Johns Hopkins University Press

All of this sounds frighteningly close to the clichés of our times.

Joe in Nymphomaniac: Volume II

What are the clichés of our times? The universal human rights regime is liberating and empowering. The United States is a color-blind and welcoming nation of immigrants. Nazis are the epitome of evil. The earth is a precious planet. Women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Cinema is dead. Pornographic cinema is especially dead.

The affect of cliché is ennui. Some clichés are timeworn because they are true. But it is because they are timeworn that they are often met with a jaded yawn, a physicalization of the clichéd response to cliché: “been there, done that.”

Lars von Trier is often accused of being clichéd, and he is, but he also takes cliché as his subject matter and ennui as his target. The risk of attacking cliché is precisely this: being mistaken for someone who seeks to innovate merely for the sake of innovation. This is why von Trier is sometimes accused of being an enfant terrible. Where the clichéd are charged with offering nothing new, the enfants terribles are charged with being new for novelty’s sake, of seeking merely to shock or provoke by being faux new. The essays collected here, however, suggest a third option: we see von Trier’s films as intensifying clichés of gender, power, and politics in ways that may usefully press democratic and feminist theory in new directions.

The clichéd form of the manifesto is one of von Trier’s favored genres and he has used manifestoes frequently to locate and challenge his work. His first three films were released with accompanying manifestos. Most famous of all, however, is the Dogme Manifesto, announced in 1995 in Paris at a panel featuring von Trier and several distinguished filmmakers. Printed on red fliers and dramatically thrown to the audience by von Trier, the Dogme Manifesto was accompanied by the Vow of Chastity. The Vow was a set of rules to guide filmmakers who wanted to revitalize cinema on the 100 year anniversary of the art form. Three decades after the declaration in Paris of the death of the author, Dogme 95 declared the death of the auteur. Rule number 10 of the Vow of Chastity’s Decalogue announced: “the director must not be credited.” This would not be the only one of the chastity vows to be violated by von Trier and his Dogme 95 colleagues.

Fig 1. Vow of Chastity
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Fig 1.

Vow of Chastity

If the aim was never to keep to the rules, why issue them? In her exploration of von Trier’s relationship to tragedy as a genre and to the tragic as an ontology, Miriam Leonard notes that from Schelling onward tragedy or the tragic has provided a way out of Kant’s antinomy between causality and freedom by finding freedom in relation to constraint and not its absence. Similarly, we may say, Von Trier sets for himself the constraints that could free filmmaking from (commercial and) other constraints, but he then rejects the purism that might result and seeks, within the very rules he chafes against, an occasion for agonistic creativity. Hence Lars Tønder’s conclusion in his essay: that comic rules, in particular, generate the friction needed for creative new communality and self-fashioning. We could say, then, that Von Trier performs at a meta-level the very thing that his films depict: his characters are often in the Post-Kantian situation of (re)claiming freedom from necessity. Indeed, von Trier makes the theme explicit in his documentary, The Five Obstructions, when he challenges director Jorgen Leth to remake his own short film, The Perfect Human, five times, each time subjected to a limitation imposed on him seemingly arbitrarily by an impish and charming Lars von Trier who at one point says: “I want you to do close to a few really harrowing things.” The result is a directors’ agon that gives us a peek into the resilience of creativity over constraint.

Clichés are themselves a kind of constraint. Finding the truth in them and then forcing their “truth” out of them is von Trier’s signature move. Thus, the symposium’s essays, which vary widely in terms of the films they focus on, and the techniques of analysis they enlist, all share this: they can all be said to approach central questions of gender, power, and politics by pressing on the clichés in von Trier’s films. Although von Trier may seem to operate as an exposé-style documentarian revealing the emptiness at the heart of a cliché, these authors find something more. When the films repeat or recirculate tired tropes (evil, emptiness, the “money shot,” the rituals of plantation life, gangster violence, crazy women, the dangers of nature), the authors in this collection see not just repetition but a kind of repetition with a difference that may bring us “frighteningly close to the clichés of our times” but not all the way there – or not only there, in any case. There is always a surprise, a contingency, a swerve, or a third term that introduces another, perhaps frightening, possibility.

The surprise comes from a kind of intensification that von Trier uses to press clichés to their (il)logical absurd extremes. His films intensify the wearily familiar aspects of the everyday. The subjection of women becomes a tawdry subjugation in Dogville, the American exploitation of immigrants becomes the juridically licenced murder of Selma in Dancer in the Dark, and the binary of rational male versus emotional female is lampooned to the point of explosion in several of his major films, most notably perhaps in Breaking the Waves, Antichrist, and Melancholia. Such intensification moves us beyond the sentimentality of pity for the oppressed to something potentially much more radical: laughter. Indeed, one is hard pressed to watch a von Trier film without experiencing a discomfiting explosion of laughter bursting out at the most unlikely moments. Laughter is von Trier’s ally in his quest to defamiliarize the quiescent pieties of late modern life. In his films, liberalism, feminism, progress, work, community, and family values are intensified to the point of absurdity.

The essays in this collection all light on some surprise or swerve in von Trier’s films. While for some that swerve is the product of von Trier’s technique of intensification, for others it comes from adopting a minor vantage point in the film. Miriam Leonard’s analysis of von Trier’s Medea focuses in part on Medea’s older child, the boy who says he “knows what has to happen.” In Bonnie Honig’s reading of Melancholia, the swerve is introduced by focusing on Leo, the young boy who, like the young king Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae (with whom Leo is compared by Honig), exits the perils of adolescence by way of a thwarted sovereignty whose pain and violence in these texts are too often overlooked. Similarly, Christopher Peterson shifts our attention away from the obvious, in this case toward “objects,” in his reading of Melancholia alongside Cuaron’s Gravity: jelly beans, space debris, golf-ball sized hail, and other “things” resist the enlistment of Melancholia into the radical posthumanism of Speculative Realism’s Object-Oriented Ontology approach that has done so much to put “things” on the agenda of political and critical theory.

Mappings are foregrounded in the next essays. Thomas Elsaesser maps the von Trierian “thought experiment” in European cinema, seeing “mind games,” “mouse traps,” and “what if” scenarios in Melancholia, which for him is less about the end of the world than about the possible end of cinema; the mapping of Europe in (non)relation to Egypt features alongside the mapping of the film’s crimes and the criminal’s brain in Michael Shapiro’s treatment of Element of Crime; Paul Apostolidis treats Dogville as an intervention into the chalk-lined mapping of class politics whose lines are difficult to erase. All three foreground cinematic elements that intensify viewer experience, highlighting the music (Apostolidis) forms (Elsaesser) and techniques (Shapiro) used by von Trier to break the hold of cliché, to survive the end of cinema (or not), and reanimate new genres while breaking the grip of sentimentality whose grip on Danes is mercilessly depicted in The Boss of it All. (The film, mentioned by Elsaesser but not considered in any detail by any of our contributors, is one well worth viewing). Indeed, we may hazard (elaborating Elsaesser’s argument that Melancholia reflects on the end[s] of cinema) that the cool blue light from Melancholia in which Justine bathes (noted by Dienstag and Peterson, too) may be not only the saturnine or the lunar, but also the digital: this light is too cool for sentimentalism, breaks the clichés of cinema, and stands for the new visual forms that will sur-vive it.

Evil is the cliché as well as the fugitive figure in Joshua Dienstag’s reading of Europa. It is the blind spot at the heart of representation with which von Trier struggles in that film as well as in Dancer in the Dark. In Dancer, Victoria Wohl argues, Selma (Bjork) eludes the schemes of representation offered by the U.S. and its myth of an Immigrant America, and she also eludes Von Trier, who can never fully capture his protagonist’s face. Selma is America’s blind spot, Wohl concludes. Moreover, as her name itself indicates, Selma points to the other famous blind spot in U.S. political culture: race and the durability of white supremacy even after emancipation and the end of slavery as a juridical institution. These are Elizabeth Anker’s topics in her reading of Manderlay which, she says, explores the (im)possibility of freedom, especially black agency, in post-colonial contexts that so often restore, rather than overcome, race hierarchies.

Stephen Bush reads Breaking the Waves beyond the redemptive narrative of “goodness,” drawing on Bataille to explore the break in our collective appetite for violence, while James Martel tries to find a way to relate to Bess’ goodness without falling into the remediations of redemption. Bess’ improbable but somehow credible conversations with God, her intervention in, but acceptance of, her own fate (again, combining freedom and necessity) and her crafting of her own, new dogmas of faith, inspire Martel to think there may be power in a kind of counter-faith, a way for God, as it were, to break into the reality of everyday life, and unsettle the cruel normativities often secured in his name. Analyzing The Idiots and Dogma 95, Lars Tønder enlists Kierkegaard to show how, for von Trier, comic rules, in particular, bear down on Danish clichés, to explode them and point beyond them.

Rosalind Galt, Lori Marso, and Lynne Huffer all contest the very common claim that von Trier is a misogynist whose sadistic, pornographic images show him to be hopelessly mired in tired clichés of gender and sexuality. All three find in von Trier an unremitting castigation of such clichés, as well. True, as Galt points out, spectators risk a certain voyeuristic pleasure when they watch von Trier’s films, but complicity is also what he offers up for critical exploration with his impish auteur maneuvers both outside and inside the theatre. Lori Marso argues that the grotesque figurations of the body in Antichrist work to disrupt the ennui that is itself an affective response to the clichés of patriarchy. And Huffer claims Nymphomaniac does not repeat but rather subverts male fantasies of creative nymphs subject to their artistic control. The film’s black screen, off-camera, violent ending portends neither the conventional feminist heroine (who turns the tables on her adversary) nor the triumph of patriarchy (which sets the tables right), but rather something far more elusive and powerful: the feel of the agon.

Finally Anthony Cokes asks us to think about the “Face Value” of celebrity, scandal, and historical evil in his artful montage of outrageous, provocative statements made by von Trier, David Bowie, and Kanye West. Each set sheds light on the others, as he has gathered them together. The symposium concludes with the words of von Trier himself: a recent interview with Danish journalist Martin Krasnik is published here in English for the first time, thanks to the efforts of Lars Tønder and Troels Skadhauge.

Bonnie Honig

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor at Brown University in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science. She is also Affiliate Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. Her most recent books are Emergency Politics (Princeton, 2009) and Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013). She is currently working on a new project on public things. Bonnie can be reached at bonnie_honig@brown.edu

Lori J. Marso

Lori J. Marso is Professor of Political Science and former Director of Women’s and Gender Studies (2003-2010) at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She is the author/co-editor of the following books, (Un)Manly Citizens (1999), Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity (2006), Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking (2006) and W Stands for Women (2007), as well as author of several recent articles. Marso is “Critical Exchanges” editor for CPT and on the board of Theory & Event. Her current project explores Simone de Beauvoir’s encounters in and beyond The Second Sex. Lori can be reached at marsol@union.edu

Acknowledgements

This collection developed out of two live gatherings, one at the American Political Science Association Conference in Washington DC in August 2014 and one at Brown University in November 2014. All papers were presented in early versions at one of these two events. Panelists commented on each others’ work and revised their papers in response to comments from others as well as from us in our role as collection co-editors. This was a truly collaborative project and we want to thank all our contributors for their cheerful participation in this multi-stage process. We also thank our funders, who made the live events possible and helped us to stage this work as a collaboration and not merely as a collection: at Brown University, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Media and Cultural Studies, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Pembroke Center Faculty Seed Grant program, the C.V. Starr Lectureship courtesy of Office of the Dean of the Faculty, and also the Creative Arts Council. We are grateful to Jo Anne Colson for her assistance with this project, and to Theory & Event for hosting it.

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