What results is a bizarre solipsism, of checking again and again on his victim’s abode while the body festers in the backseat, leading to a self-inflicted close call with a local cop, and ultimately a miraculous escape featuring rain-water that literally washes away Jack’s sins (i.e. Of the film’s five chronicled “incidents,” the second home invasion scenario showcases Jack’s paranoia by visualizing the (nonexistent) evidence left behind at the scene of the crime - a blot of blood on the carpet, or smeared behind a rickety painting. Matt Dillon’s Jack - an engineer and aspiring architect - similarly relishes in manic compulsions. Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman is wicked - he kills women and homeless people for fun - but somehow it’s his 12-step skincare routine and his fixation with the textured business card of his office nemesis that lingers in the mind like a running joke. Like Mary Harron’s 2000 satire American Psycho, The House That Jack Built fiddles with the mythology of the conveniently OCD, tall, white and handsome serial killer, weaving extreme cruelty with a sort of self-aware and self-incriminating absurdism. If the idea of an enlightened psychopath sounds as ridiculous as it is deranged (and I exclude the convincingly dignified chianti-sipping Hannibal Lecter from these ranks), that’s because it’s meant to be. In The House That Jack Built, bodies are bent, sculpted and mutilated into playthings, the dignity of others sacrificed in the name of Jack’s intellectual-artistic cause, which offers a more eccentric understanding of “evil” than the mindless bloodlust or “faulty wiring” explanation of say, the killer of the 1983 Austrian film Angst. In any case, a serial killer movie would seem like the most literal expression of von Trier’s interests, and a natural visual progression towards the explicit violence of murder that his films have been inching towards since Dogville. Is The House That Jack Built an unapologetic misogynistic blood-bath? That I’ll get to later. This description feels casually transferable to most of von Trier’s work, but it’s the genre’s cliched gender politics - of naive, fallible, sexualized victims - that bears an overt resemblance to the director’s decades-long fixation with troubled women. The genre is often premised on deciphering desire and motivation (or lack thereof) as a metaphor for the dark underbelly of human nature, and it relies on bodily violence as its catharsis. It was really only a matter of time before von Trier decided to take on the serial killer movie. Read More at VV - Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Fresh’ The relationship just becomes more complicated. Myself included.Īnd I don’t mean to say that his films are unfit for a grown person with her mental capacities firing functionally on all cylinders. The consistent flashiness of his oeuvre, uninterested in all but the most extreme personalities and emotional states, each film tinged with a sense of the apocalyptic, will naturally satisfy the petit subversiveness that teens with a chip on their shoulder would find attractive. I’m just saying von Trier’s version of a softer touch is a planet colliding into Earth. Intro to cinema that you’ll watch in secret from your parents. I was in high school when I discovered Lars von Trier, through the digital grapevine of provocation by hungry young people bestowing his latest film, Antichrist, with the sort of intellectual obligation reserved for Stanley Kubrick and Luis Buñuel.
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