What Is Posthumanism? by Cary Wolfe

Author:Cary Wolfe [Wolfe, Cary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Humanism, History & Surveys, Movements, Univ Of Minnesota Press 2009, Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9780816666157
Google: TtxbuAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0816666156
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2009-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

admitting that “the power of Dancer in the Dark is undeniable,” David

Ansen, in Newsweek, called it “a magnificent sham” riddled with “emo-

tional sadism. ”4

What is going here?

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w h e n you c a n ’t b e l i e v e you r e y e s (or vo ic e )

To begin to answer that question, we need to get a fix on how

to approach this weird and iconoclastic film, what sorts of generic

expectations we may bring to it. That, however, is only the point of

entry into the much more complicated question I will take up later:

the question of what we might call the film’s ethical project and how

it might well be the source of its audience’s and reviewers’ hysterical

reactions (a term whose appropriateness will become clear, I hope, in

due course). To take up the question of genre first, we have to under-

stand that for Dancer in the Dark, any hint of “reality,” “character” in

the usual sense, verisimilitude, and the like are, for the purposes at

hand, the merest— and I do mean the merest— vehicles for the film’s

deeper concerns. Here it will suffice to simply register the shameless

melodrama of the plot: the incredibly innocent Selma (played by the

pop phenom Björk, in what nearly everyone agrees is a stunning per-

formance), who is slowly going blind, sacrifices her own life so that her

ten- year- old son Gene (Vladica Kostic) may receive an operation that

will save his sight from the ravages of the same congenital disease.

Dancer in the Dark, in other words, is no more satisfactory, fulfilling,

or compelling in terms of plausibility and Aristotelian necessity than,

say, The Marriage of Figaro— and that is precisely the point. In fact, the

film’s power is in a profound sense inseparable from what many view-

ers will see as its “absurdity” (if one wants to put it that way) precisely

in the way that the absurdity of opera (its melodrama, its hyperbole,

its staginess— all those qualities that make people either love or hate

opera too) is in fact absolutely central to opera’s philosophical and

ethical project. To put it as bluntly as possible, Dancer in the Dark, like

opera, isn’t about “reality”; it is about what “reality” turns away from,

and the “aversion” (to borrow an Emersonian term I will excavate later

on) of opera to that turning away. In that, it is (again like opera) more

real than reality— but more about that in a moment.

On the question of genre, it needs to be said that although

Dancer in the Dark invites us to make it legible within the genre of the

Hollywood musical, this is ultimately a blind alley. The film is not a

musical, at least not in that sense. While the musical insists on, as

a constitutive feature, the seamless continuity of the world inside and

outside the musical numbers themselves— characters engaged in “real-

istic” dialogue among passersby who (realistically) pay no attention to

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w h e n you c a n ’t b e l i e v e you r e y e s (or vo ic e )

them suddenly break into song, and

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