In a book entitled Everything Is Connected: The Power of Music, Daniel Barenboim starts with a paradoxical statement that immediately negates itself. He writes: “I firmly believe that it is impossible to speak about music” (5). He doesn’t use a more nuanced verb to describe his position like, for example, ‘I think’, ‘I assume’, ‘I fathom’ or ‘I feel’. He believes, firmly, that it is impossible to speak about music. The statement negates itself because, right after it, Barenboim seems to make the impossible possible by writing a sizeable book of more than two hundred pages on precisely nothing but music. The paradox of the (im)possibility of speaking about music is, of course, most appropriate considering the subject matter, which is by its very nature a paradoxical event. Music “says everything and nothing at the same time” (5). It seems to present the world, yet it also presents naught. Defining music, to Barenboim, is even more problematized by the “physical phenomenon that allows us to experience a piece of music, which is sound”, since “music expresses itself through sound, but sound in itself is not yet music” (7). It is because of sound that music must be limited in time, yet it puts the listener “in direct contact with timelessness” (10). In music, “joy and sorrow exist simultaneously” and it can “help us forget and understand ourselves simultaneously” (20).

The writer of this book—or more accurately this writing project—feels more or less in the same situation. If I attempt to write about woman, it is precisely because I believe that I cannot write about woman, and not least because I happen to be a man. The project, unwritten as it stands, seems impossible to embark on. Have I any right at all to write about woman? Considering the fact that Barenboim is a celebrated musician, musicologist and philosopher who claims that it is “impossible to speak about music” (5), my task seems to be far more difficult as a man trying to speak about woman. Upon hearing that I wanted to write a book about woman in Lars von Trier’s cinema, a feminist intellectual friend of mine seemed to have already taken a critical position towards the unwritten idea, giving me an unforgettably cynical look, as if to say: ‘in cinema or outside cinema, how dare you speak about woman in the first place?’ Of course, I dare not. That is, I dare not claim that I am going to write something about woman that can be understood in terms of defining what woman is or is not for von Trier, or even for this writer, in cinema or outside. In fact, I cannot even claim that this writing project will constitute anything in the course of a message communicated to its reader. In order to explain this awkward start, which may prove quite discouraging to some readers, I would say that this already declared failure to communicate is precisely the subject matter of this book and what constitutes the secret of its enjoyment on the part of the writer as well as, hopefully, the reader.

In this sense, there is already a resemblance between what constitutes enjoyment in writing this book and what constitutes enjoyment in watching Lars von Trier’s distinctive cinematic works, which, even though created to be enjoyed, always seem to question what is enjoyed by the viewer. For what is enjoyed, in this case, simultaneously makes the viewer ill at ease. And, unlike in mainstream cinema, it is neither the violent nor sickening elements that are solely responsible for the viewer’s enjoyment of such grotesque scenes of female torture as the ones in which the heroine of Breaking the Waves is slashed by two sadistic sailors, or the heroine of Dogville is raped in cold blood by all the men of the township, or the heroine of Nymphomaniac experiences an orgiastic moment while being violently whipped by a cat o’ nine, or the heroine of Antichrist mutilates her own clitoris with a pair of scissors. In spite of its notorious legacy of visible misogyny, there is something in Lars von Trier’s cinema that goes beyond its perceived gender division and violence against women.

This book, therefore, discusses the corpus of Trier’s cinematic production from 1996 to 2014 in order to raise some questions about woman, the deployment of female sexuality, desire, and the idea of subjectivity. It takes into consideration the evolution of film theory and its departure from figures such as André Bazin (What Is Cinema?), Christian Metz (The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema) and Laura Mulvey (Visual and Other Pleasures), who established certain universalizing assertions about filmmaking and the viewing experience, as well as from the idea of cultural contextualization that deals with the filmic text and its spectator as unique phenomena peculiar to their local circumstances. Instead, it turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis and a number of its contemporary exponents such as Slavoj Žižek, Todd McGowan, Jacques Hassoun, Frances Restuccia and Anna Kornbluh, who offer new Lacanian aspects of ideas of subjectivity, female sexuality, the gaze, melancholy and love, based on which the whole theoretical perspective about the cinematic experience has significantly changed in recent years according to the evolution in Lacanian theory itself and its relation to analyzing cinema.

In light of this, this work adopts the view that the era of looking solely at form or stylistics when analyzing film, based on the popular postmodern notion that a film “should not mean but be” (Abbas 18), is over. The contemporary viewer, whose life is largely spent in front of various screens, now demands more from a cinematic film than visual effects, graphics and digital tricks, which can, after all, be found in other, more interactive, leisure-time activities such as story-based video games on the touch screens of advanced computers and smartphones.

The elements giving value to a cinematic film can be located in either its content or its stylistics, without giving a consistent advantage to one over the other. This, however, should not be understood as the kind of regression into cinematic identification on the part of the viewer that was thoroughly looked at and staunchly attacked by Theodor Adorno in the mid twentieth century. To Adorno, one of the most dangerous characteristics of mass culture was that it took reification beyond its metaphoric sense. It was not just that the products of mass culture illusively reified objects of dreams and fantasies, but that people themselves “resemble[d] products […] they assimilate[d] themselves to what is dead” (Culture Industry 95). What was reified came as a result of searching for identity in the wrong place and, in the course of this, acquiring some sort of a pseudo-identity.

That is why Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin in one of his letters that the “reification of the cinema is all loss” (Complete Correspondence 129). While the character on the screen defined the human subject strictly in terms of his/her function in a capitalist society, the spectator assimilated himself/herself to what he/she saw on the screen. That is to say, first, that the human was transformed into dead material. The dead material was then endowed with humanness. Products of mass culture were not exactly seen by Adorno as anti-auratic. The lost aura of high art was compensated for by what he saw as the seriously flawed over-identification with products of low art or mass culture, giving them a “human aura”. Human subjects as victims of their own capitalistic drive develop a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions that tend to be dehumanizing them. The more they are gradually being transformed into things, the more they invest things with a human aura (Stars Down to Earth 100).

Instead, the experience of viewing cinematic films in our contemporary time of visual overproduction, interactive video games, social media, speedy flow of information and instant news should be a search for that which is beyond both interpretation and simple enjoyment; beyond both looking for the constitution of some totality of meaning—either in the film’s content or its form—and visual pleasure. McGowan argues that “cinema is first and foremost a site for the revelation of the gaze” (172). The gaze, in Lacanian theory, is defined as the “objet a in the field of the visible” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 105); in other words, the ultimately unattainable object-cause of desire, or the real of desire in what is viewed, which, however, “is not a positive entity but a lacuna in the visual field” (McGowan 6), which destabilizes the viewer’s position as viewer.

The nothingness of the object-cause of desire traumatizes the viewer as a desiring subject, as the encounter with this uncanny voidness directly puts the subject face to face with its own condition as a mere product of language, an “effect of the signifier” or, as Lacan explains, as that which has nothing to do with ideas of either subjectivity or individuality (My Teaching 79). The nullity of the object is itself the nullity of the subject. In other words, the subject at this point is not only threatened by the realization that the object is always already lost but by the prospect of the traumatic loss of desire itself, which is the very condition of the subject’s existence. The (non)existence of the objet petit a in the field of the visible is an abyss which instantly corresponds with the destiny of the subject as that which never finds its own tangibility in existence.

In the viewing experience then, the gaze, as McGowan argues, is “not to be located in the spectator” but “in the film itself” (5). The spectator’s voyeuristic gaze is disrupted by “the real gaze”, which constitutes a “gap within the spectator’s seemingly omnipotent look” (6). It is a point at which the viewer feels that he faces something in the visual field that looks back at him, which objectifies him, which marks his death as a subject by virtue of being “subjected to the gaze” (7). The gaze is not something that can be seen on the screen, but makes itself felt through the negative effect of an overpowering unseen seer, or “appears to offer access to the unseen” (6). It does not belong either to the imaginary register or the symbolic order, but to the Real defined as a fracture in reality or, as Lacan puts it, “a hole in the symbolic” (Psychoses 156).

The gaze is that “inexplicable blank point in the image” that “the Other cannot embody” (McGowan 86–7); therefore, it cannot even be defined as the eye of God in a religious sense. God, in the language of institutionalized religion, is God in language or God of language. The gaze, however, neither belongs to language nor can it be fully expressed or defined by it. The Other cannot be entirely foreign since “it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal” or “constitute[s] himself in his imaginary reality” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 144). The Other belongs to the “imaginary reality” of the subject because knowledge as such, to the subject, resides in the Other; it is the Other that “knows”, and this Other itself is “posited […] at the outset” by the subject. Without the Other, “nothing indicates to us that there is a dimension of truth anywhere” (Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality 96). This is why Žižek argues that:

The most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing [that the subject is barred/crossed-out] but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack. (Sublime Object 122)

The name of this “traumatic kernel” in the context of the cinematic experience is the gaze. Based on this, in order to continue to be relevant to the highly screen-addicted lives of modern subjects, film viewing should not be marred by taking critical positions or maintaining a sense of resistant reading. On the contrary, one “should not be conscious or critical in a cinematic experience”; one “should submit totally to the logic of the cinematic or dream image” in order to “meet the gaze” (McGowan 13). A film should no longer be viewed and enjoyed as a temporary imaginary escape from the realities of daily life but as a medium carrying possible chances for the viewer to encounter moments in which reality itself is revealed as imaginary. It is only in this sense that a fictional film can be more interesting than a documentary.

For example, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker’s secret of success is not that it offers a certain dramatization of aspects of the Iraq War but that it contains scenes in which the absence of traditional villains, the absence of face-to-face conflict, the camera’s disconnected and queasy motion and the soundless moments before bomb explosions seem to internalize the drama and make the main characters’ internal struggles loom larger in their unseen presence than the presence of the images and sounds of the actual war. In turn, the viewer’s feeling of sympathy towards the victims of war, on both sides of the conflict, as well as awareness of their own mortality and the nearness of death can be much more genuine in the case of watching Bigelow’s film than in the case of watching the surreal images of the actual war in BBC or CNN footage.

By contrast, a recent ‘realistic’ four-minute Frontline documentary entitled Life in Baghdad: Joy Amid the Chaos of War—which was made at the time when television and computer screens were flooded with news about the notorious terrorist group ISIL’s spread in Iraq and Syria—had an unexpected alienating effect on many of its viewers, though it was clearly made with the intention of showing that, in spite of the news reporting and appalling images of the brutal killings and beheadings conducted by ISIL, there were ordinary people in Baghdad leading ordinary lives just like everyone else. In it, one can see children joyously diving in an irrigation waterway surrounded by heaps of debris, pedestrians and commuters making their way through the shambles of Baghdad, people eating ice cream in a big, carnival-like gathering in the open, et cetera. The first reaction to this short video is to observe the optimism in the faces of Iraqi people laughing and enjoying the simple pleasures of life in spite of the constant fear they are living in.

One scene, however, seems to spoil everything: a decorated limousine carrying a newlywed couple is caught in traffic and surrounded by a group of dancing young men. Somehow this scene does not chime easily with the other scenes of Baghdad. My first reaction was that it was hard to imagine there are still decorated wedding limousine cars on the streets when all one gets nowadays out of Iraq is the sleek, spotless and Hollywood-like images of the carefully directed beheadings of ISIL. This, however, was followed by a moment of deep sorrow for the city, which has transformed over the centuries from being the ultimate cosmopolitan capital of the world in the early middle ages to the contemporary devastated capital of today’s Iraq, a land of limousine car weddings and media stunt beheadings.

It is at this moment that one can see the resemblance between the glossy surface of the limousine and the glossy surface of the long knifes th...