LARS VON TRIER AN OVERLOOK

LARS VON TRIER TEN TITLES ELEVEN FILMS OR SERIES AN OVERLOOK POLITICALLY CONTROVERSIAL OR SEXUALLY AND EXPERIENTIALLY PARANOID ANTISEMITE OR SOCIALLY IRRESPONSIBLE Dr Jacques COULARDEAU What follows is only notes and reviews of these eleven films in chronological order. Some themes dominate and they are deeply unpleasant. Let me just list a few. The films are consistently heterosexual to the point of sounding sexist on several issues particularly of course the question of rape, the unbalance of the presentation of women in their sexual derangement, hardly ever men, except maybe when the actress is American and cannot accept such a sexist presentation of things. I am thinking of “Dogville.” The pretention that the cinema is supposed to propose a real image of the real society leads the director to manipulation because it is always his own point of view that is presented and never any contradictory point of view. The motivation of this reduction to one point of view, like Sigmund Freud or the Nazis, raises important questions as for the meaning of this reduction. I feel as if Lars von Trier had been through severe experiences in these fields and he cannot step back, remember and yet reconcile, recollect and yet also recommit himself to humane values. Too often the only way out is to kill those who are on your road, blocking of course your desire, your ambition, your social climbing or whatever motivates you. The story telling technique is also deficient in the fact that many things in the stories are asserted and yet they are absolutely impossible. How can a child of twelve know about the too famous Messalina or even the Whore of Babylon to the point of having visions of them? His hypnosis trick backfires at times with the Hypnotist hypnotizing in the voice over tale of Europa a man who is dead, for one example. We only learn he is dead at the end, but then it destroys the whole story. Why did he do? I can’t say. Why do I ask? Because Lars von Trier could not ignore it. In other words he is the perfect proof of Marshall McLuhan’s pronunciamento that the medium is the message and that the message is the massage. He is constantly manipulating us into reducing our vision to one ideological tunnel vision. In fact he is himself becoming part of the medium he uses by calling it “The Artificial Eye.” In fact the cinema is not an eye at all but a filter for the audience to infiltrate into a world presented on the screen and get into the characters to live their adventures. The systematic one-sided vision prevents that relation to the film and frustrates the audience that cannot find its expansion in the film. Lars von Trier, and that will be my last idea here, is obsessed by sin, death, punishment, and all his films always come to that kind of an end: someone is punished for the evil doing of humanity, or of some people around the main character. We could understand that stance if it came from some sectarian fundamentalist, for example of the Christian Born Again in Jesus Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons or some other affiliation of the Christian faith, not to speak of other religions. That makes some collaborations surprising like the one with Stephen King because Stephen King is strongly optimistic about the future of the world because he believes human beings can face and probably control any nasty negative and morbid situation. In the Dark Tower what is important is not that the last page is the same as the first but that all along the members of the team of adventurous volunteers led by a gunslinger have always been able to step over any difficulty and painful task. Lars von Trier is maybe a fascinating pessimist but he is a pessimist nevertheless and his vision does not leave any hope, future and even dream to mankind as well as womankind because even dream is impossible but be a nightmare. TABLE OF CONTENT 1- The element of Crime, 1984 2- Epidemic, 1987 3- Medea, 1988 (2003) 4- Europa, 1991 5- The Idiots, 1998 6- Dogville, 2003 7- Kingdom Hospital, 2004 8- Antichrist, 2009 9- Melancholia, 2011 10-The Europa Trilogy, 2011 11-Nymphomaniac, Volume I, 2013 12-Nymphomaniac, Volume II, 2013 LARS VON TRIER – ELEMENT OF CRIME – 1984 The first thing to say concerns the atmosphere and the style of the film. It is bleak. It is dark. The only color is a few dots of red in a lot of black. We are always or nearly always underground, in tunnels, galleries, with running water, in sewers or equivalent places. It is always the night with just some red lights or fire cutting the darkness. Then when we are inside some buildings they are just like outside, in ruins, dirty, bleak, dark, bad hotels when it is not some kind of indescribable refuge for human rats. It is supposed to be Europe, some reduce it to Germany, after WW2 and it is just a vast wasteland abandoned to its own irreversible decay. The characters are two let’s say ex-cops. One, Osborne, has fallen out of grace though he is the head and thinker of the film, and the other one, Fischer, is an ex-cop who ran away from police work to find some peace in Cairo. One day he accepts to be hypnotized by a doctor to try to find some solution to a case that is haunting him. This explains the blurred and fuzzy images, the lack of details and the concentration on desolation and a few details here and there that are hardly visible and recognizable or identifiable. The only interest of the film, apart from this dystopian if not suicidal vision of Europe, is that Osborne advocates a special method to deal with serial killers. You have to enter their minds and penetrate their motivations. Why do they do this, why do they do it like that, and thus understand every single detail of the pattern of serial killers because they follow patterns. This is profiling as it was at the time devised by the FBI in Quantico. But the film shows that the cop runs a risk: he will little by little get into the tracks if not the footsteps of the killer in order to stop him by knowing what his next crime will be. He thus becomes the serial killer, and not only in a way, in reality. He has to stop and he did stop just in time. I am not sure that the fact the prostitute he uses all along has had a child by the killer Harry Grey adds anything to the plot except that Fischer is thus put some more in the position and even place of the killer to make us even doubt whether he is not the killer himself. That’s the five seconds of tragedy, or rather melodrama. Of course we do not really know what is the past, what is the hypnosis or what is a new trip to Europe. Chronology is not important at all. A film that is difficult to really penetrate because of this somber darkness that wraps everything, every detail in some unbearable horror. We are like repulsed by it more than in anyway attracted to it. Horrified no, terrified no, grossed out for sure. LARS VON TRIER – EPIDEMIC – 1987 Everything gas to be minimal, and minimal is everything. Black and white of course. Minimal camera, film, format, special effects, if any. Everything has to be really happening the way you see it, or nearly that way. Because the end is not exactly that really real and realistic. A virus destroys the scenario that was on a floppy disk of one of those first text processors from before GUIs and PCs. So Lars and Niels have five days to produce a scenario and they are no longer interested by the one they have just lost, “The cop and the whore,” which would have been a remake of “Element of Crime.” So they start a new scenario from scratch in five days or so. I guess the virus got into them like a gremlin into some computer and they decide to get into the description of some epidemic in modern times. The details are not really interesting. What is important is the treatment of the subject. If you have to only show real images and situations, how can you show a modern plague on the model of Milano under attack from the Black Death in 1348, bricking up in their houses the families that were infected for them to die inside their houses and not contaminate the others. Pure egotistic selfish absurdity anyway. Those viruses were transported by rats that do not know what bricks are and they can always go through if necessary, and they were probably already out. And the virus is like Father Christmas: it can go up and down chimneys. Then they can go in archive underground with walls totally infected with some saltpeter like ulmcers in the plaster popping up regularly. That looks like some plague too. And then they get some facts that are told about this old plague. And if you cannot really show the new modern plague, at least you can show the scenario writers writing their scenario. And you can get into their minds and listen to what they see in their mind’s eye, how they see the film, the characters, etc. So there are a few cameos about that fictitious plot that ends in the most absurd way, but you’ll have to discover it yourself. To add some modern realistic flavor they have one man telling what his mother told him about the way a whole set of people were parked or packed in some hole full of water and made to die slowly by the Nazis. We can believe that, in fact we can believe any horror about the Nazis. So no problem and we have seen so many images of these horrible events that we can put such pictures on the words. The film is only showing the self-imposed torture of the man telling what his mother had told him just before dying. And we can also send the two scenario writers on a quick trip to Germany and have some infernal vision of cables, highways, tunnels, and all those means of transportation that would be the best vectors for any epidemic in modern times. Our cars are modern rats in a way. And I will say nothing about buses, trains, planes, and what the Canadians call char-à-bancs. And that is what Lars von Trier is doing all the time, shifting us from any period of time and any place to any other period of time and any other place. He even includes a pathology department in some hospital and a dissection to reveal some glandular tissue change, small little pea-looking globules that develop no one knows why and how. Fifteen cases yesterday, mind you. Once again we are in for a séance of grossing out. But the final one is a champion in the genre, in the style, in the ambition to make us sick. Lars von Trier uses a trick he has already used in “Element of Crime” and that is hypnosis. If you cannot take the producer of the film who is on a quick visit to Denmark to the plague itself evoked in the 12 page scenario, or rather sketch, you can bring a woman (of course it has to be woman, don’t ask me why, but it has to be a woman) who is hypnotized by a man (and it has to be a man here too, don’t ask me why but it has to be a man) and she is thus projected into the epidemic film and she describes the epidemic, what she sees, to the point of catching the disease, though it happens to her after it had happened to the first scenario writer, probably Lars if it is not Niels, and she develops, like him on his arm, ulcers on her neck and she gets crazy and she punctures the ulcers with a fork and she kills herself. How’s that as for a demonstration of the power of the plague, of the film seen as a contagious and killing fatal lethal deadly epidemic? Altogether I am still not convinced as for that film technique that illustrates a famous manifesto cosigned by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95 and the Vow of Chastity. But what I am becoming convinced of is that if you try to only give true real material facts on the screen, you are spreading around the matter necessary to psychoanalyze you, which I hate. So I won’t try to see how sick Lars von Trier is. But one thing is sure. That film technique is revealing the tremendous guilt some have in their mind and conscience. All beautiful stories, love stories and adventures, action films and horror films based on nothing but science fiction and special effects, utopia and dystopia, all that produces an audience that is blasé, that does not believe in anything any more and that does not even know reality is really horrible, provided you accept to look at it instead of all the fictional depictions of it that only suspend your disbelief fifteen minutes and then let you go on living in the dreamlike reality you imagine you are all the time blind and deaf to any horror, mute of course like a dumb thumb when you should shriek and yell, howl and protest. Leonard Cohen got it right right: “I am blind, don’t pass me by.” But the audience is blind and it is them, every single member of that audience who passes by the real horror and does not see it because they have been made blind to it by the cinema of the cinema industry in Hollywood, Bollywood and Saint Denis. But does Lars von Trier make us able again to see the real reality of our real modern world? I am not sure because the body, the flesh, the blood and adrenalin matter we are transporting on our bones and feet, is not more able to see horror than this blind audience Lars von Trier is speaking of, because we do not see with our eyes only, with our body only, because we see first of all with our mind, and minimalist films like this one do not make us think one iota more than “Star Trek” or Star Wars.” And some people would disagree with what I have just said. And I might not disagree with them. THE VOW OF CHASTITY I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95: 1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found). The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.) 2. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. 3. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.) 4. Optical work and filters are forbidden. 5. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.) 6. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) 7. Genre movies are not acceptable. 8. The film format must be Academy 35 mm. 9. The director must not be credited. 10. Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. 11. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. 12. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY. Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995 On behalf of DOGMA 95 Lars von Trier Thomas Vinterberg TO KNOW MORE VISIT/ http://www.thesis.bilkent.edu.tr/0002310.pdf LARS VON TRIER – CARL-THEODOR DREYER – MEDEA – 1988 (2003) This is an adaptation of Euripides’ play. It starts with Jason and his new wife, but on a very political tone: Creon is yielding power to Jason and to make it more powerful and official in this Greece moving towards hereditary kingship he gives him his daughter Glauce. But Creon requires – and orders – the banishment of Medea and her two sons. We all know what comes after that. Medea begging Creon for one day’s suspension of his decision. Then the hypocritical change of mind with Jason that she seduces again but he reacts violently, after yielding to the desire, and yet accepts to convince Glauce to ask her father to keep the two children. He goes with them to give her a present: Medea’s bridal crown. Glauce will die poisoned and Creon too. Then Medea will have to kill the two sons and go away. Told like that this fable is as simple as a cold draft in a heating deprived house in winter when it is snowing outside. Lars von Trier in 1988 only had the very low definition of the television of these days in Denmark to make his film but he already had his brilliant both lethal and murderous imagination rooted in the war and the German defeat which is also the allies’ victory. But Lars von Trier could never decide which was good and which was bad and he only saw the bad side of things. In this film he modifies some elements to adapt them to this low definition television. The killing of the children is not spectacular with blood. He wants to have them there dead hanging in front of our shocked eyes in a long lasting full screen frame. So he has them hanged to the two branches of a totally dead tree. You can imagine the silhouette of these cadavers, these hanging bodies against the sky. That’s more spectacular than some blood on a nightshirt. But that’s too static, dead in a way. He wants life in his vision of death. So Lars von Trier has to add something a lot more odious, repulsive. The younger boy runs away. The older boy gets him and brings him back and pulls on his leg to help him die faster on the rope that his mother had tied to the tree branch. On the following morning he asks his mother to help him. He ties the rope to the second tree branch, he puts the noose around his neck and she only has to let him go and pull slightly. The final embrace of the mother letting the child die hanged by that mutual desire shared in this final act is more than frightening. It is blood curdling and yet who is at fault, who is wrong somewhere? And during that time Jason is getting crazy. Medea goes to a ship, waits for the tide. The sail is rolled down and she unties her hair and she goes away. No god, no divine intervention, no Deus ex Machina, just a plain ship going away from Greece probably to some distant country. Maybe Colchis after all. But where is Euripides in all that? In the final caption on the screen: “A human life is a journey into the darkness where only a God can find the way for what no man dares believe God can bring about.” Finally a reference to God but this final caption means nothing and yet so much. That’s in fact the vision of Lars von Trier about humanity. He cannot bring man out of this darkness of the cataclysmic war and the ruined Europe and the viciously hypocritical people from both sides who have to save what they can in order to get some kind of revenge, not to speak of vengeance. Lars von Trier has a totally morbid and death-bound understanding of life, though understanding is not the proper word. It should be ignorance, and yet he knows too much, so what? Errant banishment from any over-lording understating understanding! That might be it. He sure wants us to somewhere believe we understand Medea in her suffering, but in fact he probably just wants us to wonder where can she find any haven, refuge, sanctuary with a condescending and understanding God. And if it were a Goddess? Hecate for example? But that’s beyond Lars von Trier. A Godless world is his final affiliation and conviction – and the sentence will be unsuspended. LARS VON TRIER – EUROPA – 1991 This film, finally and at last, makes sense, though in 1991 it is a strange way to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. But sense it makes because the splitting of Germany in two was the only way the West, the victors could deal with what was absolutely still alive and kicking, that is to say Nazism and the obligation for most Germans to go on being Nazis because they had been Nazis and now they felt guilty about being defeated Nazis in their minds as much as remorseful about not being victorious Nazis, and maybe never being able to be any day. The film is so clear about that. There is no doubt, no question asked. Everyone agrees and we are shown what they were able to do. The only hope the Americans, the allies had, was to get some of the big wheels of the regime on their side because they were industrialists for example and they were needed and they could be bought, cleaned up with some false Jewish witnesses and then whitewashed innocent. But the Nazis in 1945 were everywhere and they were holding everyone who were werewolves at night and human in the day time. A Jew could make you “innocent” but then you were the target of the underground Nazis because the Nazi party was not Hitler but was the upper class in Germany with the support of 90% of all Germans still in 1945. So you could buy one of them but you had to take him as far as the USA for his security. When you have said that, you have the film on your palm because there is nothing else to say. How did Germany survive? How did they deal with their past and their memory and their guilt? That’s not the question of the film. That’s the pedestal of the German statue and that pedestal is not mud or sand. It is concrete, pure stone, stainless steel. The film though has another dimension that makes it absolutely effective this time not because it terrifies us, not because it could horrify us, certainly not because it might gross us out. It is effective because it frightens us to the point of making us wet and soil our pants like a little baby in the middle of the dark night. It frightens us because it is still what the Germans are. This guilt, this deeper layer of crime and enjoyment in that crime is still there even in the younger generations because it was kept alive by the Cold War, because it was kept alive by the division of Germany, because it was kept alive by both the western pro-American side and the eastern pro-Soviet side. Worse even than that is the fact that the reunification was the best way to erase the past, to erase the guilt, to finally be German again, conquering, proud, above all and everyone else. The every symbol of that is not visible yet in 1991 because the East Germans had to climb a lot of steps to take over the political machinery of the Bundes Republik, but it only took something like twelve years or so. Lars von Trier in his frightening vision of what it was in 1945 is projecting it into what it was going to be in 2015. In seventy years the full fledged reunified bossy and domineering Germany was to come back and tell Europe this time what was good for them, the Europeans, maybe, the Germans for sure, and good for the world, the Germans of course, the Europeans maybe and the Americans, if they play it nice for German business. Yet the film seems to suggest that some sacrifice will have to be made by the Nazi side of history, getting rid of some of their werewolves who could betray, getting rid of their too obvious and visible presence in the full light of day. They had to go underground and they had to dive and settle deep in the minds of people. And that is definitely a genial side of the film. The Nazis are mental and ideological and not an SS militia any more. The film, from beginning to end, is led by a hypnotizer who tells the main character to go back to 1945 and then to jump to this place and this time, in chronological order. But this character is dead as we learn at the end. So who is that hypnotizer hypnotizing if not us and no one else but us. He is manipulating us into believing he is manipulating the character who is strutting on the screen in a makeshift German uniform whereas he is manipulating us and that is even more frightening than what I have said so far because we are the accomplices of this situation, the accessories of this criminal intention and project, of both the Americans who are trying to take control of the country, but also of the underground Nazis who are trying to save the independence of Germany from sheer humiliation and colonial enslavement. Lars von Trier makes us feel guilty because we supported the splitting of Germany to keep that basically imperialistic country under control. And in 1991 when Germany reunified we started running away, escaping, fleeing in our minds because we understood that Germany was back and with a vengeance to take. Was he right? Was he wrong? Are we still mentally being chased and hunted by our fright and fear? Maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t really know, or don’t really want to know, but for sure we cannot ignore the question. We can then wonder if this film is really representative of the Dogma 95 manifesto and The Vow of Chastity Lars von Trier and consorts signed and advocated for the cinema or at least their cinema, a sectarian minimalist approach of the fundamental means of communication, the central TV and cinema medium for which the message is the massage, the medium is the message that means the basically sacrilegious ritualistic enslavement of the mind to some cool feeling of comfort in front of images and messages that caress us comfortably where it feels nice and matters. But the color frames now and then are absolutely unrealistic and they emphasize the moments when there is some emotion, some emotional dimension in the situation. That is not minimalist. This is direct intervention of the director on our vision. And the hypnotist is definitely a means to take the control of our minds, of our reflection, of our thinking. “The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable.” So far three films, “Element of Crime,” “Epipdemic” and “Europa,” in black and white and the third one with a subtle play on color frames in the vast ocean of black and white pictures. “Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden” as if the hypnotist was not a way to play on temporal and geographical alienation, depravation, even traumatization. You can tell me that one-sided manifesto was written in 1995, four years after the third film, but it is then a denial of all they have done so far, and it is when Lars von Trier is finally coming to some convincing discourse that he edicts his pronouncement that tells us all that he has done so far has to be discarded and the audience who was starting to find some interest in all has it all wrong and there the director is a terrorist who tells the audience they can go get lost in some antipodean place somewhere on another planet. GOOGLE + Marcel Gauchet considère que nos sociétés sont des réseaux imbriqués. Il suffit de faire sauter un noeud névralgique pour que la société se bloque et que la révolution soit possible. Pour les Américains il s'agit de contrôler les réseaux pour contrôler les esprits et les personnes. Impérialisme révolutionnaire contre impérialisme de la hiérarchie en place. Et la Chine dans tout ça? LARS VON TRIER – THE IDIOTS – DOGMA 95 MANIFESTO – 1998 At first sight the film is plain idiotic. But there must be a second sight. The second sight is the manifesto behind the film I say the manifesto but certainly not the project because it has no objective OR destination whatsoever. The manifesto first: I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95: 1- Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found). 2- The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.) 3- The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. 4- The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.) 5- Optical work and filters are forbidden. 6- The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.) 7- Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) 8- Genre movies are not acceptable. 9- The film format must be Academy 35 mm. 10- The director must not be credited. 11- Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. 12- My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY. Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995 On behalf of DOGMA 95 Lars von Trier Thomas Vinterberg The concept of Chastity seems to imply all they refuse is for them nothing but a rape. They are raped by the camera, the director-dom, the actor-dom, etc. In other words they dream about making films without any cinema technology. They thus reduce their films to a mirage inside a delusion. And yet here is one film they made. The film is an absolute illustration of these principles. It describes a voluntary community, if not a commune of some sort, of people systematically called, in the English subtitles since the film is in Danish, idiots, retards and other nice terms of this type. All the actors are acting their own parts, their own reality, their own truth. The retards in the film are retards in society. Does this bring any truth? These people who are going to a restaurant and acting their mental and behavioral handicap against the personnel and the customers in order to be kicked out, after eating of course, without paying does not reveal anything true or truthful since these people are playing what they are to gain an advantage. This is thus a big lie and nothing but racket. In fact it reveals that the only decent people are more or less the innocent witnesses who actually accept the disturbance with patience or even accept to help the differently-abled persons with some empathy and care, like two tattooed bikers who actually take one of them who had been “entrusted” to them by his “educator” to the toilet and help him urinate without any fishiness. Of course the fact that it is filmed is the proof it is all a lie. Too bad for Lars von Trier: we know there is a camera filming the scene that has probably been rehearsed several times. The only moment when we may think something slightly enlightening is provided is at the end when an officially normal woman who is under a strong post-traumatic stress syndrome due to the death of her infant tries to go back to her husband and family. She is accepted, including the real handicapped woman who accompanies her, and yet she is unable to cope and she plays retard with catastrophic consequences. When we know she had escaped into that commune on the day before the funeral of her own child, we can measure how deep her Trauma was but that has little to do with mental handicap. This Dogma thing seems to me to be extremely over-rated. LARS VON TRIER – NICOLE KIDMAN – DOGVILLE - 2003 IMDB JANUARY 28, 2008 Summary: A sublime Nicole Kidman *** This review may contain spoilers *** A mysterious film in which everything is upside down. No setting really, in fact a nearly empty stage like in a minimalist dramatic production in some avant-garde theater. The only originality is that the camera can look down upon the stage from a higher position, which an audience cannot do. Of course too the camera can move around the stage. This is supposed to express a society that is upside down and besieged due to the depression. Depression in all directions: the mine is closed, there is no work for anyone, survival is the fundamental rule, autarky is the objective of everyday life. But that is not all. A female fugitive arrives one day in this dead mining community in the mountains preceded by the sound of gunshots and followed by a car that looks like a gangster's car, and it is. Yet the girl is hidden at first, then accepted, and then things turn sour. The film is about this slow transformation and revelation that human nature is not to be trusted. The girl is given some tasks in a friendly manner at first, and then little by little these tasks become an obligation that everyone expects. Thus the girl is transformed into a domestic slave. The next stage will be the progressive use of her body by all the men and the total hatred the women will feel and express for her. From being morally enslaved she will become physically enslaved with a chain and a flywheel attached to the chain itself attached to a metal collar. She becomes some kind of bitch or dog used by the villagers for their chores and impulses. The young would-be writer who protected her at first and declared is love at the beginning is also transformed from a rather kind and loving young man into a traitor who accuses her of a theft he had done himself, for her to escape it's true, but himself with his own hands. Then he will little by little consider her as an obstacle between himself and the village, hence an obstacle on his road of laziness and comfort. He will in the end call the gangsters to come and get her out of the village. On that level, simple people in a simple community hit by the depression, the least we can say is that good intentions and civilization are very superficial and very short-lived. But the worst is still to come. The gangsters come back of course. The girl is the daughter of the boss of the gang, and he gives her the responsibility, if she wants to come back with him out of this hell, to give the order to shoot everyone and burn the village down. And she will demonstrate a tremendous level of arrogance, condescension and cold hatred that was unimaginable before. For the details go to the film and she will be the one who executes, shoots the handsome would-be writer. "There are a few things you have to do yourself," will she conclude. That frozen inhumanity is beyond all limits. The film thus becomes a demonstration of what human beings can become in extreme conditions. If they can be that rude, brutal, cruel in a situation that has nothing to do with a war, you can imagine what they are ready to do to survive in a situation where life and death are a daily stake. The survival instinct is the strongest motivation for any individual, any group or community and even the human species as a whole. Humane attitudes are in no way natural. So, if you push aside the varnish of good behavior, you find out that many people are bullies when necessary in extreme conditions, even if only a few, and even few of them would be bullies in normal conditions. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines AFTERTHOUGHT AUGUST 17, 2015 How can we make humanity worthy living ? There is a tremendous lot we could add to this approach. The key to this film is probably at the end as the background of the final credits unwind itself. Dogville is the representative of the most rejected, ostracized and segregated against American community you can think of, the poorest among the poor. They are not even listed anywhere. They do not have the telephone, nor television, certainly not the Internet. They are miserable. They live on tit bits of social benefits, some nearly autarkic means, totally enclosed in their own limits and boundaries, locked away from the world. Let a stranger arrive in strange conditions with some strange mystery behind and they will accept him or her (it’s easier if it is a her) out of the goodness of their hearts at first but as soon as they learn she is wanted down in the valley, outside in the big world they start transforming the favors they were accepting from her for a miserable salary into exploitation: always more for less salary. And that descent into Dante’s Inferno will go on forever and she will become the men’s prostitute and then the prisoner of the village with chains, wheels attached to her leg and keys on the doors. And finally the only one who was in love with her and she was in love with will turn against her when she refuses his rape as love and accepts his love as rape, which makes him totally frigid, impotent. He will call the gangsters who were looking for her. A gangster who reveals himself as her father. At this moment there is no escape from the necessity to clean up the place. She cannot forgive them because if she had been in their place she would have done the same things and she can’t think of one single excuse for such a bleak behavior. So rather than surviving with the idea that she is like them she orders her father to get rid of the people and the village, and the mother of the many children (including a baby), the very woman who had been obnoxious enough to destroy her seven porcelain figurines she had bought from the fancy store of the village with her meager salary, is supposed to be made the witness of the killing of every single child of hers one after the other before being killed in her turn. And finally she confronts her would-be lover Tom, the doctor’s son, the would-be philosopher, the want-to-be novelist who could never be able to imagine anything, except ethical explanations why he would torture her, and she finally shuts him up with only one bullet. “There are things you have to do yourself,” she says. And finally a dog, Moses, is still barking after the village has been burnt to the ground. He is in his kennel and wants to get out. She checks upon him but she does not kill him. She leaves Moses alone in captivity with no people to lead across the Red Sea to die all by himself out of hunger and thirst. Absolute and exquisite torture! We can wonder what this film is all about. It is about social segregation and social stratification. No matter how low you can go on the social ladder, even the people you would think are on the lowest rung will either find people lower than them or they will put some stranger or strangers in that lower position so that they themselves can gain some greatness, some grandness, some importance. She is white. Fourteen people out of fifteen are white in Dogville. So they do not use color or race to do it. They use the first circumstances to bring her down. She is set under suspicion since she is declared missing by the police and she will have to pay for her safety and anonymity. And pay she will. Some good action will become work, and then the amount of work will be doubled and the pay cut DOWN mind you in proportion. And then she will be raped by all the men, and then she will be chained to the village with a metal wheel attached to her leg and there is no end to her being lowered under the last rung on the social ladder. This is a lesson on humanity and not in humanity and the final shooting of all these people and burning of the village seem to imply there is no other way but to make such communities extinct, knowing that you can destroy one, another will come because they are like Jack-in-the-box cockroaches: they are not destroyed even by nuclear radiation. Is Lars von Trier advocating social cleansing? That’s your own responsibility to answer yes he is or no he isn’t. Yes he is, if you take it literally but the social cleansing is done by a gang of gangsters and criminals. So what! So what? No he is not, because it is so excessive that the logic of it is flawed. It is black humor, very dark somber black humor, but it is the type of humor Daniel Defoe used when he advised the Irish to have many children, fatten them and at the age of three sell them on the market just the way you do with piglets or young pigs: as food mind you. LARS VON TRIER – STEPHEN KING – KINGDOM HOSPITAL – 2004 No one will be surprised by the fact this series counts thirteen episodes. No one will be surprised either that the format is obvious prime time television with the regular and frequent blackout cuts and the slow rhythm. Stephen King is more a producer than the real author. The series is by Lars Von Trier and Stephen King only wrote the teleplay of some episodes. We thus have some renewed elements in the plot and story as compared to standard Stephen King stuff. Stephen King though adds here and there his own style and that is not necessarily good or bad, it is variety. The general landscape of the plot is in three time periods on the same spot of land. In the 1860s it was a textile mill exploiting children in the downstairs section. A sweat shop for sure with 16 hours of work a day and then after the Civil War 12 for children condemned to work in the furnace and dyeing level. The factory was going to bite the dust. So its owner decided to burn it and to burn all the children along with the factory to have no witnesses. This owner had a brother who was using the wounded of the factory as guinea pigs for his anti-pain treatment which was essentially some primitive form of lobotomizing. Then the next period was a first hospital in the 1930s in which a descendent of the previous textile mill owner went on with his experiments on patients this time causing a lot of suffering and many deaths. And finally today Kingdom Hospital. This time we are following the model of normal or standard hospital TV series with all the necessary components: emergencies, ambulances, accidents, surgical operations, stressed personnel, romantic episodes, etc. This series adds several other elements to make it fantastic but in a soft way (though too often grosser than horrifying or terrifying). It adds outside the hospital a street priest and in the late episodes this priest will be crucified on some fence, he will die and then rise again in three days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with plenty of miracles along the way. That is nothing but a side plot with a lot of Christian chanting and other stuff like that. It adds nothing to the plot of the series itself except of course the equivalent of one full episode spread over two. Inside the hospital the series adds two mentally handicapped people, a manager who is only interested in raising money with sponsored advertising campaigns, a crazy surgeon with a past of malpractice and new cases here that are developed at length, and a psychic old lady who takes us into the world of the dead and ghosts. That’s at least the superficial visible world. In this visible world the authors add a lot of humorous elements like a nearly blind security supervisor, a dog scavenging for body parts, a practical joker and his pranks, etc. Then the world of the dead is added with its two layers of descending time and the whole plot is the call of these trapped dead people, and children, for the living to help and liberate them. That will take some divine magic to do. The god will be borrowed from the Egyptians, Anubis, in the form of an anteater called Antubis. He will manage to bring on the scene of the hospital an artist who is necessary to see and solve the old problem. A car accident will suffice. I will not go beyond that as for telling you the plot. Go discover it yourself. Be careful it is slightly long and you can’t afford to miss one episode. But I will spill a few more rice on the meaning of this tale. It is both a criticism of the hospital world as greedy, expensive, wasteful, stressed and uncaring, etc, without speaking of malpractice and cover-ups. It is also a vision of the hospital world that contains and welcomes some warm personalities, interesting and humane personalities, even if at times it becomes a cliché, like the young nurse who swoons as soon as she sees blood or something bizarre. It shows how mentally handicapped people can be seers and how extra-sensorial perception is needed to counter-balance the world’s insanity with some psychic and mental sanity, even maybe religious spirituality. It shows how artists can also be useful in extreme situations because what they create is as solid as the real world. But the end shows there is some justice somewhere in this world, and that is not King-like. The bad doctor is still there at the end with the Paul ghost but we know he has already been medically suspended and that the malpractice suit will bring him down. Hence there can be some rosy hope and future in this world. Too optimistic for a standard objective mind that righteously considers there is no justice down here, since at the best justice can only exist up there, but necessarily optimistic for prime time television. LARS VON TRIER – WILLEM DAFOE – CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG – ANTICHRIST(O) – 2009 This film is not a very great film, even if it is very well done. It is the story of a couple with an important age difference, a professor and a doctorate student with a young child, a toddler actually. One night when they make hectic love in the bathroom, on the washing machine, in the living room, etc, the child wakes up and they do not hear the call in the baby surveillance unit that might not have been on. He gets out of his bed, through the baby gate, sees his parents, goes back to his room, pushes a chair to the table, climbs on the chair, then on the table, then on the window ledge because the window is open. There is snow there because it is snowing. He slips and falls. The film is the story of the mother’s subsequent depression treated by her husband who is supposed to be a head shrink. This is the fundamental mistake. A psycho-therapy cannot be performed by a person directly connected to the patient: members of the family and above all sexual partners. He knows that because he tries to cut sex off, but he cannot resist to her neurosis or psychosis that is taking hold of her and forces sex onto him as a poison for herself. The second mistake is to isolate with her in a mountain cabin far from everything and any communication line. He broke there the normal procedure in which the relation doctor-patient has to remain within the frame of a socially situated and defined setting, method, process, with help within easy reach. These two mistakes become dramatic when he discovers the mother had systematically and probably for a long time put the shoes left side right on the feet of the baby. He knew something was wrong because of the autopsy performed on the child that noted a deformity in the feet, which could explain the accident on the window ledge. You add that deformity to the fact that the window was open and rather easily reachable and you have a criminal scenario, maybe unconscious but definitely from a criminal mind. The man finds confirmation of this “torturing” with pictures of the child on which the shoes are always right side left. He finds these pictures in their isolation, and then this guilt gets into her head and she becomes convinced she has to do something to purge it. The doctor and husband should have known that she was to come to this breaking point for various reasons: 1- The torturing reveals she wanted to make the child suffer and hence felt guilty about the birth and presence of the child, hence about having sex with the older professor. 2- The fact that they were making love when the child “committed suicide” makes her responsible at first (“it’s my fault” she says at the beginning) and her guilt getting bigger she will shift this guilt from her to him who forced her to have sex when the child was in danger. 3- Her desire to have rough sex, even hurtful sex at the end shows that she considers sex coming from him is and has to be a violent process, that she has been forced into it, that she was raped, and that explained how and why she tortured the child. 4- Then she will have to torture him and eventually kill him to alleviate her own guilt, and that will be justice for her since he is the “bastard.” The whole story is wrapped up in some kind of myth. The myth of the three beggars, represented by a fox, a deer (that has to be a doe) and a bird of prey. When the three beggars come together someone has to die. She tells him about the myth. And in his own torture (she has screwed up a sharpening stone into his left leg to prevent him from escaping and also with a very obvious sexual innuendo: to sterilize him, to make him impotent without castrating him) he sees visions and he finally sees her lying with the fox, the deer and the bird of prey, and he knows she will kill him. So by some miraculous turn of the screw in the story he recuperates the wrench she had hidden under the cabin (suspend you disbelief one minute) and in spite of her trying to stop him he manages to get the sharpening stone off his leg and he strangles her, then burns the body (to prevent her being scavenged by animals of prey, shall we say). His escape becomes a futuristic vision that has little value: the myth of the resurrection of the hundreds if not thousands of dead bodies buried in the forest and they come from behind him alive and rejuvenated and overtake him and we can then wonder if he is still alive or if he has joined the resuscitated crowd, whose resurrection was called by the killing of the curse of the three beggars. The film though is a tragedy brought by some insidious torturing of a child by his own mother, and then by the absolutely absurd and unprofessional decision of the father and husband to take over the psychological treatment of his wife himself, which is totally forbidden by all codes of behavior and action in the psychiatric profession. Lars von Trier decision to make his characters make these mistakes is of course the fruit of his own twisted mind that tortures his characters probably because he does not have the courage to do it for real in his own life. The film must have a cathartic dimension for him. But the film has not cathartic dimension for the audience because we would never, for those who are doctors in a way or another, do this mistake. It becomes then a warning, a road sign saying: “ROAD TO HELL” and you better know you must not take it. LARS VON TRIER – MELANCHOLIA – 2011 Don’t believe the title. There is no melancholia in this woman on the front page. Don’t believe the Ophelia looking front page with Justine floating in water in her wedding dress holding lily-in-the-valley, a whole bunch of them. There is no Ophelia, no suicide by drowning and no flowers floating on top of the water. Justine is not going to go to a nunnery, the nunnery of the dead, at least not what Hamlet and Shakespeare had in mind. You will discover as soon as you get into the film beyond the title page that we are dealing with the end of the world set in parallel with the end of celibacy for Justine. She cannot accept her personal perspective because of what has been announced and is coming: the planet Melancholia is going to ram into the Earth. There cannot be any enjoyment while it lasts because lasting should mean there is no end decreed even before it starts, and obviously there is an imminent announced foreseen end. So the little (though super rich, but the richer the more little) people at that wedding reveal how little they can be while they are forgetting it is one of their very last days. The mother is obnoxious and ridiculously anti-marriage and anti-husband, particularly hostile to her ex-husband that refused to be dominated into silence. The father is secretive, more than strange and absolutely selfish meaning he is not able to think beyond his own mental limits and they are quite narrow. The sister Claire is the only sane person and yet she will yield to insanity when the end is coming. Sane people are only behaving like sane people, as sane people, but as soon as conditions get insane they are also getting insane because they are just copying what is normal at any time in their society. And yet at the last minute just before Melancholia crashes into the Earth she will get back to some sane peace and quiet, thanks to her own sister, Aunt Steelbreaker. Claire’s husband, John, is entirely preaching what he knows is not true. He knows there is a margin of error in any calculation and that his own calculations that make Melancholia fly by have a fair chance to be wrong especially since everyone else or nearly says it will crash into the Earth. Actually he is a coward who will see before others the imminent ending and will steal his own wife’s poison to leave life before the meeting of the two planets. Justine’s newly-wed husband Michael is just a non-entity who loves, in fact desires, Justine and leaves her as soon as he understands she is beyond domination. For him love is submission both ways except that the husband only submits for his own pleasure and enjoyment. And he has little more to say. I won’t say anything about Justine’s boss: he is the biggest business non-imaginative non-entity that I hope you will never have to come across in life and after life. So we are back with Justine, depressed by what is coming, always depressed because of a domineering and vain mother who hated anyone but herself and deserted her daughters to only come back once in a while to insult them. She is also depressed because of the evanescent and always absent father who cannot even find five minutes to have a personal word with his daughter on her wedding day. And she is the creative one who will be able to invent some fable about a magic cave that will create peace and bring quiet to her nephew Leo, her sister Claire and herself for the last fifteen minutes of their life. We are back with Claire who is the sound and safe one in life but also the realist in danger and in a crisis, which makes her buy some poison before the end if it has to come to an end. Like all these people who have their feet well anchored in and not on the earth she is not able to face a real existential crisis in her own life but she is the best empathetic help anyone can find in their own existential crises. And when the end comes it is the sound sister that needs the help of the depressive one. And we have Leo, Claire’s son and Justine’s nephew. He is a child, innocent and gullible, afraid of nothing because he has never seen death and suffering and torturing and cruelty face to face, one on one, in personal confrontation. When such an event comes he is curious to see it and he believes the soft and smoothening tale of his aunt, Aunt Steelbreaker, who makes him build the skeleton of an Indian Tepee and makes him accept this is a magic cave in which no danger can reach him or anyone with him and he closes his eyes and finds the peace necessary to reach the end of the road without the slightest jolt. He is hypnotized in a way, one of Mars von Trier’s favorite device. When I have said that I have said nothing about the meaning of the film. I have simply repeated, summarize, given a gloss of the factual surface of the film, nothing but spoilers. But what is the meaning? Here we come across Lars von Trier who has forgotten his provocative and absurd dictum and pronunciamento in his Vow of Chastity that was nothing but a dogmatic fundamentalistic Dogma 95. Everything in this film is fake, unreal, artificial, using all sorts of artifices and special effects including the special effects of the story itself that is supposed to blind the audience and make them believe we are dealing with normal though completely berserk people but berserk because the circumstances are exceptional. And what is so exceptional in it? In 2011 when the world was falling head first in the worst financial crisis since 1929 (that brought Hitler and the Nazis Lars Von Trier loves-hates so much), when the first signs of the debt crisis in Europe were appearing, when the leadership of the USA was at stake everywhere in the world from China to Iraq with the economic defeat in front of the BRICS and with the military defeat in the Middle East, when nothing was improving and everything was getting worse, he came up with the fable of a cosmic end to the Earth and humanity. To make sure we get the message he does not even look at this cosmic destruction from the point of view of more than four people, first by wrapping up some gathering of the super rich in a wedding party that is a total failure but we can always enjoy the wedding cake and forget about the cosmic end coming soon. And then when we cannot avoid that moment we are locked up in a group of four people, cut from the rest of the world with no telephone, no electricity, no means of communication, no servant even, nothing, all alone. A crisis of that type cannot in our world be experienced like that. It would necessarily be experienced as a collective drama, a collective panic, a collective epiphany, maybe even a collective salvation. But there is no reference to the billions of people on the Earth, no reference to any ideology, be it religious or nonreligious, philosophical or secular, artistic even or poetic, with hardly ten seconds on Google or some Bling like that for some opportunistic info given to us the audience about this Melancholia. We are manipulated in cold blood and we are not even in any way pushed towards some personal empathy for anyone in the tale, except maybe the horses. The medium is the message and the message is the massage. Good morning, Vietnam, straight from MacLuhan’s Global Village on Epsilon One Billion, or is it Antares in Scorpius? Then what is left in that waste land of human desolation? The obsession of death that Lars von Trier cultivates with gusto! His obsession about some kind of catastrophe brought by some kind of agent. Since all man-made catastrophes have failed to produce this end of humanity Lars von Trier wishes with all his heart and not the slightest part of his mind, then he has to come to some more drastic means and that is to use the cosmos as God almighty punishing humanity for its vanity, its cruelty, its absurdity, its folly and insanity. In other words that film is morbid and is supposed to make us think that there is no hope whatsoever as long as humanity exists. Of course he knows that there is no other life like ours in the cosmos and that our end would not be that drastic for the universe: “The Earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it… When I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on Earth and not for long,” says Justine. It’s obvious when humanity is destroyed no human being will feel sorry for it. How could they since they will be reduced to cosmic dust and powder and back to the super black hole of the big Bang. Good riddance! LARS VON TRIER – TRILOGY EUROPE – 2011 This trilogy is essential in modern cinema. It is the absolute negation of Marshall McLuhan who has demonstrated one hundred times that the medium is the message and the message is the massage. Lars von Trier pretends that he wants to remain absolutely neutral in giving to the audience the rough and raw world he is contemplating. These three films are progressively bringing to the surface in sharp focus a German film maker who is absolutely haunted by the crimes he committed directly up to 1991 or indirectly via his parents, relatives, acquaintances and friends like Gunter Grass. He is obnubilated and what he says is that the Americans, and in fact all the allies, western and eastern, have saved that guilt, remorse, regret, nostalgia of a glorious ten or twelve years when killing was an asset and a glorious achievement Some may say that Germany is back on such trails, tracks, railroads and railways after reunification, after the top jobs having shifted to East Germans, after the financial crisis of 2009, after the European debt crisis of 2012, after the Irish crisis and then the Portuguese, Spanish, Greek crises, and the Italian and French “debt problem(s)” looming behind, not to speak of the refugee crisis across the Mediterranean Sea. Is Germany to be “Über alles” again and impose its leadership to the whole Europe? With the lackluster and mediocre leaders some countries are putting on the table we could think it might be an easy task and Lars von Trier would be amazed to have been such a prophet of the return of the werewolves. As if we were on the last page of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to find out it is the same as the very first page of the very first volume, some eight volumes and four or five thousand pages before. LARS VON TRIER – NYMPH(vulva)MANIAC PART I & PART II – 2013 That’s a monumental film with four hours of moving pictures that end in one single sequence that alas changes the whole meaning of these four hours. But let’s keep that last sequence for the end. The film has a subject that is irritatingly made sibylline by the parentheses in the place of the O in the title. These parentheses could mean many things but they always have to mean that something is inbetween them, and in a title it can only be the person this title indicates, hence Joe. She is thus asserted to be in-between two things and though we do not understand what she is in-between when looking at the title, we very fast understand many possible meanings. Right at the beginning of the story, a story that is being told to us by the voice over of Joe herself and the voice over of Seligman, her benefactor, savior and listener, she tells us about a vision she had when twelve or so with two women appearing in the sky, one being seen more or les like the Holy Virgin by Joe herself. But Seligman at once introduces another interpretation. One is Valeria Messalina, Emperor Claudius’s wife, and the second is the Whore of Babylon. The first one is a woman with a very dubious reputation though that reputation is probably more the result of political strife than of real facts. “She was a paternal cousin of the Emperor Nero, a second-cousin of the Emperor Caligula, and a great-grandniece of the Emperor Augustus. A powerful and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity, she allegedly conspired against her husband and was executed on the discovery of the plot.” (Wikipedia) The Whore of Babylon everyone knows since she is the great monstrous promiscuous by profession heroin of Saint John’s Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation. It is strange a girl of twelve could have a vision of these two women though she has no religious education and she does not recognize them, hence she does not know them. That’s the type of detail that shows that Lars von Trier is manipulating us because he wants to introduce Seligman as someone who knows about this all because as we are told he is a Jew and he tells us his name means “the blessed man” in German or Yiddish. He even clearly says he is an anti-Zionist and he declares that anti-Zionism does not mean anti-Semitism though many people think the opposite. This is at the very beginning of this saga and at once Seligman is positioned as a Jew and as the one who is going to give the meaning of the story, who is going to be the guide of Joe and us in the story, who is going to add his two-pennies of science and reflection to the story. Most of the time it is trite and not really useful and with always the same references behind, mainly Freud and Sigmund and Sigmund Freud seen as the new trinity of the modern world. He is of course a Jew as we all know. This Jewish cluster will become the key of the film with the very last sequence. And it will go bang, though definitely not a big bang, just a surprising and shocking bang. But more about it later. Joe is a nymphomaniac and she has been obsessed by her sexual desire since the age of two she says. She is shown as adventurous, rebellious and independent all the time, looking for some isolation, loneliness to let her desire blossom and bloom even before it could simply satisfy itself. The mother is a very cold, distant and authoritarian woman, just like Justine’s mother in “Melancholia.” But Joe does not have a sister or a brother. But she has a father who encourages her in her dreaming and fantasizing. He will die when she is still young in atrocious scenes, the mother totally absent then and the daughter totally fascinated by that death that was known as death anyway, from the very start and with no escape possible whatsoever. The film insists how the escape from this dying man’s hospital room led Joe to the basement of the hospital where she could seduce and use all the janitors and menial workers taking care of the furnace or cleaning up the mess here and there. The film wants us to believe of course that the mother is the guilty character. Her distance and absence produced the nymphomaniac sex obsession or addiction of her daughter. This is of course trite and superficial. Unluckily the film is not going to propose any other explanation, neither in voice over commentary, nor in real situations. She is stated as a nymphomaniac and there is only this embryonic explanation that is worth two pennies again on the psychoanalytical market. In the first part Joe finally leads us to understanding she had three main lovers with the frequent repetition that she had something like ten sexual partners a day, and yet a full time job. The reduction to three makes the tale a little bit more believable. If she did not have a job it could be possible to have ten but with a full time job it is plain impossible. The three men are F and G and in-between a certain Jerome is introduced as the third one. He is the one between the F and G parentheses on a screen split in three boxes, one for each lover. Just as that poor Joe was locked up between the deficient parentheses of her two parents, she is now surrounded by three main lovers, one being locked up between the utilitarian and meaningless parentheses of F and G. Why this central position? Because Jerome is the one who introduced her to sex, three penetrations in front and five penetrations behind. This will lead Seligman to the Fibonacci numbers and later to the Cabalistic numbers of the Jewish tradition, without telling us it is Jewish. When he applies it to Bach implying that Bach was using such numerical formulas, we feel awkward because Bach could not have any Jewish cultural reference and he was too late in historical time to be still, like Shakespeare in England, under the influence of some medieval numerology. Here with these Fibonacci numbers we feel manipulated and of course we think of the very Jewish film, “Pi” (1998), about these cabalistic numbers and their eventual usefulness in stock exchange trading. Note that has nothing to do with the subject of this film, so we can wonder why it is introduced in connection with Joe’s first encounter. Anyway she has created a trinity of her own with these three lovers. Yet Jerome stands apart. He was a temporary boss in one of her first jobs at a publishing house and he refused any sexual advances from her then. One day he disappeared with the secretary who he had secretly married. That Jerome comes back into her life later on, when he comes back from his travelling with his wife. Yet we are not given any explanation why he falls in her trap and what happens to his wife. He just becomes the third man, but she falls in love with him, and as soon she falls in love with him she finds no pleasure whatsoever in any carnal contact with Jerome or anyone else. Yet she manages to get a son from him thinking it would re-ignite her desire. It does not and the son, Marcel, is the victim of his parents, a recurrent theme in Lars von Trier. She abandons him without a baby sitter at night to go to some kinky non-directly-sexual masochistic and sadistic séances. On Christmas night she leaves in spite of Jerome telling her she would never see him and Marcel again if she did, and she does. When she comes back from her punishing séance Jerome is gone and Marcel along with him; The film though will tell us the son was put in a foster home and she will provide money on a special account to his name. A good mother art a great distance. Nourishing your son by telepathy, I guess. There is in Lars von Trier a recurring element about careless and even vicious parents. He does have a problem in his films with his characters who are deprived of any proper parental love, which is such an easy superficial Freudian element that it makes this reference to Freud vain and useless. It explains nothing because it is turned into a recipe that prevents anyone in the film from just thinking and empathetically analyze the real personal situation of let’s say Joe for one example. Lars von Trier must have suffered a very strenuous or traumatic experience in his university studies from some Freud-obsessed professor trying to prove that everything in this world can be reduced to vulva symbols and penis symbols with Frau Libido having a go at Herr Death Instinct and vice versa, Libido being feminine and Death Instinct masculine, and vice versa too. Lars von Trier even gives us the feminine version of it that he calls “the little flock” and the words are very Christian indeed: “Mea Vulva, Mean Vulva, Mea Maximum Vulva” with a simple piano chord which is the Satanic tritone with explanations from Master Seligman that it is playing two notes at the same time Si-Fa or if you prefer B-F, and the explanation is long enough for us to know everything about this tritone and the Medieval ban because it was considered Satanic. But how could these girls (who were in their early teens) know that to play it over and over again while they were reciting their sinful confession? They must once again have been inspired by some archangel, in this case Lucifer himself. Such elements that do not fit any credible approach of the facts and characters make the film unbelievable and they prevent us from suspending our disbelief. And yet Lars von Trier tries hard to expand the music theme with Bach and the numerical cabalistic meanings and values of the four letters of his name (2 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 14. Note this is amateurish since it refers to the rank of the letters in the Latin alphabet. The cabalistic approach gives values to the various letters in the Hebrew alphabet: B = 2; 1 = 1; C = 8; H = 5; hence BACH = 16. Did Bach often use this number in his compositions as he is said to have used 14), and then with a music lesson on polyphony. Bach would be the best who did it with the organ after the choir and the soloists. The bass voice is on the pedals. The second voice is on the keyboards with the left hand. And the first voice is also on the keyboards with the right hand. Bach would have been a genius about bringing the melody of each voice into perfect harmony together in polyphony. That’s a nice lesson that introduces a third trinity and that obsession about trinities seems to show some deeper uncomfortable layer in these characters who are Christians who have forgotten their roots and cannot recognize them any more. It is slightly awkward for Seligman who is a Jew, but a Jew who is trying to integrate and is assimilating the basic concepts of a Christian society to look part of the décor. And do not forget the tritone is a trinity in itself, a Satanic trinity? We are really getting close to something deeply heretical and apostatical. But here we are at the end of the first part with love that kills sexual desire but Joe’s nymphomania then becomes explosive and she has to find a way to restart her promiscuous lustful obsession. A son, a child did not solve the problem. She then goes to some kind of Nymphomaniac Anonymous and that does not work either. She had tried sadism-masochism and that was another failure. She even tried some black African speaking no English whatsoever. She selected one and he came with his brother for a double penetration but they started arguing and forgot about her: a kinky girl can always find some kinkier lovers. That’s when she meets a new boss who is having problems with customers who forget to pay their debts. He needs a debt collector, and a good one at that because it is implied debtors who forget to pay their debts are people who have a sexual problem. We are shown one who needs to be flagellated on his bare bottom to accept paying and the flagellation must have been performed at every payment I guess. Then another one is brought to a sensible response when she prods into his unconscious and reveals he is a closet pedophile which brings him down to remission because he does not want that to go out, does he now? And she gives buccal relief to his strenuous wooden excitement, out of pity for his loneliness in his closet locked up desire that he probable has never satisfied. Her boss suggests she should capture the attention of a girl who is just under age to make her become her successor. That part of the story is more than successful. Joe even discovers a type of carnal satisfaction she had never used before with that young lady. But she also discovers there is no love in that relation because one day the bad debtor is a certain Jerome, and she entrusts the customer to that young lady of hers. Jerome will seduce her and then when Joe tries to get her vengeance and kill Jerome, she will fail, forgetting how to use a weapon and she will be beaten up by Jerome and that’s when she was discovered in the street by Seligman at the beginning of the first part. But Lars von Trier cannot avoid going back to another numerical symbolical formula of his: Jerome is taking the young lady friend of Joe’s to some carnal paradise and Joe can count three penetrations in the front side and the five penetrations in the back side. Fibonacci numbers again and we remember another episode at the beginning. With Lars von Trier a story always seems to repeat itself. And then we come to the end and what Joe says then is essential: “Even if only one in a million succeeds in mentally, bodily and in her heart of ridding herself of her sexuality, this is now my goal.” [Seligman: “Is that a life worth living?”] “It’s the only way I can live. I will stand up against all odds. Just like a deformed tree on a hill. I will muster all my stubbornness, my strength, my masculine aggression. But most of all I want to say thanks to my new and maybe first friend. Thank you, Seligman, who perhaps is happy when all is said and done. I’m happy at any rate that the shot didn’t go off and made me a murderer. If I may, I’d like to sleep now.” We are surprised by the “masculine aggression” in this discourse because she never showed any masculinity at all. Her aggressiveness was always feminine sexuality and submission to masculine violence, willingly in her masochistic-sadistic period and unwillingly in her last encounter with Jerome. The script here does not correspond to the film we have seen, because that script would imply her lovers were nothing but clandestine homosexuals. But the film that could stop there with Seligman getting out, Joe turning of the light and going to sleep, does not reach its end then. A final sequence is added with Seligman, in his shirt coming back into the room and trying to take advantage of sleeping Joe. We understand Joe refuses, we hear Seligman arguing she has done it with a lot of men, as if that argument gave him the right to take what he suddenly wanted after having explained that he was a virgin, that he had never had a woman, not a man as for that. We hear a shot in the total darkness on the screen, pants being zipped up and then feminine shoe steps going away. She became a murderer after all. But that was inescapable after the four hours of Freudian rationalizing about Joe. The shocking element in this last sequence is that the one who tries to take Joe without her consent, the one who has no moral ethics at all in such a situation where Joe had enshrined in him her total trust is also a Jew. This ending implies that Jews do not ask before taking, and Jews are perverts and a few other things. That last sequence is absolutely and inescapably anti-Semite. Why did Lars von Trier inject that last touch of unacceptable ideology in a film that had been too long for one and too intellectual for two, but it had remained free of sexism, racism and anti-Semitism. Unluckily the last sequence changes that last fact and this is not acceptable, just the same as the sexism implied by a man taking a woman without her consent. Does it reveal the film is anti-Semite? Definitely yes. Does it say anything about the author and director? Certainly not. Then what is the director’s motivation in that last touch of anti-Semitism? He is the only one who can answer this question but it is definitely out of place in this film.