Reconsidering The Idiots: Dogme95, Lars von Trier, and the Cinema of Subversion?

Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

—Bertolt Brecht

Sheds are bourgeois crap.

—Stoffer, The Idiots

Using Lars von Trier's controversial The Idiots (1998) as a starting point, I intend to examine the compelling ways in which the infamous Dogme95 manifesto aims to address and correct the failings of contemporary film. The Idiots is a remarkable and provocative materialist critique of modern culture in its own right, but its meaning is significantly complicated by its centrality to the otherwise celebrated output of the Dogme95 movement. It received virtually none of the critical acclaim, financial success, or festival awards garnered by the other major Dogme films such as Mifune (1999) and The Celebration (1998) and is generally regarded as a disturbing and tasteless failure even by those who admire von Trier's more accessible outings such as Breaking the Waves (1994) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). However, precisely because of its many imperfections and discomforting subject matter, The Idiots may be the most fully developed and compelling expression of Dogme ideology. The meaningfully artless form and content of The Idiots are intertwined in particularly unique and revolutionary ways, enabling the film to critique contemporary film and contemporary culture. The dual target of this assault is precisely what I think has been either overlooked or insufficiently explored in existing accounts of the film, and I hope to demonstrate the extent to which The Idiots is only really comprehensible when viewed in light of its counter-hegemonic aspirations.

As a finished product, The Idiots is an uneasy synthesis that attempts to locate an elusive sense of the "real" in late capitalist (film) culture, one in which the spassing (or sustained faking of mental disability) on the part of the film's characters is ideologically reflected by the seemingly amateurish precepts of its construction. In this respect, The Idiots is unlike the other Dogme films. Although these works all tend to be technically quite oppositional or at least adventurous, they nevertheless maintain a rigid split between form and content and therefore offer very little sustained political critique of the ideology of mainstream society or cinema. My argument is that The Idiots is the only recent counter-hegemonic film work that is demonstrably radical both in its form and its content and, moreover, in its brilliant and playful deconstruction of these categories. An examination of this film and of the debates it is intimately involved in will make it abundantly clear that a reconsideration of this most challenging film is necessary if we are to imagine a different kind of cinema. Furthermore, in ways that are by no means immediately clear, The Idiots may even help us imagine a different way of being in our culture.

I suggest that the seemingly perverse and disruptive activity of spassing in The Idiots is a self-reflexive allusion to the technical prescriptions of the "vow of chastity" that each Dogme film must adhere to, forging a critical connection between the transformative power of unmastering oneself both as a director and with regard to the practices of everyday life. In both capacities, the rejection of prior ways of being entails an analysis of those behaviors that are made to seem mandatory by a society whose aim is to maintain the structures that ensure conservative sameness. Far from only being a ridiculous and meaningless slap in the face of a too-genteel (film) culture, as formulated by von Trier spassing ought to be also read as a détournement, a thoughtful and substantial attempt to address the precarious situation of the subject amid what Guy Debord famously termed the society of the spectacle. The Idiots can thus serve as a test case when considering precisely how the Dogme95 movement aims to fix what is wrong with both contemporary film and, ultimately (and necessarily), even the culture that produces it and is...