Rex Butler and David Denny (eds.), <\/b>Lars von Trier\u2019s Women<\/i><\/b>. London: Bloomsbury, 2017; 264 pages. ISBN: 978-1501322457.<\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by William J. Simmons, CUNY.<\/i><\/p>\n
The relationship between Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier\u2019s filmography and women\u2014but never feminism<\/i>\u2014has been the subject of intense debate, with a clear line being drawn between academics and laypeople. Lars von Trier\u2019s Women<\/i>, edited by Rex Butler and David Denny, contains 14 essays that span all of von Trier\u2019s early and recent work, which is perhaps an admirable feat. It is the goal of these essays, at least according to the publisher\u2019s summary, to \u201c[reveal] hidden resources for a renewed \u2018feminist\u2019 politics and social practice.\u201d The role of the scare quotes over \u201cfeminist,\u201d I can only guess, is an allusion to a post-feminism, which is a meaningless stand-in for those who consider identity politics to be a tired methodology or activist praxis. For example, there are several instances wherein the authors in the volume explicitly dismiss feminist readings that are not in support of von Trier\u2019s films. This is not simply an advertising technique; the editors claim that it is von Trier\u2019s formal and thematic goal to \u201cpresent something that breaks with it [the films\u2019 formal construction], goes beyond it, can no longer be contained by it.\u201d (12) In a tired analysis that has its roots in the sexist discourses begotten by masculinist and transphobic strands of psychoanalysis, the male auteur<\/i>, simply by virtue of transgressing established boundaries, is assumed by critics to create something of progressive value that deals inherently with identity politics. This is actually sluggishness by critics to find authors or directors who can easily fit into postmodern critical strategies\u2014of which feminism is assumed to be one.<\/p>\n
If we continue to look only at the book\u2019s cover, we might take initial issue with the title, as if von Trier owns these characters, or at least owns the female actors. The core issue with this volume, however, is deeper\u2014an analytical and disciplinary reluctance to actually contend with feminist theory. This is moreover an undue adherence to the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, both of whom attain godlike status in constant, and at times nearly stream-of-consciousness, references to their writings. Lars von Trier\u2019s Women<\/i>, in its dogged adherence to outmoded and anti-feminist ideologies, fails as a work of feminist criticism, and, in this way, cannot be a truly progressive piece of contemporary film theory.<\/p>\n
There are strangely very little references to feminist scholarship, and in their place is a highly masculinist interpretation of Lacanian analysis that would benefit from even a cursory glance at feminist or queer theory. Only the first chapter, an excerpt from Linda Badley\u2019s Lars von Trier <\/i>(2011), attempts to deal in any meaningful way with feminist politics, despite her unsubstantiated hypothesis that von Trier\u2019s Breaking the Waves<\/i> \u201cbreak[s] men (in the spectatorial sense) down into transgendered beings.\u201d (19) To say that transgender is a reduction<\/i> of traditional gender categories is a misunderstanding of gender theory so egregious that it nearly negates her entire argument about von Trier\u2019s self-identification with his female characters and the concomitant rehearsal of sexual politics in his films. However, Badley does at least consider von Trier\u2019s own words in a useful way, as in her reading of the self-consciously masculinist Dogme 95 manifestoes.<\/p>\n
Lars von Trier\u2019s Women<\/i> then launches immediately into the canonized essay by \u017di\u017eek that has often been reprinted and cited as essential reading on von Trier\u2019s Breaking the Waves<\/i>. \u017di\u017eek rehearses Lacan\u2019s long-disputed understanding of femininity as \u201ca mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said.\u201d (23) \u017di\u017eek ambivalently attempts to complicate this narrative of Woman-as-inscrutable, but he only reinforces it. For \u017di\u017eek, the central character\u2019s beating, rape, and death at the behest of God and her husband \u201cundermines the phallic economy and enters the realm of feminine jouissance by way of her unconditional surrender to it, by way of renouncing every element of the inaccessible \u2018feminine mystique,\u2019 of some secret Beyond which allegedly eludes the male phallic grasp.\u201d (23) Versions of this simplistic argument, that Woman is either illegible or entirely legible, plague this book, and von Trier\u2019s female characters are never offered an element of surety to their subjectivity that has been afforded to the male characters.<\/p>\n
In this vein, most of these essays would benefit from Judith Butler\u2019s recent assertion with regard to transgender activism that the romantic notion of the \u201cinscrutable\u201d subject is itself a retrograde methodology, that the facile argument for fluidity, or, in Butler\u2019s own words, \u201cexisting \u2018beyond all categories,\u2019\u201d is entirely limiting and latently transmisogynistic. (Ahmed, 2016, 490) In Chapter Four, Rex Butler falls into this trap, writing: \u201cIn each case here, these women occupy a \u2018liminal\u2019 or \u2018interstitial\u2019 space within the film\u2026.There is no place for these women, there is no exception made for them. And yet it is they who bring about and make possible this social order, or to put it otherwise it is they who are the makers of their own destiny.\u201d (59) Are we satisfied with Woman always being in a state of becoming, always in a process of formation but never whole? Do we accept that the responsibility for criticality has always been placed on Woman in allegedly progressive scholarship, since it is She who remains perpetually in a state of incompleteness and resistance?<\/p>\n
The chapters focused on von Trier\u2019s more recent filmography (chapters 9 through 14) are perfect illustrations of the limits of the \u201cWoman as beyond all categories\u201d dogma. In his chapter on Antichrist<\/i>, David Denny suggests, \u201cHer [the main character of the film] freedom is less the recognition of guilt and more the radical gesture of assuming it.\u201d (176) Once again, the female protagonist is somewhere outside the realm of interpretation and therefore bears the onus of interpretation. She cannot be understood in the terms we might assign to men; she must instead be somewhere between self-hatred and self-erasure. Likewise, Todd McGowan\u2019s essay on Melancholia <\/i>and fascism positions the female protagonist as being in between subjectivities, or what McGowan considers a fascist subject, \u201cUnlike others who fear destruction, Justine embraces it. She finally discovers an authority that can save her\u2026von Trier points toward the ultimate failure of the film to break from the paternal authority it mocks.\u201d (197) In Melancholia<\/i>, a story of crippling depression, it is apt to look at the particularity of the main character\u2019s circumstances rather than generalize her as an incomplete stand-in for the female subject as a whole. Finally, the readings of von Trier\u2019s latest film by Hilary Neroni and Tarja Laine, Nymphomaniac<\/i>, constantly center on the excesses of female sexuality, as if that trite notion had never been challenged by Alice Jardine or Luce Irigaray.<\/p>\n
Returning to the very real violence inflicted on women in von Trier\u2019s films, it would seem that the authors have no interest in speaking beyond theory or considering the implications of their analyses upon lived experience, a core element of feminist\/queer art histories and criticism. In his essay on Manderlay <\/i>(which incidentally suffers from a lack of any awareness of anti-racist criticism), Ahmed Elbeshlawy makes a distinction between film acolytes and \u201cthe common viewer.\u201d (134) The same is true in Magdalena Zolkos\u2019s essay in which she calls journalist Julie Bindel\u2019s reading of Antichrist <\/i>terse, as if an activist-journalist lacks the necessary vocabulary to make an effective argument. (143) Whether or not one agrees with Bindel, her writing style should not be denigrated in favour of academic formalism. There should be no difference in how a film historian\/critic and an informed moviegoer can engage in the discourse produced by scenes of intense racial and sexual violence onscreen. One may have a more advanced or historically aware vocabulary, but the sentiment should be the same\u2014how can the discourse surrounding film be mobilized in a way that supports the accurate and complex depiction of underrepresented persons?<\/p>\n
Lars von Trier\u2019s Women<\/i> is thus a case study in all the ways that a masculinist postmodern criticism can go wrong. The editors and authors fall woefully short of their stated goals, and the assumption of irony or illegibility becomes a stand-in for any real engagement with feminist or queer analysis. In all, one must understand this not as a mistaken lack of acknowledgment, but rather an active disavowal of feminist politics for the sake of a generalized argument that lacks any relevance for the embodied experience of the female characters and actors the volume claims to represent. What von Trier\u2019s films require is not intellectual remove. Instead, authors must foreground their personal investments in their chosen theories, and, in so doing, perform<\/i> their argument in an instructive manner. This, after all, is this crux of feminist theory\u2014to make the structures of power inherent in theory freely available to all readers, without resorting to trite methodologies that rely on ambivalence or theoretical smokescreens.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Additional Works Cited<\/b><\/p>\n
Ahmed, Sara. \u201cInterview with Judith Butler.\u201d\u00a0Sexualities<\/i>\u00a019, no. 4 (June 01, 2016): 482\u2013492.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rex Butler and David Denny (eds.), Lars von Trier\u2019s Women. London: Bloomsbury, 2017; 264 pages. ISBN: 978-1501322457. Reviewed by William J. Simmons, CUNY. The relationship between Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier\u2019s filmography and women\u2014but never feminism\u2014has been the subject of intense debate, with a clear line being drawn between academics and laypeople. Lars von Trier\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[118,77,217],"class_list":["post-5240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-cinema","tag-feminism","tag-queer-theory","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-21 15:07:39","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5240"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6940,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240\/revisions\/6940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}