In his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, Theodor Dostoyevsky narrates a story of evil, guilt, human nature, and the corruption and decay of the human soul. He pushes on the idea that Nietzsche brilliantly posed, the idea that perhaps we should not be too quick to celebrate the death of God, as he put it, in the hands of the "Enlightenment". In the same vein, Dostoyevsky puts forward the grimly idea that "if God is dead, then everything is permitted" and gives us a shivering glimpse of what that would look like.
Von
Trier’s latest movie, The House That Jack Built, seems to possess some
similar elements. Although it appears to un-learned eyes like a serial-killer
Hollywood thriller, a closer look reveals a stark difference. Hollywood’s
depiction of topics like evil, crime, and punishment is by construction (given
the nature of the industry) shallow and even paradoxical. It often
(unconsciously) glorifies what it tries to demonize, because it hollows out the
evilness by reducing it to a mere act, by over-dramatization, by setting it up
to fail, and by making it only dark enough to digest without throwing up.
Hollywood
draws a line in the sand between the good and the evil, puts us on the side of
the good, and externalizes the evil onto elements outside the human nature,
elements that spawn from a few bad apples not from our "good nature".
This allows us to feed with joy the dark inner desires we cannot satisfy in our
controlled civilization, with the assurance that we are not capable of
committing the same acts, because they are only exclusive to deranged and
demented psychopaths.
Von
Trier’s movie, despite all its graphic and disturbing violence, which is of
course nothing new in his work, consciously withholds the horror-thrill that
Hollywood often gives us. How does he do it? Instead of suppressing the
violence, giving us just the dose we can tolerate from the distance, from
behind our TV sets, he releases all the details that makes it "human, all
too human".
Von
Trier does not hide that his latest work is also an introspection into his past
work, a conversation with himself, out in the open, in a self-reflective (and
perhaps a bit pretentious) mood. Jack is a homicidal proxy he uses to examine
his own work in the face of all the criticisms he has faced including misogyny
and anti-Semitism. Conversations between Jack and Verge are Von Trier’s attempt
to break away from self-rationalization to the extent possible, an articulation
of his inner conflicts. And in doing so, same as usual, he does not shy away
from being unapologetically provocative and does not deprive himself from
self-flagellation.
