۱۳۹۷ بهمن ۱۵, دوشنبه

The house that jack built – Lars Von Trier




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.