Redeeming Lars Von Trier’s Women - The Creation Of A Filmic Feminine World
An exploration of Lars von Trier’s depiction of the feminine in ‘Breaking the Waves’, ‘Dancer in the Dark’, ‘Antichrist’, and ‘Melancholia’.
A wife boards a ship of sailors that will assault her and leave her for dead. She believes this act will save her husband’s life. As she journeys across the water to meet her fate, her eyes turn toward the camera, and she smiles at us knowingly. Following her death, her husband appears miraculously recovered, and bells ring from the heavens.
‘Breaking the Waves’ (Lars von Trier, 1998)
A mother has passed on her degenerative eye condition to her son. Falsely accused of murder, she refuses to fight the death penalty, believing the money she could spend on a lawyer would be better spent saving her son’s sight. She faces her death not with anger but with song. Midway through the soaring vocals, a sudden crack, then silence as her body swings gently from side to side.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ (Lars von Trier, 2000)
The wife and mother I speak of are the heroines Bess from Breaking the Waves (1998) and Selma from Dancer in the Dark (2000). They make up two thirds of Lars von Trier’s infamous ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy; three films that focus on martyr-like female protagonists, whose golden hearts will be their downfall. Von Trier has asserted that his films operate, in some sense, as ‘feminine’. This assertion has sparked outrage, and understandably so. The interminable suffering of his female protagonists leads one to wonder whether he is, as many have accused him to be, an outright misogynist. Considering Selma and Bess alongside the violent She of Antichrist (2009) and depressive Justine of Melancholia (2011), I want to come to a better understanding of von Trier’s assertion; through the creation of a filmic feminine world, von Trier urges the viewer to move, alongside his tormented female protagonists, beyond patriarchy.
Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark depict the worlds of Bess and Selma in muted, sombre tones. The strict religious community of Bess’s world is dominated by men; women are not permitted to speak in the church, or attend the community’s austere funerals. The church itself is bereft of bells, making their heavenly appearance at the film’s end appear as an act of posthumous defiance on Bess’s part against the masculine austerity of the church.
‘Breaking the Waves’ (Lars von Trier, 1998)
Likewise, it is down to Selma to bring life to the impoverished existence she leads as an underpaid factory worker. This life comes in the form of the musical numbers she constructs in her mind. With their appearance, the dreary diegetic world is transformed into one of visual abundance; characters dance and sing gleefully, and Selma is allowed both a literal and metaphorical freedom of movement that is closed off to her in the real world.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes that “there is much feminine behaviour that has to be interpreted as protest”. Acknowledging how women are forced to exist within a masculine world, Beauvoir identifies the negation of masculine logic as one such form of revolt. It is this rejection that Bess exhibits in her unerring belief that her commitment of dangerous sexual acts with other men are not merely the perverted will of her paralysed husband, but the working of a miracle that will save her husband’s life.
Selma, too, creates for herself a world in which she is neither victim nor pariah, but a free agent. In her musical daydreams, she is able to transform her surroundings into a space in which masculine logic is not only denied, but entirely absent. Through the employment of extreme close-ups, we, as viewers, are urged to identify with Bess and Selma, forced to occupy their painful position of Beauvorian otherness. The cruelty of their deaths is not easily recovered from; having experienced the filmic feminine, we fight against a return to the patriarchal realm with renewed vigour.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ (Lars von Trier, 2000)
It is this fight, lost by Bess and Selma, that is bravely taken up by She and Justine in von Trier’s later ‘Depression’ trilogy. If Bess and Selma represent the impossibility of embodying the perfect wife and mother, then She and Justine exhibit a flat-out refusal to conform to these moulds. After the death of her son, She’s husband takes her to Eden, a cabin in the woods, to work through her ‘atypical’ grief. His masculine way of knowing is soon undermined by the senseless violence of She, and the irrationality of the nature of Eden; in a world where a dead fox reanimates and eerily proclaims that “chaos reigns” - there is only so far a degree in psychotherapy will take you.
The violence that She inflicts upon her husband depicts her as free from the sacrificial love of the protagonists of the ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy. And though She is eventually strangled to death by her husband, we do not see in Antichrist a comfortable restoration of the patriarchy. In the film’s epilogue, hundreds of faceless women ascend towards the hero, bringing with them their feminine knowledge that threatens the Apollonian order.
‘Antichrist’ (Lars von Trier, 2009)
This feminine knowledge appears again in Melancholia in the form of clinically depressed Justine. Despite scientist John’s assertions that the planet Melancholia will pass by Earth safely, Justine prophetically proclaims that “The Earth is evil. There’s no need to grieve for it.” Throughout the film, Justine communes directly with the planet that promises the destruction of Earth, smiling contentedly as she basks naked under Melancholia’s blueish rays.
If Antichrist promises a bringing down of the patriarchal order, then Melancholia is the fulfilment of that promise. As she rejects the mutilation of marriage, Justine’s complex emotional world, like that of Bess, Selma, and She, becomes constructed around a kind of feminine knowledge that encourages transcendence outside the masculine realm. That this transcendence can only be achieved through self-destruction makes evident the perverse injustices of the patriarchal order.
‘Melancholia’ (Lars von Trier, 2011)
In his radical invoking of the filmic feminine, von Trier offers an experience of otherness that is both horrifying and heartbreaking. With his depiction of the establishment of women within a patriarchal framework as one inextricably linked to trauma, I find myself, alongside Justine, basking under the promise of nihilist liberation that comes with complete annihilation.