Scribblings with Green Chalk

Truth be told, I saw Dogville a little while before I was plagued by the eye-eating curse from outer space.

Maybe you too know what it’s like: you hear about a movie, want to see it, but before you realize it’s in and out of movie theaters. Everyone around you is talking about it, making you feel like Rip van Winkle. Apparently it was there long enough for everyone and their uncle to see it but you, the one person on the planet, missed it. That, in short, is my unhappy love affair with movie-theater going. Recent additions to the list of the unseen: Control and I’m Not There. Turn the knife and send reviews if you like.
 
 

(Image found here)

 
 
Although it would have been nice to have seen the movie when the rest of humankind saw it and participate in the discussions, watching it on a small screen had its advantages. Due to its rudimentary set design, Dogville reminded me of Teatr Telewizji, the weekly play staged for Polish public TV on Monday nights. That’s where the resemblances end. The acting was nothing like the exaggerated Wyspiański or the exaggerated Brecht of TV theater. TV theater certainly didn’t feature graphic rape scenes, settling rather for suggestive violence. I understand that theater has since gotten raunchier with plays by Sarah Kane et al. Still, I think I could have grasped the idea without seeing Stellan Skarsgard’s bare buttocks. Again.

The movie got me off apples for a couple weeks, even though German subtitles were covering part of the screen. That was, upon reflection, to be expected from my difficult relationship with Von Trier’s stories. I nauseated my way through the highly acclaimed Breaking the Waves (feeling overdosed with carnal knowledge of Skarsgard and Emily Watson), I drifted away during the dreamy tragedy and execution of Björk in Dancer in the Dark, I angrily fast-forwarded through Idiots. Try as I might, I cannot get myself to like Von Trier’s insistence on tying naivety and evil. Could it be a question of the medium? The ingenious abstractions of violence in Angela Carter’s fiction set the cogs running in my brain. Carter, however, clothed her plots in opulent literary structures and vocabulary. Von Trier’s stories, for me, fall flat due to the bareness of expression. His characters appear retarded in their ill-conceived kindness and naivety: bodies, naked and clothed, reciting fragments of a tale they don’t believe in. Paper, even if filmed even if filmed with an unsteady hand.

I don’t know what kind of realism and/or surrealism Von Trier wants to explore. I’ve heard many high-sounding interpretations of the gratuitous violence and suffering of his paper people, but they come in one ear and fly out the other. The kathartic spectacle he tried to build up in Dancer in the Dark is for me very bland in comparison with the one second in Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing when you see a plastic basin kicked underneath the hanged man’s body. What in Kieślowski is both symbolic and real, in Von Trier’s rendition tastes like cotton candy.

When I finally got used to the acting mannerism of Dogville and decided to buy the dark warehouse as America sans America, the story turned its back on me. I did try to come up with some deeper thoughts on sacrifice and suffering, but I couldn’t. The story ate itself somewhere towards the end and the mathematics of repetitions and objects did not add up to anything for me. I was watching Grace buy the ugly figurines, yet in spite of the whole emotional build-up, I didn’t understand why their loss was supposed to be meaningful or painful. I’m sure there’s a story hidden away in that story, yet I can’t excavate it. I wish I were taken in by John Hurt’s narration. Together with the stage design, it creates an alluring frame for the content that I do not see. There is probably a review out there that neatly theorizes Von Trier’s Subtle and Invisible Content, but I have an eye infection and a more or less fixed blind spot for the Danish movie magician, it appears. I do understand that these are supposed to be fables with characters who are supposed to represent human types. I don’t understand, however, why these types have to seem like cruel caricatures of people with mental retardation; the whole psychological or anti-psychological strategy that Von Trier is playing with seems gratuitous. The dialog attributes to the characters the eloquence of five-year-old children, so when rape and violence begin, you feel like you’re stuck in a social worker’s report. The sparseness of detail makes it neither surreal nor exemplary, but more like an unfinished draft, a movie made too soon, before the story and imagery ripened in the creator’s mind.

Before the end credits–which were meant, I believe, as a reminder that the movie, on some intangible level, was about the US–I had forgotten about Grace and Tom. Their tragedy is an image and word salad in my memory, while the lasting questions are: (1) what was Lauren Bacall doing in that movie? and (2) how does one construct a metaphoric mine in a small rented apartment without alarming the Hausmeister? I am seriously impressed with the stage design in Dogville and maybe there is a highly theoretical and intellectually tickling review essay out there praising Von Trier’s contributions to both the mining industry and interior decoration…