In this article I am going to address how one can interpret or make use of the narrative of Lars von Trier’s film. I am not going to address the way director was self reflecting on his career or the use of excessive violence which is common anyhow in todays entertainment, but rather stay on the topic of aesthetics.
Jack as a hammer
In the first scene of film we watch Jack pick up a hitchhiker, to be more precise, a woman in distress, her car is broken, her jack is broken. Their conversation, among the rest goes about the consequences of her trusting Jack, a stranger, to help her. Quite evidently that the trust does not come from naivety but the assumption of control or The assumption that things would not get out of control, but they do.
The jack is being used as a hammer to inflict damage, to break the common beliefs among us people, or the viewers, to challenge the norms and our expectations. The fact that the narrative of the film is discussed by the characters and that theres a clear analogy between Jack the person and jack the tool (to smash), suggests the relationship between the director and the viewer. Lars von Trier is going to hit us in the face with Jack.
This scene also shows how a victim of circumstances (broken car), can use the position of a victim to demand help, rather that asking for it), it relies maybe on the belief that all people share the same empathy and sentimentality about ethics and each other in general. The film discusses the issue of trust in relation to morals to try to uncover its weak points as a form of a dark-humor-provocative-criticism.
Hunter and hunted, victim and aggressor
The glimpse to Jack’s past shows us some scenes from his childhood. First one – cutting a ducklings feet – he lacks the ability to feel empathy by nature, he is lacking the emotional capability of feeling the wrong of his doing. He is also actually a victim of circumstances (he was born emotionally handicap), therefore he should also get empathy from the viewers. When he is already an adult, we see how he tries helplessly to mingle in society having a very disturbed way of imitating cut out faces out of cheap magazines in front of the mirror.
Another important scene is the one which he plays a game, hide and seek. He chooses, maybe deliberately, to run through a field of corn, making traces which could lead to him being caught, the exact same thing happens to him as an adult with the ‘blood trail’ literally and figuratively. This show and also being discussed how easily the lines between the hunter and hunted or victim and aggressor can be blurred, Jack uses the trail left in the corn as bait to wait and hide for who is pursuing him.
Theres also a scene which is meant to reflect about the act of hunting which was an aristocratic ritual. It shows again how powerful and destructive a human action could be, not only by taking the lives of animals or destroying nature, but also to suffer ourselves as we witness such a scene. It shows how we still have a problem with changes of norms and morality in individual level because it didn’t eliminate suffering but rather just shifted it.
Imagine hunting as a common practice of early humans, they needed it simply to survive, there was no self reflection. At some point in history not far away from now, as we developed self reflection as human beings, we condemned hunting for pleasure or as a part of some tradition and today even consuming meat in general is considered by many beliefs (including contemporary western culture) as unethical. The more we know, the more we self reflect, the more we realize that we are a cause of destruction.
Von Trier is pointing out again the ambiguity of the human conscience (the logic contradiction in it), that with human good will to prevent suffering and pain we are actually inflicting it on ourself by conceiving it as wrong from the first place. Our conscience makes us suffer when we witness suffering, but then it becomes a problem when the mental-social mechanism (=ontological predicament) that is supposed to prevent it causing the exact same thing on itself – suffering. We should be suspicious about our bad conscious that creates the same thing that it tries to avoid as a mean of avoiding it. It might as well be, that outside our loop of our conscience, suffering exits as something quite different than what we grew up to believe. We might be looping (as a result of a post Judeo-Christian western mentality some thinkers would say) in a circle of guilt in which theres no way out, what is symbolized as hell.
OCD and western culture
Jack is being depicted as a person with OCD. He has in his mind as an architect to create an ultimate artwork – a house. This house can be an object of aesthetic value but also emotional value. It could be a shelter from outside but also one you can bring others you trust inside in private.
The portrayal of the search after the most ideal art or standards shows how full of mistakes, pathetic and cruel getting there could be. Every mistake in the search for the ideal can show how wrong it is from the first place. The sublime does not have anything common with the earthly and the mundane, therefore it exists only in theory. Any attempt of achieving it is bound to end in horror, or at least imperfection.
Irrationality in art
Maybe one of the main topics of the film, is the nature of art. Among other examples of art in the film are Dante’s inferno, Gothic architecture, Warplanes design, von Trier’s other films etc’.
Art exists only in the human mind, it is self referencing, so are morals and the distinction between good and bad (animals, plants and planets does not have morals). Art existed in the past as a field of aesthetics in which the goal in to find and express beauty. That beauty is not like our language because it comes to us a-priori, instinctively. We do not necessarily have to read notes to feel and enjoy music for example or to look at the sunset, it comes emotionally and unbiased (in the way of rationality as a mental structure). It is a mechanism working by itself that does not interface directly with our rationality, because if music had a formula it wouldn’t take our greatest geniuses like Bach or Glenn Gould to write it and it wouldn’t be called Art. Although this conception might be challenged by Aristotles formulas of a tragedy or computer algorithms writing music, art evolved in a period of 2500 years to keep challenge itself and breaking its own boundaries and the answer to the question of where are we now, is not yet fully answered. One possible answer is that art collapses into itself and disappears in a sort of a black hole paradox.
Goethe
Goethe is mentioned in the film in the context of how Irony was present in the face of horror. Although Goethe was one of the main figures of cultural western society he also one of first to challenge rationality (without having to abandon it). In some of his works (study of colors, Faust) he would show how light and darkness or good and bad are the just complementary to each other and are inseparable. In his color theory the color blue connects to darkness, yellow to light and between these two all the other colors exists. Mephistophiles in faust shows how satan can be god’s best apostle. Any normal man compared to a saint would be a sinner. The divinity of the ideal is not something a man can achieve so when Faust is trying to achieve a moment of perfection he is actually making his way to hell, just like Jack.
Dante and Virgil (Jack and Verge)
Who is virgil ? Sound of self reflectance and conscience ? At the end he does notice a second voice, is it criticism ?
Dealing with the process of time and history in which there is never stagnation but a big deal of stirring in which there would always be dominant and submissive, triumph and failure, master and slave, dominance and extinction.
Von Trier’s film is clearly a form of self confession and reflection about his own work of art, compared with some of humanities most monstrous use of propaganda and violence. On a positive note it can serve as an example of the possibilities of art used to the degree of a moral compass almost like a sacred text, on a less positive note von Trier is portraying his relationship with his audience rather as a disturbed sado-masochistic one. He considers Jack as himself going to hell at the end, although his initial ambition was building a masterpiece that would guarantee his place in Heaven. I am sure though that for some people von Trier is a modern genius, that together with some of his other works, had come to some interesting conclusions regarding his own personal fight with depression and self abuse, modern and classical western culture, the status of art regarding its current post-pop-culture-audience.
Conclusion
The movie shows us a quest, of the protagonist, of the Director, of Western civilization or of ourselves. That journey that aimed to establish values and meaning to everything and therefore achieve happiness, turned out to be a somewhat pathetic failed experiment which became a monstrosity. We hear through the dialogue between Jack and Verge how by asking the wrong questions Jack went the wrong way, building a the ultimate artwork which was a gateway to hell as a metaphor for a life of suffering. It does not have to be a physical place but it can be a mental state in which a person lives his life.
Von Trier is a very good student of the enlightenment, that period of western society that was a symbol of hope through rationality, expressed in art, literature and philosophy. We thought we could find answers to all questions and find happiness at the end of this quest.
To many, that experiment ended more or less at the start of the 20th century with world war II and the collapse of the subject in the fields of art and philosophy.
In a post Nietzschean / Kafkaesque age von Trier shows how much we are still troubled with some of the basic questions of Western civilizations and modern lives regarding ethics and morality at its basis. The roadmap for our future is still unclear and polarized. Von Trier is depicting quite a modern man, although living in the modern world, he is completely lost.