Dogville

(MAJOR SPOILERS!!!) Writer/director/enfant terrible/rabble rouser Lars von Trier is either a certifiable madman or a cinematic genius. Oh, but what a fine line! I have seen several of his films, and all have wildly impressed my not easily impressed self. BREAKING THE WAVES is one of my Top 10 of the 1990s. THE ELEMENT OF CRIME is an arresting sci-fi debut from 1984 (shades of BLADE RUNNER, but all his own). THE KINGDOM is one of the most unique, trenchant satires ever. DANCER IN THE DARK is a heartbreaking, thoroughly original tragimusical. I greatly anticipate Criterion's release of EUROPA (American title: ZENTROPA) in December. Now, after watching DOGVILLE, I am stunned into the recognition that I have just spent three long, brutally painful hours of my life being toyed with, manipulated, and thoroughly probed. Hitchcock said he liked to play the audience like a piano. 

Lars von Trier instead breaks out the scalpel and slashes, sometimes with marked precision, other times indiscriminately, as if he is blindfolded. Then, he lets us bleed. Slowly. Much has been written and discussed about the director's anti-American sentiments. Much I have heard about DOGVILLE states that this film is his ultimate magnum opus on the subject. A film which savagely depicts the ultimate ostracization of an outsider to a closely-knit community. To wit, Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a woman apparently on the run, who stumbles into a 1930s small town in the Rocky Mountains. The kindly local son-of-the-town-physician and resident philosopher, Thomas Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), pities her, offers protection. His intellect is also curiously stimulated by this development, this sudden deviance from the daily blueprint. The town of Dogville is very small. Only a few blocks, in fact. Everyone indeed knows everyone else. There are shopkeepers, apple orchard harvesters, delivery men, assorted tradesmen, cleaning ladies, the cognitively challenged, the more shrewd, husbands, wives, children, and yes, a dog.

Thomas Jr. holds regular meetings at the town hall, holding court akin to a preacher, mixing damnation of these insular folk in his tirades with the more routine daily bits of business. No one pays much attention, until the day he introduces them to Grace. They cock their eyebrows in deeply uncomfortable suspicion. It is decided that Grace has two weeks to prove her worth, her place in Dogville. At the end of this trial period, the townspeople will cast their votes. It is awkward at first. The town's clockwork precision has no need for a strange woman soliciting philantropy. Even the local blind man refuses her help. Perhaps guilt overcomes Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) when she relents and allows Grace to rake a garden, an activity that is not needed. Soon, all the townfolk have Grace toiling at things not needed. She's quite good at such things. The vote is unanimous. She is allowed to remain. She befriends each one, gets to relate to them in ways perhaps they had never been privvy to before. Her encourgement enpowers each of them. She becomes part of their extended family. 

So of course, popularity has the inevitable backlash. Society seems to love to build up and then destroy our heroes. Perhaps it would've happened even if those gangsters hadn't shown up, asking for the whereabouts of a certain young woman. Maybe the ugly tide turning of betrayal would've still befallen Grace at the hands of Dogville even if the police didn't come around to post handbills offering a reward for the return of that same certain fugitive lass. But happen it does, in ways that are often excruciatingly painful for Grace and the viewer alike. DOGVILLE is not a fun movie. It is not at all pleasant to watch, and at times, it is quite unbearably difficult to endure. It is also punishingly long at just under three hours. Was that much time necessary to tell this tale? Did we need all that early exposition, followed by scene after scene detailing the rise and fall of a mysteroius young woman whose tale ressembles that of so many literary characters before her? 

If von Trier is creating an essay on the evils of a xenophobic America, did we need so many brutal scenes (including rape) to put a fine point on it? It's all up to you, dear viewer. One of my takes after days of contemplation, however, is that DOGVILLE is a biblical tale disguised as said anti-America tract. This ground has been covered by the writer/director before, to some degree. At the end of BREAKING THE WAVES, Bess sacrifices her life so that her injured husband may live. During the climax, she is pelted with debris on the way to her death as she walks a path that might well represent the Via Dolorosa. In DOGVILLE, I don't think we are merely looking at a closed America, but rather a representation of mankind at large. It starts with the central conceit of the movie; instead of the usual sets, the town of Dogville is shown on an obvious soundstage as a series of chalk outlines with no walls or doors. Very theatrical. It takes some adjustment for the viewer. At first, it almost seems like some actor's exercise run amok. We see right through the invisible walls of the family across Elm Street (that street name also designated in chalk, right on the path) . So does God. Of course He sees through walls just like we do in this film, sees through the imaginary roofs, and sees into men's hearts. But so does Grace. See where I'm taking this? The ugliness which befalls the young lady as the town turns against her echoes another previous figure in history. And that point is hammered home with increasing dread for nearly two hours during the film's midsection.

Then. That last half hour. Read no further if you do not want to know the outcome. The town, after imprisoning and humiliating Grace in every imaginable way, finally decides to turn her in to those gangsters we saw earlier. A parade of shiny cars arrives. Thomas Jr., who may as well be Judas Iscariot by this point, leads the pinstriped men right to her. But the tide is about to turn again. Grace is removed from her Dogville shackles and led into one of the cars. There's her father, the head mob boss played by yes, James Caan. Grace had fled from a life of crime and death, only to become the recipient of scorn, jealousy, and brutality in the company of "common folk." Dogs, they are. All of them. Grace is offered a chance to return home with dad and assume responsibility as a mafia daughter. She will have power, be a decision-maker. She balks. She needs air. She takes a walk on the outskirts of Dogville. She looks at her former friends, a town filled with souls who brutalized every ounce out of her after their initial warmth. The film's narrator speaks:

 

"How could she ever hate them for what was at bottom merely their weakness? She would probably have done things like those to be fallen her if she had lived in one of these houses. To measure them by her own yardstick as her father put it. Would she not, in all honesty, have done the same as Chuck and Vera and Ben and Mrs Henson and Tom and all these people in their houses? Grace paused. - - - And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all too well. If she had acted like them she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. No. What they had done was not good enough. And if one had the power to put it to right it was one's duty to do so - for the sake of other towns, for the sake of humanity. And not least for the sake of the human being that was grace herself. "

They don't deserve to live. Not a single one. After a philosphical tete-e-tete with dad, Grace decides to bring all manner of vengeance against her tormentors. Kill. Them. All. She orders the mafia henchman to waste every last citizen of Dogville, even an innocent infant, and we see that and several other murders. Hear the awful screams, see the expressions of horror. Torch the town, she orders. Out come the flamethrowers on these invisible walls. By the end, Dogville is completely destroyed. Wiped off the map. Except for that dog. Moses. That's the dog's name. I was reminded of Exodus in some odd way. We read in Chapter 34, as the second tablets of the law are ordered to be chiseled by Moses himself. Verse 6:"....The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness." Verse 7 continues, "maintaining love to thousands, and forgiven wickedness, rebellion, and sin..." Grace endures, allows a martyr's existence for months as the town destroys her. Yet, she takes it all in stride, never lashing out or even raising her voice to the horde. The horde, mankind, a sinful world, if you ask me. 

Then, the second coming, a rapture of one. Destruction for all the rest......"Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sins of the fathers to the third and forth generations." We do indeed see the destruction of multigenerations at the end of Dogville (DOGVILLE). All filthy dirty guilty as sin. American or not.  As unsettling as this sequence was, truly the most disturbing thing to me was how I felt as it played out. I was cheering her on. I wanted her to get her revenge, God-imagery or not. They wronged her. I spent nearly three agonizing hours watching this woman suffer and you're damn right I wanted to see her unleash this justice. It was primal, born of the most base desire for bloodlust. Like I was merely watching Charles Bronson pop round after round into those scumbags for the 800th time in DEATH WISH 8, not an ambitious art film. 

Then I stopped. The director had just made me realize I am a citizen of Dogville, and perhaps no better. This is the flip interpretation-perhaps von Trier was not making Grace into God but rather a flawed human who herself is not better than the bloodthirsty mob. "For the sake of humanity" I wanted her to get even. Even when the children were wasted I felt vindication. I became sick to my stomach. The audience, played like a piano. I hated and loved von Trier by the end. These are my takes. Lars von Trier had a much more global, universal intent for DOGVILLE, despite other interpretations, and despite an end credit sequence, showing slides of dispossesed presumed U.S. citizens living in assorted squalor, perhaps the aftermath of violence. David Bowie's 'Young Americans" plays over the credits. Hmmmmm.