – the patriarch of Judaism. Like his namesake, the horse evinces a patriarchal authority that none of the merely human paternal figures in the film display. Justine finds satisfaction in Abraham, though even he eventually incurs her wrath when he refuses to cross the bridge that leads off the family property. Abraham stops and disobeys Justine’s commands, which prompts her to begin savagely beating him for this failure of nerve. Justine’s disproportionate violence directed at the horse stems directly from a show of weakness that places him among the other paternal authorities that Justine has rejected. Hysteria seeks an authority that will relieve the sufferer from the burden of subjectivity, from its intractable self-division. It rebels against every authority, but at the same time, it seeks a genuine authority. At the end of the film, this genuine authority finally appears in the form of nature itself, which brings disaster and death. Melancholia solves Justine’s desire in a way that no authority figures in the film are able to do. Though we might have difficulty imagining anything worse than death, Justine courts death throughout Melancholia and welcomes it when it comes. By destroying her, nature spares Justine from the torments of subjectivity, and her desire for this destruction places her and the film within the orbit of fascism.

Die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ During the promotion for the film at the Cannes Film Festival, von Trier infamously began to talk about his connection to Nazism when asked about the film’s debt to German Romanticism. After explaining that he previously believed himself to be Jewish, von Trier states that he discovered that he was in fact a German. This quickly leads him to a discussion of Nazism, in which he claims, ‘I understand Hitler’, and ‘I am a Nazi.’ Though he later apologized for the statement and claimed that he was simply joking, it is not coincidental that the first time that von Trier associated himself with Hitler and Nazism occurred while talking about Melancholia.

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It would be absurd, of course, to analyse the film as a fascist work of art because of von Trier’s comments after making it, and von Trier himself made clear after the fact that he felt no allegiance to the Nazi project. But one’s choice of jokes signifies where one’s thoughts are, and von Trier was thinking about identification with Nazism because of the direction that his film took. After looking at the film, one can see his comments not as the ideas that shaped the film but as evidence of the effect that the film had on him. Making the film did enable von Trier to ‘understand Hitler’ in the sense that it provided unique insight into how fascism responds to capitalist modernity. In Melancholia, Justine shows the same allergy to modern art that the Nazis put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937. During this exhibition, Josef Goebbels displayed various forms of modern art, including paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Georg Grosz, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall. The point of this exhibition was to mock modernism for its ludicrousness and in the process to reassert the value of an early modern aesthetic. Whereas modernist art exposes the absence of any substantial authority in the world, early modern art and specifically romanticism, though it does away with God, sustains the idea of an external perspective of authority from which to observe the beauty that it depicts. The scene that aligns Justine most clearly with a fascist aesthetic occurs just after Claire accuses her of lying to everyone at the reception by acting as if she’s enjoying herself without really doing so. At this point, von Trier shows Justine confronting the insubstantiality of the world she inhabits. After Claire leaves, Justine looks around the study and scans the various art books that are held open to abstract modernist paintings by Kazimir Malevich. The camera pans across these images and cuts back to a close-up of a despondent Justine. These images exacerbate Justine’s sense of her own failure to belong because they reveal the absence of any authority anchoring the world, the absence of any look that provides support for the subject’s existence. But just as her face registers the horror that these images arouse in her, the music from the overture to Tristan und Isolde begins softly to play. As if spurred on by this music that she cannot hear, Justine hurriedly replaces the modernist works with romantic paintings. Justine commences replacing the Malevich paintings with Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565), and then she finds John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1852) along with his The Woodman’s Daughter (1851) on the facing page, in another book and displays them on the shelf. The next paintings she puts up include Pieter Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne (1567), followed by Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1610). She concludes with Carl Fredrik Hill’s Crying Deer (1883) and slaps the page down to punctuate her achievement prior to defiantly walking out of the room. Justine displays a wide variety of paintings, but they all share (even if some are pre-romantic) a romantic belief that modernity’s toppling



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of traditional authority doesn’t portend the elimination of all authority. According to this romantic line of thought, we can still discover a substantial authority in nature, in community or even in death. Justine’s substitution of pre-modernist paintings for modernist ones makes clear her desire to have modernity without modernism, which is the fascist dream. The fact that music from the overture to Tristan und Isolde plays just before Justine replaces the paintings is not coincidental. Von Trier aligns Justine with the attitude of romantic art through the music that accompanies her throughout the film, and it is almost always music from the overture to Tristan und Isolde. In fact, Justine appears to retreat from other diegetic music into the protective womb of the overture. At the moment when a guitar player steps forward to play music at the reception, Justine walks outside so that neither she nor the spectator hears the diegetic music produced by the guitar player. Instead, we hear once again the non-diegetic overture to Tristan und Isolde as the film cuts to Justine leaving the mansion. This music serves as the touchstone for Justine’s character and always plays when she interacts with Melancholia. Since music from Tristan und Isolde is the only non-diegetic music that appears in the film, Wagner’s opera has an outsized importance for the task of understanding Melancholia. The choice of this particular opera is significant. Tristan und Isolde shows a successful romantic union occurring, but this union requires the death of both partners and the reduction of the woman to the man’s fantasmatic complement.10 In Wagner’s opera, death doesn’t destroy the couple but constitutes it. Destruction is the site of beauty, which is one reason why this opera resonated so well with those who wanted to remain in modernity while simultaneously escaping it. The great appeal of all forms of fascism is that they promise modernity without the burden of subjectivity that modernity brings to the fore. Modernity uproots the subject from tradition, and it does so by destroying the foundation of the authority that supports this tradition. Traditional pre-modern society privileges an authority figure that gives subjects a secure identity, while modernity privileges the subjects themselves, thereby depriving them of any secure identity. Fascism offers subjects modernity with the restoration of authority so that they are not faced with the prospect of enduring their subjectivity without any external support. This is the common thread that runs through all incarnations of fascism. With this common thread, fascism can take on many apparently contradictory forms, especially in its aesthetics. Nazism can abhor modern art, while Italian Futurists can fully embrace it. What both share is a desire to preserve the advantages of modernity and simultaneously to escape its evisceration of all authority figures. Nazism does this through a turn to traditional myth, while Futurism does it by positing the formation of a new authority through acts of violence. In both cases, destruction plays

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the central role in rescuing the subject from modernity while allowing it to remain within the modern world. The fascist fascination with death stems precisely from its role in marking the end of the subject. Death relieves the subject of the torment of its living death – its inability to fit into the world. When the subject dies, it is finally able to assume a clear identity and have a place. In death, the subject solves the problem of subjectivity, which is why fascism erects a cult around it. But this solution remains only a promise because actual death doesn’t bring identity but oblivion. Fascism appeals to subjects because it presents an impossible position for them to occupy from which they can observe their own death. For speculative realist Steven Shaviro, Justine’s ability to occupy the impossible position of perceiving while abandoning subjectivity doesn’t mark the film’s tendency toward fascism but instead its emancipation from the trap of always thinking in terms of the world as it is for us. He writes: Justine’s position as a witness to a world from which we have been subtracted can only be described paradoxically. She has a strange sort of access, we might say, to that which remains forever beyond access. She envisages her own exclusion from any possible envisagement. She sees and feels what obliterates her very ability to see and feel. In apprehending the world outside of its relation to us, and outside of all the categories that we impose upon it, Justine makes contact – affectively, if not epistemologically – with what the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘the great outdoors, the absolute outside’.11 The problem is that the position that Shaviro attributes to Justine (and also to the film) is not just paradoxical (as he says) but simply contradictory. When one has access ‘to that which remains forever beyond access’, what one accesses is no longer beyond access. Though we can of course know about the universe in ways that don’t bear on us as subjects, we cannot avoid the detour of our subjectivity in arriving at this knowledge. But Melancholia invests itself fully in the hope of avoiding this detour. In what is undoubtedly the most beautiful scene in the film, Justine walks out of the mansion at night in the midst of her depression, and she lies down on rocks just above a stream while the light from the approaching Melancholia illuminates her naked body. The image resembles one of the romantic paintings that Justine had earlier displayed in the study in the stead of Kazimir Malevich’s modernist works. In this scene, the film aligns female beauty not only with nature but also with imminent death. After the initial image of Justine lying on the rocks, von Trier presents a shot/reverse-shot sequence not between Justine and another character but between her and Melancholia, while the music from the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde plays in the background. It is clear that



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Melancholia functions here as a romantic partner for Justine, adequate to her desire in a way that no organic authority has been.12 As she stares at what she knows will be the vehicle for the world’s destruction, she has a look of satisfaction on her face and runs her hand erotically over her body. This love scene separates Justine from everyone else in the world of the film. Unlike others who fear destruction, Justine embraces it. She finally discovers an authority that can save her. In the way that he shoots Justine’s love scene with Melancholia, von Trier points toward the ultimate failure of the film to break from the paternal authority that it mocks. This scene also underlines Justine’s failure through the figure of Claire. As Justine communes with Melancholia, Claire secretly watches from afar and recognizes Justine’s satisfaction. The presence of Claire’s look reveals that Justine cannot simply relate directly to nature: this relation occurs through a third party that witnesses it. Even though Justine doesn’t know that Claire is watching her, her connection with Melancholia necessarily involves a third party, a reference to an external look for whom it is performed. Every image of destruction is an image of destruction for a look. The incredible beauty of this scene depends on the beauty of Melancholia itself, and this is a point at which von Trier reveals in the clearest fashion his attempt to aestheticize destruction. If a stray planet really flew through the galaxy and threatened Earth, it would no longer look like a beautiful living world but like a dead rock. All vitality would be destroyed by its long journey through the coldness of space. Of course, no one should demand that von Trier adhere to absolute verisimilitude while making a film, but such extreme departures from it necessarily have significance. He refuses to show destruction coming from a dead piece of rock and instead portrays it as the utmost achievement of beauty, so that spectators can regard destruction as an event in which they can experience aesthetic pleasure. When the world finally comes to an end, Justine faces it with satisfaction. But she also builds a ‘magic cave’ out of sticks to ‘protect’ her nephew from the destruction. This recourse to the primitive represents the film’s final flight from the consequences of modernity. Though she rejects Claire’s proposed ritual of wine on the terrace to mark the end, she substitutes an even more compromised alternative. To express her displeasure with capitalist modernity, she erects a tepee, signalling her bond with nature and her attachment to a world in which traditional authority remained intact. This is how fascism greets the end of the world. Several critics have celebrated Melancholia for going where the Hollywood disaster film would not dare to go by depicting a disaster in which no one survived. But we should not mistake extremism for radicality. If conventional disaster films tend to turn death into a spectacle for the spectator’s pleasure, Melancholia doesn’t surpass or overcome this strategy but doubles down on it. One leaves von Trier’s film fully in love with violent

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death. In the midst of the love affair with death that Melancholia stages, one is on the way to the disaster of fascism.

Notes 1

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 122.

2

Justine herself disavows any causal relationship between the disaster and her depression. She tells her sister in no uncertain terms, ‘If you think that I am afraid of that planet, then you are stupid’. Though this seems definitive, there is no reason why we should accept Justine’s own judgement on her depression.

3

Christopher Peterson, ‘The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia’, Discourse 35 (3) (2013): 407.

4

As Richard Boothby notes, the fact that von Trier aligns the fascist impulse to aestheticize politics with female desire renders the film all the more objectionable (private communication, 17 August 2015).

5

The wholeness of male subjectivity stems, ironically, from its investment in a figure of exception – the paternal authority not subjected to castration. This ideal defines male subjectivity, which is constantly striving toward it and failing to live up to it. Despite this inevitable failure, the male subject nonetheless receives a sense of its own wholeness from the idea. The absence of a corresponding ideal for female subjectivity leaves the division of the subject apparent. The female subject does not have an ideal woman who escapes lack with whom she could identify, and this absence is the key to the female subject’s freedom.

6

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XIX: … ou pire, 1971–1972, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2011, p. 104.

7

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, p. 175.

8

The figures of paternal authority in the film are weak, but Justine’s hysterical response to authority demands this weakness. As Serge André notes, ‘The hysteric’s father is structurally impotent’, Serge André, What Does a Woman Want? translated by Susan Fairfield, New York: Other Press, 1999, p. 119. This does not exculpate the fathers who fail in the film, but it is the case that no matter how effective they were, Justine would find their point of weakness.

9

This statement not only asserts Justine’s bond with the natural world, but it also represents one of her many provocations of John and his authority. He responds with a quiet defiance, saying, ‘That’s not exactly true … Occasionally I take him for a ride.’ Between these two statements, we see a shot of Claire glaring at him and implicitly upbraiding him for the pettiness



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of his quarrel. This is the first time of many that Claire attempts to buttress paternal authority and prevent it from revealing its weakness. 10 As Slavoj Žižek points out in his analysis of Wagner, ‘Tristan’s very clinging to the appearance of Isolde as his final redeemer bears witness to the fact that Isolde herself has been reduced to a male fantasy’. Slavoj Žižek, ‘I Do Not Order My Dreams’, in Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 130. 11 Steven Shaviro, ‘Melancholia, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime’, Sequence 1 (1) (2012). http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence1/1-1-melancholia-or-theromantic-anti-sublime/. 12 David Denny contrasts this scene with the similar image of Justine mimicking the pose of the drowned Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. Denny notes, ‘The image provides a nice contrast to the image of Justine, in the prologue, where she replaces Ophelia in Millais’s painting. Whereas in the prologue her look is placid, resigned and blank, in this frame her face is serene, calm and content, as though she were communing with a loved one,’ David Denny, ‘Melancholia; An Alternative to the End of the World: A Reading of Lars von Trier’s Film’, in Sheila Kunkle (ed.), Cinematic Cuts, New York: SUNY Press, 2016.

12 How to face nothing: Melancholia and the feminine Jennifer Friedlander

Introduction Lars von Trier proclaims that his 2012 film Melancholia concludes with the ‘happiest ending he’s ever made’,1 and Slavoj Žižek declares Melancholia a ‘profoundly optimistic’ film.2 In the light of these remarks, it might surprise those unfamiliar with the film to learn that Melancholia centres on a morosely depressed woman, Justine [Kirsten Dunst], who, on the brink of the apocalypse, abandons her husband and her job at her wedding. The film concludes with the destruction of the Earth via a cosmic collision with the stealth planet Melancholia. How, then, are we to make sense of these comments? In this essay, I suggest that these affirmative statements can be understood in terms of the way the film provides fresh possibilities for living ethically in the face of loss and the collapse of the big Other, possibilities best appreciated in terms of what Lacan elaborates as the ‘feminine’ position of sexuation. These possibilities may not be readily apparent due to the spectacularly distracting nature of the film’s content. Melancholia, as has been frequently remarked, is characterized by stunning extremes, at an affective register, narrative construction and level of form. Yet, on closer inspection, the spectacles and exaggerations presented in the film may provide a key to understanding the interpretation of the film offered by von Trier himself, and by Žižek. To be specific, I argue that the very modality of the film’s excesses points to us toward a reading of the film as a triumph of the

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‘feminine’ logic in offering an ethical response to loss, which deploys the strategy of masquerade as a response to the impossibility of symbolic totality. Such an interpretation involves playing up the artificiality of the fiction, not in order for it to be seen through to reveal an underlying reality, but rather in order to both titivate and highlight the ‘nothing’ that it purports to conceal. Viewing the film within the framework of the feminine logic of sexuation can also offer a way of making sense of von Trier’s assertion that Melancholia is a ‘women’s film’. This contention has often been read as a reference to the film’s deployment of the conventions of ‘melodrama’ and the ‘gender patterns’ exhibited by its characters.3 I will argue that Melancholia is a ‘women’s film’ in another sense: it offers a lesson in the triumphant logic of the Lacanian sexuated position of Woman over that of Man. As is well known, the positions of Woman and Man, for Lacan, have nothing to do with biological or even cultural identities, but should be understood as psychic orientations to lack, specifically as ways of accommodating the failure of the symbolic order as a totalizing system capable of grounding our identities. In particular, Lacan tells us that the symbolic always fails in one of two ways: either it is incomplete or it is inconsistent. And, he adds, that ‘every speaking being situates itself on one side or the other’ of this failure: subjects psychically aligned with the ‘masculine’ pole of sexuation respond with a strategy of imposture to the incompleteness of the symbolic order, and those aligned with the ‘feminine’ pole of sexuation respond to the symbolic order’s inconsistency with a strategy of masquerade.4 Steven Shaviro touches upon Lacan’s schema of sexuation as a lens through which to view the film when he comments on how the two key ‘“alpha-male” characters are both unmasked as impotent impostors’.5 As I indicated, in Lacan’s account Man’s approach is characterized by imposture – an authoritative display of empty but resonant signifiers of power, so as to hide the fact that there is ‘nothing’ securing one’s symbolic identity. The two ‘alpha-man’ characters referred to by Shaviro are Justine’s sister Claire’s [Charlotte Gainsbourg] husband, John [Keifer Sutherland], and Justine’s boss, Jack [Stellen Skarsgård]. John, the exorbitantly wealthy owner of the vast mansion and estate where the wedding is held (and also where they live), has supreme confidence in the scientific prediction that Melancholia will not strike Earth, and zealously awaits the once-in-alifetime, spectacular sight of seeing it ‘flying by’ Earth. His confidence is as ostentatious as his wealth, but when he discovers that the scientists, whose authority he has been drawing upon for his own credibility, are wrong and that Melancholia will indeed crash into Earth, he cannot face the failure. He abandons his family and kills himself in the horse stables.6 The bombastic Jack is similarly exposed as a weak fraud. He offers Justine a promotion at her wedding, but she bluntly rejects him and demeans his authority, calling him ‘a despicable, power-hungry little man’. He is left

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speechless and manages to respond only by petulantly smashing a plate to the ground.7 In short, the film reveals imposture to be a precarious strategy for covering lack: it involves fastidious effort to maintain the illusion of a robust big Other that can fully guarantee symbolic completeness, but is easily imperilled. Since it leaves no room for error, even a minor challenge can lead to its absolute and unbearable collapse.8 *** In order to explore the seemingly surprising claims that von Trier and Žižek make in connection with Melancholia, I begin by considering the film’s violation of generic expectations. It has been frequently remarked that, although Melancholia is a film about the end of the world, it nevertheless departs from the typical Hollywood ‘disaster film’. Chris Peterson, for example, argues that the film positions itself as ‘an antidisaster disaster film’.9 Hollywood disaster films, Peterson points out, tend to invite the spectator to ‘participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death’, whereas Melancholia ‘leaves us with no survivors, thus depriving the spectator of the routine pleasures afforded by the disaster genre’.10 Here Peterson is referring to the way in which the film concludes with a black screen at the exact moment of the catastrophic collision of Melancholia into Earth. Such a bleak ending seems to trouble Žižek’s and von Trier’s reading of the film as ‘happy’ or ‘optimistic’. But, on second glance, despite the grim ending, the film opens a space for optimism. Although we are faced without any surviving character with whom to identify, we, the audience, live on. As Peterson points out, ‘due to the mechanical reproducibility … this performative annihilation bears a capacity to repeat itself before innumerable spectators’.11 The filmic medium’s ability to infinitely reproduce the end of the world seems to put viewers at a considerable advantage. Although we are left ‘bereft of any living protagonist with whom we can identify, we nevertheless survive’.12 André Bazin famously confronts this dimension of mechanical reproducibility in the context of death in ‘Death Every Afternoon’, in which he reminds us that, ‘on the screen the toreador dies everyday’.13 Through the filmic medium, even the most singular of events becomes a daily regularity – part of what Lacan calls ‘the automaton’. In Melancholia the recurrence of the singular event of the end of the world is not reserved for repeat viewings, but is included within the film itself. The apocalyptic conclusion to Melancholia appears first within the diegetically unintegrated prologue. The film begins with a visually stunning, slow-motion, lyrical prologue, set heavy-handedly to the overture of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which the denouement is revealed in magnificent fashion. The prologue serves neither as a background nor as a supplement to the film, but rather offers an alternative mode of telling the

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same story. As Neil Maizels puts it, ‘there is almost a sense in which these opening moments make the rest of the film redundant’.14 When the final scene of the film occurs, we already know (even if the characters do not) that the planets will collide since this has been revealed to us in the opening sequence. The climactic ending thus functions as a return to what has been anticipated rather than as a conclusion. Trauma, as Bruce Fink describes, follows the logic of the future anterior: it emerges as something that ‘at a certain future moment … will have already taken place’.15 Trauma, in this sense, is retrospectively constituted through the act of its return ‘from the future’, as Žižek describes it.16 Similarly, for the spectator of Melancholia, the prologue offers an engagement with something that ‘will have happened’, which, I suggest, rather than preparing us for the conclusion makes it more disturbing, indeed constitutes it as a trauma. We may say of the interplanetary collision that ‘before it actually happened, there was already a place opened, reserved for it in fantasy-space’.17 To be specific, before the fatal, final moment has appeared on screen, the space of the event was already prepared for us by the dreamily expressive prologue. A second way of justifying Žižek and von Trier’s claims regarding the film’s ‘optimism’ is to consider it as an allegory of the intolerable experience of deep depression. Indeed, von Trier suggests exactly this when he claims that Melancholia ‘is not so much a film about the end of the world; it’s a film about a state of mind’.18 In discussing Melancholia, Peterson refers to the conventional view that an allegorical reading is ‘comforting’ because it makes the destruction of humanity seem ‘unreal’. From this point of view, the film goes beyond the simple avoidance of trauma to serving a ‘prophylactic function’ against trauma.19 We may elaborate this idea of the film as a deterrent against trauma by recalling Freud’s suggestion that anxiety can function as a ‘sort of inoculation’ against real trauma.20 In particular, drawing upon Freud’s account of anxiety, we may say that the film, as an allegory, safely removed from the real thing, incites precautionary anxiety in the spectator, so as to avoid a disturbing encounter. In Freud’s terms the film ‘vividly imagines the danger situation … with the unmistakable purpose of restricting that distressing experience’.21 The film itself comments on the possibility that anxiety serves to protect us from a real threat within its explicit content. Claire, the anxious sister, envies the melancholic Justine for her preparedness for the catastrophe. In particular, as she frets about the likelihood of the apocalyptic disaster to her unruffled sister, Claire bitterly expresses her jealousy, chiding Justine, ‘Oh, you have it easy, don’t you?’ Here the film seems to suggest that melancholia provides a stronger shield against catastrophe than anxiety. We will return to this question shortly in the context of exploring how the film represents the two psychic structures of anxiety and melancholia as responses to imminent disaster.

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Many critics have argued that the apocalyptic theme as an allegory for profound, immobilizing depression is too heavy-handed to be effective. As Peterson points out, the film as a ‘metaphor for … severe depression … is about as subtle as being hit over the head with a two-by-four’ (a metaphor which itself is about as subtle as being hit with two-by-four). Similarly, in his scathing critique of the Melancholia as ‘the only real dud among the films [shown at Cannes in 2011]’ Colin MacCabe denounces the film as a ‘pastiche [that] uses every cliché in the book’ (as if ‘in the book’ is not a cliché) whose characters ‘seem like caricatures’, and whose theme of ‘damning the bourgeoisie [is] so hackneyed that you wonder how von Trier persuades great actors to so demean themselves’.22 But, I contend, rather than undermine the film’s power, it is through the overt exaggerations and the commitment to hyperbole that we encounter the film’s ethico-political potential. To make this argument, I reverse the usual direction in which the allegorical argument is made: rather than read the apocalyptic as an extended metaphor for morbid depression, I will turn this around to consider how Justine’s melancholia and Claire’s anxiety can be seen as allegories for the end of the world. Each sister demonstrates a psychic formation that offers opportunities for assessing how a subject may cope (or not) with radical loss. I begin with the tactics that the melancholic has at her disposal for managing trauma. Von Trier, insisting, as he often does, that the role of the most miserable woman in his film is indeed autobiographic, tells us that the inspiration for the character of Justine emerged from his own analysis. He was struck by the therapeutic insight that ‘melancholics will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, partly because they can say: “what did I tell you?”’23 Through her behaviour, the melancholic Justine indicates that she has been preparing for the apocalyptic interplanetary disaster long before anyone could have known about it. She is depicted as having withdrawn interest from objects, goals, and relationships that are meant to make life meaningful, long in advance of their absence. This, as Claire resentfully points out, makes it easier for Justine to accept their actual loss. The only thing that we see bringing comfort – and perhaps even jouissance – to Justine is the approaching of the eponymous planet, Melancholia. As it nears, she basks blissfully naked in its glow, her depressive inhibitions beginning to fade. By contrast, when Justine is deep in the throes of her unbearable depression, she is unable to muster the energy to lift her foot high enough to enter into a bath that she would have previously enjoyed and she can no longer eat her favourite food (meatloaf), declaring that it tastes of ash. But, once Justine becomes certain that Melancholia’s path will intersect catastrophically with Earth, her appetite returns: we see her unreservedly enjoying jam by repeatedly sticking her finger directly into the jar and right into her mouth.

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Prior to her spirits lifting in the wake of Melancholia’s imminence, how was Justine’s psychic melancholia serving her? Žižek contends that, ‘against Freud, one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholia’.24 In opposition to the mourner, who integrates loss into the symbolic realm, the melancholic remains faithful to the ‘remainder’ that cannot be integrated. As Lacan puts it, in melancholia, the mourning process ‘doesn’t come to a conclusion because the object takes the helm … [the object] triumphs’.25 But, Žižek points out, the melancholic confuses ‘loss’ and ‘lack’, in that the object that appears lost is really not an object at all, let alone one that the subject possessed. What the subject misses is the constitutive lack that no object had ever fulfilled. Since the object that appears to have been lost was not only never had, but also never existed, the mode of honouring it takes the form of deception. For Žižek, this melancholic deceit occurs in both form and degree: melancholics treat ‘an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost’ and the magnitude of their mourning can be characterized as ‘a faked spectacle of the excessive’.26 Now we can turn from the melancholic Justine to the anxiety-ridden Claire. What protection is afforded to Claire by virtue of her anxiety? The comparison between anxiety and mourning emerges pressingly at the end of Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety paper. As Lacan puts it, at the end of this seminal paper ‘Freud wonders in what way everything he has put forward on the relationship between anxiety and object loss is distinct from mourning’, and goes on to devote the ‘entire addenda … to Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety [to this] most extreme awkwardness’.27 In particular, Freud powerfully asks, ‘when does separation from an object produce anxiety, when does it produce mourning, and when does it produce only pain?’28 Freud follows up this inquiry immediately with the comment: ‘let me say at once that there is no prospect in sight of answering these questions’.29 I will argue that these questions, especially regarding the relationship between melancholia and anxiety, are illuminated by the relation between Claire and Justine. Both melancholia and anxiety involve a complex relation between deception and temporality, which straddle both retrospective and anticipatory trajectories. In melancholia, as we discussed, the subject institutes a loss as a way to engage with and attempt to manage lack. The melancholic withdraws interest and affect from the objects they still have, in anticipation of their loss. For example, Justine dramatically threw away all the things that seemed meaningful in her life: her job, her marriage (at her wedding), and the good will of her friends and family. In anxiety, we encounter an inversion to this structure: rather than introduce a loss in order to manage a retrospective lack, in the fashion of the melancholic, the anxious subject institutes a lack in order to prepare for an impending loss. Thus, by contrast with the melancholic who mistakes

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constitutive lack for mere loss, the anxious subject treats impending loss as a threat to her lack. The deception is deepened by anxiety’s inoculating function: it is in a sense by pretending that the danger has already struck, that one can avoid it really hitting. Anxiety, in Freud’s words, involves both ‘an expectation of a trauma … and a repetition of it in mitigated form’.30 Here, again, we are faced with a form of deception, which we can understand via an engagement with Lacan’s account of anxiety. Lacan takes Freud’s explanation in the direction of highlighting the way in which lack itself functions as the foundation of subjectivity. Consequently, Lacan qualifies the Freudian description of anxiety as a ‘reaction to the danger of a loss of an object’,31 telling us, rather, that ‘anxiety isn’t about the loss of the object but its presence’; it strikes when a positive object appears where lack should be.32 As Lacan repeats frequently throughout his Anxiety seminar, rather than being associated with the loss of an object, ‘anxiety is not without an object’. By ‘object’ here, Lacan means the object a, which plays the vital role of regulating and palliating the subject’s relationship to the Real. To this he adds that anxiety strikes whenever this object fails to sustain the subject in a tolerable relationship to lack. The object can no longer tame the threat of the Real if it fills the place of lack too fully. Lacan, thus, reformulates anxiety as the ‘lack of lack’. He emphasizes, ‘anxiety isn’t the signal of lack but of something that has to be conceived of … as the failing of the support that lack provides’.33 The danger, to which anxiety points, then, is that of losing the lack. For example, Lacan explains, the most distressing thing for an infant is not the mother’s absence, but of her over-presence. What provokes anxiety is ‘everything that announces to us … that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap … the most anguishing thing for the infant is [if] the relationship upon which he’s established himself, if the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted … when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while’.34 As such, for Lacan, anxiety shares a close relationship to doubt: although anxiety is itself ‘free of doubt’, it nevertheless is ‘the cause of doubt’.35 This deep connection with doubt stems from the certainty that anxiety brings. As Lacan puts it, anxiety is ‘that which does not deceive’;36 it is ‘the only thing to target the truth of … lack’.37 One way to understand this Lacanian relationship between doubt and certainty is to appreciate that, when faced with the real of anxiety, the subject looks for some way out. But, as Lacan attests, ‘as regards anxiety … there is no safety net … each piece of the mesh … only carries any meaning insofar as it leaves empty the space where anxiety lies’.38 The subject, in the throes of anxiety, clings to doubt as an attempt to ‘snatch from anxiety its certainty’.39 But, as we will see, this doubt only entrenches us more deeply in certainty. A pivotal scene from the film can be read as a chilling manifestation of Lacan’s insight here, that in ‘the effort that doubt expends … to combat anxiety … what it strives to avoid is what holds firm in anxiety with

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dreadful certainty’.40 After being promised by John that Melancholia has safely passed Earth and should be receding, Claire’s sense of doom remains unshaken. In an attempt to introduce doubt as a weapon to combat her terrifying certainty, she picks up a wire contraption made by her son, Leo, which he uses as a gauge to tracking Melancholia’s distance from Earth. If John is to be believed, Melancholia will appear smaller when viewed through Leo’s metal ring. But when Claire puts the ring to her eye, the rogue planet alarmingly fills the hole completely, signalling its increasing proximity to Earth. Thus, her attempt to introduce certainty to doubt, winds up confirming the ‘dreadful certainty’ of her anxiety. The image of the planet appearing fully in the hole where lack should be vividly illustrates Lacan’s refrain that anxiety occurs when ‘something … appears [in the place of the lack] … because lack happens to be lacking’.41 This encounter with the certainty of anxiety is untenable for Claire, and sets her off on a frantic attempt to escape somehow the unavoidable catastrophe. Her acting out appears to take the form of a massive disavowal; when faced with knowledge that Earth will be destroyed, she nevertheless attempts to take Leo and leave the grounds of her vast property. This impossible attempt ends with Claire collapsing into the ground while struggling to bear Leo’s weight in her arms, breaking down with grief at the futility of escaping the immanent horror – a scene depicted in heart-wrenching slow motion in the prologue. This is not the only example within the film of Claire exhibiting disavowal. When Justine bluntly tells her that she knows the world is coming to an end, that ‘life is only on Earth and it’s not for long’, Claire responds, ‘but where would Leo grow up?’ This moment is characterized by Peterson as a ‘disavowal … at once poignant and darkly comic. What part about the world coming to an end does she not understand?’42 One could turn this around, however, and say that it is precisely Claire’s ability to understand perfectly what is meant by the end of the world that prompts the need for her acts of disavowal. Thus, it seems, Claire is like the fetishist, who is a realist because he has found a mechanism for enabling him to face the truth.43 But, I argue, this approach is unsuccessful for Claire because, despite appearances, she is not perverse, but instead neurotic. Lacan prepares us for this reading when he tells us that, when faced with anxiety, it is not unusual for the neurotic to appropriate the perverse fantasy as an approach to ‘defending himself against anxiety … keeping a lid on it’.44 But, we learn, the perverse fantasy doesn’t suit the neurotic – in Lacan’s words, it ‘becomes him much like gaiters do a rabbit’.45 The perverse fantasy at issue involves having ‘things … in their right place … the a right where the subject can’t see it and the capital S is in its place’.46 The neurotic, thus, puts himself in the place of the object a, but never succeeds in ‘mak[ing] much of [t]his fantasy’ as a defence against anxiety.47 Why not? Because the object a, which helps neurotics manage their relationship to lack, also

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functions as ‘the bait with which they hold on to the Other’.48 Ultimately, the perverse fantasy fails for the neurotic because the ‘neurotic won’t give up his anxiety’.49 It is this unyielding grasp for the Other that remains at the heart of how we might cope with the loss of the Other. And here we return to a version of the question with which we began: namely, what the film might demonstrate regarding possibilities for coping with or refusing to cope with radical loss. This returns us, too, to ethico-political questions regarding ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ responses to symbolic impasses, which might lend support for von Trier and Žižek’s positive remarks regarding the film’s ending. Steven Shaviro offers a tempting interpretation of how the film concludes with a triumph of the feminine logic. When it becomes clear to all the characters that Melancholia will indeed collide with Earth, Leo becomes appropriately terrified and explains to his aunt, Justine, that his father had warned him that, if the planet struck, ‘there would be “nothing to do” … “nowhere to hide”’.50 Justine eases Leo through the horror of the catastrophe by telling Leo that his father must have gotten about the one place where they will be safe – the ‘magic cave’, which Leo keeps asking ‘Aunt Steelbreaker’ (as he refers to Justine throughout the film) to build with him. In their final moments, Justine, Leo and Claire build the ‘magic cave’, a tepee-like structure of tree branches, under which they sit and hold hands until the deadly collision strikes. Shaviro analyses Justine’s final act as a consummate feminine gesture. Justine, he argues, ‘offers Leo an exception – a kind of Lacanian “feminine” supplement’.51 Many critics, too, point to this as a ‘redemptive’ moment in the film. Maizels, for example, writes that ‘Justine finds her modicum of salvation from melancholia in a brief maternal gesture to her sister’s little boy, keeping some structure of meaning and hope alive within him, long after it has flown from his parents and herself’.52 In particular, Shaviro links Justine’s ability to step outside of her intractable depression in order to comfort the child as a ‘gesture to [the] “fantasy of the future”’.53 Here Shaviro invokes ‘what Lee Edelman calls reproductive futurism’: a heteronormative structure of values, in which the ‘figure of the child [is posited] as the promise and guarantee of “social and cultural survival”’.54 Edelman advocates for the ethical function of the queer as a threat to ‘the future’ that the child secures. Seductive and compelling though this reading may be, I object to Shaviro’s interpretation on two grounds: (1) this act does not follow the feminine logic developed by Lacan, or at least not for the reason he gives; and (2) the ending of the film points not to the fantasy of reproductive futurism, but rather to a way to inhabit fully the ultimate destruction. As a prelude to my first objection, I argue against the temptation to equate kindness with the ethical. What Justine does for Leo is an act of tremendous compassion, but that does not necessarily qualify it as an ethical act in

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the Lacanian sense. A Lacanian ethical act does not aim to reaffirm the fantasy of wholeness (as Justine’s erection of the ‘magic cave’ seems to do). Rather it serves to abandon the fantasy that such wholeness is attainable. In particular, contrary to Shaviro, Justine’s testament to the existence of an exception which can preserve the symbolic order may be understood as a ‘masculine’ act: the invocation of an exception, which serves to stitch the incompleteness of the symbolic together. Here, I agree with Zahi Zalloua’s account of the ‘male logic’ as characterized by ‘exception’ and of the female logic as making ‘no claim of universality rooted in exception’.55 Thus, if we see Justine’s suggestion to build the ‘magic cave’ as a promise of an exception to the zone of destruction, then her actions fall within the masculine logic, in which the exception functions as the external guarantee required to knit together a whole. The feminine pole, by contrast, refuses the totalizing exception and instead inhabits the impossibility – the not-all, which characterizes the truth of the Real. Against Shaviro, I will suggest that, although Justine does indeed (as he claims) act according to the feminine logic, it is definitely not on account of mobilizing an exception. On the contrary, my contention will be that her final act of constructing the ‘magic cave’ follows the logic of the feminine by carrying out a masquerade, which attests that only illusion can guarantee the Other. Before developing this argument in more detail, let us return to the second objection I have to Shaviro’s account, namely my disagreement that the ending functions as a comforting nod to ‘reproductive futurism’. I will argue that a reading of the film as happy and optimistic is justified not because it points to a comforting possibility, but rather because of its stark facing of reality. The palpable fear exhibited by Leo, the proverbial ‘innocent child’, at the moment he registers that the end of the world is near, drives home the inescapable reality that Claire disavows throughout the film: that with the end of the world comes the end of sexual reproduction. Justine, who seems to have not only already accepted this nothingness, but has luxuriously basked in its glow, is able to facilitate acceptance of this fate for Leo, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) for Claire.

Conclusion Each of the three characters, Claire, Justine and Leo, comes to face the inevitable in his or her own way. As Peterson notes, ‘each character … embodies a different mode of comportment toward the absolute end … yet none of these modes are presented to us as necessarily more authentic … than the others’.56 Before Leo voices his fear to Justine, Claire makes a suggestion for how to enter into the nothingness: they should spend their

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last night together ‘on the terrace’ with ‘a glass of wine’ – an arrangement that, notably, excludes the child. This plan attempts to uphold the big Other at the very moment of its definitive destruction. The proposal is fitting for Claire; a neurotic in the throes of anxiety will attempt to conjure the big Other as a misguided attempt to both ward off loss and disguise its inexistence. Justine responds harshly to Claire’s plan, calling her idea ‘shit’ and suitably retorting, ‘why don’t we meet on the fucking toilet?’ Justine’s crude rejoinder evinces a disregard for civilization – an institution secured via prohibitions issued on behalf of the Other – appropriate on the eve of the end of the world. Rather than cling desperately to the resources of the symbolic, like Claire, Justine flouts the imminent meaninglessness of cultural conventions. In carrying out an act that attempts neither to reinstall symbolic authority nor to reject its efficiency, Justine, I submit, undertakes a potentially transformative engagement, aimed at the very point at which the symbolic ruse gives way to the real. In making this point, I reply to a question that Peterson raises of who, exactly, the ‘magic cave’ is for: is it only for the child or does Justine also ‘require a symbolic bulwark against destruction?’57 This question of who effectively ‘believes’ in the power of the magic cave overlooks the way belief functions as a binding mechanism, without the need for any subject to identify as the one who believes. All that is required for belief to hold together the social-symbolic network is the belief in the existence of a subject who really does believe – a ‘subject supposed to believe’. As Žižek describes it, belief is ‘always minimally “reflective”, a “belief in the belief of the other” … In order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in persona’.58 The question of who it is who actually believes evades the crucial point that the mere illusion of belief suffices to secure its binding function. Justine’s construction of the ‘magic cave’ can be understood as a fundamental embrace of exactly this constitutive power of illusion. This, in turn, suggests a reading of the film’s apocalyptic ending as an acceptance of the triumph of the Real over reality, which, rather than positing the Real as undermining reality, positions the Real as ‘an illusion which irrationally persists against the pressure of reality’.59 The conclusion of the film, thus, falls squarely in line with Lacan’s notion (drawing upon Joan Riviere) of the feminine masquerade. In building the ‘magic cave’ – an overt artifice (invoked by Leo throughout the film as a game) – Justine highlights that the efficacy of the big Other is sustained only through fiction. Critiques of the film for its inauthenticity are thus turned around: rather than simply posing a limitation to the ‘reality-effect’, we may read Melancholia’s exaggerations as the key to decoding the feminine logic of how to live within the horizon of the Real that undergirds the film, as well as pointing to an alternative interpretation of Melancholia as a ‘women’s film’. By

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simultaneously inhabiting and flaunting the artificiality of our most binding illusions, the film’s ending demonstrates a way to live within the contradiction of the not-all, which characterizes woman’s relationship to the symbolic order. In this sense, the film can be read as a parable for dealing with the loss of the Other, which protects us from the Real. If the film can, indeed, be seen as happy or optimistic, I suggest that it is in the sense that, in a hyperbolic way, it reveals the condition of all subjects; we are all always-already both marred and sustained by lack and living, both in the aftermath and on the brink of loss. The beauty of the film, for Žižek, lies in its expression of the possibility that one can come to ‘accept … that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near’.60 Rather than degenerate into nihilism, Žižek suggests that the film shows that ‘this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity’.61 I concur that the ‘profoundly optimistic’ quality of the film emerges from its demonstration of how a subject can live, and live ethically, in the light of this full recognition.

Notes 1

Cited in Marta Figlerowicz, ‘Comedy of Abandon: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia’, Film Quarterly 65 (4) (2012): 26.

2

Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Optimism of Melancholia’. http: bigthink.com/videos/ the-optimism-of-melancholia.

3

Steven Shaviro, ‘MELANCHOLIA or, the Romantic Anti-Sublime’, Sequence 1 (1) (2012): 32–3. http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence/ files/2012/12/MELANCHOLIA-or-The-Romantic-Anti-Sublime-SEQUENCE1.1-2012-Steven-Shaviro.pdf.

4

Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, p. 79.

5

‘MELANCHOLIA’, p. 35.

6

John’s suicide should be read as a response to his inability to face having been exposed as a fraud. Otherwise we are left with the less plausible explanation that he kills himself in order to avoid death.

7

And to this list of pathetic male characters, we might also add Justine and Claire’s father. Rather than an impostor, he embodies the ineffectual father who fails to mobilize the symbolic law and for whom all women are interchangeable (and appear to him to all be named ‘Betty’). As the only man Justine turns to when she finds herself at her wedding utterly unable to cope with the façade of happiness required of the bride, he inexplicably abandons her.

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I develop these strategies in more detail in Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, and Subversion, New York: SUNY Press, 2008.

9

Christopher Peterson, ‘The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia’, Discourse 35 (3) (2013): 407.

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10 Ibid., p. 402. 11 Ibid., p. 411. 12 Ibid., p. 412. 13 André Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 31. 14 Neil Maizels, ‘Melancholia, Cosmolis, and Modern Pain’. http://www. academia.edu/4117527/Melancholia_and_Cosmopolis_Arena_Magazine. 15 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 64. 16 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, p. 69. 17 Ibid. 18 Peterson, ‘Magic Cave’, p. 401. 19 Ibid., p. 403. 20 Sigmund Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety’, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 20, London: Hogarth Press, 1925, p. 162. 21 Ibid. 22 Colin MacCabe, ‘Riviera Eschatology’, Film Quarterly 65 (1) (2011): 63. 23 ‘Magic Cave’, p. 401. 24 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Melancholia and the Act’, Critical Inquiry 26 (4) (2000): 658. 25 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2014, p. 335. 26 Žižek, ‘Melancholia’, p. 661. 27 Anxiety, p. 333. 28 ‘Inhibitions’, p. 169. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 166. 31 Ibid., p. 169. 32 Anxiety, p. 54. 33 Ibid., p. 53. 34 Ibid. 35 Anxiety, p. 76. 36 Ibid., p. 297. 37 Ibid., p. 231. It might be argued that deception arises within the formation of anxiety in an additional way. Although Lacan asserts that ‘as an affect,

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anxiety never lies; the signifiers that moor it’ are unreliable as a result of the process of repression (Anxiety, p. 14). 38 Ibid., p. 9. 39 Ibid., p. 77. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 42. 42 ‘Magic Cave’, p. 407. 43 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief, New York: Routledge, 2001. 44 Anxiety, p. 50. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 49. 47 Ibid., p. 50. 48 Ibid., p. 51. 49 Ibid., p. 52. 50 ‘MELANCHOLIA’, p. 44. 51 Ibid. 52 Maizels, ‘Melancholia’, p. 23. 53 ‘MELANCHOLIA’, p. 49. 54 ‘Magic Cave’, p. 415. 55 Zahi Zalloua, ‘Žižek with French Feminism: Enjoyment and the Feminine Logic of the “Not-All”’, Intertexts 18 (2) (2014): 112–13. 56 ‘Magic Cave’, p. 119. 57 ‘Magic Cave’, p. 419. 58 Slavoj Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997, pp. 107–8. 59 Žižek, ‘Melancholy’, p. 671. 60 ‘Optimism’. 61 Ibid.

13 Lars von Trier’s fantasy of femininity in Nymphomaniac Hilary Neroni

Von Trier’s excessive feminine Von Trier’s films reveal his fascination with the feminine. In the majority of his films, women’s struggles occupy the central role in the narrative. For example, Breaking the Waves (1996) looks at a woman’s response to her new husband’s paralysis and his request that she have sex with other men. Melancholia (2011) situates one woman’s struggle with depression as a radical critique of a patriarchal society about to be destroyed by a stray planet. Antichrist (2009) considers one woman’s reaction to the death of her son and her husband’s attempts to pull her out of her grief, and Nymphomaniac (2013) stages an epic investigation into the cause of and potential interpretation of a woman obsessed with sex. As much as these films have female-centred narratives, they are also studies of the female characters. In other words, the camera prompts the viewer to interpret the women’s actions throughout the unrolling of the narrative. The plight of the women in these films seems obvious, and yet the women all retain an aura of mystery. The films lay out the very restrictive social expectations that contribute to the women’s oppressed positions, but the women’s reactions to those positions seem excessive and create a riddle that the viewer can’t work out. For von Trier, the social restrictions that women experience generate femininity while at the same time condemning any expression or exploration of the feminine. Through this paradox, von Trier presents femininity

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as caught in a Kafkaesque trap. The rules make no sense, and yet they are the only option. By presenting femininity in this way, von Trier uncovers the potential radicality of femininity in relation to the social order. At the same time, however, he also creates a rather unfinished picture of femininity, one that lacks an acknowledgement of a woman’s potential for an internal limit. Von Trier depicts femininity confronted with an external limit in the form of patriarchal restrictions, but entirely lacking its own internal limit. Nowhere is this truer than in his recent Nymphomaniac. In investigating Nymphomaniac, I hope to shed light on the mysterious missing feminine limit in most of von Trier’s films. It will be helpful initially to consider the infinite qualities in von Trier’s depictions of femininity. A von Trier film presupposes that women are defined by the restrictions they face in the social order. While women may have myriad aspects that define them, they are also incessantly constrained from movement, accomplishment and expressions of desire. Patriarchy has numerous ways of limiting women by defining the domestic sphere as their proper realm, to dictating acceptable sexual expressions, to restricting their movement through fashion expectations, and so on. How do we form our identities amid these restrictions? Do we locate authenticity by following the social laws or rebelling against them? A von Trier film asks these questions, but it tends to begin its narrative after a woman has grown up within these restrictions. This woman seems already ensconced in a certain neurotic way of responding to social limitations on gender. (Here, Nymphomaniac is the exception since it attempts to explore the evolution of this female character through her own flashbacks that document all the experiences she feels landed her in her current situation.) Von Trier’s female characters neither conform nor rebel against social expectations. Instead, they are afflicted with excessive emotions and desires that make them unable to escape and unable to conform. To this end, they become paradoxical characters that puzzle the other characters and the viewer. In doing so, they throw the structures of patriarchy into relief. Melancholia, for instance, begins just after Justine has got married and is about to arrive at the wedding reception. The film’s subject – a young woman who has just got married – is utterly traditional. Patriarchy expects that women marry, are happy about marriage and see marriage as one of their most important social accomplishments. Ideology (in fiction, advertising, family structures and so on) undergirds this patriarchal expectation by depicting marriage as that which will make women happy for the rest of their lives. Melancholia debunks these mainstream ideological assumptions while exposing the bankruptcy of marriage. The opening shot of Melancholia depicts Justine as laughing and happy, but soon after Justine exhibits characteristics of extreme depression. The viewer learns that depression has been a problem for Justine in the past and that



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her family, especially her sister Claire, is worried about her falling into another depressive bout before the wedding is over. Justine’s melancholia overwhelms her so that she is unable to rise to the demands of the lavish wedding. She takes a bath, for example, when she is supposed to be cutting the cake; she makes it clear that smiling for the guests feels like a terrible chore; and her sister has to force her to throw the bouquet. Each of these depressive outbursts occurs in response to a social expectation during the wedding reception. She can’t be shaken out of her depression to attend to her female responsibilities, which she shirks in her lack of action and lack of happiness. Her husband appears loving, attentive and understanding, so the viewer is led to surmise that what is depressing her is patriarchy itself rather than a bad union. The trouble in the film is universal rather than simply particular. It is weddings as such that are causing her depression, and clearly the wedding is a synecdoche for the larger restrictions on female behaviour. Most von Trier films begin as the main female encounters one last straw of restriction that is causing her a great deal of trouble. This last straw reveals a major restriction to which she can no longer even pretend to adhere. It also sheds light on her mode of dealing with the social. In Melancholia, it is an excessive depression in response to the dictums of marriage. In Antichrist, the main female character, just called She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), responds to the death of her son with such extreme grief that she must be hospitalized. Her therapist husband, He (Willem Dafoe), however, decides to bring her to a remote cabin to help her out of her excessive and debilitating grief. The sex, violence and depression that unfold thereafter continue the excessive response to the son’s death. The film makes it clear that She grieves in response not only to the death of the child but to motherhood as such. In these two films, as well as most of the others from von Trier, the female characters’ neuroses (whether depression, hysteria or sex addiction) are both perplexing and admirable. The viewer can be simultaneously traumatized (and often annoyed) by the character and be rooting for the character to continue with her neurosis (for Justine to wallow further in her depression, for She to be more grief stricken, for Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to have more sex and so on). The neuroses are admirable because they rebel against these patriarchal restrictions. Many theorists analysing von Trier also note this. For example, Lori Marso says, ‘Their bodily suffering and pathological symptoms (depression, melancholia, nymphomania, anxiety, fear) are linked to an inability or unwillingness to conform to society’s bourgeois and patriarchal expectations.’1 In other words, von Trier depicts the women’s neuroses through their bodily and emotional responses to patriarchy. In this light, von Trier’s depiction of neurosis is close to Freud’s original theories on neurosis. Freud posited that a neurosis is a response to a trauma that has been repressed. The response appears in the form

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of symptoms that prevent the subjects from engaging in their lives. The symptoms themselves speak; they have meaning. Freud explains, ‘Neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and, like them, have a connection with the life of those who produce them.’2 For von Trier, each restriction that patriarchy places on women becomes a repressed trauma, one that causes neurotic symptoms.

Reading feminine sexuality as symptom In Nymphomaniac, for example, a seemingly kind man, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), finds a young woman named Joe beaten up in an alley behind his apartment. He brings her in and promises her no harm. She accepts his help and responds positively to his prodding that she tell him how she ended up in such a precarious situation. She proceeds to tell the story of her sexual life from when she was a little girl to the present day. As a young girl, she explains, she enjoyed discovering her clitoris and vaginal pleasures in innocent ways. In one flashback of herself around five years old, she delights in rubbing her vagina on a bathroom floor flooded with water with her friend doing the same next to her. These early years of sexual exploration gave way to teen years in which she discovered sex itself. Joe tells many stories explaining that as a young person she pursued more and more sexual exploits to satisfy her cravings. As she tells these stories, however, she seems unaware of any connection to social restrictions. Her behaviour, that becomes progressively socially unacceptable, remains to her just an attempt to satisfy herself. It is Seligman who declares that Joe’s nymphomania is in fact a symptom, a symptom that reveals a larger trauma. As a sexually desiring woman growing up in a restrictive patriarchal society, Seligman suggests in his many interpretations of Joe’s behaviour that Joe reacted to patriarchy’s demands on her sexual expression by rebelling through her endless sexual exploits. Patriarchal society, von Trier contends through the film, dictates that women can desire only within the bounds of acceptable behaviour (both in the way they desire and whom they desire). However, Joe repressed this social restriction, which led to an excessive sexual desire that could find little satisfaction without increasingly excessive sexual exploits. In this way, the title of the film, Nymphomaniac, acts as a label that is revealed to be itself a symptom of society’s attempt to contain and categorize female sexuality. That is to say, ‘nymphomaniac’ is a term that describes a perversion rather than an acceptable mode of behaviour within society. Thinking of herself as a nymphomaniac reveals Joe’s acceptance of that designation. At one point in the film, Joe tries to rehabilitate herself by going to a sex addiction therapy group but defies the group’s anti-sex



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rhetoric by standing up and embracing the fact that she is a nymphomaniac.3 Von Trier uses this title to reflect the way that a restriction can generate an excessive response that in itself lays bare the restriction. It is Seligman who takes up the role of the interpreter of Joe’s behaviour, since Joe seems (until she meets Seligman) utterly non-self-reflective. Seligman takes up the position of the therapist in the film when he begins to read her actions as symptoms. After each story Joe tells him, he interprets it for her in order to prompt her to see how her actions were rooted in a cultural context. He wants to demonstrate to her that her symptoms, her infinite unsatisfied sexual desire and sexual exploits, have sense, that they can be interpreted. His point is that this interpretation can shed light on her behaviour, potentially freeing her from the violent downward spiral through which she tumbles. By the end of the film, in Seligman’s final interpretation, he says, ‘You wanted more from life than was good for you … You fought back against a gender that had been killing and mutilating millions of women.’ In interpretations like this, von Trier verbalizes – through Seligman – what the viewer should consider along with his or her own visceral response to Joe. Whether the viewer sees her in a positive or negative light, von Trier suggests that the viewer should at the very least also consider her actions as having meaning, as a response to a society that constricts her identity. There are two ways Seligman turns out to be a bad therapist and in which von Trier breaks from Freud’s understanding of neuroses. First of all, Seligman doesn’t understand countertransference. Countertransference occurs when the therapist begins to have feelings for the patient. Drawn into the web of the patient’s desires, the therapist’s own desires begin to intermingle with the patient’s presence and stories. At the end of the film, Seligman betrays his depiction of himself as simply a well-meaning intellectual who will keep her safe by entering Joe’s bedroom when he thinks she is asleep and trying to have sex with her. When she says no, Seligman says, ‘But it can’t matter to you, you’ve had sex with thousands of men.’ Dismayed and shocked, Joe finds her gun and shoots him before she runs off. This abrupt and violent ending seems a surprise after all of Seligman’s careful intellectual interpretations as well as his endless assurances to Joe that she was safe with him, in part because he claimed to be utterly asexual. As a visual contradiction to this assertion of asexuality, Seligman pulls out his penis and fondles it before telling her she can’t care after having had sex with so many men. Part of the shock of the scene is revealing Seligman’s genitals after his intellectual status had allowed him to be one of the few characters in the film whose body was not shown naked. His attempt to have sex with Joe, which might even be a surprise to himself and is certainly meant to surprise the viewer, depicts a classic countertransference that he acts on. Obviously, Seligman is not an actual therapist. In fact, his role seems to hover between

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professor, art critic and psychoanalyst. But the setting visually belies this lack of credentials as she lies on the bed and he sits above her in a chair. In this classic pose, Seligman interprets her answers while prodding her for more self-awareness. His ability for astute interpretation, however, seems to fail when it comes to being aware of his own position, which leads to his fall into full countertransference with no ability to check his actions. Additionally, Seligman fails as a therapist by trying to impose his interpretation on Joe rather than acting as a barrier that can elicit Joe’s own interpretation, her own realization. While this depiction may well be a critique that von Trier is levelling at well meaning patriarchs (and possibly himself), it doesn’t reveal itself in time nor does it undo the overwhelming presence of Seligman’s constant interpretations of Joe’s sexuality. The erudite Seligman’s interpretations stand in sharp contrast to the pornography, violence and uncertainty that riddle scenes of Joe’s life and define her experiences. He eloquently folds her explicit and often unnerving experiences into art history, religious doctrine, archetypal myths and even psychoanalysis itself. Rather than allowing her to revel in her own depiction of debauchery and failure, Seligman reveals that her sexual exploits contain the same themes and desires that are expressed by artists, theologians, psychoanalysts and culture itself. For example, when Joe tells of her father dying, she explains that she wasn’t able to cry but instead began to become sexually lubricated. In the last shot of this flashback, the camera shoots her father through her legs as a drop of moisture rolls down her leg. She says her reaction was shameful. Seligman, however, interprets it otherwise. He says, ‘I know you like to present yourself in a negative way and that you have this kind of dark bias that you are worse than everyone else, but this story doesn’t add to that belief. It’s extremely common to react sexually in a crisis. It may be shameful to you but in literature there are many worse examples.’ He works to show her that, rather than being an abomination, she is instead the very expression of culture, albeit an expression of culture’s inability to grasp its own desire. The surprising ending, in which Seligman reveals himself to be just like the other men in Joe’s story, does undermine Seligman’s position as saviour and would-be feminist. The brief surprise ending, however, doesn’t seem to have the power to completely upend the six-hour investigation that Nymphomaniac undertakes. If this final scene undermines Seligman, the question remains: does it undermine all his points, all his attempts to make the feminist argument about social restrictions? The ending certainly does not resolve any of the issues within the film, but instead leaves the viewer wondering about voice and interpretation. The film focuses on Joe’s story, but Seligman continually tells Joe that she’s not reading herself correctly, that she’s not reading the way her actions are reactions to the oppressive nature of patriarchal society. The ending suggests that Seligman, however



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well meaning, may be just one more oppressive force that Joe needs to escape from. Ultimately, the crux of their relationship is expressed in the form of the film as it goes back and forth between Joe’s memory and the two sitting in his bedroom talking. Joe’s memories may be aptly summed up by something that she utters towards the end of the film. Right as her story is catching up with the present day, she recounts how she came to be beaten and in the alleyway when Seligman found her. She explains that through a job gone wrong P (Mia Goth), her current lover, and Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), her former lover, met and became lovers with each other. They find her in the alley and savagely beat her up, have sex in front of her when she is lying beaten and defile her by urinating on her. After they leave, Joe is lying on the ground, and she says, ‘Fill all my holes please.’ Joe had uttered this same line earlier in the film when she was a young woman having sex with Jerôme, with whom she had fallen in love. The line becomes an analogy for female desire, especially the idea that female desire is insatiable. In this way, female sexuality is depicted as an infinite void with no limit and no contours. At the earlier iteration, Joe had just discovered that love greatly adds to sexual pleasure. The moment she buys into this belief, however, is the moment she can no longer experience pleasure. Initially, when she utters the line, ‘Fill all my holes’, it seems possible. In other words, with the addition of love to her experience of sex, she seems to have found what she was looking for. In the last part of Volume I, Joe has reached a peak of sexual activity as a young adult. She holds down a job during the day while at night she manages to have sex with between seven and ten men a night. While talking to Seligman, she suggests that the quantity of sexual partners is an attempt to orchestrate one perfectly harmonized lover. She says, ‘Normally a nymphomaniac is seen as someone who can’t get enough and therefore has sex with many different people. Well, that of course is true, but if I’m to be honest, I see it precisely as the sum of all these different sexual experiences. So in that way, I have only one lover.’ But when she re-encounters Jerôme and they fall in love, she realizes that love is the component she was missing. Previous to loving Jerôme, she sought different men to fill her various needs; when she falls for Jerôme, however, she feels as if he could fill all those needs, could satisfy all her desires. Initially, the film seems to take her request (‘Fill all my holes’) literally and focuses on several close-ups of vaginal penetration, but then von Trier presents a screen split in three ways. Each panel depicts an image from one of the three lovers she has been describing. This triptych provides a visual orchestration of her lovers that together create one lover. These images range from the actual sex to the images used to reference Joe’s own analogies (of her lovers as tigers and so on) or from Seligman’s analogy of Bach’s method of structured polyphony through the image of an organ being played. The song that Seligman has played comes to an end dramatically as we see the tape player

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click off and the next shot is of Joe and Jerôme full screen having sex, with Joe looking despondent. Jerôme asks what is wrong, and Joe says, ‘I can’t feel anything.’ Thus, the apex of Volume I, itself an orgy of sexual images that coalesce in her discovery of the added pleasure of love, is also the end of Joe’s pleasure. This ends Volume I and leads to her quest in Volume II to rediscover her orgasm. At the end of Volume II, she repeats the line, ‘Fill all my holes, please.’ This time, her lovers have attacked her and left her behind. The second iteration is filled with desperation and longing rather than hope and expectation. The second iteration also robs the first iteration of its potential for success. In other words, by the end of Volume II the film suggests that satisfying this need is impossible. This line also seeks to illustrate Joe’s drive throughout the film. The need to fill the unfillable holes of the female body leads to excessive behaviour, or drives the excessiveness that defines femininity. This view of feminine sexuality implies that social restrictions create a female desire that rages out of control. It also suggests that the excessiveness leads to destruction instead of fulfilment. Or rather, that the pleasure for the ‘nymphomaniac’ is in the destruction itself rather than the sexual encounter. Joe’s drive seems to be a perfect example of jouissance or a pleasure in pain. Depictions of violent women mirror this idea since their violence is often depicted as going too far. Whereas male violence fits within the social order, female violence often marks a rupture of the social order and thus appears as uncontainable. Such a depiction of the violent woman is in fact linked to an idea of female sexuality as uncontainable.4 The depiction of Joe eventually turning to violence in Volume II is then consistent with the depiction of excessive female desire in Volume I. Certainly, the idea of excessiveness is also embedded in the film form itself, most especially in the unsimulated sex shown throughout. The question is, however, whether von Trier’s representation of female desire as excessive remains utterly traditional or radical in its presentation. Throughout the film, Seligman argues that Joe’s behaviour is a symptom that reveals the repressiveness of patriarchy, which could lead to a political awareness for Joe or the viewer. Joe’s flashbacks present her desire as singular and not in relation to patriarchy. Nymphomaniac, therefore, may take up neither Joe’s nor Seligman’s position, and instead make clear its position through the variegations of their interaction within the film form itself.

The generative effect of the restriction We can glean some insight into how restriction functions for von Trier in his film The Five Obstructions (2003), which he co-directed with Jørgen



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Leth. In this documentary, von Trier considers the generative nature of restriction, which he calls the obstruction. The film documents von Trier setting challenges for Leth, an older film-maker whom von Trier admires. Von Trier explains that Leth’s The Perfect Human (1967) – a 13-minute film questioning the existence of a perfect human and shot in a minimalist style – remains one of his favourite films, and as a result, he wants Leth to remake the film five times. For each remake, von Trier sets up obstructions, as he calls them, to guide the making of the film. For example, for the first film the obstructions are that Leth must make the film in Cuba, cannot use a set, can have no shot last longer than twelve frames and must answer the questions posed by Leth’s original The Perfect Human. The two riveting aspects of The Five Obstructions are the generative nature of the obstructions in the process of film-making and the cruel way that von Trier interacts with Leth. Von Trier’s cruelty lies in his pushing his friend and mentor with little concern for his health or mental state in the name of the artistic experiment. Von Trier often reacts negatively to Leth’s films and sends him out to correct the mistakes that von Trier feels he has made. The viewer has the freedom to disagree with von Trier, but von Trier seems to have the last word. Nonetheless, even more provocative is the revelation that restriction sparks creativity. Von Trier’s vague request that Leth repeat his former film doesn’t seem sufficient. On the other hand, the random restrictions he gives Leth on both form and content create problems that generate imaginative responses. These responses lay the foundation for the discoveries that the director makes in each film. Through documenting the making of the shorts themselves and his own analysis of them, von Trier demonstrates the way restrictions make room for creativity rather than destroying it. The restrictions create scaffolding that generates content but ultimately falls away in the process. In other words, the result is excessive in relation to the initial restriction because the experience of the short film obscures the original restriction, which just becomes a generative tool. The restriction is the ladder that the film kicks away once it is utilized. But von Trier’s other films do not evince the same investment in the generative nature of restrictions that The Five Obstructions does. In his other films, the societal restrictions placed on women produce femininity, but it is a femininity that remains obsessed by this restriction throughout its production. Unlike the films in The Five Obstructions, femininity remains determined by the patriarchal restrictions that initially constitute it. In the films of von Trier, femininity responds to patriarchal restrictions with excess, and it has no other limit than these external restrictions. What von Trier does not posit is the possibility of an internal limit to femininity or feminine sexuality. Certainly, one could argue that von Trier also sees this excessive femininity as a point of entry into the truth about society and patriarchy. That is to say, he sees the excessive symptoms as a road map to

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the traumatic limits that patriarchy places on women. As the interpreter of feminine excess, Seligman plays the role of one who can read those symptoms to understand their link to culture and see the evidence of the original patriarchal restrictions. Outside of this excessive femininity being a marker of social restrictiveness, von Trier does not see the obstructions of patriarchy as positive in the way he sees the five obstructions as positive in The Five Obstructions. He also fails to recognize a key generative limit – an internal limit – within all the subjects that could play a part in femininity. The failure to see an internal limit to feminine sexuality is a failure to recognize that every subject is always barred through its relationship to the signifier. For psychoanalysis, the subject emerges through the signifier, which means there is no subject prior to the encounter with signification. This implies that at the heart of subjectivity lies a foundational limit or restriction. The signifier allows us access to ourselves through a representative, but it also divorces us from ourselves by locating our identity in this representative. In this way, the signifier creates the ultimate generative restriction, one that both creates the subject and alienates her from herself. Patriarchy has a very specific relationship to the barred subject. Patriarchy’s structure promulgates the idea that our identity would be in chaos if it weren’t for the restrictions that patriarchy imposes on us. It imposes restrictions on the subject and announces prohibitions in order to hide that there is already a foundational limit. If we see patriarchy’s restrictions as an attempt to obscure a more foundational restriction (the split nature of subjectivity itself), then we can understand that allowing for the truth of one’s identity to flourish is not just about finding better restrictions. The split subject can never be whole but instead remains lacking and fractured. This is not a state that needs to be healed because it is this state that defines subjectivity itself. The barred subject poses problems for the expectations of identity under patriarchy, and thus patriarchy’s restrictions are severe in order to belie this underlying inherent contradiction. On the one hand, von Trier’s focus on the symptomatic responses that the women evince in reaction to patriarchal restrictions remains important. On the other hand, this representation of female subjectivity as wholly formed by patriarchal restrictions suggests that the only answer would be to switch to another system of restrictions. While this may not be a bad idea, it still ignores the nature of the subject, specifically the female subject’s relation to patriarchy or any social system. There will always be a dissonance between society’s expectations of non-fractured identity and the nature of subjectivity as such.



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Why pornography? Von Trier’s use of pornography further makes clear his attitude toward the limit in Nymphomaniac. His employment of unsimulated sex in Nymphomaniac also points to the question of the role of excess within a social structure. The question of the status of female neurosis in relation to patriarchy necessarily plays out through the pornography itself in this film. Film theorist Linda Williams points out that unsimulated sex is often seen as authentic since it is recording an act not usually shown in mainstream film. But Williams argues, ‘there is no such thing as authentic sex whether in art films, R-rated films, or pornography’.5 Williams uses the term ‘hard-core eroticism’ to describe European art films that employ unsimulated sex.6 As a European art auteur whose work is known as pushing the envelope of formal expectations, von Trier’s use of unsimulated sex in Nymphomaniac calls attention to itself throughout the film as an excess that the viewer must engage with. Von Trier himself often refers to this film as his pornography film even though he has used unsimulated sex in other films. He represents Joe’s desire through unsimulated sex scenes within the film, and these scenes proliferate throughout the film. Certainly, von Trier could have made this film without these scenes, without showing actual penetration and genitalia, but it would have been a far different film. The pornographic elements within the film are as much the topic of the film as Joe’s rampant desire. How do we approach von Trier’s use of pornography? Does it actually provide any insight into his relationship to feminine sexuality and excess? In an essay on Antichrist, Lori Marso asks a similar question by comparing Simone de Beauvoir’s approach to the Marquis de Sade to her own approach (or to the approach feminists should take) to von Trier. She theorizes a way to understand the radical potential of von Trier’s images of women. She argues, ‘I think these grotesque images of nature, the body, and women exceed such reclamation. They do not simply return us to misogyny and business as usual. They are not so easily recovered. They stay with us and press us to reconsider not only our values, but also our usual forms and means of political association.’7 While this may be true of his other films, in Nymphomaniac the grotesque neatly mirrors pornography itself. In other words, the grotesque in this film is not uncomfortable or unseen; it is an accepted genre with expected shots and images. Close-ups of the vagina, of oral sex, of the penis, of penetration are not rendered disturbing but rather remain within oft-repeated tropes that viewers are aware of even if they are not avid viewers of porn. The extreme depression and social rebellion that the female body represents in Melancholia or the grief that morphs into sexual desire and violence in Antichrist are indeed grotesque images that linger in the viewer’s mind. But Nymphomaniac’s pornography, while

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titillating, is not grotesque.8 The scenes shot are relatively common for pornography, even if they are reminiscent of an older style of pornography rather than the contemporary Internet porn.9 In order to film this with mainstream film actors (such as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Shia LaBeouf and Uma Thurman), von Trier used body doubles for the sex scenes. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in Cannes, Nymphomaniac producer Louise Vesth explains, ‘We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post we will digital-impose the two … So above the waist it will be the star and the below the waist it will be the doubles.’10 The shots are therefore a high-tech amalgamation of porn and art film aesthetics. Von Trier also used prosthetics for shots in which the actors perform oral sex. Of course, there have been other European art film-makers who employ unsimulated sex. Notably, Catherine Breillat has shot several such films (for example Romance (1999), and Anatomy of Hell (2004)), but she usually employs porn actors to play the entire role rather than as a body double. Von Trier’s approach created a digital landscape replete with the pleasure of seeing well-known actors having sex. This is clearly a realm where mainstream cinema doesn’t go and one that pornography doesn’t have access to, since appearing in pornography would hurt the careers of mainstream actors. The combination of the two creates a titillation of fantasy, so much so that the actors were often asked about the process itself as if to reassure their audience. For example, Stacy Martin (who plays the younger version of Joe) responded to one such question about the practical nature of the scenes. She says, ‘Because of the special effects, they needed the porn doubles to do it first. So they would have sex – they would do their job, basically, because I think they’re porn actors in Germany – and then we would come on and do exactly the same thing, but with pants on, basically. And then it’s all [edited in] post.’11 Every actor in the film, when interviewed mentions this filming process. In fact, almost all the articles about the film mention that there are body doubles for the sex scenes. Interviewers had a hard time even imagining the actor and the porn actor in the same room, though they were so intimately connected in the same frame. In trying to understand how to imagine the mainstream actor alongside the porn actor, one interviewer asked if Stacy Martin hung out with her porn double. Martin answers: No. I mean, I met her, but we didn’t have tea or anything. It’s strange just to see how quickly a set can change. Like, the atmosphere really changed when they did those scenes, and I did stay a bit too long at one point. When they started filming, I was like, ‘Actually, this is a bit too weird – I’m gonna go’. It was like they were doing a porn movie, and everything they do, they do [for real].12



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With answers like this, the actors make it clear that they had nothing to do with the porn scenes – that they couldn’t even handle being present when those scenes were shot – even though those shots were digitally stitched into their performances. They also suggest that the hierarchy between mainstream actors and porn actors is such that they can’t be friends (or even have tea together). This divide between the actors indicates the filmic restrictions that von Trier confronts with this film. Von Trier defies the restriction on unsimulated sex in mainstream and art films in Nymphomaniac. The digital stitching together of the mainstream and porn body is visually successful, looks seamless and appears as if these actors are having unsimulated sex. Von Trier could have shot it or edited it together in such a way that there was clearly a schism between the two sets of actors, but this is not the case. He clearly wanted it to look seamless and appear as unsimulated sex. If von Trier were going for such realism, why would his producers, his company and his actors broadcast that there were porn doubles used in the film? In other words, if he were going for realism, why not purposely obfuscate the fact that he used body doubles? Rather than obfuscating the use of body doubles, the body doubles and the technical achievement of this seamless sex superimposition became a part of the mythology and advertising surrounding the film. Most likely, since all the mainstream actors had very specific nudity contracts for this film, the well-known actors in the film would not have taken the role if people didn’t know that they weren’t having sex in the film. In this way, the film is a paradox. It is a film about a woman with a sex addiction that advertises that the film has unsimulated sex in it, while at the same time advertising that this very sex wasn’t by the actors but by porn body doubles. This not only makes sense, but also mirrors the logic of feminine excess that manifests itself in the film. The prohibition in mainstream cinema is against unsimulated sex. This is clearly true in Hollywood where even very erotic simulated sex will land a film-maker an NC-17 rating, and unsimulated sex will automatically bar a film from appearing in mainstream theatres. While other nations may have less strict ratings systems or censorship codes than the USA, they still generally keep pornography and mainstream cinema separate. In many ways, von Trier was successful in this rebellion against this restriction, since the film was shown in the USA and around the globe. Of course, there was controversy, and many theatres elected not to show the film, to show only one volume of the film, or to show the censored version of the film that cut out many of the actual sex scenes (though not all). At the same time, it is important to note that the press surrounding the film (in interviews with producers and actors) tempered the extent of the rebellion by emphasizing that the mainstream actors were not involved in the unsimulated sex. The way they present it seems as though there are two different films, one with the actual actors

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and then a side project with porn actors. This becomes the extra-textual information with which viewers approach the film. This mirrors von Trier’s depiction of the feminine threat to patriarchy in his films and specifically in Nymphomaniac. Von Trier depicts excessive female desire as a symptomatic response to the restrictions of identity, but these responses do not really threaten the system as such. In the same way, von Trier’s use of unsimulated sex leaves the traditional cinematic division fully intact. Joe’s sex addiction puts her own life at risk without threatening or radically changing patriarchy as a whole or even any one patriarchal individual. Joe’s story, for example, clearly influences Seligman by changing him from an asexual intellectual to a sexualized man who thinks he can impose himself on Joe. In other words, it seems to change him from a feminist into a sexist patriarch rather than moving him in the direction of feminism. The film’s unsimulated sex relies on a traditionally patriarchal distinction between the good girls (the film’s stars who never engage in sex on screen) and the bad girls (the porn doubles who perform the sex scenes). When von Trier turns to unsimulated sex, he does not end up creating a genuine disturbance.

The holes are the limit The scene in which Joe first utters her key line – ‘Fill all my holes, please’ – is exemplary. Joe is trying to fulfil her desire by having sex with many men. To round out the experience, she realizes that falling in love seems to be the missing piece of her sexual satisfaction puzzle. She utters the line at the height of one of her sexual experiences with Jerôme, the man with whom she is in love. Once she utters the line, the sex scene becomes more dramatic: von Trier turns to more close-ups of the sex act itself. There is a shot of Jerôme putting his extended tongue into Joe’s mouth, and the next shot is of his penis penetrating her vagina. The following shot is a close-up of his penis in her vagina and two of his fingers in her anus. This frenzy of hard-core close-ups attempts to literally perform Joe’s request. After this, von Trier moves to the triptych discussed earlier, which brings together Joe’s different sexual encounters but ends with her no longer able to orgasm. Joe had made the claim to Seligman that her many lovers blended together as one but this sequence belies that claim. Just as love turns out not to be the answer to desire, multiple men also turn out not to be the answer to desire. Joe has all her holes filled literally and figuratively but is left with nothing. Pornography relies on fascination with actual penetration and with an attempt to represent orgasm or track what leads up to orgasm. This is where von Trier veers away from traditions in pornography. As Linda Williams points out, hard-core pornography remains concerned with orgasm as the



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result of sex (regardless of what constitutes that sex). But orgasm not only is not centre stage in Nymphomaniac; it is that which Joe loses in the film.13 In this way, the film is much more about Joe’s desire and her jouissance rather than about her sexual pleasure. The restrictions of patriarchy make that pleasure unavailable to women like Joe, whose desire can’t run its course within the very limited expectations surrounding it. Filming unsimulated sex suggests that the viewer will get closer to experiencing orgasm or to relating to it. There are several shots that attempt to represent orgasm in porn – specifically, ejaculation and the woman’s moaning or screaming. Images of the vagina and other female orifices being penetrated, being filled with the penis, fingers or tongue have become genre tropes – whether shot in close-up or longer shots. These holes that fill the screen – the vagina, the anus, the mouth – are in fact a limit that ideology obscures. The hole is the internal limit that may seem endless but is completely limited. Its endlessness is a fantasy. In patriarchy, the female bodily hole as infinite remains the objective correlative of female sexuality. All of these images that make up patriarchal fantasy cannot answer the very difficult human question: where is desire and satisfaction located? Even the most explicit screen sex still cannot locate a place on the body or a way to film the body that arrives at desire and satisfaction itself. This is because subjects themselves don’t have access to this elusive answer. As psychoanalysis points out, desire remains constitutively unsatisfied and destined to promulgate itself through an infinite number of missed potential objects. What feels inscrutable about sexuality, for both men and women, is the limitless nature of desire. Actual sex appears to be the logical place to turn to investigate the question of desire, but sex can be misleading because the answers do not necessarily lie within the body. This is true for both men and women since we are both barred subjects. The burden for women in patriarchy is that they have constantly to signify the perpetual nature of desire whereas men do not have to bear this particular burden of representation.14 The split nature of the subject produces a desire defined by repetition because there is no object that can make the subject whole. Patriarchy defines identity, however, as whole. The foundational obstruction of subjectivity – the fact that it is split – can expose the falsity of patriarchy’s expectations. This is where von Trier’s film concedes to standard patriarchal expectations. Even though it reveals patriarchy as restrictive of female sexuality, it continues to propagate the fantasy that female sexuality is limitless. It can’t imagine that women – like men – contain an internal limit that reveals the falsity of patriarchy’s assumptions about identity. In the end, Nymphomaniac repeats the male fantasy of female sexuality that it is trying to critique. This is evident in both the depiction of Joe’s limitless desire as well as in the inability of unsimulated sex to reveal more than simulated sex. Von Trier makes the same mistake as Seligman: he interprets

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insatiable female desire as transcendent and sees bodily orifices as limitless. The point is not that female desire is a limitless hole but rather that the hole is the limit. Pornography and von Trier are fascinated with female orifices because they reveal that they are limited, but this truth must always be disavowed.

Notes 1

Lori Marso, ‘Must We Burn Lars von Trier?: Simone de Beauvoir’s Body Politics in Antichrist’, Theory & Event 18 (2) (2015): 6.

2

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture XVII, ‘The Sense of Symptoms’, translated and edited by James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966, p. 319.

3

In this moment, Joe heroically embraces her symptom as the truth of her identity, but it doesn’t lead to the dissolution of her nymphomania or alienation.

4

See Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema, Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

5

Linda Williams, ‘CINEMA’S SEX ACTS’, Film Quarterly 67 (4) (2014): 15.

6

Williams also points out that what is most disturbing in European art films to viewers is not so much the sex as the pushing of established boundaries of representation in general of gender, sexuality and so forth. See Linda Williams, ‘CINEMA’S SEX ACTS’.

7

‘Must We Burn Lars von Trier?’, p. 18.

8

One caveat to this here might be that bringing the porn and the mainstream actors together may itself be the grotesque, that thing that is truly barred in society.

9

As Marso points out in her essay, when she mentions Nymphomaniac, the most unusual scene might be when Joe repeatedly slaps her vagina after she is no longer able to have an orgasm.

10 Scott Roxborough, ‘Cannes: Nymphomaniac Producer Reveals Graphics Are Used in “Groundbreaking” Sex Scenes’, Hollywood Reporter, 20 May 2013. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-nymphomaniacproducer-sex-scenes-525666. 11 Quoted in Oliver Lunn, ‘Talking to Stacy Martin About Her Fake Sex with Shia LaBeouf’, Vice 2 (26) (2014). http://www.vice.com/read/the-innerworkings-of-lars-von-triers-fake-sex-scenes. 12 Quoted in ‘Talking to Stacy Martin About Her Fake Sex with Shia LaBeouf’. 13 As Williams argues, ‘Even pornography’s sadomasochistic variants are only about the achievement of more circuitous pleasure’, ‘CINEMA’S SEX ACTS’, p. 22. 14 The difference between films such as Shame (2011) and Thanks for Sharing



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(2012) about men with endless desire and Nymphomaniac about a woman with endless desire is revelatory. In Shame and Thanks for Sharing, the men are depicted as sex addicts. They have an addiction problem and sex is their drug of choice. Although both films make it seem difficult to deal with this addiction, they also suggest that proper vigilance may help the problem. Nymphomaniac, however, does not see Joe as simply addicted to sex but rather pursuing a desire inherent in but denied to most women.

14 Mea maxima vulva: Appreciation and aesthetics of chance in Nymphomaniac Tarja Laine

This essay considers Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac dilogy as an allegory of a polyphonic cinematic event that creates an unusual relationship between the film and the spectator. The two films revolve around Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) narrating her life story to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who sometimes reacts to her narration with fascination, sometimes with disbelief. I shall explore how their relationship can be seen as an allegory that describes the relationship between cinema and the spectator in general. This relationship is based on trust and the aesthetics of chance, and it is best characterized as a reciprocal, co-creative energy that flows in both directions. However, as soon as this flow of energy is blocked, a form of resistance develops, which prevents the functional relationship.1 This, in turn, is linked with the valuation of cinema. I shall argue that aesthetic appreciation seems to be at its most intense when one is able to trust the very event of cinematic experience – however untrustworthy – from within one’s own sensory perception and intelligent deliberation. The Nymphomaniac dilogy is no empty provocation. Rather, it invites us to reflect upon our own act of looking by first closing and then breaching the spectatorial contract with the films. This complicates the controversy that is raging over these films; a controversy that is based on complaints that von Trier subjects his female protagonist to a patriarchal worldview, restraining her autonomous agency. This is an accusation that has been brought against many of von Trier’s films, even though his male protagonists are clearly subordinate as narrative agents to his female ones from Breaking the Waves (1996) onwards.

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Nymphomaniac Volume I starts with a black screen accompanied by diegetic off-screen noises such as the sound of an approaching train, pattering water, squeaking metal and a dinging bell. Silence enters only after approximately a minute and a half, and the black screen is replaced by a long shot of a dark, gloomy, labyrinthine alley, lit by only one streetlight that illuminates slowly falling snow. The architectural structure of the alley evokes an association with Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures that literally absorb the spectator within their space, while the film invites us to step into the world of cinema. Then the image is cut to a close-up of meltwater dripping down a brick wall, the camera lingering on its uneven surface before passing a squeaking, rusty ventilation fan and coming to a halt with a trash can cover in close-up, rhythmically hit by the dripping water as if it were a drum. In the next shot the camera tracks along a tin roof before settling in a close-up of a rusty iron nut chain suspended from a roof beam, jingling quietly as the nuts make contact. A chain is often associated with the logic of cause and effect, but the way in which the shots are organized in this opening suggests haphazardness instead, as they follow each other seemingly without any narrative motivation or significance. At the 3:15 minute mark of the film, there is a crane shot into a close-up of a bleeding hand, after which the film tracks into a square hole in the wall, diving into darkness. Finally, there is a shot from inside this hole, the edges functioning as a black frame for the image, just as the wall behind the movie screen in a film theatre might function. The image that we see here is exactly the same as the one with which the film opens, but it is now expanded into an extreme long shot so that we see our badly beaten Joe lying unconscious on the ground to the left side of the image, while Rammstein’s ‘Führe Mich’ (‘Lead Me’) kicks off forcefully on the soundtrack. Both volumes of Nymphomaniac regularly and randomly cut to footage of which it is difficult to say what status it has, that is, whether the footage is existing educational, archival or stock material, early film imagery or documentary film. There are references to Eadweard Muybridge, von Trier’s earlier work (The Kingdom, Antichrist) and countless quotes from Andrei Tarkovsky. The icon that triggers the chapter on ‘The Eastern Church and the Western Church’ could be seen as a reference to Tarkovsky’s film about the great icon painter Andrei Rublev (1966). The image on the title card of The Compleat Angler is the spitting image of the first shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). Nymphomaniac also features a shot of Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565) as well as a Bach church chorale from ‘The Little Organ Book’, two masterpieces that play important roles in Tarkovsky’s film. The scene with young Joe levitating is a direct reference to the levitation scene in Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), and one of the chapters in von Trier’s film is given the same title. Again, the similarity between the title card of this chapter and the poster for Tarkovsky’s film is striking.



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Finally Seligman’s apartment itself is as rundown as Stalker’s house in Stalker (1979). It is clear that we have landed in the world of cinema, and this is why the dilogy can be read as an allegory in the first place. As said before, the Nymphomaniac dilogy revolves around Joe, who narrates her story to Seligman, the man who finds her in the alley and takes her into his house. Her storytelling is triggered by random objects (a fly fishing hook, a cake fork, a painting with a nametag, an orthodox icon, a mirror), conversation topics (Edgar Allan Poe, Johann Sebastian Bach) and even a stain in the wallpaper. This is why the organization of narrative in Nymphomaniac cannot be understood in terms of spatial and temporal causality. This is accentuated by the fact that the story is not set in any particular time or space – everybody speaks English, for instance, but the dilogy was mostly shot in Germany and Belgium. The setting, especially the train compartment and Seligman’s apartment, is best characterized as shabby and old-fashioned. Joe’s clothing seems deliberately inelegant, ranging from vulgar ‘fuck-me-now’ clothes to a boring ‘piano teacher’ outfit, both styles chosen to attract men. In Nymphomaniac, causality is conditioned by disentangled impulses that randomly emerge. As a result, the spectator does not construct meaning along some sort of logic of cause and effect, but rather along patterns of coincidentally occurring different narrative triggers. The argument that is made in this essay is threefold. First, I argue that the Nymphomaniac dilogy embodies an insight into the ontology of cinema, which takes a polyphonic form. In music, polyphony is a style of composition employing two or more simultaneous, but relatively independent, musical lines. It is the central theme in Chapter Five of the dilogy, entitled ‘The Little Organ School’. The narration in this chapter is triggered by a church cantata by Bach that Seligman recently has been listening to. Seligman explains to Joe that Bach was a master of medieval polyphony, which is based on the idea that even though every voice follows its own melody, together they are in harmony. Polyphony has its origins in a form of numerical mysticism based on the Fibonacci sequence, which in turn is connected to Pythagoras’ theorem and the golden section. This provides Joe with an opportunity to define her nymphomania as starting from a mathematical premise, rather than as a pathology or as an addiction. She explains that her nymphomania is the sum of all her different sexual experiences and that, in that way, she only has one lover. But since Bach’s music has only three voices, she limits herself to talking about three lovers only. There is the gentle-hearted F (Nicolas Bro), who forms the bass voice, the foundation, which is monotone, predictable and ritualistic; G (Christian Gade Bjerrum) is the second voice, unpredictable and in charge; and Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) is the first voice, cantus firmus, or the secret ingredient, which is love. These voices are presented to us through a triple split screen tied together with Bach’s music. The left screen shows an organist’s foot playing the

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pedalboard, F waiting outside of Joe’s house in his used red car, Joe sitting in his lap, and F performing cunnilingus on her. The right screen shows the organist’s left hand playing the keyboard, a jaguar moving through a jungle with prey in its mouth, Muybridge-inspired footage of G naked and walking in the same spot and Joe being taken from behind by him, as if in the clutches of some wild animal. Finally there is the middle screen with the organist’s right hand playing the keyboard, and Joe and Jerôme embracing passionately. The scene is cut abruptly to the present tense in Seligman’s apartment with an emphatic click from an old-fashioned tape player as it suddenly brings the music to an end. This is followed by a return to the past tense with Joe announcing not to be able to feel anything while still making love to Jerôme, which ends Volume I of the Nymphomaniac dilogy. The polyphonic structure described in ‘The Little Organ School’ epitomizes the organizational logic of cinema in general, which entails that there is no distinction between what the film is, what the film means and what the film does. This means that cinema might be best described through what Paul Crowther defines as ‘ontological reciprocity’, in which our bodily lived capacities (the bass voice) engage with the aesthetic diversity of the film (the second voice) through ‘the secret ingredient’, which Edgar Morin simply termed magic.2 Each of these elements brings forth and defines the characteristics of the others reciprocally and together they operate in a unified field3 – or should we say a polyphonic field? Furthermore, Joe’s nymphomania can be described as the defining element of her ontological reciprocity, which shatters the assumption that intimacy is directed towards one person only and cannot be administered in variable degrees. Describing the character that Gainsbourg plays in Antichrist, Magdalena Zolkos writes that she is ‘free from the forms of selfvictimizing and self-destructive love’.4 The same could be claimed for Joe, whose nymphomania is not a pathological symptom linked to her inability to conform to society’s patriarchal expectations. Rather, her nymphomania is an open strategic game that defies any form of social control telling her how to express her sexuality. This is why it is significant that Joe loses all sexual feeling as soon as she falls in love. Her frigidity can be seen as a form of critical re-examination of the expectations that both men and women hold for their intimate relationships. One of the central assumptions in western society’s system of intimacy is that romantic love creates a union, with which the lovers come to identify. This assumption includes a concept of sexual desire as an arena for celebrating this newly formed ‘we’. By contrast, Joe’s nymphomania and later frigidity do not celebrate the central beliefs and ideals of love, but critically call into question its uncertainty. And it is only after leaving Jerôme and their child that she regains her sexual pleasure, whipped into orgasmic ecstasy by a mild-mannered, soft-spoken sadomasochist K (Jamie Bell). This act of humiliation and brutal cruelty towards Joe could be easily condemned as justifying sexual



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violence towards women, but I think the provocative dimension of the scene complicates the all too easy claims that von Trier is a misogynist here, as I will argue later. My second argument is that the Nymphomaniac dilogy is a pornographic work of art that not merely represents but reveals – a process in which the spectator is co-responsible for bringing the film’s meaning into the open. This is a process based on reciprocity and dialogue. For instance, the first chapter of the dilogy, named after a book by Izaak Walton entitled The Compleat Angler (first published in 1653), is prompted by a fishing fly (a nymph) on Seligman’s wall. In this chapter the art of fishing is interwoven with the art of seduction both on the visual level and on the level of storytelling. In this sequence the camera follows Joe and her friend B from a low camera position as they make their way through a train corridor in search of men to fuck as a form of competition, as Joe’s voice-over explains. Seligman interrupts her story though, in order to draw a parallel with ‘reading the river’, in which men are equated to fish and women to fishermen. The sequence rewinds and starts again, while the image is superimposed with underwater imagery, inserted with topographic maps of a river and cross-cut with shots of fishing. This exemplifies the way in which Seligman is able to relate to Joe’s story, regardless of its remoteness to his embodied experience, as he is asexual. As a result, the meaning of the angling anecdote belongs neither to Joe nor to Seligman, but it emerges through the reciprocal, interactive encounter between the two. A popular controversial charge brought against the Nymphomaniac dilogy comes down to the judgemental – rather than descriptive – claim that it is pornographic. I think the films actually raise the question whether pornography should categorically be considered ‘bad’ or harmful and generically incompatible with art house cinema.5 Furthermore, if cinema is ‘an inherently participatory art’ like Bruce Isaacs has argued,6 then pornography is the ultimate participatory genre. Thus the suggestion embodied in the form and style of Nymphomaniac is perhaps that all cinema is inherently pornographic, which is supported by the relationship between Seligman as a spectator-voyeur and Joe as a pornographer-exhibitionist. But, unlike Seligman, we do not have the luxury of occupying the voyeuristic position voluntarily, which perhaps is the true source for the porno-debate surrounding the film. In another train scene Joe attempts to hold on to her memory of Jerôme, the man who took her virginity, the only one of her lovers whom she grows to love, and with whom she has a child later on. In this scene Joe masturbates amongst other train passengers, doing a jigsaw puzzle in her mind. This jigsaw puzzle consists of details she finds in the other passengers that remind her of Jerôme. The camera tracks into these details, such as a slicked parting of hair or a pair of shoes, which are then framed in the form of a jigsaw puzzle piece. In a white frame with Jerôme as the silhouette, Joe’s

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mind organizes the pieces so that in the end a fragmented patchwork of ‘Jerôme’ emerges, which she nevertheless finds impossible to hold on to. This sequence is what Pepita Hesselberth and Laura Schuster call a ‘recollection narrative’ in their discussion of puzzle films,7 and it could be seen as a watching instruction for the whole dilogy. It exemplifies the way in which the act of random recollection is the operational logic of the films’ narrative strategy. But it also shows how sensuous, affective meaning can arise from a fusion of the separate, formal features of the world, which is what happens when an artist creates an artwork that others can respond to. Memory, and the limitations of memory, play a central role in the opening scene of the chapter on ‘Mrs H’, in which Joe starts having trouble remembering which of her lovers is which. These men exist only as random voices in Joe’s answering machine, so that they stay anonymous and inseparable from each other, both for us and for herself. As she finds it impossible to remember the individual relationships or to predict the things these men want to hear, she invents a method based on randomness and chance. Sitting at her kitchen table Joe is shown throwing a dice, which determines the reaction each of these anonymous voices will get, ranging from an overtly loving answer to complete rejection. Neither she nor her lovers can predict what her reaction will be, and this unpredictability can be considered emblematic for cinema in general, in which ‘the canonical and recurrent elements are juxtaposed with unique and specific elements; and the audience’s expectations are juxtaposed with unavoidable surprises’, as Francesco Cassetti puts it.8 The Nymphomaniac dilogy is by no means the first film in which von Trier explores the concepts of unpredictability and chance. In his The Boss of It All (2006), the film-maker used a computerized method called Automavision, in which the computer picks six or eight randomized set-ups for each scene. In The Five Obstructions (2003), von Trier has his mentor film-maker Jørgen Leth make five new versions of his short film The Perfect Human (1967). In this film, and especially in its fifth chapter, the point is that the highly skilled, perfectionist Leth is forced to make a mess of his own film by the equally skilled, perfectionist von Trier. As the fifth and the ultimate obstruction, von Trier states that Leth is to do nothing at all apart from being credited as the director, and reading the narration written by von Trier. The fifth version consists of scenes that had already been shot during Leth’s four previous sojourns in Cuba, Bombay, Brussels and Texas, while reworking The Perfect Human. Furthermore, this black-and-white footage is collected and assembled neither by Leth nor by von Trier, but by Camilla Skousen, one of the film’s editors. Thus all the rules of film-making are deliberately ignored, and the resulting film has nothing to do with the original The Perfect Human, but with von Trier’s personal relationship with Leth, the latter being present in every randomly chosen scene on top of which he narrates words not



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written by him. I think that here von Trier’s point is that in the process of making, the film always takes on a life of its own, which seems to have almost nothing to do with the film-maker’s attempt to control it.9 Furthermore, in The Five Obstructions the two film-makers try to understand each other’s aesthetic choices, just as one might imagine a film-maker attempting to predict what the audience’s response to his or her film will be. Obviously, this too is beyond the film-maker’s full control, which makes all cinema fundamentally unpredictable and accidental. At the same time film spectatorship too is a process in which the spectators use their intuitive understanding of the creative or artistic choices of the film-maker, without ever being able to know what went on exactly during the making of the film. Hence my argument that Joe and Seligman’s relationship can be seen in allegorical terms that describe the relationship between cinema and the spectator in general. Joe is the ‘film-maker’ telling her story and Seligman is the ‘spectator’ investing in her story in a way that enhances his own experience of it. Crowther describes this relationship as follows: The artwork […] places us in a relation of aesthetic empathy to the creator’s view of things. In such an experience, we are not simply told how a fellow being views and experiences the world. Rather […] because the work becomes physically independent of its creator once its production is complete, we are free to appropriate his or her version on our terms. What is common in the work to both artist’s and recipient’s experience can serve as a basis for imaginative development by the latter.10 Furthermore, this relationship could be considered as a film-philosophical concept, be it in a romantic sense. According to Robert Sinnerbrink this is based on: a mutual becoming, a dynamic, transformative relationship in which the relata in question are profoundly altered by their very engagement, opening them up to new relations with each other as well as with other things (as in any good relationship).11 This mutual becoming might best be described as based on the concept of trust, which takes me up to my third argument. As Philipp Schermheim has shown, trust plays a central role in aesthetic experiences, insofar as they provide us with the feeling that our connecting link with the world is not broken. He writes that trust: essentially seems to be an attitude directed at a world shared with others, a matter of being-with-someone, or being-with-others. Put prosaically, trust means closing one’s eyes and falling asleep on the passenger seat in

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the certainty that the driver will steer you safely towards your mutual goal. It is a form of letting go.12 This trust is the main reason why Joe narrates her story to Seligman in the first place, and why he agrees to listen, although not always without disbelief. For instance, in the scene in which Joe is reunited with Jerôme, she is shown taking a walk in the forest where she accidentally stumbles upon some pieces of torn photographs, scattered around like clues for a treasure trail. Joe decides to follow these clues, and the final piece she picks up depicts Jerôme during his honeymoon, after which a male hand emerges in the image from the upper right corner of the frame. In the left side of the frame, Joe looks up to what appears to be Jerôme himself, reaching down to Joe. Seligman comments on this account as follows: No. No, no, no. No, there … there are some completely unrealistic coincidences in your story about Jerôme. First, by chance, he hires you as an assistant, and then you take a walk in the forest that is littered with photographs of him. And not only that, he is present. And then, like a God, pulls you up to him through the clouds. Goodness gracious. Both Seligman’s disbelief and Joe’s reaction (‘Which way do you think you’d get the most out of my story? By believing in it or by not believing in it?’) could be seen allegorically to describe the relationship between cinema and the spectator in general. Joe asks Seligman to trust her and, after a brief hesitation, he agrees. It could be argued that it is through trust that cinema – more or less successfully – invites us to invest in its spatiotemporal organization and to experience its aesthetic system from within our own sensory perception and intelligent deliberation, even when we are aware of the films’ fictional and artificial status. Daniel Yacavone makes a similar claim when he argues that in an aesthetic apprehension of cinema the spectator becomes immersed in the film world through the temporal, spatial and affective dimensions that structure the cinematic experience.13 Furthermore, this experience is reciprocal and co-creative since, as Thomas Elsaesser puts it: A film not only immerses and absorbs an audience into its (fictional) world, there is also a counter-current where the spectator has to immerse the film into his (psychic) world, brought to the threshold of consciousness and bodily sensation by the complicated dynamics emanating from a viewing situation itself.14 This reciprocality could be seen as an affective-intellectual energy that flows in both directions, and as soon as this flow of energy is blocked a form of resistance develops, which ‘makes it impossible for the film to



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“work”’.15 This blocking of energy between the film and the spectator has consequences for the aesthetic appreciation of the film and, in fact, the whole process of appreciation may depend vitally on the way in which the flow of energy establishes itself, as I shall show later. Another scene that could evoke disbelief rather than trust takes place at the beginning of Nymphomaniac Volume II. The film starts off where Volume I left off: Joe’s sudden frigidity and the ensuing apathy. At this point Joe shifts her narration to the past, to a memory of a school trip in the hills. In this sequence, the twelve-year-old Joe is shown in a medium close-up lying on her back in a field, cut with shots of high grass blowing in the wind, bumble bees collecting nectar from flowers and a small creek running down the hill, with the sound of birds chirping empathically on the soundtrack. Some of these shots are framed differently, so that our attention is directed to the black borders on the edges of the image, reminding us of the film’s artificial status. This is followed by a shot of the brightly shining sun, centred exactly in the middle of the image. There is a booming noise, during which Joe is shown levitating towards the sun while experiencing a spontaneous orgasm. A circle of light emerges, with two figures on each side of the circle, with Joe in the middle. Seligman offers as an insight that these women were Valeria Messalina, the wife of Emperor Claudius, the most notorious nymphomaniac in history, and the great whore of Babylon. He interprets Joe’s account as a blasphemous recounting of the New Testament narrative in which Jesus is transfigured and becomes radiant in glory upon a mountain. As he has trouble relating to her story, Joe asks Seligman to imagine that he lost all desire to read, all his love and passion for literature, in one fell swoop. This request is accompanied by an image of a naked, frozen Joe floating in the air and dissolving into a vast ocean, which is followed by a similar image of Seligman dissolving into an ocean of books and letters. This may demonstrate the power of cinema, enabling unusual experiences that might otherwise be out of reach for an average spectator. This blasphemous theme continues in the chapter ‘The Eastern Church and the Western Church’, in which the Western Church is clearly meant to refer to ‘natural’ heteronormative sexuality, and the Eastern Church to an ‘unnatural’, dark form of sexuality based on sadomasochism. But for Joe sadomasochism becomes ‘the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously’, as Michel Foucault would have it.16 Yet it is in these scenes that the film starts to breach the relationship of trust with the spectator. First there is a scene in which Joe attempts to experience a sexual situation with two African men, in which verbal communication would be impossible. In this scene the two men are having an argument about to how to perform the threesome. But the way in which the scene is filmed – mobile camera positioned on low height turning from left to right with Joe in the middle – creates the impression that their penises were having the discussion, not the men themselves. This

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is a hilarious scene, but it is also a troubling scene as it would be very easy to interpret it in racist terms, insofar as in the scene the agency of the two men is confined to their bodily characteristics and their sexual ability only. In my opinion, this is a conscious provocation on von Trier’s part. Von Trier is often considered a notorious provocateur, accused of misogyny ever since his 1996 film Breaking the Waves, and especially with regard to his Antichrist (2009), in which Gainsbourg’s character cuts off her own clitoris with rusty scissors. But rather than being misogynist, the film provides a serious metacinematic commentary on misogyny, as Sinnerbrink has shown.17 Similarly, this scene could be considered conscious of its own racism, but the question remains whether this makes the scene any less racist. In any case, we start to doubt as to how we should react to these scenes. In other words, we are starting to lose our faith; no longer is the relationship a good relationship. In the same chapter, in order to get back her orgasm, Joe starts her nightly visits to K’s ascetic practice studio, the man for whom she leaves Jerôme and their child Marcel on Christmas Eve. A particularly cruel spanking session follows a sequence that is a direct reference to von Trier’s Antichrist. Here shots of Joe in K’s waiting room are cross-cut with shots of Marcel waking up to the noises and the flashing lights of a snow plough. And, getting out of bed, he heads towards the balcony doors that are wide open. The sequence is accompanied by Handel’s aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, which can be heard in the remarkable opening scene of Antichrist, in which a child falls to his death while his parents are making love. As a result, the audience’s expectation in Nymphomaniac is that Marcel will fall too, but he is rescued by Jerôme at the last moment. After Jerôme gives her an ultimatum, Joe shows up at K’s place unexpectedly, forcefully demanding his ‘cock’. In the spanking scene Joe receives the ‘original Roman maximum’ of forty lashes, while stimulating her clitoris against the cover of the telephone book under her pelvis. All this is shot up close and personal, camera constantly switching from close-ups of Joe’s buttocks full of bleeding wounds and bruises to close-ups of her ecstatic face. This creates a proximity, which is not pleasurable but agonizing, as it confronts the spectators with their spectatorial desire, breaching the trust that the film can be experienced from a safe distance. As a New Yorker critic described this scene of excruciating detail, ‘von Trier seems to be saying, “You’re fascinated? Well, stomach this”’.18According to Jacques Lacan, this is the function of all visual art. For him, art must lead to self-reflection, catch the spectators looking, invite them to see themselves not only seeing, but also as seen: The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, might be summed up thus – You want to see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on,



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but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons.19 Von Trier’s provocation explicitly challenges the coordinates of the film-maker–spectator relationship, critically daring us to converse with him rather than to condemn him,20 in a similar fashion to the way Joe dares Seligman. Thus again the formal structure of the film as framed by the relationship between the two confirms the analogy of Joe as a film-maker and Seligman as a spectator. Further evidence for this analogy can be found in von Trier repeatedly stating that his female characters are all versions of himself, an approach borrowed from Carl Theodor Dreyer.21 Not only does this complicate the controversy surrounding von Trier’s representation of his female characters, it also complicates the divide between the character and the film-maker, as well as the divide between the film-maker and the spectators. The relationship between the film-maker and the spectators in von Trier’s films has always been saturated by provocation, which is not always appreciated by his critics. For instance, Mette Hjort writes that, due to von Trier’s provocation, he is ‘less of an artist than he could be, on account of his consistent gravitation, in his films and his public pronouncements, towards provocation [which is] inappropriate, irresponsible, disingenuous, and incoherent’.22 By contrast, I argue that von Trier’s provocation is a responsible form of provocation – in the sense of assuming responsibility – rather than merely seeking controversy insofar as it is based on risk-taking and rendering oneself vulnerable to misinterpretation. At the same time, von Trier’s provocation makes it impossible for the spectators to ignore the process of their own interpretative engagement with his work, which potentially also provides grounds for philosophical reflection. The Nymphomaniac dilogy ends with Seligman ‘absolving’ Joe’s ‘sins’ and leaving her to sleep after she has finished her story, and the trusting relationship between them could be compared to the Sacrament of Penance by which a penitent confesses his or her sins to a priest. This association is evoked also by the phrase ‘mea maxima vulva’, hauntingly chanted by Joe and her friends during a ceremonial scene of a secret sect that repudiates love in the pursuit of sex. Obviously the phrase is a blasphemous twist of a prayer of confession when a penitent receives the sacrament of Penance. But then Seligman betrays the trusting relationship by re-entering the room and climbing into her bed, in an attempt to have sex with her. Joe reacts by reaching for her gun, at which point the image goes black and we can only hear the subsequent series of actions: the sound of cocking the gun, Seligman pleading (‘but you have fucked thousands of men!’), his body thudding, Joe getting dressed and escaping. Finally, the film ends with Charlotte Gainsbourg singing Jimi Hendricks’s ‘Hey Joe’. This ending is significant as it shows that the breach of trust between the film and the spectator can go both ways. All films beg for spectators to fill in the gaps

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left open by film-makers, but some film-makers like von Trier structure their films in order to invite the spectators to reflect on the way in which they fill in these gaps. In other words, film-makers too trust the spectators and their ability to generate and to contribute to the diversity of cinematic experience. Throughout the Nymphomaniac dilogy we see examples of this as Seligman continuously fills in the gaps in Joe’s narration with his own stories of the superiority of Finnish lures, the role of cake forks in the Bolshevik revolution, and the mountain climber Prusik, among other things. But in the end Seligman turns out to be an unreliable spectator, totally misinterpreting Joe’s motivation to tell her story. And this seems to be especially relevant in the context of the reception of von Trier’s controversial oeuvre. But what does this have to do with valuing cinema? That, too, has to do with trust, insofar as the aesthetic appreciation seems to be at its most intense when one is able to have faith in the intentional dimension of the film. It is this intention that enables reciprocal exchange to occur between cinema and the spectator. This means that aesthetic appreciation is not merely a question of imposing interpretation on the film, but rather a relation that emerges in and through an affective, embodied, sensorial, and intellectual engagement with the film. Martin Heidegger, among others, affirms this when he writes that lived experience is ‘the source that is standard not only for art appreciation and enjoyment but also for artistic creation’.23 In this process both the film (maker) and the spectator are co-responsible for the emergence of the cinematic event, and they need to trust each other for being open to this responsibility. Crowther argues that in aesthetic appreciation: We empathize with … those feelings and intentions which we take to be embodied in the work’s formal structure. Here, at the very least, the grounds of our appreciation logically presuppose that we believe [my italics] the work to be what it seems to be.24 At the same time, this complex encounter can neither be known in advance nor predicted, as the film becomes more or less independent of the film-maker once its production is complete, after which the spectators are free to appropriate the film-maker’s vision on their own terms. Crowther writes that aesthetic form is only energized if it reflects the possibility of an exchange of this kind of freedom between the artist and the spectator.25 What makes the Nymphomaniac dilogy unique is that it enables the spectators to see von Trier’s vision from where he sees the spectators, but at the same time it grants the spectators the freedom to engage with this vision on their own terms as well. This actually renders the dilogy an ethical project aimed at altering our practices of looking, so that we might adjust our viewing mode and then look again. This second look might be



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characterized as what Linda Williams calls a ‘double vision’, a recognition of the way female sexuality is traditionally located within the gendered economy of looking, which renders the conventional spectatorial contract much more problematic.26

Notes 1

In a similar vein, Nicola Evans argues that the controversy surrounding von Trier’s oeuvre stems from the way in which his films violate the ‘melodramatic contract’ with the spectators. Nicola Evans, ‘How to Make Your Audience Suffer: Melodrama, Masochism, and Dead Time in Lars von Trier’s Dogville’, Culture, Theory and Critique 3 (2014): 366.

2

Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 107.

3

Paul Crowther, Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 2.

4

Magdalena Zolkos, ‘Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’, Parrhesia 13 (2011): 186.

5

Similar debates have surrounded films such as Nagisa Oshima’s The Realm of the Senses (1976), Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi (2000) and Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001). But as Linda Williams has argued, explicit sexual dramas like these can also be seen defying ‘the soft-focus erotic prettiness … of mainstream Hollywood’, thereby allowing ‘an unprecedented emotional and physical honesty’, Linda Williams, ‘Cinema and the Sex Act’, Cineaste 1 (2001): 21–3. I think that similar claims could be made of the Nymphomaniac dilogy.

6

Bruce Isaacs, Toward a New Film Aesthetics, New York: Continuum, 2008, p. 77.

7

Pepita Hesselberth and Laura Schuster, ‘Into the Mind and Out to the World: Memory Anxiety in the Mind-Game Film’, in Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven (eds), Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008, p. 98.

8

Francesco Cassetti, Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002, p. 29.

9

For a similar point on painting, see Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image, London: I. B. Tauris, 2010, p. 1.

10 Art and Embodiment, p. 173. 11 Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy’, in Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (eds), New Takes in Film-Philosophy, New York: Palgrave, 2011, p. 41. 12 Philipp Schmerheim, Scepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema, Amsterdam: ASCA, 2013, p. 207.

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13 Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 193. 14 Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 97. 15 The Persistence of Hollywood, p. 97. 16 Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, New York: New York Press, 1997, p. 165. 17 Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images, New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 163. 18 David Denby, ‘The Story of Joe’, New Yorker, 24 March 2014. http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/24/the-story-of-joe. 19 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, London: Penguin, 1994, p. 101. 20 On this point see also Lori J. Marso, ‘Must We Burn Lars von Trier? Simone de Beauvoir’s Body Politics in Antichrist’, Theory & Event 18 (2015). 21 Paul O’Callaghan, ‘The Many Faces of Lars von Trier’, British Film Institute, 25 February 2014. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/ features/many-faces-lars-von-trier. In an interview with the Danish Politiken on Antichrist, Charlotte Gainsbourg confirms this by saying: ‘It was my character that Lars has personally identified with. He was very close inside the life of my character and my feelings, my vulnerability, my anxiety attacks were his. It was him that was her’ (cited in ‘Violent Affects’, p. 179). 22 Mette Hjort, ‘The Problem with Provocation: On Lars von Trier, Enfant Terrible of Danish Art Film’, Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media 2013. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=492&feature. 23 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977, p. 204. 24 Art and Embodiment, 22. 25 Crowther, Art and Embodiment, p. 174. 26 Such questioning of our ethical relation to the spectators’ acts of looking can be found in many other films by Lars von Trier, like Caroline Bainbridge has shown. She argues that the ethical structures found in von Trier’s oeuvre concern not only the films themselves, but also the spectator’s relationship with them. Caroline Bainbridge, ‘Making Waves: Trauma and Ethics in the work of Lars von Trier,’ Journal for Cultural Research 3 (2004): 364–5.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Linda Badley is Professor of English and Film Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Published widely in film, popular culture and gender studies, she is the author or editor of Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic (1995), Writing Horror and the Body (1996), Traditions in World Cinema (2006), Lars von Trier (2011) and Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016). With R. Barton Palmer, she co-edits ‘Traditions in World Cinema’ and ‘Traditions in American Cinema’, companion series at Edinburgh University Press. Rex Butler is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne. He has written Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (2005), Borges’ Short Stories (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? A Reader’s Guide (2015). He also writes on art history and theory, with an emphasis on Australian art. Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the GSH – Genoa School of Humanities – and holds visiting positions at the European University at St Petersburg and the Freud Museum of the same city. He has published books and edited collections on Lacan, Subjectivity and Otherness (2007) and Lacan and Philosophy (2014), and on biopolitical thought, The Italian Difference (2009) – with Alberto Toscano – and Italian Thought Today (2014). He has edited and translated books of Agamben and Virno into English and of Žižek into Italian. A new books on Lacan, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, has recently been published by MIT Press and another, The Virtual Point of Freedom, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. David Denny is an Associate Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. He teaches and does research on the intersection of critical theory, psychoanalysis, film and politics. He has published ‘Signifying Grace: On Dogville’ in The International Journal of Žižek Studies’, ‘The Politics of Enjoyment: On The Hurt Locker’ in Theory and Event and ‘Melancholia: An Alternative to the End of the World’ in the edited volume Cinematic Cuts (2016).

248

List of contributors

Ahmed Elbeshlawy is an independent scholar. His writings include America in Literature and Film (2013), ‘The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America’ in The Comparatist (2008), ‘Cairo and Alexandria: A Tale of Two Cities in Egyptian Literature and Film’ in The Palgrave Handbook to Literature and the City (2016), ‘The Deployment of the Impossible Woman in Antichrist’ in Sexuality and Culture (2014), ‘Dogville: Lars von Trier’s Desexualized America’ in Scope (2008) and ‘The Prayer of Lady Macbeth’ and ‘Zulaikha’ in fe/male bodies (2006 and 2005). Jennifer Friedlander is the Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies/Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, Claremont, California. She is the author of Moving Pictures: Where the Police, the Press, and the Art Image Meet (1998) and Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, and Subversion (2008). She has published articles in (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, Journal for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Subjectivity and International Journal of Žižek Studies and in several edited volumes. She is currently completing a book called Imperfecting the Illusion: The Aesthetic Destruction of Reality, which aims to develop an account of the critical roles that realism and deception can play in the formation of contemporary aesthetic politics. Ulrike Hanstein is a lecturer at the Academy of Music and Theatre, Leipzig. Her research interests include film philosophy, performance art, media history and the aesthetics of moving images. She is the author of a book on the melodramatic film aesthetics of Lars von Trier and Aki Kaurismäki (Unknown Woman, geprügelter Held: Die melodramatische Filmästhetik bei Lars von Trier und Aki Kaurismäki, 2011), and co-editor of an anthology on media history entitled Re-Animationen (with Anika Höppner and Jana Mangold, 2012). Angelos Koutsourakis is a university academic fellow in World Cinema at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (2013) and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015). Sheila Kunkle is Associate Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota. She has published articles on psychoanalysis, film and culture in journals such as Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, American Imago, Journal of Lacanian Studies and International Journal of Žižek Studies. She has contributed chapters to Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis (2012) and Psychoanalyzing Cinema (2012), and edited a collection entitled Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings (2016).



List of contributors

249

Tarja Laine is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. She is the author of Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011) and Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015). Her research interests include cinematic emotions, film aesthetics and film phenomenology, on which she has published widely. She is currently studying to become a visual artist at the Wackers Academy in Amsterdam. Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016) and other works. Hilary Neroni is a professor of Film and Television at the University of Vermont. She is the author of The Violent Woman (2005) and The Subject of Torture (2015), and has published numerous essays on female directors. Slavoj Žižek is a senior researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana and Co-Director at the International Centre for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. Among his many books are The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), The Ticklish Subject (1999), The Parallax View (2006), Less than Nothing (2013) and Trouble in Paradise (2015). Magdalena Zolkos is senior research fellow at the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. She is a political theorist specializing in the fields of: memory politics; historical justice and reconciliation; cultural and psychoanalytic trauma theory; and emotions and affect. She is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing (2010), and the editor of On Jean Amery: Philosophy of Catastrophe (2011).

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INDEX

act 4, 5, 7, 11, 56–7, 59, 68, 70, 73, 76, 82, 131, 160, 166, 176, 186–7, 209–10 Adorno, Theodor 131, 139n. aesthetics 11–12, 15, 17, 19, 27–8, 31–2, 34–5, 39, 96–7, 144, 148–50, 181–3, 194–5, 197, 233, 240–1, 244 Agamben, Giorgio 105–6, 121n., 150, 157n., 247 allegory 11, 18, 71, 105, 117, 146, 153, 204–5, 233, 235, 239–40 animal/animality 10, 107, 116–18, 142, 147–9, 154, 164–5, 168, 177 anthropomorphism 168 Antigone 54–7, 74, 107, 109, 169 antinomic 114 anti-semitism 91 anxiety 128, 134, 142–5, 149, 162, 164, 167, 177, 204–9 apocalypse 105–6, 118, 122n., 201, 205 Artaud, Antonin 10, 90, 92–3, 96, 99, 100–1n. autonomy 18, 37, 40, 68, 72–3, 79, 82, 172, 174, 233 avant-garde 87, 90, 99 Bach, Johann Sebastian 48–51, 63n., 80, 221, 234–5n. Badiou, Alain 10, 87–8, 90, 98, 99n., 118–20, 124n. Badley, Linda 3, 8, 13n., 15, 19, 72, 83n., 100n., 143, 156n., 164, 177–8n. Bainbridge, Caroline 16, 19n., 101n., 144, 156n., 246n.

Bataille, Georges 103, 110–15, 122n., 146–7 Baudrillard, Jean 128, 135, 138n. Bazin, André 52–4, 62–3n., 203, 213n. Beauvoir, Simone de 186, 198n., 225, 230n., 246n. becoming 151, 239 being 10, 40, 67–9, 70, 72, 74, 77–80, 82, 84n. belief 26–8, 54–5, 70–3, 120, 178n., 211, 240, 244 Benjamin, Walter 152, 181, 198n. Bergman, Ingmar 8, 51 Bjork 2, 19, 39, 44, 62, 70, 88 Bowie, David 25 Brecht, Bertolt 8, 10, 12, 58, 64n., 71, 83n., 103, 120 Butler, Rex 9, 54, 138n., 179n. capitalism/capitalist modernity 9, 11, 67, 75, 112, 115–18, 147, 171, 183–6, 189–91, 194, 197 castration/symbolic castration 15, 18, 28, 78, 162–3, 165, 170–1, 174, 176, 177, 198n. cause/causation 5–6, 56, 57, 67–9, 74, 125–6, 131, 134, 136–7, 182, 234–5 Cavell, Stanley 9, 32–41, 44–5n., 64n. Chaplin, Charlie 61, 137–8 Chiesa, Lorenzo 10, 103, 165–6, 169, 172, 178n. Christ 51–4, 58, 63n., 13, 73, 96–7, 133, 146, 154–5, 169 Christianity 16, 21, n. 8, 54, 104–6, 108, 116–20, 144, 151, 167 comedy 33–7, 44n., 77, 81, 83n., 147

260 Index

Communism 130 concrete universality 81 content (content vs form) 25–6, 43, 53, 71–2, 89–90, 201, 223 Copjec, Joan 57, 64–5n., 68–9, 78, 82n., 174, 176, 179n. cruelty 10, 53, 87, 90, 95–6, 223, 263

112, 119, 125, 160–1, 170–1, 175, 185, 187 ethics 10, 16, 56, 69–70, 72–3, 77, 110–14, 119, 202, 206, 209–10 evil 74, 81, 92, 99n., 118–19, 121n., 123n., 172–4, 176 exception 9, 49, 51, 53–4, 56, 59–61, 65, 69, 165, 198n., 209–10

Dafoe, Willem 60, 141, 159, 217 death 69–71, 75–7, 81–2, 124n., 146–7, 183–4, 193, 196–7, 203 Deleuze 83n., 131, 139n., 149, 170, 178n. Democracy 89, 115, 125, 129–31, 137 Denny, David 11–12, 75, 84n., 159, 199n. depression 21–2, 60, 74–5, 81, 149–50, 160, 172, 182, 184, 188, 196, 198n., 204–5, 215–17, 225 Derrida, Jacques 127, 138n. desire 10, 18, 50, 61, 70, 80–1, 84n., 107, 112–13, 125–7, 130, 134–6, 170–1, 221–2 disaster film 181–5, 197, 203, 205 Doane, Mary Ann, 17, 20n. documentary 12, 26, 48, 61, 90, 97, 143, 223, 234 Dogme 95, 8, 12, 15, 53–4, 63–4n, 143–4, 164 double, 12, 57–8, 61, 97, 126, 142, 153, 197 doubt 33–5, 207–8 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 8 Ordet 53–5, 63n., 243 drive 24, 69–70, 78–9, 82, 84n., 124n., 161, 222 Dunst, Kirsten 1, 67, 182, 201

fantasy 9–10, 24, 36, 73, 119, 125–7, 10, 134–5, 137, 161–2, 168, 170, 203–4, 208–10, 229 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 10, 90–2, 94–95, 100n. Fellini, Fredrico 52 feminine 8, 15–16, 60–1, 88, 99, 146, 211 act 6–9, 57–8, 60, 64–5n. ethics 10, 69–72, 77 goodness 172 jouissance 4, 10, 21, 23, 56, 71–3, 77, 79, 82, 171, 177, 185 logic/symbolic order 6, 11, 16, 61, 74, 151, 184, 201–2, 209, 216, 227 sacrifice 24, 56 secret 23 sexuality 21–3, 225 vs masculine logic 9, 11, 15–16, 49, 60, 142, 152, 202, 209–10 Fincher, David, (Fight Club) 9, 67, 69–70, 75–7, 81, 85n. finitude 71, 76, 170–2, 175–6 Fink, Bruce 138n,. 204, 212–13n. Foucault, Michel 138n., 140n., 241, 246 freedom 10–11, 68–9, 72–3, 81–2, 126–9, 130–2, 160, 174, 176, 198n. Freud, Sigmund 11, 73, 130, 139n., 159, 171, 174, 204, 206–7, 213n., 217–19, 230n.

eden 141, 146, 149, 150–1, 154, 161–8, 172–7 Elsaesser, Thomas 240, 245–6n. ending 6, 28, 43, 69, 73, 80, 83–4n., 201, 203–4, 209–12, 219–21, 243 enjoyment 22, 23, 68–70, 77–9, 84n.,

Gainsbourg, Charlotte 1, 60, 67, 74, 92, 141, 145, 156n., 182, 202, 217, 226, 233, 236, 242, 246n. gaze 17–19, 23, 50, 56–9, 62n., 94–6, 98, 125, 133, 160–2, 243

Index

general economy/restricted economy 110–14 gift 10, 104–9, 112–19, 125–31, 137–8 good/goodness 4, 21–2, 24, 28, 34, 40, 56, 92, 106–7, 109–10, 114, 118, 121n., 123n., 144, 158n., 166–7, 172, 174 grace 10, 23, 104–24 Griffith, D. W.: The Birth of a Nation 131 Heidegger, Martin 131, 183, 244, 246n. Hitchcock, Alfred 51, 58, 63n., 83n. Hitler, Adolph 1, 129, 193–4 horror genre 89, 137, 146–7, 159, 162–5, 168, 179n. Howard, Bryce Dallas 2, 89 Hurt, John 75, 126, 129, 189 hysteria 8, 56, 60, 64n., 136, 164, 169–71, 178n., 183–6, 189, 193, 198n. ideology 10, 92, 95, 130, 134–5, 137–8, 216, 229 interpellation 143, 145, 219–20 irony 15–16, 26, 28, 37, 55, 57, 70, 80–1, 89, 91, 144 jouissance 17–18, 22–3, 69, 71–4, 77, 79–80, 82, 161–2, 168, 171, 185, 222 Kidman, Nicole 2, 17, 20n., 67, 89, 105–6, 117–20, 163. LaBeouf, Shia 77, 221, 226, 230n., 235 Lacan, Jacques 5–6, 11, 13n., 22, 29n., 63n., 73, 77, 82n., 85n., 106–7, 109, 118–19, 120–2n., 124n., 126, 133, 138–9n., 177–9n., 198n., 201, 206, 212–13n., 242, 246n. act 160, 210 fantasy 127, 134 feminine ethic 10, 68–9, 110

261

feminine jouissance 10, 21, 185 not-all 23, 57, 166, 184–5 object a (or objet petit a) 125–6, 134, 136–7, 207–8 Oedipus complex 167, 171 real 51, 68, 207 sexuation (or non-relation of the sexual relation) 8, 11, 71, 165, 201, 209, 211 symbolic 112–15, 128, 132 lack 10, 12, 70, 78, 81, 106–7, 109, 112, 114–15, 119, 166, 169–71, 202, 206–8, 212 law 24, 26, 60, 68–70, 73, 82, 107, 128, 166, 170, 174, 176–7, 212n. Leth, Jorgen: The Perfect Human 223, 228 liberal democracy 89, 130 limit/limitless 12, 34–7, 39, 40–1, 51–2, 56–7, 62n., 70, 73, 76, 79, 82, 92, 107, 174, 182, 211, 216, 221, 223–5, 228–31 love 11, 16–17, 21–3, 37, 77–8, 81, 84n., 137, 144, 154–5, 221–2, 228, 235–6, 245 Lynch, David 8, 28, 164 masochism 3, 9, 15–8, 67, 76, 81, 95, 108, 111, 116, 118–19, 123n., 160, 163, 166, 236, 241 master-signifier 119, 129, 169 Mauss, Marcel 104–5, 107, 114–17, 120n. Medea 2, 3, 54–9, 63n., 165–6 melodrama 3, 9, 15–17, 25, 26, 31–40, 64–5n., 89, 159, 160–3, 202, 245n. misogyny 2–3, 9, 16, 25–6, 31–2, 36, 39, 70, 89, 126, 159–61, 163, 202 modernism/modernity 11, 22, 27, 34, 39, 40, 75, 85, 90, 142, 150, 170, 183–6, 189, 194–7 Moodysson, Lukas 47–50 A Hole in My Heart 47–8 Mulvey, Laura 17, 19, 94, 100n.

262 Index

nature 4, 11, 19, 27, 82, 85n., 92, 141–2, 145–6, 148–53, 164–8, 173–7, 186, 188, 193, 196–7, 225 Nazi/Nazism 1, 11, 88, 93, 97, 99n., 129, 193–5 neorealism 51–3 neurosis 112, 133, 139n., 169, 208–9, 211, 216–19, 225 not-all, 11, 23, 57, 69, 72, 74, 77, 166, 177, 184, 210, 212 nothing 5, 23, 49, 54–6, 68–9, 120, 128, 137, 166, 172, 174, 191, 202, 210 objet a/partial object 9, 70, 76, 125–6, 133–4, 137, 162, 175, 178n., 207–8 Oedipus 54, 84n., 98, 124n., 169–71, 175–6 opera 9, 34–44, 182, 195 Other 25, 33, 68, 70, 74–5, 79, 119, 127, 130–1, 134, 136, 169–72, 175, 201, 203, 207–9, 210, 212 Palahniuk, Chuck 76 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 51–2, 54, 62–3n., 121n. The Gospel According to St. Matthew 51, 54 passage à l’acte/acting out 8, 60, 171, 176, 178n,. 189 patriarchy 8, 12, 18, 23, 73, 93, 154, 166, 172, 174, 176–7, 186, 188–9, 190, 193, 215–18, 220, 222–4, 228–9 phallus 18, 23–4, 28, 49, 56, 73, 81–2, 94, 162, 166, 168, 172, 176–7 Poe, Edgar Allan 52, 235 pornography 18, 25, 48–50, 64n, 143, 146–7, 150–1, 153, 159, 161–2, 225–8 post-modern/post-modernity 9, 25, 27, 73, 75, 83n., 85n., 90, 98, 144, 170–2 psychosis 22, 24–5, 28, 56, 73–4, 81, 112, 139n., 170–2, 175

racism 125–6, 133–4, 242 Reage, Pauline: The Story of O 95 real 10, 17, 22, 51, 67–9, 73, 82, 87, 90, 98, 107, 133–4, 16–17, 169, 207, 210–11 romanticism 25–6, 71, 75, 85n., 193–7 Rossellini, Roberto 52–3 Rothman, William 44n., 64n. sacrifice 5, 9, 11, 17, 18, 22–4, 54, 56, 59, 69–71, 73–4, 82, 119, 133, 166 Sade, Marquis de 12, 18, 52, 62n., 71, 73, 90, 143, 155, 225 Sinnerbrink, Robert 63n., 91, 100n., 155n., 239, 242, 245–6n. Sirk, Douglas 3, 16 Skarsgard, Stellan 72, 74, 88–9, 185, 189, 202, 218, 226, 233 Shakespeare: Hamlet 35, 44–5n., 50, 63n., 130, 139n. Shaviro, Steven 196, 199n., 202, 209–10, 212n. Sontag, Susan 92, 100n., 146–7, 150–1, 157n. Sophocles 54, 169 Stevenson, Jack 20n,. 63n., 101n. Strindberg August, 8, 90, 92, 95, 97, 100n., 156n. subject 11–12, 26–7, 33–4, 49, 56, 68–70, 76–9, 85n., 88, 95, 104, 113, 118–19, 123n., 126–7, 132, 134, 137, 139n., 145, 148, 150, 152, 154, 171–2, 174, 183–5, 188–9, 193, 195–6, 198n., 206–7, 211, 224, 229 Sutherland, Keifer 74, 182, 184, 202 symbolic/symbolic order 5, 16, 24–5, 51, 56–61, 67–8, 70–1, 73, 78, 85n., 104, 106, 112–15, 119, 132, 142, 148, 160–1, 163, 165–7, 169–72, 174–7, 202–3, 209–12 symbolic exchange 10, 22, 128, 131–2, 139 Tarkovsky, Andrei 160, 177n., 234

Index

theatre, 34, 37–41, 58, 65n., 92, 94 Thing/das Ding 68, 71–2, 78–80, 82n., 84n., 106, 109, 168 transgression/inherent transgression 17–18, 23, 27, 51, 56–7, 60–1, 87, 89–90, 93, 136, 141, 145, 146–7, 149, 150, 153–4, 176, 187 trauma, 28, 68–9, 87, 91, 134, 142, 144–5, 151–2, 155n., 160, 162, 204–5, 217–18, 224 Trier, von Lars Antichrist 3–4, 7, 11–12, 13n., 60–1, 63n., 67, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99–100n., 141–50, 152–4, 155–8n., 159–61, 163, 165, 169–72, 175–9, 215, 217, 225, 230n, 234, 236, 245–6n. Befrielsesbilleder 10, 97 Boss of it All, The 238 Breaking the Waves: 2–5, 9, 12, 13n., 15–19, 20n., 21, 25–6, 31, 55–8, 62, 64n. 67, 69–72, 74, 81, 85, 88–9, 146, 153–4, 155–8n., 171–2, 215, 233, 242 Dancer in the Dark 2–3, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 31, 39–41, 44–61, 88–9, 146, 172 Dogville 3–4, 7, 10, 12, 17, 31, 60–1, 67, 89, 104–11, 116, 120, 121–4n., 128, 132–7, 146, 152, 154, 157n., 163, 172, 178n., 245n. Element of Crime, The 15, 88, 146 Epidemic 3–4, 7, 9, 12, 63n., 88, 146 Europa 3, 7, 15, 88, 98–9n., 146 Five Obstructions, The 12, 222–4, 238–9 Idiots, The 3, 7, 12, 15, 17, 19, 31, 61, 88, 146 Kingdom, The 234 Manderlay 2–3, 12, 89, 125–38, 140n., 146, 176 Medea 15, 54–5, 57–8, 63n. Melancholia 1, 4, 9, 11, 60, 62, 69, 71, 74–6, 84, 89, 99, 129,

263

136, 138, 171–2, 182–9, 193–8, 198–9n., 201–5, 211, 211–14n., 215–17, 225 Menthe – The Blissful 2, 10, 93, 95 Nymphomaniac 2–4, 7, 9, 11–12, 60–1, 67, 69, 71, 76, 79, 81, 83n., 85n., 89, 93, 95, 98–9, 171, 215–16, 218–20, 222–9, 230–1n., 233–8, 241–4, 245n. Orchidigartneren 10, 93, 95 trilogies Depression 7, 9, 10, 60, 71, 171, 172 Europa 15, 16, 19, 60, 63n., 98, 144, 146 Gold Heart 16, 60, 144, 146, 152, 172 USA 7, 9–10, 88, 146, 172 universal/universalism, 56, 70, 73, 76, 79, 81, 83n, 87, 97, 107, 165–6, 182, 210, 217 violence, 11, 76, 90, 105–6, 110, 112, 115–16, 118, 135, 142–4, 146, 154–5, 159–61, 172, 195, 219–22 voice, 9, 34–44, 56, 73, 174–6, 235–6 Wagner, Richard: Tristan und Isolde 24, 60, 74–5, 182, 195–6, 199n., 205 Watson, Emily 2, 18, 20n., 67, 88, 171 Williams, Linda 17, 162–3, 178n., 225, 228, 230n., 245, 245n. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 33–4, 36, 44n. women’s directors/women’s films 3, 16, 31–3, 202, 211 Žižek, Slavoj 5, 8–9, 13n., 20n., 29n., 47, 54, 62–4n., 71, 81, 82–3n., 85n., 90, 99n., 124n., 125, 130–2, 137, 138–40n., 161, 178–9n., 199n., 201, 203–4, 206, 209, 211–12 act 5, 56–7, 73, 131–2 castration 170–1

264 Index

feminine ethics 69, 72–3 jouissance, or enjoyment 17–18 object a 76–8, 134

real 68 Zupančič, Alenka 51, 62n., 68, 72, 77, 81, 82–5n.