Splendor in the Darkness: Von Trier as a Sadist

I just finished watching Lars von Trier’s third film, Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve and Peter Stormare. It’s about a Czech woman who comes to America in the hopes of raising enough money to have her son’s vision repaired before he, like her, eventually goes blind, but things don’t go quite as planned. After having seen only Dogville out of von Trier’s oeuvre, I have to say he might possibly be one of my favorite directors, if solely for the fact that he manages to provoke within the viewer a true sense of horror. His directing is similar to the Sadean boudoir, and his torturous probing goes to the very end, to the point where you almost can’t bear it. At the same time, von Trier’s heroines, like Sade’s victims, radiate with splendor, to borrow a phrase from Lacan in his analysis of Sophicles’ Antigone, under the most excruciating of circumstances.

In this way I think von Trier’s films are able to touch the core of tragedy, while abandoning any pretension or orthodoxies that he may or may not be accused of. Even if his visions don’t always succeed to their fullest potential, he cannot be accused of not being radical in the experimental sense. It’s through this that his films retain a thoroughly auteur quality that most contemporary cinema lacks (some exceptions off the top of my head would be Lynch, Kieslowski and Herzog).

The musical numbers in Dancer clearly contain a self-deprecating dimension that could be called Brechtian, but I think, more importantly, they serve as a reminder as to what the essence of film is by rendering palpable the fantasms that haunt reality, akin in many respects to the stifling libidinal space of the Lynchian mise-en-scène.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this movie. But it was torture to watch.

Oh, and if you’re curious about von Trier, check out the dogme!