LARS VON TRIER –
NICOLE KIDMAN – DOGVILLE - 2003
IMDB 28 janvier 2008
Summary: A sublime Nicole Kidman
*** This
review may contain spoilers ***
A
mysterious film in which everything is upside down. No setting really, in fact
a nearly empty stage like in a minimalist dramatic production in some avant-garde theater.
The only originality is that the camera can look down upon the stage from a
higher position, which an audience cannot do. Of course too the camera can move
around the stage. This is supposed to express a society that is upside down and
besieged due to the depression. Depression in all directions: the mine is
closed, there is no work for anyone, survival is the fundamental rule, autarky is
the objective of everyday life. But that is not all. A female fugitive arrives
one day in this dead mining community in the mountains preceded by
the sound of gunshots and followed by a car
that looks like a gangster's car, and it is. Yet the girl is hidden at first,
then accepted, and then things turn sour. The film is about this slow
transformation and revelation that human nature is not to be trusted. The girl
is given some tasks in a friendly manner at first, and then little by little
these tasks become an obligation that everyone expects. Thus the girl is transformed
into a domestic slave. The next stage will be the progressive use of her body
by all the men and the total hatred the women will feel and express for her.
From being morally enslaved she will become physically enslaved with a chain
and a flywheel attached to the chain itself attached to a metal collar.
She
becomes some kind of bitch or dog used by the villagers for their chores and
impulses. The young would-be writer who protected her at first and declared is
love at the beginning is also transformed from a rather kind and loving young
man into a traitor who accuses her of a theft he had done himself, for her to
escape it's true, but himself with his own hands. Then he will little by little
consider her as an obstacle between himself and the village, hence an obstacle
on his road of laziness and comfort. He will in the end call the gangsters to
come and get her out of the village. On that level, simple people in a simple
community hit by the depression, the least we can say is that good intentions
and civilization are very superficial and very short-lived.
But
the worst is still to come. The gangsters come back of course. The girl is the
daughter of the boss of the gang, and he gives her the responsibility, if she
wants to come back with him out of this hell, to give the order to shoot
everyone and burn the village down. And she will demonstrate a tremendous level
of arrogance, condescension and cold hatred that was unimaginable before. For
the details go to the film and she will be the one who executes, shoots the
handsome would-be writer. "There are a few things you have to do
yourself," will she conclude. That frozen inhumanity is beyond all limits.
The
film thus becomes a demonstration of what human beings can become in extreme
conditions. If they can be that rude, brutal, cruel in a situation that has
nothing to do with a war, you can imagine what they are ready to do to survive
in a situation where life and death are a daily stake. The survival instinct is
the strongest motivation for any individual, any group or community and even
the human species as a whole. Humane attitudes are in no way natural. So, if
you push aside the varnish of good behavior, you find out that many people are
bullies when necessary in extreme conditions, even if only a few, and even few
of them would be bullies in normal conditions.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine,
University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin
en Yvelines
AFTERTHOUGHT 17 AOÜT 2015
How can we make humanity worthy living ?
There is a tremendous lot we
could add to this approach. The key to this film is probably at the end as the
background of the final credits unwind itself. Dogville is the representative
of the most rejected, ostracized and segregated against American community you
can think of, the poorest among the poor. They are not even listed anywhere.
They do not have the telephone, nor television, certainly not the Internet.
They are miserable. They live on tit bits of social benefits, some nearly
autarkic means, totally enclosed in their own limits and boundaries, locked
away from the world. Let a stranger arrive in strange conditions with some strange
mystery behind and they will accept him or her (it’s easier if it is a her) out
of the goodness of their hearts at first but as soon as they learn she is
wanted down in the valley, outside in the big world they start transforming the
favors they were accepting from her for a miserable salary into exploitation:
always more for less salary.
And that descent into Dante’s
Inferno will go on forever and she will become the men’s prostitute and then
the prisoner of the village with chains, wheels attached to her leg and keys on
the doors. And finally the only one who was in love with her and she was in love
with will turn against her when she refuses his rape as love and accepts his
love as rape, which makes him totally frigid, impotent. He will call the
gangsters who were looking for her. A gangster who reveals himself as her
father.
At this moment there is no escape
from the necessity to clean up the place. She cannot forgive them because if
she had been in their place she would have done the same things and she can’t
think of one single excuse for such a bleak behavior. So rather than surviving
with the idea that she is like them she orders her father to get rid of the
people and the village, and the mother of the many children (including a baby),
the very woman who had been obnoxious enough to destroy her seven porcelain
figurines she had bought from the fancy store of the village with her meager
salary, is supposed to be made the witness of the killing of every single child
of hers one after the other before being killed in her turn.
And finally she confronts her
would-be lover Tom, the doctor’s son, the would-be philosopher, the want-to-be
novelist who could never be able to imagine anything, except ethical
explanations why he would torture her, and she finally shuts him up with only
one bullet. “There are things you have to do yourself,” she says. And finally a
dog, Moses, is still barking after the village has been burnt to the ground. He
is in his kennel and wants to get out. She checks upon him but she does not
kill him. She leaves Moses alone in captivity with no people to lead across the
Red Sea to die all by himself out of hunger
and thirst. Absolute and exquisite torture!
We can wonder what this film is
all about. It is about social segregation and social stratification. No matter
how low you can go on the social ladder, even the people you would think are on
the lowest rung will either find people lower than them or they will put some
stranger or strangers in that lower position so that they themselves can gain
some greatness, some grandness, some importance. She is white. Fourteen people
out of fifteen are white in Dogville. So they do not use color or race to do
it. They use the first circumstances to bring her down. She is set under
suspicion since she is declared missing by the police and she will have to pay
for her safety and anonymity. And pay she will. Some good action will become
work, and then the amount of work will be doubled and the pay cut DOWN mind you
in proportion. And then she will be raped by all the men, and then she will be
chained to the village with a metal wheel attached to her leg and there is no
end to her being lowered under the last rung on the social ladder.
This is a lesson on humanity and
not in humanity and the final shooting of all these people and burning of the
village seem to imply there is no other way but to make such communities
extinct, knowing that you can destroy one, another will come because they are
like Jack-in-the-box cockroaches: they are not destroyed even by nuclear
radiation.
Is Lars von Trier advocating
social cleansing? That’s your own responsibility to answer yes he is or no he
isn’t. Yes he is, if you take it literally but the social cleansing is done by
a gang of gangsters and criminals. So what! So what? No he is not, because it
is so excessive that the logic of it is flawed. It is black humor, very dark
somber black humor, but it is the type of humor Daniel Defoe used when he
advised the Irish to have many children, fatten them and at the age of three
sell them on the market just the way you do with piglets or young pigs: as food
mind you.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:58 PM