12.05.2004
lars von trier's dogville
well, i finally saw dogville, lars von trier's controversial allegory about power dynamics in rural 1930's america. and while, ultimately, i think it's miserably one-dimensional and needlessly long, i am (perhaps reluctantly) glad i made it to its conclusion. it at least got me thinking...
first, let's get the description out of the way-- dogville is the story of a mysterious, beautiful woman named grace (nicole kidman, interesting both as a choice and as an actress). grace is on the run from mobsters when she strolls into a small mountain town. there she meets tom (a totally miscast paul bettany), who convinces the town's population to protect her. to show her gratitude, kidman becomes determined to help the local people with their day to day business. the town is reluctant to let her at first, but upon acceptance they slowly begin to take advantage of her. this eventually triggers a downward spiral of increasingly hyperbolic abuses of power, all punctuated with allegorical musings about the nature of power itself.
trier's films, at least from breaking the waves to the present, create for me a bit of a crisis...
on the one hand, i thank god he's got the resources to do what he's doing. unlike your average arthouse director, trier has not only resisted the urge to make more mainstream fare, he's actually become more and more stylistically audacious. and more power to him. our theaters are better off populated with mentally-ill-impersonators and musicals with bjork in them. the sheer existence of dogville is refreshing at first. the film is quite radical in its rejection of realism. the set is jet black and map-like, punctuated only by props that serve either an indexical or allegorical purpose. in my opinion, anyone who can talk nicole kidman and lauren bacall into pretending to open doors on a set more threadbare than that of a high school play is worthy of some admiration.
but let's not beat around the bush. trier is also appallingly pedantic, often cheap with his provocations, and, in the end, an unforgivable misogynist. and with dogville, he's orchestrated a film which, by its conclusion, has had almost every man in it literally rape one of the most recognizable women in contemporary film (kidman). beyond his superficial radicality, trier proves time and time again that much of his creative energy is borne from a deep-rooted, garden variety madonna/whore complex. carrie rickey of the philadelphia inquirer puts it rather well:
Of a piece with the director's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, his new film also sees a guileless woman as the trembling object of fear and desire. Von Trier is a New Age Victorian, one who gets a sexual thrill from seeing a woman defiled try to maintain her fortitude. To watch this film is to be a sadist's accomplice.
indeed, trier's female protagonists always seem to fall short of the joan-of-arc-like determination he tries to bestow upon them. his recent labeling of the three films proceeding dogville (breaking the waves, the idiots, dancer in the dark) as his "golden heart" trilogy is particularly revealing in its faux-pious yuckiness. with grace, however, the violations she must endure are more overt and graphically sexual than those dealt to the "golden heart" ladies. trier's point of reference moves from saint joan to sade's justine. by film's end, kidman has become a sex slave with a metal clamp around her neck (for real), and it's getting pretty hard to not to notice that rod in his pants.
dogville is allegorical in the worst way possible. trier's pervasive sense of entitlement keeps its metaphors strict and rigid. all of the questions raised by it are polluted with a plodding, alpha-male assurance that he's already answered them for you. the only thing that seems to escape this logic is the unchecked, sadistic eroticism i've described above.
the attempt to compensate for this randiness creates an even bigger mess. after two solid hours of dull benevolence, grace inexplicably chooses the dark side, and dogville becomes a revenge fantasy. trier tries to convince us that he is not at all a "new age victorian," but has been merely a misanthrope all along. a five minute sermon about the arrogance of pity becomes the proto-nietzschean apology for grace's unlikely, old-school idealism. it's not very convincing.
as an investigation of power, the film never abandons the position of power long enough to get anywhere interesting. trier's ideas about xenophobia and america are so belligerent that one begins to mourn the subtleties he misses along the way. for example, the town of dogville contains two oddly de-racialized women of color. for a film set in a xenophobic town in middle america during the dust bowl, the way they are pushed into the periphery of the story is both ignorant and irresponsible (sidenote: for a far superior film about race and gender in rural america, try elia kazan's baby doll). trier is less concerned with the schematics of power than he is with the volume of his own thoughts regarding them. his controversial, anti-american photo-montage during the credits is more of the same... it replaces any real investigative interest in the working poor of our country with cheap cultural elitism. i gather he intended something a bit more complex than this, but he hasn't done the legwork to back it up. the last thing this film's largely progressive audience needs is more ghetto stereotypes and ironic music, whatever the cloudy agenda behind them might be.
if trier could focus his wild fearlessness on something other than style, he might arrive at something vulnerable and magical. unfortunately, this shit ain't it.
first, let's get the description out of the way-- dogville is the story of a mysterious, beautiful woman named grace (nicole kidman, interesting both as a choice and as an actress). grace is on the run from mobsters when she strolls into a small mountain town. there she meets tom (a totally miscast paul bettany), who convinces the town's population to protect her. to show her gratitude, kidman becomes determined to help the local people with their day to day business. the town is reluctant to let her at first, but upon acceptance they slowly begin to take advantage of her. this eventually triggers a downward spiral of increasingly hyperbolic abuses of power, all punctuated with allegorical musings about the nature of power itself.
trier's films, at least from breaking the waves to the present, create for me a bit of a crisis...
on the one hand, i thank god he's got the resources to do what he's doing. unlike your average arthouse director, trier has not only resisted the urge to make more mainstream fare, he's actually become more and more stylistically audacious. and more power to him. our theaters are better off populated with mentally-ill-impersonators and musicals with bjork in them. the sheer existence of dogville is refreshing at first. the film is quite radical in its rejection of realism. the set is jet black and map-like, punctuated only by props that serve either an indexical or allegorical purpose. in my opinion, anyone who can talk nicole kidman and lauren bacall into pretending to open doors on a set more threadbare than that of a high school play is worthy of some admiration.
but let's not beat around the bush. trier is also appallingly pedantic, often cheap with his provocations, and, in the end, an unforgivable misogynist. and with dogville, he's orchestrated a film which, by its conclusion, has had almost every man in it literally rape one of the most recognizable women in contemporary film (kidman). beyond his superficial radicality, trier proves time and time again that much of his creative energy is borne from a deep-rooted, garden variety madonna/whore complex. carrie rickey of the philadelphia inquirer puts it rather well:
Of a piece with the director's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, his new film also sees a guileless woman as the trembling object of fear and desire. Von Trier is a New Age Victorian, one who gets a sexual thrill from seeing a woman defiled try to maintain her fortitude. To watch this film is to be a sadist's accomplice.
indeed, trier's female protagonists always seem to fall short of the joan-of-arc-like determination he tries to bestow upon them. his recent labeling of the three films proceeding dogville (breaking the waves, the idiots, dancer in the dark) as his "golden heart" trilogy is particularly revealing in its faux-pious yuckiness. with grace, however, the violations she must endure are more overt and graphically sexual than those dealt to the "golden heart" ladies. trier's point of reference moves from saint joan to sade's justine. by film's end, kidman has become a sex slave with a metal clamp around her neck (for real), and it's getting pretty hard to not to notice that rod in his pants.
dogville is allegorical in the worst way possible. trier's pervasive sense of entitlement keeps its metaphors strict and rigid. all of the questions raised by it are polluted with a plodding, alpha-male assurance that he's already answered them for you. the only thing that seems to escape this logic is the unchecked, sadistic eroticism i've described above.
the attempt to compensate for this randiness creates an even bigger mess. after two solid hours of dull benevolence, grace inexplicably chooses the dark side, and dogville becomes a revenge fantasy. trier tries to convince us that he is not at all a "new age victorian," but has been merely a misanthrope all along. a five minute sermon about the arrogance of pity becomes the proto-nietzschean apology for grace's unlikely, old-school idealism. it's not very convincing.
as an investigation of power, the film never abandons the position of power long enough to get anywhere interesting. trier's ideas about xenophobia and america are so belligerent that one begins to mourn the subtleties he misses along the way. for example, the town of dogville contains two oddly de-racialized women of color. for a film set in a xenophobic town in middle america during the dust bowl, the way they are pushed into the periphery of the story is both ignorant and irresponsible (sidenote: for a far superior film about race and gender in rural america, try elia kazan's baby doll). trier is less concerned with the schematics of power than he is with the volume of his own thoughts regarding them. his controversial, anti-american photo-montage during the credits is more of the same... it replaces any real investigative interest in the working poor of our country with cheap cultural elitism. i gather he intended something a bit more complex than this, but he hasn't done the legwork to back it up. the last thing this film's largely progressive audience needs is more ghetto stereotypes and ironic music, whatever the cloudy agenda behind them might be.
if trier could focus his wild fearlessness on something other than style, he might arrive at something vulnerable and magical. unfortunately, this shit ain't it.
