Back to Blog
The house that jack built7/25/2023 ![]() These are the facts that people choose not to reference when talking about Lars Von Trier’s work. Sofie Gråbøl said in an interview with The Guardian, “the environment Lars created was so loving and safe and calm that we were able to shoot these quite disturbing scenes.” There is also the recurring presence in his films of Uma Thurman ( Nymphomaniac), Charlotte Gainsborough ( Antichrist), Siobhan Fallon Hogan ( Dancer in the Dark), and others, giving at least the slightest impression that the working relationship with Von Trier is professional enough to come back for more. Janle Hallund, as Von Trier states in an interview on the DVD, had a big part of both this film and Nymphomaniac 1 & 2, which was also heavily criticized. But these takes discount other voices in the story. And it seems that most critical analyses shun the film as pure condescending sexism and a barely veiled attack against the women in Von Trier’s life. The allegorical and metaphorical significance of the images within THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT have been exhaustively discussed. There is a brief detour from this abuse – but as Jack’s focus is shifted to children, it doesn’t give much relief. As with any film that deals with “extreme” elements, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT contains violence almost exclusively against women. Some Incidents, however, strike an honest and familiar nerve.įor many women who are fans of Lars Von Trier, the film has forced a sort of reckoning within. ![]() He is a completely unreliable narrator, and the stories he tells seem at times too fantastical to be real. The story is told in such a way that the audience consistently questions the validity of Jack’s story. No matter how cruel and sadistic his act, Jack veers the subject toward the virtue of his art. As Jack tells Virge his story in five “Incidents,” he insists that he has committed art, not murder. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT is a statement on art and how people interpret that art. Viewers are forced to contend with the age-old question: “Can you separate the artist from the art?” The director’s career has been muddied by claims of alleged sexual harassment and media mishaps that have allowed critics to blanket-label Von Trier as a misogynist and Nazi sympathizer. This is due to both content within his films and without. Von Trier’s films have never been easily accessible. These elephants in the room are addressed through a philosophical and somewhat over-indulgent voice-over whilst Jack is led through Dante’s Inferno-style circles of hell by Virge (Bruno Ganz), a mostly disembodied surrogate for the viewer and their questions and counterpoints. The meta nature of THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT would be lost only to a viewer completely unfamiliar with Von Trier’s previous films, and most will recognize the self-referential scene where Jack tosses away placards expressing aspects of his personality that the film community and critics have focused on.Įgotism. ![]() Jack (Matt Dillon) is undoubtedly the closest to a Von Trier avatar presented in his filmography. Throughout THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (2018) it seems as though Von Trier is using the titular psychopath/artist as a catalyst to address every assumed aspect of his complicated personality. Artist, misogynist, Nazi, romantic, nihilist – can an auteur be all things at once? In Lars Von Trier’s case, he can be most things, though he vehemently insists that Nazi is not one. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |