Lars von Trier Beyond Depression by Linda Badley

Author:Linda Badley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Volume II: Showing Everything / Speaking the Unspeakable

In nearly all of von Trier’s films since the Europe trilogy, male power is a pretense asserted in order to be deflated. In Nymphomaniac this theme is literalized in a succession of jokes about male genital vulnerability, as in Joe’s oral rape of the aforementioned would-be father to the hangdog clinginess of Mr. H, and the sexual exhaustion of Jerôme. In an episode—based on a testimonial—featuring Joe with two African brothers with impressive “dueling” erections, von Trier delights in violating the taboo against showing erect penises (outside of porn) while joking about penis size fetishization (especially in porn). While the elephant in this room is over-the-top racist stereotyping implicit in Joe’s (and von Trier’s) exoticization of Black male sexuality, the primary joke is that the men are less interested in Joe’s body than in competing with each other through that body as they argue in dialect over who gets which of her orifices. In the opposite way, Joe’s “morphological study” of flaccid penises displayed in a brisk series of stills (which Romney calls the “penile equivalent to mug shots”) reverses the compositional rhetoric of porn.156 Overall, as Joe acquires exotic specimens to “fill all [her] holes,” the film flaunts male frontal nudity as much as, if not more than, female nudity, playing off the vulnerability of the male genitals, whether erect or soft, confronting the heterosexist male gaze with its literalization in abject flesh. It is no accident that the last dick we see is Seligman’s “very floppy” one (as described by Skarsgård, quoting von Trier).157

Von Trier’s hardcore close-ups are sensational, but, as Rosalind Galt has noted, the purpose of the sensation is “the overturning of conventional ideologies of image composition,” destabilizing patriarchal visuality. When Joe’s father dies, his corpse in the background is framed by Joe’s legs in a necrophilic female-subjective money shot: the eye is drawn to the drop of liquid running down her right thigh, provoking simultaneous “repulsion, arousal, and empathy” while “privileging … female sexual pleasure over patriarchal scripts.”158 When in close-up, female genitals, like the aforementioned penises, are rendered clinically (that is, unmediated and corporal) in images that thwart a conventional erotic or sadomasochistic response—for example, in the sequences in which Joe is whipped by Jamie Bell’s dominator K. (By contrast, consider Dakota Johnson’s rosy bottom in Fifty Shades of Grey.) In shots of the fifty-year-old Joe’s genitals after years of abuse, the pornographic affect of arousal is sabotaged by a literalization of woman as bleeding wound—as it is to a more traumatizing effect in Antichrist’s rendering of She’s autocliteradectomy.

Von Trier’s disturbing porn close-ups compel us either to look away or to watch analytically and, often, politically. A case in point is the film’s protracted BDSM subplot (chapter 6) presided over by K, who names Joe “Fido” and deploys an assortment of knots, whips, and lashes, as well as the “silent duck” (fisting) to provoke orgasm, and, as Richard Brophy comments, von Trier films the “sadomasochistic relationship” with a real “verve, an excitement … missing from the rest of the movie.

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