Dogville

In Lars von Trier's 2003 film, Dogville is a hamlet located in the Colorado mountains, a desolate place perched at the end of a road that climbs a canyon above Georgetown. There is an abandoned mine and collapsing mill and a scatter of rustic, decaying cabins where a half-dozen families live among the ruins of the ghost-town. The costumes in Lars von Trier’s parable suggest that the film takes place around the era of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and the characters embedded in the wreckage of the town seem to be dreamers, eccentrics, half-mad hermits: an elderly doctor suffers from hypochondria; an tramp trudges up and down the mountain harvesting fruit and gathering wood; a Black woman cares for her crippled daughter; the tramp's wife is raising seven children in a shack and trying to educate them; there is a small store that sells ceramic figurines operated (surprisingly) by Lauren Bacall, a blind man who conceals his blindness from the villagers who, nonetheless, know that he is blind and the doctor’s idealistic son, a handsome young man, who dreams about writing a novel and presents lectures of an improving and optimistic tenor on the subject of something called “moral rearmament.” The town is presented as a diagram, some rectangles painted on the studio floor and labeled with the names of houses that are represented by a window here and there or a fragment of a moldering façade. A church steeple is suspended overhead, apparently cradled by some wires and it serves as a kind of sundial, marking the hours as time progresses by the course of its shadow angling across the barren studio terrace where the action takes place. There are some pieces of disheveled furniture sitting within the markings on the floor signifying the walls and corners of the structures and a heap of plastic stones that is a metonym for a mountain peak; some wooden scaffolding is defined as a mine-shaft and, at the edge of the town, there is a radiant tree that seems to be lit from within, a gleaming apparition that suggests the natural world surrounding the forgotten village. Von Trier presents his allegory through a combination of florid narration, something like excerpts from an overly fastidious and desiccated 19th century novel and a series of tableaux that play out in herky-jerky close-up, a hand-held camera hopping from figure to figure, the images randomly edited and stuttering with pointless time-cuts -- the hair-shirt mendicant technique of the Dogma movement that von Trier helped to found. Night is represented by a black void surrounding the shards and ragged debris signifying the village; during the day, the cubist bits of wall and window and the scatter of furniture is surrounded by a glacial white emptiness. Cumulatively, the effect is like a version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” combined with the more austere, and acerbic aspects of Beckett and Friedrich Duerrenmatt -- indeed, the plot, such as it is, of “Dogville” is similar to “The Visit” ("Der Besuch der alten Dame"), the Swiss playwright’s nasty account of a town’s descent into cruelty and madness when a wealthy stranger comes to town. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a woman on the lam from some gangsters who appear suddenly in town in a long black Cadillac like something from “Public Enemy.” The doctor’s son, who is planning his lecture on “moral rearmament,” conceals the girl in the mine and, while speaking to the assembled and grumpy townspeople, decides to illustrate his uplifting lecture by staging an example of human benevolence. He presents the frightened girl to the townspeople and suggests that they shelter her from the gangsters and, in fact, make her a member of their community. The townsfolk are suspicious but they agree to allow the woman to remain in their midst if she will visit each of them in turn and spend her days performing simple tasks for them. This arrangement proves to be congenial and the girl is accepted into the community, paid well, and falls in love with the doctor’s son. But, then, the police appear and accuse the girl, who the townspeople hide once more in the abandoned mine, of committing bank robberies in California -- a reward is placed her head. Of course, the townsfolk know that the girl could not possibly have committed these crimes -- she has been with them during the past several months, but they are worried and a seed of doubt is placed in their minds. The doctor’s son suggest that the refugee can earn the continued trust of the townspeople by working harder for them and for less pay and so the scene is set for Lars von Trier to turn aside from the bucolic, rather dull idyll that comprises the first half of the film to the kind of action that he favors -- scenes of degradation, rape, and humiliation as the town’s people first begin to exploit the girl and, then, abuse her savagely. Von Trier is famous for cruelty -- he is like Fassbinder, a connoisseur of torture and sadism, and the film shifts into high gear as the villagers collude in persecuting the helpless woman. Her plight puts her at their mercy and von Trier shows us that powerlessness invites sadism. Von Trier’s lurid dramaturgy and his peculiarly stilted dialogue -- at times “Dogville’s” characters rant in the hushed, rabid tones that you hear in an Ed Wood movie -- always reaches a point where the audience simply can not accept what is being shown on the screen. The viewer experiences a very real rage directed at the film. You want to howl with indignation at the gratuitous cruelty, the unnatural and pretentious diction, the abstract mise-en-scene, and, indeed, von Trier’s unashamed deployment of obsessive imagery that appears in his other films. The exercise seems ridiculously self-indulgent…but, here is the mysterious aspect of this director’s filmmaking: notwithstanding your intellectual conviction that what you are seeing is tawdry, absurdly melodramatic, and tediously didactic, somehow his films engage your emotions; you’re ashamed of your emotional reaction to this material. You walk out of the experience somehow both humiliated and inspired. There is no other director in the world who can achieve these kinds of effects and, against all criticism, you find yourself consenting to von Trier’s imagery and, as you argue with his ideas, you must acknowledge that very few movies induce this sort of reaction in you -- that is the desire to refute everything that you have been shown and told. Although it is abhorrent and grandiose in a particularly lifeless and Teutonic way, you find yourself haunted by the scenes in his films. In “Dogville,” Nicole Kidman’s “Grace” is manacled to a heavy piece of metal, a steel fetter around her throat welded to a bell that rings as she walks. (The scenes of Kidman dragging the chain and weight across the sound-stage are similar to the more graphic and horrifying images in “Antichrist” in which Willem Defoe has his ankles drilled through to pinion his feet to a log.) The men in the town systematically rape her -- the narrator (John Hurt) assuring us that it “was no more disgraceful than a hillbilly caught having carnal knowledge of his cow, embarrassing to be sure, but not really criminal." The children in Dogville salute each rape by ringing the bell in the steeple -- a detail that echoes the final scene in “Breaking the Waves” in which the heroine is raped to death while, high overhead, massive celestial bells toll. Everyone assures Grace that she is being tortured for her own good. Even her boyfriend, Tom, the young writer who invited her to stay in the town is appalled by her -- her gentleness and the aura of martyrdom that accompanies her has effaced his love for her. He telephones the gangsters who were threatening to kill her and summons them back to the town so that they can take her away. The gangsters are led by James Caan, who seems confused by the long dialogue scene that he has with Nicole Kidman -- he turns out to be her father and the film slips into a bizarre parody of Wagner’s “Die Walkuere”. Caan lectures Kidman and says that she is too arrogant, always holding people to her impossible standard of virtue and that she should treat the villagers as fellow human beings, that is, as moral agents culpable for their actions. After some hesitation, she agrees to this proposition -- the narrator tells us that the sun has come out and she sees the squalor of Dogville for what it is: a horrible, inhuman place. The gangsters torture and kill everyone in the hamlet, burn down the buildings, and Grace executes Tom with her own hands. Of course, the audience feels a savage glee at the comeuppance visited upon the self-righteous and hypocritical townspeople. But it’s humiliating to be manipulated into this state of blood lust and our own vicarious thrill at seeing the villagers murdered -- a scene that has an ugly emotional charge and that is filmed like a squad of SS men liquidating a Polish village -- is profoundly disquieting. A dog’s silhouette chalked on the floor of the sound-stage suddenly becomes a real animal and the beast growls and lunges against his chains. Von Trier ends the picture with a gratuitous provocation -- David Bowie’s jaunty tune “Young Americans” played over a montage of starving children and haggard Okies, images of the Depression, and, then, a picture of Dick Nixon and half-a-hundred still photos of corpses in the ghetto, drug addicts expiring on the sidewalk, victims of rapes and beatings staring impassively into the lenses of the cameras. (Roger Ebert famously condemned "Dogville" as anti-American -- in fact, it is anti-human.) The fate of goodness and Christian virtue in the world seems to be victimization that turns into savagery that is the exact opposite of that virtue. Is this fair? Is this truthful? And, more problematically, if this is truthful is this a story that we need to be told at the dawn of a new millennium?