Nymph()maniac (Lars von Trier, 2013)

[therewillbeblus]

Watched this again, still an imperfect film and one that I'm less enamored with each revisit, but it rents a lot of space in my mind between viewings. I feel a strong urge to return to it every so often, like a compulsion that the film documents so well. Do I think this work contains the answer to fill my spiritual hole too?

One half-baked theory I've been ruminating on for why the controversial ending here works is prompted by an extensive understanding of what I believe to be von Trier's ethos, and something he's communicating in all of his films to some degree. As I've written about before, most clearly in regard to Antichrist, I think von Trier often offers up his characters as serving dual purposes that are mutually exclusive: real characters in the story or parable he's telling, and extensions of von Trier's competing psychological 'parts' or selves, in conflict in his mind and externalized onto the medium. Dafoe's pragmatic psychologist attempting to tame Gainsbourg's manic-depressive patient in an enmeshed spousal relationship also mirrors as a logical part trying to engage with an unhinged emotional one in IFS terms. Dogville may be von Trier's richest film, not because he wrote it in a fortnight's drug binge, but because that relentless rabbit hole of exorcising his various internal parts erupted into a community of layered motives. Bettany's Tom Edison is a gentleman on the surface, but one who is self-deceptive, rationalizing his behavior and attempts to pitch himself as better than others, when he is really so sensitive and fearful of being 'found out' that he cowardly facilitates harm and blinds himself to his immorality with delusions of grandeur (defaulting to intellectualization in praising Grace's violence for the nonexistent lesson she's granted for him) or total suppression. von Trier sees himself in the townspeople too, but is interested in exploring the exterior differences but ultimate similiarities in the two most developed characters: Tom and Grace. He barely differentiates them in the first part of the denouement's reveals, as Grace also achieves and sustains an identity based on a sense of arrogance, by martyring herself as a puritanical doll and coddling to imperfect actions of others without allowing them space to attain the ethical standards she idealizes for herself, a supreme bein. But then he does differentiate them at the very end based on the actions they take, which deserve the merit because they are tangible and actionable against the grain of their 'good intentions'. Here are two sides of von Trier - vulnerable emotional beings hidden beneath logical exteriors, and the anxious, delusional one that has no willingness to face its flaws is executed by the anxious, delusional one who faces itself and chooses to do the work. And one could easy draw up parts of von Trier in a practical man of logic in Sutherland's scientist, Gainsbourg's complacent support, and Dunst's surrendering manifestation of misery in Melancholia. And so on and so forth.

So, what of Nymphomaniac. Well, as I wrote upthread, I think Gainsbourg's Joe represents von Trier's own addictions pretty obviously, and Skarsgård as a seemingly neutral part coming in to engage with this addiction in a moment of clarity. The addiction never really stopped to reflect or face itself in the mirror, as Grace does in the end of Dogville, at least not in any way that 'stuck'. I've seen a lot of von Trier's interviews prior to this film being made- ones where he admitted he was powerless over alcohol and drugs, that they made his life unmanageable, but that he could not conceive of a life without their aid, and each time he would seek treatment to 'dry out', he would return to using- back into that delusion of Tom Edison, back into embracing the fatalistic depression of She in Antichrist. But von Trier was sober when he wrote Nymphomaniac - it reportedly took him far longer to grind out than any other project, and -warts and all- the final product shows this. Here is von Trier finally sitting with himself for a length of time sober, struggling to make sense of his narrative.

So we get Skarsgård, a calming presence not initially meant to be skeptical of, inviting in the disease to acclimate to the other internal parts of his psychology. They engage in gentle debates and the addiction is listened to, affirmed, validated, seen, and has the opportunity to see without indulging in its default inebriation. So, what does it say when Skarsgård -an asexual, patient, sensitive part- assaults the addiction? Is this a representation of how hard it is to stay sober- where one cannot trust their own internal psychological parts to behave according to a predictable logic? Does the addictive disease part infect the others- unknowingly finding unconscious creative ways to convince them that they need to use to survive? Is Skarsgård actually the addictive part in disguise as a stable listener, and is Joe the sensitive, emotional part - the spiritual vacancy that often precedes addiction, that the user tries to fill with drugs, sex, food, etc.? I don't know, and it would be pretty lame if this was cut-and-dry (just like one could read Dogville's exhibition of psychological 'parts' in much greater detail than I laid out above, which is really just an unfair 'top of my mind' example, when there are thousands buried in there), but I do think there's something to this idea. I don't think it's actually only a cheeky cop-out, though it's certainly there to provoke us. Instead, I believe von Trier is demonstrating that, with addiction and in life, one is never safe -one never "beats" or "escapes" the external triggers or internal mental forces that disorient periods of stability and aggressively pull us back to what they message us our "natural state" is with painfully reductive identity-first language: whether as an "addict", a "fuck-up", destined to be used and abused and objectified and destroyed. von Trier, like many people struggling in early recovery, seems to be sharing with us his experience- that when his back is turned, and often as an indirect response to actually engaging with the parts of him that are most delicate, he's at his most fragile. He knows the beast too well- he knows what it's like to be running scared, to share, to feel unsafe and not received, and to abuse himself when he thinks he's on the right track and helping himself.

Cue a cover of "Hey Joe" - a song I've always found profoundly simplistic in conveying lyrical confusion. 'What's happening?' 'Why is it happening?' 'I'm desperate to know' - A curious and compassionate and bewildered agent trying to get a handle on events that escape them: expressing that they got third-hand information, while speaking to the source and not getting answers, musing that the person not responding to them got some information that felt tangible from a tertiary source as well.. maybe. It all feels so uncomfortable, so displaced -a voice working through a theory attempting to grasp a nebulous situation out loud in real time. That clawing for catharsis, for harmony, for comprehension. Joe wants that, as does von Trier's addict part and his part aching from a lifelong emotional/spiritual hole, but neither knows how to get it or how to communicate that need in a way other parts will hear. Maybe whatever part Skarsgård resembles wants that too -after all, parts are not malicious in intent, they all have positive intentions, even if they aren't being helpful and can often be harmful when unleashed in a vacuum. Maybe it just doesn't matter, just like action is what really matters at the end of Dogville. Though I reject that von Trier really believes that. He knows that how he feels inside cannot be bought or resolved with behavior changes -as we see across plenty of his works where the pragmatists are revealed as myopic and die. It's all a mess that he's working through different strategies for, in real time, on the page and screen, just like the lyrics of "Hey Joe." It's only because he arrives at such raw conclusions that people mistake them for empty provocations. He's provoking himself, because that's the only hope he has for gaining therapeutic progress. And he's not wrong about that.

[feihong]

Really good post, and I tend to agree ––none of this is stuff had occurred to me before you pointed it out, but it makes exceptional sense when you sketch it in. I can see von Trier putting self-insert characters into all these movies, now, that's pretty interesting. Sorry I have nothing more to add––never really liked watching or thinking about von Trier's movies––though I make an exception for Dogville, and maybe Dancer in the Dark, somewhat. But bravo for cracking all these pictures open like an egg.

[colinr0380]

That is an interesting take although I think it needs to be mixed together in combination with Von Trier's well acknowledged bouts of depression as well as his more general figure of the 'ineffectual intellectual' figure that crops up in all of his films. The Paul Bettany character and Skarsgard's ostensibly asexual figure in this film (principled about this matter as he is about lots of other things, until Joe systematically lays waste to the principles undermining each and every tenet of his being through the long dark night of the soul for them both) are maybe the most overt figures but you can see it in a much smaller way in films such as Breaking the Waves (where the doctor that Bess goes to for help with her God voice does not and cannot understand her issues because he is coming at her situation from a purely medical framework; similar to the way that on the other side the members of Bess's church are damaging her from their own limited perspective. Whilst Bess is a mixture of both Heavenly and Earthly concerns. Maybe that makes her the companion to Jack in The House That Jack Built, just using sex instead of death to explore her world?) or the kindly jail attendant helpfully whisking Selma on her last dance to the noose in Dancer In The Dark.

Much like the idealist doctor in Epidemic flying in to treat, but only spreading the disease wider (paired with the flippant writers of the story casually playing around with and eventually unleashing into the real world material that is too dangerous for them to control), they superficially 'understand' the situation and have worked out intellectualised ways to manage and control human behaviour (or at least the behaviour of their characters that they are pulling the strings of), but do they truly feel for others in their orbit? And because eventually they prove that they don't feel, they end up not being able to grasp the irrational nuances of human behaviour, and are left at a loss as the entire worlds that have been created collapse into shattering apocalypses. In that sense there is little difference between the inevitable collapse of the commune in The Idiots and the destruction of the world as a whole in Melancholia. It's all just a matter of scale, which is what makes these most recent films of Nymph()maniac and The House That Jack Built so interesting, because they are getting past that and into critiquing the entire underpinning of the sex and death drives that underlie the subconscious, and to do that you have to scrape through a whole layer of cultural conceptual veneer (which is the 'ineffectual intellectualism' turned from a character into actual cultural artifacts) to see it all as the groping in the dark for meaning that humanity creates to justify its actions.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah that's a good reading, and those are definitely all competing parts von Trier is contending with as he engages in his fatalistically excessive thinking and feeling. I believe I mentioned it in my last writeup on the previous page a few years ago (which was really more of a direct reading of this film and von Trier's ethos, rather than a meditation on the final behavioral shock to justify its provocations), but the end of your last sentence reminds me of this 'twisted humanism' -an embrace of our Sisyphean struggle to gain meaning, stability, finality, clarity, or any concrete definition as we traverse through life attempting to self-actualize