In Lars von Trier’s most recent movie The House that Jack Built , the main character Jack reflects on the nature of art. As he speaks the screen is filled with clips from many of von Trier’s films, all but assaulting us with the idea that his works should be considered in light of Jack’s statements and perhaps the movie as a whole:
There are reasons to be skeptical of Jack as a stand-in for von Trier, though von Trier certainly provokes this interpretation in a very intentional way. Jack is a serial killer who views his violence as art. Von Trier is an artist who has frequently been accused of violence against the audience through his films as well as blatant misogyny and the outright abuse of his actresses. It is possible to think of him as an artist who has been implicated in serial violence both in his work and through his actions. A book such as this wouldn’t be honest if it didn’t confess to anxiety in engaging extensively with the work of someone about whom there is much reason to be uncomfortable. The material requires that we think and write against it, even as we work through it, with hermeneutic suspicion and care. In his surface identification with Jack, it is clear von Trier himself recommends such anxiety and caution in the face of his work.Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So they are expressed, instead, through our art. I don’t agree. I believe heaven and hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell. The soul is reason and the body is all the dangerous things, for example art and icons.
Despite the intentional resemblance, however, it is hard to imagine von Trier extensively identifying with Jack or trusting his evaluations of his work. Jack is successful as a killer more by chance and fate than through his skill or art. He is a largely clumsy and incompetent monster. The “artistic” nature of his kills is largely pedantic or crass. Though he pictures himself as very clever and subtle, choosing the name “Mr. Sophistication” for his serial-killing persona, he is far from sophisticated or even all that interesting. His most artistic characteristic is that he is an engineer who dreams of being an architect, and he crafts careful models and plans for a house he will one day build. However, he turns out to be utterly incapable of creating his house. As an artist, Jack is a banal failure. Perhaps we should take this to mean that Jack is not von Trier or that von Trier’s violent “killer” side is banal and uninteresting in comparison to the other characteristics of his art. Or, perhaps, art itself is overestimated in terms of its own qualities, no different from the pile of frozen and mutilated bodies that constitute Jack’s “house” near the end of the film.
Determining how we should interpret The House that Jack Built in relation to Lars von Trier’s entire body of work is beyond the scope of this introduction. But it does provide us with a useful fulcrum from which to address the question of what philosophers are doing mucking about with the films of von Trier. Art, Jack insists, is one of the dangerous things of the body and of hell. Reason, and we might replace this with philosophy, is of the soul and of heaven. If heaven and hell, body and soul are one, we can see philosophy as a useful impetus for art or, more to our point, art as a necessary provocation to philosophy. As Longtin states in the second essay, “von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and evaluating how we see and understand the world, which makes it the perfect medium for moral provocations aimed at self-examination.”
The movies of Lars von Trier impact us, often enough, at the bodily level, provoking visceral disgust, rage, fear, and despair—as Gurley states in Chap. 1 they “gut us and leave us lying on the floor.” For many of us, the unavoidable response to such an experience is to think, to reflect, and eventually to speak and write. We are provoked to philosophy by the bodily impact of von Trier’s assault. We are also provoked by the importance and agonizing demand of the questions and problems his movies raise—problems translated to a bodily experience that insists on a reply.
If this is a major reason why philosophers are interested in the films of Lars von Trier, it does not yet make clear why others might find useful what it is we have to say about them. Why should you turn to the philosophers in this volume to assist you in grappling with von Trier’s work?
There is a methodological connection between the way that von Trier’s movies achieve their effect and the way in which philosophy operates. Philosophy, often enough, shocks and discomforts us. It might begin in wonder, but it tends to live out its life in the medium of the uncanny and uncertain. The process of interrogating the obvious, the immediate, and the fundamental is not without its costs and sacrifices. Frequently it can only achieve its effect—getting us to see and think about the questionable in what had seemed most firm and clear—by making our life-world something suddenly unfamiliar and strange.
For the most part, the movies discussed in this volume take as their subject matter the most ordinary and common of human experiences. Our cast of characters is not at all strange: newlyweds, husbands and wives struggling with the illness of their partners, sisters tending to the sickness of their siblings, mothers fighting for the future of their children, mothers mourning the death of their children, communities offering assistance to strangers, and strangers seeking to right communal wrongs. To be sure, from time to time, the end of the world or a nymphomaniac may appear, but they stand out far more for their familiarity than their foreignness—as if the apocalypse were a common family drama and nymphomania our collective nature. The chapters in this book are populated with similar characters, so intimate with us as to be entirely unseen, and ultimately monstrous in their own right: phantasms and wild tongues, the Death Drive and the Semiotic Chora, the flesh of the world and states of exception. What discomforts about these movies and philosophical investigations, what provokes thought, is that the familiar becomes very uncanny indeed. This is the mirror that is philosophy—that is film—that often enough provokes resistance, horror, rage, and sometimes wonder. There is a natural kinship here that makes these films informative about the nature of philosophy and makes the philosophical inquiry provoked by these films uniquely suited to engaging with them in the richest sense. It is not enough to think about the films of Lars von Trier; rather, we must think against and with them in light of the philosophical aporias they embody.
This is what West Gurley accomplishes in “The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier.” Here, the question of whether we can read misogyny into the torture von Trier’s female characters undergo, or rather find ourselves provoked to investigate the nature and necessity of sacrifice in general, is powerfully asked. Might not our horror in the face of von Trier’s sacrificed heroines properly call...