Lars Von Trier has made a career out of stunts: explicit
material, crass juxtapositions between the high and low, casting of unexpected
actors, and outlandish statements. This makes Von Trier at once a nuisance in
contemporary cinema—someone who thinks he is telling the Real Truth when it’s
just a satirized form of regular ideology—and perhaps a necessity. It'd be
great if the American vision of contemporary Euro-Art cinema was, say, more
Alain Guiaurdie or Thomas Arslan, but instead we have Von Trier and Herr
Haneke, mostly because the way they directly invoke and challenge the expectations
of Hollywood cinema. In a way, they urge us to balance our diet of Hollywood
cinema with their “cultural vegetables.” Von Trier’s cinema wouldn’t exist
without someone to gasp at it.
This is all to say, the easy reading of Nymphomaniac, his five and a half hour opus, would be as a
self-critical examination of the director’s own career. One could even place
each of the chapter's into the various sections of his filmography: plot points
from Breaking The Waves, a direct
quotation of a scene and the music from Antichrist;
is the scene of Joe and the African men is a play on Manderlay? Even Joe's discussion of Hitler and the way Seligman
misinterprets her point of evokes Von Tirer’s indiscretion at the 2011 Cannes Film
Festival.
A better way to put Nymphomaniac
into context is less autobiographical than read it as a statement of artistic
principles, or a dialectic on why Von Trier makes Von Trier movies. Trailers,
advertisements, early reports focused exclusively on “how far” would Von Trier
go—and even the basic log line feels like a parody of one of his films. What
wasn't focused on was the fact that the entire film centers around the
discussions between Joe and Seligman, the artist and the critic. Like all Von
Trier films, this debate occurs between directly opposite philosophies: Joe’s nihilistic
spirituality wants to prove she has sinned, while Seligman rationalizing,
contextualizing, and normalizing each part of her behavior.
Seligman's digressions into fly-fishing, Fibonacci,
polyphony music are at once Bad Interpretation and completely reasonable
compared to Joe's insistence that her acts were truly masochistic. Shot in a
weary room in which the walls seem to be dying, the sequences are at once
decidedly slow in terms of the two actors’ soft spoken voices, but the shot
length and amount of editing is surprisingly speedy for the
Tarkovsky-influenced auteur. It’s as if word and image clash: Dreyer-esque
stillness against Dostoevskian theoretical debate. East Church Vs West, pleasure
vs. pain, male vs. female, virgin vs. whore: Von Trier chooses the biggest
targets possible to smash together.
It's not the clash that's interesting (such as the film’s
early and tiresome Rammstein cue) but the aftermath of these. Seligman thinks
he can contain Joe’s story and deny the own artist's interpretation, while Joe
continually re-asserts, "you're not even listening." Seligman's perfected virginity in ways provides the perfect Straw Man for Von Trier's Joe,
and not in a bad way—he can't get off on the material, and thus Joe’s critic
does not even respond to the basic level in a way Von Trier sees necessary.
Like many of his “New Extremism” contemporaries (Noe, Dumont, Haneke), part of
responding to a Von Trier film is the fact that one must either feel pleasure
or pain, and it is in responding to that bodily function that one finds meaning.
This is what makes Nymphomaniac most
compelling—what happens when we remove the body from cinema?
The most essential scene in this, ironically, is the
sequence only available in the complete director's cut: a lengthy abortion
sequence, described
quite thoroughly by Peter Debruge. It must have been an obvious cut for the
international censors, because while most of the sex is, well, sex, this is
truly the most squeamish and offensive the film truly gets. It also thus gets
to I think what the core of Nymphomaniac
is really about: the importance of provocation as a narrative device. Joe's
ideas of why she wants an abortion are so morally objectionable, and the
procedure so brutal to watch (bravo to whatever digital or prosthetic work was
done here), that even Seligman has a hard time putting them into his theory. "On principle, I believe that taboos are damaging for human beings,"
Joe demands.
What you can say about Joe's abortion rhetoric, her demand
to use the word "negro" to explain the aforementioned ménage à trois, or her sympathy for
pedophiles, is not that one must agree with it, but it is Von Trier laying his
cards plainly with an explanation. Do we need one? There's another version of Nymphomaniac
without Joe and Seligman's debates, a film which simply tracks Joe from her
erotic becoming at age 2 all the way through thousands of men before being
pissed on by her adoptive daughter-cum-sexual-replacement. And what would be
the meaning of that story? Certainly not the interpretation given by Seligman near the end as a proto-feminist tale, nor Joe's interpretation as a moral
failing that leads to an attempt to purify herself and reach some idealistic
goal of transcendence. Von Trier knows that such lofty goals, read into his
films or general, are silly affairs, and so Nymphomaniac ends with the
follies of both man and woman, Joe and Seligman recant their ideas. It's the final
pun on an elongated joke–not the eros of Scheherazade and the king, nor
the jovial return of The Decameron,
but a final trolling in case you were also “not listening carefully.” Nymphomaniac
must end with a bang. Von Trier isn't here to reconcile his points of view with
a more rational form of society, only to state their necessity to exist and
clash. If Von Trier didn’t exist, cinema would have to invent him.
1 comment:
I'll admit, I went with the "easy reading" of the film the first time (the formal changes between chapters in Volume I seemed reminiscent of The Five Obstructions, and the whole speech about use of the word "negro" seemed like a shot across the bow at von Trier's Nazi controversy), but really like the idea you pose of the film existing for provocation's sake.
Seligman describes how some fish only take the bait when directly provoked, and watching the Director's Cut made me wonder if this is how von Trier treats his audience. If your reputation is that of a provocateur, you have to push even harder to really shock people who expect transgression, and perhaps try to prove their maturity by acting as though they're above it.
Though the abortion scene certainly would be the thing to not make it to North American screens, I wonder if it was intentionally held back specifically so that the Director's Cut could provoke even those who saw the original cut. I'll admit to watching most of the abortion sequence through knit fingers, enjoying not so much the impact it was having on the story (which it does: Joe's relationship to P becomes more interesting in light of twice refusing motherhood), but the fact that I was seeing something I wasn't prepared for.
I prefer your read on the ending, which I didn't like before and still don't like with the DC. Much of my own engagement with Nymphomaniac stemmed from being unsure whether or not von Trier was sincerely trying to be transgressive, or whether the whole thing was a 6-hour con job, wherein the most provocative thing he could do was make a vulgar shaggy dog story, and see whether critics or "fans" of his work would take the bait by trying to ascribe deeper meaning to it. The latter option better explained the ending to me, which felt like a cruel punchline. That being said, it did provoke a reaction in me, even though I considered myself enlightened enough to not be upset by a film that shows hardcore sex.
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