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December 14, 2004
To The Dogs
"If you present yourselves to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them"
It's easy to be suspicious of premeditatedly theory-driven productions, and this prejudice could cause one to shy away from the films of Lars Von Trier. His ascetic manifesto for film-making (no SFX, handheld camera only, telling a story simply and directly) has its attractions: who can deny, scanning a bloated sleepwalking Hollywood, that the cause of its somnolence is an overdose of just those technical irrelevancies that Von Trier rejects?
Nevertheless, to anyone schooled in the disappointments and embarassments of theory-driven cultural production, and with a faith in the unconscious rather than the analytical as the source of innovation, these arbitrary limitations seem dry.
But arbitrary rules provide a framework against which to kick, and von trier's submission to such rules is a partly personal matter, with an interesting relation to the supposedly free but surreptitiously theory-led ideology of 'liberated creativity': he grew up in an atmosphere of super-tolerance in some sort of rationalistic enlightened commune, in which he says, 'everything was allowed except emotion'. Dogme 95, and Von Trier's obsession with 'the rules of the game', can therefore be understood as his attempt to come to terms with the poverty of liberal-rationalism, and its insufficient appreciation of the inconstancy and contradictions of the human animal. Only by limiting ourselves, can we be free. Only under pressure is emotion focussed into a powerful blast.
Von Trier surprised me twice in the space of one week. When you live somewhere 'remote', and you are lucky enough to have a local film society who put on a decent film every week, you go and see it, regardless of prejudice. So it was that I ended up seeing '5 Obstructions'. Of all Von Trier's work, this was most likely to put me on the defensive: A semi-documentary, in which the director sets his mentor Jorgen Leth the task of remaking his 1967 film 'The Perfect Human' five times, the catch being that Von Trier supplies a set of rules for each remake which Leth must follow. What a recipe for curmudgeonly dismissal -" I imagined a nightmare of black-polo-neck chin-rubbing directorspeak, a series of formal experiments interesting only to film-school anoraks, one for the nerds.
These misgivings seemed borne out initially, although the clips from the original 'Perfect Human' are beautiful, and I would have liked to see it in its entirety. Even after seeing '5 Obstructions', I don't know the original film well enough to comment with certainty on it, but it is clear that as well as being a political-aesthetic statement, Von Trier sees it partly as a commentary on Leth himself, on his quest for formal perfection within the medium of film. It soon becomes evident that the 'obstructions' game is a deeply personal challenge on Von Trier's part, an exorcism-of-the-father's-influence, a candid exposition of what he considers to be Leth's faults, which adds a more compelling narrative drive to what could otherwise be a filmmaker's parlour game.
The obstructions begin, and one naturally expects them to continue, as an experiment in apparently bizarre and arbitrary constraint: the film must be made in Cuba; no take must be longer than 12 frames long; no set is to be used. The viewer sympathizes with Leth in his despair and frustration -" surely this is just ridiculous. However his response to it, once he is committed and begins to feel his way around the rules, is a very interesting film (and pretty much indescribable except to say that by necessity it owes more to fast-cutting pop videos than arthouse ponderousness) , and sets the pattern for the rest of the obstructions: von Trier doing his best to trip Leth up, and Leth finding some loophole in the rules, or some unexpected interpretation of them, that allows him to make something of the obstruction.
Nothing in this first obstruction prepares one for the second: It is here that the purpose of the game starts to come into focus: von Trier is not happy with his mentor's making such a good film under the constraints set: he wants to make him howl, he wants the constraints to force Leth to do something he doesn't want to do (why this is so, is not yet clear). In the second film, then, He must shoot in the place which he finds the most personally unpleasant, but must not show the place or its inhabitants themselves. And Leth himself must play the Perfect Human. Leth decamps to a red light district in Bombay, clearly shaken by the task, but steeling himself for it; reassuring the camera and himself that he can carry off this inhuman act with sangfroid. As, indeed he does; the resulting film, which could have been a disgusting act of aestheticization, is rather beautiful, and uses a rich visual device to separate the Perfect Human from the 'real humans' around the set, giving dignity to both, showing how the highest articulation of the aesthetic can, and does, co-exist in this world with the most desperate quotidian reality.
Von Trier responds to this in severely bad humour -" Leth has failed to apply the rules strictly, and has failed to enter into the spirit of the game: by this time it's clear that von Trier really wants not only Leth but also the audience to have a bad time -" in their conversations, he makes it clear that he does not want Leth to make a 'good' film, he wants him to suffer and become unable to do so, and so to reflect on his criteria for a 'good' film.
Hence, the third obstruction emerges as a punishment for Leth's failure in the second: having refused to remake the second (during one of the most intense and philosophically rich documentary sequences, von Trier fully exercises his mental cruelty over Leth, the game once and for all overspilling its artificial boundaries). Leth must make the film with no rules.
Inferior to the original (but as von Trier rightly says, 'you have already made the best version you will make') the remake is set in a Paris hotel, and is a slick production. Von Trier is again disappointed - each of the obstructions is becoming transformed in Leth's hands into a fully-realised, well-formed piece, with none of the rough edges that von Trier wants to expose.
But in the fourth obstruction von Trier truly comes near to this aim of forcing Leth to make 'a crap film'. The rule is that Leth must make a cartoon -" a form for which von Trier and Leth both have nothing but disdain. In fact, the director creates a graphic film out of cut-up sections of the original 'Perfekte Menske' using digital technology. In this obstruction more than the others, the director himself has a questionable role -" essentially making a selection from a range of technical possibilities and parameters, then editing together the result in a sort of collage procedure.
I've seen a film made entirely like this (Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") and not to mention the feeble californian philosophizing in that effort, this film is visually specious and disappointing -" I like cartoons, but as von Trier rightly says, the output of this technical procedure, totally lacking in the life and rhythm of the draughtsman (with which cartoons must replace the life of actual bodies in space), evokes nothing but the endless and dreary ad-world of MTV, a world of kaleidoscopically shifting depthless surfaces: where everything is an ad for something else, and nothing real ever takes place. However von Trier again is both pleased by and disappointed with the result: Again, Leth has 'done his best', has militated against his aggressor's attempted sabotage. The film may be crap, but it is slick, undemonstrative crap.
The final, and most important, obstruction is a sort of final tantrum on von Trier's part, the rules are that Leth must do nothing, von Trier will make the film, Leth will simply read a script prepared by von Trier for him to speak. For von Trier, this is at once a gesture of frustration, an admittance of defeat, and an abandonment of the rules of the game in favour of pure force - having failed to make Leth suffer with his subtle obstructions, he is now forced into a draconian exercise of his power.
Using the documentary footage gathered during the previous obstructions, von Trier adds a script voiced by Leth; Speaking through and as Leth, von Trier's script explicitly states what the 'game' has been all about: breaking through the Leth's cool, aestheticized vision of the world that has always frustrated him; in which everything is framed and formally perfected to make it reassuringly beautiful, and forcing him to the point of breakdown, of acknowledgement of the laceration of existence. Using art to bare suffering rather than to ameliorate it. But, as the script turns from a cruel forensic examination of Leth's character into a reflection on the Obstructions, von Trier ultimately brings into question what is more human: to transform the world, to attempt to turn the shit you're given into gold; or to plumb the depths, to calculatedly strip away the veneer to reveal what lies beneath. The truth is some complex recasting of these 'alternatives', as emerges in this final obstruction: Von Trier, at first finding Leth's cool exterior impossibly impermeable, discovers that the frailty, the suffering, that accompanies his work ('those months of depression' that von Trier knows Leth suffers) need not be explicitly articulated; they are always there to be found, an inalienable part of his creation for those that look beyond the surface polish. And equally, von Trier's own shrill demands for directness are no less the product of aestheticization, of a desire to impress a meaning upon the world. As much as drawing out Leth's vulnerability, von Trier has exposed his own naïvety. Having presumptuously thought to reveal how Leth had prematurely arrested his development at the stage of aestheticizing, beautifying self-protection, von Trier discovers that his own demand for a 'baring of the soul', a 'crap film', is itself a tendentious sentimentalisation of something that Leth takes for granted, the tragic melancholy of human existence. Leth's dignity and poise envelopes and presupposes his vulnerability to despair, to depression, to the depths of the spirit; the apollonian product is wrought from their dark energies, in the same way as the cruelty of each obstruction, and the accompanying despair of the director, has been transformed into a work which for all its flaws radiates positive energy. The limits are formative of their apparent transcendence.
This final 'obstruction' is really very affecting: as well as its philosophical content, it is a touching epistle from a pupil to a master to whom the world now seeks to make him an equal or successor. One important thing is made clear about von Trier, that he is not 'merely' a director : he is a clear and astute thinker. So whilst the documentary sections honestly show the cheery rivalry and intellectual sparring between the two directors, all of which could be smug and annoying, he makes no compromises in expressing the serious intent behind the obstructions. I surprise myself afterwards by having become diametrically opposed to what I supposed my response to the film would be: where other reviewers have called the film 'playful', precisely the sort of annoying film-school treat that I was fearing, I consider it rather serious. If I hadn't been forced by contingent circumstance, I would never have seen it, so In effect von Trier won me over to the cause of arbitrary constraint twice over.
* * *
Having experienced it with only the above knowledge of von Trier's work, Dogville was a revelation, and it may be that it's best to see it like this, with as few preconceptions as possible. However as a caveat to this, I would give the filmgoer one piece of advice -" persevere!
Contrary to one's presuppositions about von Trier's filmmaking, there is no attempt at straightforward realism or naturalism here. Like David Lynch's, his writing and mise-en-scene is its own rule. It makes only the concessions to the real that it needs to become compelling, and no more. Lynch describes how at an early screening of Eraserhead, years and years in the making, and one of the most direct and unfiltered works of imagination ever committed to film, a potential financier got up and walked out, exclaiming furiously 'people don't act like that! People don't talk like that!'. Well, one could say the same of Shakespeare (even in his own time) of course, and von Trier's putting his trust in the potency of creation rather than its slavish adherence to a model of reality is equally welcome.
All the same, the film is unpromising at first. The laconic narrative voiceover , the theatrical set (the whole film takes place in one studio, with the town plan marked on the floor, and no walls) suggests some horrible theatrical experiment, and to eyes and ears used to lush perfected Hollywood productions, actors placed in this situation seem out of place, unavoidably unconvincing and wooden. Worse, the narrative sets up exactly the sort of cloying smalltown pioneer americana that I find unbearable in any form. One feels like one is being subjected to some cruel and unusual Brechtian corrective treatment of Little House on the Prairie (the brecht parallel is not incidental -" von Trier acknowledges the Kidman characters' debt to Seerauber Jenny, and the overall influence of the Dreigroschenoper on the film is evident).
Whether or not the acting actually is worse during the first half of the film, and whether or not this is purposeful, I'm not sure. All I can say is that the film turns, and how it turns. The sheer flat awfulness only makes the deep darkness that succeeds it more intense, and this contrast convincingly argues its necessity. Realising that the whole structure of the piece justifies the painful artifice, you forgive and forget. Unfortunately two of the six people in the cinema left too early, hence my warning to persevere. At the time, I only steeled myself to stay by the memoryof '5 Obstructions', and the worthy thought that even a failed experiment is preferable to a succesful cliché.
Beautiful fugitive Grace arrives in Dogville, a small and isolated town, pursued by mobsters; Tom, an aspiring writer and pedagogue, decides to use her arrival as a moral lesson to the townsfolk by persuading them to open up their community to her and give her two weeks to establish her trustworthiness. She is 'a gift', and they need to learn how to 'accept'.
Grace becomes the very portrait of the hard-working, integrated immigrant here, as her hard work in order to repay the community's trust yields her enough money to purchase from the monopolistic village shop a series of useless, tasteless trinkets that, seduced by the smalltown charm of Dogville, she now finds charming and desirable.
But gradually it becomes evident that each individual is less than happy with their supposedly idyllic lot. One Dogville resident warns Grace against her romanticisation of the tiny town: 'People everywhere are the same -" greedy as animals. Only in a place like this, they're less successful.' And this, we assume, makes them more dangerous.
Lik Straw Dogs, a film with which it shares many preoccupations, Dogville can superficially be read as an indictment of small town insularity. The corporate starbucks-homeliness of globalised amerika can all-too-easily be set against the uneasy but rich specificity of the local. But here we are alerted to an entirely sinister component of that specificity, and to its founding role within those apparently homely globally-exported myths. This puts me in mind of english writer Magnus Mills' novels (especially 'All Quiet on the Orient Express'), where urbane protagonists stumble into remote rural locations, isolated autocratic worlds where interminable series of quid-pro-quo transactions slowly submerge them into inescapable social networks of obligations, with dark undertones of sadism, control, and dread. As in Dogville, the supposedly innocent and human-scale transactions of the communities in Mills' books become by turns more sinister: in delineating this difference between the rural and the metropolitan, human and inhuman, he intimates a disturbing portrait of those 'left behind' by cosmopolitanism : insularity, suspicion, duplicity, exploitation. There is obviously a compelling element in the collective consciousness that recognises this sinister element in the rural/smalltown: witness the numerous Hammer-Horror-style films that turn on the conspiratorial reticence of english villagers. The classic moment when the protagonist walks into the inn, the music and conversation stops and every grizzled inbred visage swivels toward him. It was Straw Dogs which first made explicit this horror.
Which is to say, in spite of our nostalgic idealisation of the 'human-size' community, we have a natural recognition of its dark side, of what we've escaped from. Sometimes the dark side is submerged and confused into its opposite, as in John Major's model for perfect civilisation, the Anglo-Saxon village: the village green which, encircled by dwellings, was conceived as a circumscribed last resort, an inner sanctum to retreat to with the livestock when under siege or attacked by wolves, became from Victorian times a symbol of idyllic bliss, a safe haven of recreation and an oasis of nature-worship. As Nietzsche attempted to show, cultures so easily forget (indeed perhaps much of culture is this forgetting) that those things they value highly originate in mean, evil times.
It is no doubt a well-considered choice to show the famous series of FSA-sponsored photographs of rural communities during the depression in the end credits of Dogville, for the film is an unblinking look at -" and some would say an attack on -" this mean, desperate existence, and the society which is its product. But since the strongest denunciation of the town of Dogville comes from the lips of the one person in the township who has come 'from the city', maybe it is more an attack on metropolitan idealisation of smalltown values, on the way we tend to forget the bad and re-imagine the good aspects of our 'origins'. It is certainly an attack on the longstanding political appropriation of these values, on the texan advocates of a down-home honest-to-goodness pioneer spirit as a model for the freedom and democracy. An examination of all the evils that hide under the skirts of the 'civilised community', and by extrapolation a commentary on recent world events.
Here we get closer to the second, more powerful reading of the film : as Von Trier hints often enough (giveaway lines such as 'you're either for us or against us'), the film can also be understood as an attack on The American Way per se, and specifically on the famous open arms with which America accepts immigrants and refugees : 'give me your poor, your needy,your huddled masses' the film says, 'and I will grind them down, squeeze every last drop from them, humiliate them, and thus teach them how grateful they ought to be, that they have been accepted into our community'. We see how regular people accept gifts; with suspicion, with barely-suppressed sadism, and finally with violence. Grace brings with her the scent of the outside, the proof of the possibility of change. In Dogville, the social coping mechanisms, which unfold unconsciously, automatically, through the townspeople, are entirely negative, entirely dedicated to pulverising this intimation of difference, to violently refusing the gift that brings out their inadequacies by contrast.
At first protesting that they 'don't need anything,' by degrees the townsfolk begin first to depend on Grace for her labour, and then by a slow, sliding, sickening process, to exploit and finally to fully torture her.
The real turn begins with a blackmail staged by a sickeningly unpleasant child (thus Von Trier attacks the innocence of childhood not only as metaphorical social narrative but also literally ) who, demanding to be punished, places Grace into a double-bind from which she is never to escape. And like clockwork, one by one the townsfolk turn on the incomer: von Trier's observation of the subtilization of their sadistic, xenophobic impulses as moral and economic 'lessons-in-life' and improving examples is horrifically acute and will strike a chord with anyone who has experienced the emotional blackmail of being forcibly brought back into the fold of a repressive social group or family 'for the common good', the gleeful punishment inflicted on renegades by those who have given up their own hope of escape.
At every stage, the treatment of Grace is rationalised, apparently proceeding from rules created 'for the good of the community'. And it ends with Grace enslaved, chained up, used as a receptacle for every man's sexual appetites, a scapegoat for every frustration that had previously been stored up and repressed in this little town. Meanwhile saviour and friend Tom ('Edison,' although we also meaningfully glimpse a volume of Tom Sawyer in the film) looks on impotently, endlessly revising his theories but unable to act.
Caught up in this inescapable web of degradation, one can hardly see where it started, can hardly place blame on any individual, and the basic premise becomes one of systemic rottenness, of the diabolical efficiency of the social machine. Where did it start to go wrong? Though there are plenty of allusions to original sin (and the second half of the film pivots around the harvesting of apples), whilst it is possible that male desire is being fingered as the motive force of the infernal apparatus, von Trier makes no bones about the relish with which each individual (and this is very much a film about individuals and individualism) takes up with relish the utter pulverisation of difference. Pointedly, one by one, not only the surly men but the learned wife, the black freed-slave, the cripple, all take their opportunity to crush Grace. Indeed it is only in this sadism that the 'community' truly finds itself bound together. One point of origin is each individual's feeling that they are owed something, that they have done the outsider a favour; an apparent generosity veils a mean-spirited, narrowly economic sense of justice, a barely-supressed self-righteous indignance at the 'outsider-'only barely held in check, ready to be unleashed by the appearance of a face that doesn't fit, at any disturbance of the disingenuous peace of Dogville. A gift is the cue for hatred, charity veils cruelty. The narrative begins with the would-be intellectual Tom berating the people for being 'unable to accept'; it turns out that the inability, in several senses, is pivotal to the film.
It is here that von Trier's staging makes perfect sense. He takes down the walls and we see in toto all the hidden machinery of the community: the exploitation, humiliation, duplicity, sadism, how all the workings of the law, of business, and the shifting sophistry of the spokesman conspire to destroy someone, and to enculture them into conspiring with their own destruction.
A man rapes Grace as everyone else looks away, confined by their walls, absorbed in their own business. Each individual's confinement blinds them to the diabolical apparatus they are part of.
The last moments of the film are taken up with a wavering, almost unbearable indecision between the liberalism inculcated even in a victim, and an cold, analytical quasi-Nietzscheanism. Does one try to 'understand', or does one destroy the rot? Here, in Grace's conversation with her pursuer -" who turns out to be her father - the complexity of the film explodes. The arrogance of liberalism's self-repression versus the arrogance of power. The refusal of power. The left's love affair with the powerless, the 'simple', and the right's appropriation of the 'goodness' of simple folk and simple ideas.
In Straw Dogs we are ultimately drawn to ask where it started to go wrong -" the more that liberal Hoffman indulges or ignores the badly-behaved yokels, the more apocalyptic the final confrontation must be. Liberalism is an ethos which allows its enemies to destroy it.
When it finally happens, we are not sure whether the decision made by the character is made on behalf of the director or not. Certainly having seen von Trier's cruelty on display in 5 Obstructions, one can believe he is capable of considering such a cold act of revenge. Surely even the fact of using an american cast to act out this - von Trier's own 'illustration' of the 'inability to accept' - was some sort of laconic act of sadism? The film is also about examples, illustrations: the example that these perfect honest folk believe they set to the world, the power of illustration, and what happens when illustrations, lessons, and examples impinge upon reality and pathologically subvert their pedagogical purpose (the obvious primary metaphorical target being US Foreign policy, of course, but to call this a single-issue polemic is to limit it). Ultimately, exactly what von Trier wants to say with this film is unclear to me, and I'm not sure he wants to be clear. My one reservation when the darkness started to descend was that the film would turn out to be too directly allegorical, too symbolic. Like all important films, it assembles a complex of vectors, is ambivalent as to the resolution of this collision but meanwhile has them vibrate urgently together, and compellingly convinces you of their relation to the 'real world'. The writing is dense with meaning, countermeaning, reference, that one would have to see the film many times to begin to unravel it.
After the final frenzy, one feels assaulted by the violence of these ambiguous truths, and in this respect the only films I can compare it to, weighty comparisons though they are, would be Straw Dogs and Apocalypse Now. (A film like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine aspires to this status too, but in its pursuit of the reality-principle was ultimately unequal to the task) .
The credits roll. Bowie's 'Young Americans'. The FSA photos. A sense of having named a demon, having mutually accepted its presence and thus allowed it to enter nakedly the scene of everyday reality for a dark moment. This is far from comforting or cathartic, since it makes it all the more likely that the horror one sometimes feels at human life in general, the suspicion of something vile beneath the veneer of civilization, is not a overwrought product of personal imagination, but has a real referent. The most positive one could be would be to call it a fellowship of dread: that someone else shares the same sense of horror at everything that is supposed to be 'good' in this world. Von Trier is brave enough to question the genealogy of the good we are supposed to be fighting for, and uncovers some uncomfortable truths about its pedigree.
The film is also a revelation of the power of limited means. Von Trier attempts a rescue of film from purely technically-driven productions. On the other hand his method of filmmaking has been enabled by certain technologies (DV, handheld cameras). Here we can see at play the massive gulf between the technological attitudes of a prog-rock tendency (huge budget, every available technology, gargantuan sprawl, quickly dated and forgotted) and cyberpunk (grabbing the most available, usable technology and running with it).
Postscript: A comically vindictive american press review of the film mistakes the pursuit of pure emotional force as an avant-garde gesture, and the film as a simple surface-level anti-american fable: 'Every minute in this hundred-and-seventy-seven-minute movie says that cinema is pure artifice...we're in the dead zone of schematic abstraction and didactic moral rable...avant-gardism for idiots'obtuse and dislikable, a whimsical joke wearing cement shoes...The language is neither theatrically alive nor colloquially tough'
There follows a recourse to the valorization of vulgar realism in the context of the that art which, more than any other, has powerfully and systematically blurred the boundaries between the real and the imag(in)ed, with the global promotion of a call to global belonging through images: Arguing that "the movie is, of course, an attack on America ' though Von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he's never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it" misses the point somewhat; In fact Von Trier himself is candid about this fact:
'I went to Cannes and I was criticized by some American journalists for making a film about the USA without ever having been there. This provoked me because, as far as I can recall, they never went to Casablanca when they made 'Casablanca'. ..so I decided then and there that I would make more films that take place in America...I decided that Dogville would be in the Rocky Mountains because if you have never been there, that sounds fantastic. What mountains aren't rocky? Does that mean these ones are particularly rocky? It sounds like a name you might invent for a fairytale.'
America is a place that exists, for most of the world, firstly as fairytale, in the emotional and political imagination, as a fiction; and it is the real terrain of fictions, the assumptions and methods that shape them, and their lasting effects upon which von Trier's film is played out:
'Dogville' takes place in America but it's only America as seen from my point of view-It's not a scientific film and it's not a historical film. It's an emotional film. In my 'American' films , I mirror what information comes to me and my feelings about that information. '
'I like the individual Americans I know very much, but this is more of an image of a coutry I do not know but that I have a feeling about- What can I say about America? Power corrupts. And that's a fact.'
The attitude of vulgar realism suddenly inverts when our reviewer translates bizarrely the plight of the Grace character into an actual physical assault on the actress (whilst avoiding any criticism of Kidman herself for choosing to play the role):
'No doubt it amuses him to put a major Hollywood star like Kidman in shackles, but what, exactly, is he punishing her for? He's the one mocking her innocence, not the pasteboard Americans onscreen. Von trier treats Kidman as if she were a dumb whore, which may be more indicative of his true attitudes than anything he says.'
Doth the reviewer protest too much, perhaps? (A reviewer who, we note, believes in protecting the innocence of multi-million-earning film actresses against the scourge of scandinavian arthouse directors...) Is this a further example of the overcompensating violence of a fragile people not quite as homely, safe and kind as their preferred images would suggest?
[nb Five Obstructions is showing on British TV (CH4) sometime over christmas]
Posted by robin at December 14, 2004 02:05 PM