Dogsville, directed by Lars Van Trier and starring Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany, is a relentless movie. At first, I thought it reminded me of a house party of bad techno, drumming the same deep bass beat with the mildest of alterations, forever circling, but that comparison does it no justice. Instead, I soon realized that Dogville left me with the same discomfort as watching Gus Van Sant’s Kids, or even Schindler’s List. I kept making excuses to not keep watching the movie. I told my girlfriend that I had to work the next day, and couldn’t stay up to watch the film’s entire three hour run. I groaned, silently, and shifted in my seat, no position of my legs or arms comfortable enough for sitting still. I leap up at one point onto the arm of our couch, and balanced myself out like a pit mine crane, watching my other instead of the screen; I plucked at my hands, and reduced the story and what was unfolding on-screen to a bare shadow, an outline of dusty scenes and human pain. I laughed at the wrong moments, I barked out a shot of dismissal, and rolled my eyes, but in their orbits they always returned to Dogville.
Set in the Depression, in a mining town that has seen what little prosperity it once had come and go the film starts in classic noir fashion – gangsters and dames after all. There are shots in the night, mysterious black cars, an equally mysterious woman trying to climb a mountain. But the film is not noir at all.
The introduction, for instance, and narration is voiced by William Hurt, fusty, sarcastic, possessed of the authorial passivity that leads to narrating the most reprehensible of acts with a puckish tone and ironic understatement. The division into chapters, and the fact, Tom Edison, Jr. (Bettany), is an author-in-waiting, (so to speak) lends the movie a very ‘bookish’ feel. It could have emerged from the pen of a Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, a ground eyes view, fraught with
despair, anger and hope, of the depression, attempting an accurate and damning portrayal of the life of the poor and the destitute in America in the 1930′s. It would have been muckraking of the highest sort. But the director has never been to America, and this small village has only fifteen residents.
Dogville is not a mimetic representation of a Colarado mining town in the 1930′s, and comparison to a book is also a little fallacious. A play would be more accurate comparison, especially to the black box theatres and the theatrical theory of Bertold Bretcht. The set is the first show that this play will not be a ‘realistic’ is a single, expansive sound stage, and the town is represented by chalk outlines, names and a few key pieces of furniture, a wall, a bell, benches, chairs, cabinets, a truck or beds. There are no buildings, no bushes, no trees, and every door is opened with motions of the hand in mime. Light and camera are crucial, colours and backdrops change to reflect mood and the passage of time, and the camera focusses close for much of the film, shifting, flitting from face to face. Austere and expressionistic, a mining town Dr. Cagliari, Dogville takes some getting used to, at least to traditional movie goers used to a ‘realistic’, encompassing film set. Instead, like Bretcht’s ‘alienation’ techniques, Dogville‘s set deliberately and aggressively reminds the viewer that this is not a town, these are not people but actors playing people, and this is a movie, not a documentary. It is an odd choice, but it does focus the viewer unto the characters, as they are literally almost the only thing on screen.
The Seeds
As I mentioned, hamartia is central to the movie, in the Aristolean sense that the virtues of the protagonists lead to their own downfalls. In the case of Dogville, Grace’s (Kidman) forgiveness, patience and kindness, and Tom Edison’s moral and intellectual core are inevitably flawed like poorly made glass. Grace’s determination to forgive and not pass judgement becomes a senseless, impotent martyrdom, and leaves her vulnerable to the people of Dogville; Tom, the most intellectual villager, wants to play the hero and save Grace, but his intellectualism and overthinking prevent him from taking decisive action, his judgements of character are misplaced, and he is duplicitous and cowardly when it suits him. Ultimately, they are both prey to the third hamartia of the villagers. That point will require a little explaining.
At the beginning of the film Tom pontificates to the villagers about their greed, self-centeredness and lack of empathy or hospitality; he believes they need something (Tom imagines a gift) to show, “to illustrate” being his favourite sentence, the spirit of acceptance and charity he believes they must have. He says of America, “The whole country would be better served with a greater attitude of openness and acceptance,” and that because “nobody seems to want to admit there’s a problem,” Tom decides to ask of the villagers a chance to prove themselves as moral beings: will they take in Grace, despite her fugitive status, mysterious background and the dangers involved of shepherding someone from gangsters, or will they turn her away? Tom, however, is acting in bad faith: though he promises Grace his help and protection, he ultimately, and tellingly, views her as a opportunity to prove his point (another virtuous flaw, as the audience, and Tom, doesn’t realise the manipulation inherent in his position at the beginning). He considers her to be “generous” in allowing him to prove his point, but then, he is only displaying his own desire to be right onto Grace.
The villagers are understandably wary. Their help, protection and hospitality cannot be given away freely, however. They don’t know Grace, for one. Tom’s father wonders if “we wouldn’t doubt the young lady’s words; some way to know her. Then I think we’d all ignore the risks.” Grace warns them she may be dangerous, and that there is significant risk involved in protecting her. Therefore, their hospitality must be earned, so Tom suggests that Gracee work for her chance to prove herself, by doing manual labour, being useful, filling a role in the economy.
In so doing Tom sets up Grace for the tragedy to come, as he places her in the hands of the villagers, to trust and accept her by getting her to do chores, that they in their self-reliance claim don’t exist. But Nicole Kidman plays a very charismatic, beautiful and intelligent Grace, and she soon ingratiates herself with the townsfolk, and with the audience as well; she is so damned likeable, kind, accepting of the faults of the people, goads them on and understands them, after a fashion, in the same way Tom does.
This is the third hamartia, in a sense; the villagers are virtuous enough to extend the hospitality and protection Grace needs, but in doing so, they place a price on her protection, an arbitrary trust and the mandate of hard labour. She is forced to trust them more then they must trust her, and her position is completely weak, so she is forced to trust them MORE than they must trust her. They have the power, and at first are generous, but like any power, it takes very little for its use to go from being beneficial to being exploitative and brutal.
The Fruit
Nonetheless, all is plucky daring doo for the first few chapters. We meet the villagers, get to know them, find them interesting, likable, quirky but generally fairly harmless; Liz the town beauty, her imbecile brother, the nice black lady, the old blind man who pretends he isn’t blind, Chuck, the hard-working apple picker with a half-dozen children, the eccentric old women shop keepers, and Tom and his father, the old doctor. You are endeared to them, as much as Grace,
even if Tom picks apart their frailties and Chuck warns Grace about what is come….a warning, and a threat, he himself carries out.
When the tragedy finally begins to unfold in hernest, when that moment of hamartia is made obvious, everything, including the confidence and comfort the audience has with the villagers, and our interest and sympathy for Grace and Tom’s burgeoning relationship, Tom’s quirky, wordy intellectual character and Grace’s charisma, begins to unravel, or rather, are completely undermined. My girlfriend and I were successfully are shocked, disgusted, angered. That is the point where my discomfort emerged from, twitchy, poking, frantic.
I had the sense of watching, to use the cliche, a train wreck in slow motion, or a car crash in slow motion, helpless at the destruction as limbs flail in slow motion, and a stack of drive train pushes itself like a lance through the body. The tragedy is less cataclysmic then that, even; it is the decay of an alcoholic, a fire that destroys a building when help is far away, a disease that consumes a loved one, and we can do nothing; and yet, because it is entertainment, entertainment we can end at any time, we could turn it off, turn it away, ignore it. But I couldn’t.
The destruction starts slow, as the villagers we once assumed, and are trained to assume, were nice, quirky, a little suspicious, but decent folk nonetheless, the very stereotype of a small town American spirit ideology trumpeted so often as the bedrock of American values. Even though they were victims of the Depression and poverty, they were good, honest people. But slowly, (though the actual downturn is sparked suddenly, by the arrival of police offering several thousand dollars for the dangerous murderer Grace) they begin to exploit, Grace, brutally, forcing her to work, yelling, chaining her, mistreating her. There is a shocking act of rape, and here the set use is brilliant, horrific, because the walls do not physically exist, so the rape, by Chuck, is easily visible by all the other cast members, though not by the characters; it is a metaphor of tacit acceptance, a devastating and shocking symbol, all the more so because it unfolds so slowly, of a community’s acquiescence and shared guilt in Grace’s exploitation and debasement.
The Massacre of Sympathy
The unfolding of the tragedy is all the more painful because of Grace. She stubbornly (ridiculously) refuses to leave, or escape, or give she forgives them everything she suffers like a stoic (a philosophy referenced and argued for throughout the film) and takes the punishment, the brutality and the rapes. Grace, playing the martyr, believing that her forgiveness and acceptance will cause repentance, but instead induces nothing but more exploitation, more abuse; when she finally gets Tom’s help to escape, she is caught, chained up and literally treated like a slave (and this is difficult, to subject yourself to watching characters we enjoy destroy themselves, but that is, I think, the point of the film, in part; it rewards our sentiment and attachment to fictional characters, but also to stereotypes of small town America, by completely undermining it and them, and punishing us for taking the film to be some kind of gentle American pastoral).
We watched in growing anger the ‘noble’ intellectual Tom struggle and fail to come up with any plan to rescue Grace, his morality and intelligence paralysing him into inaction and mutely watching the sexual abuse of his love, (In Tom’s case, especially, we are forced to ask: would we have acted any braver, any more resolutely? Of course the question is stupid: this is a movie…but then again) When he finally acts resolutely, it is to finally start writing, profiting off of the pain of his love, and finally deciding that his identity, too, is wrapped up in the village more than in Clare, and that she, in her nobility, undermines even him.
When the gangsters show up, and of all things save Grace, my girlfriend, equally disgusted and transfixed, whispered ‘kill them all’, hoping in a moment of absolute honesty that the people we had ‘loved’, and then had betrayed us (how? How do fictional characters betray us? We should never have trusted them in the first place! Or is that how Van Trier wants us to react innately, at first?) would die. We grew to hate those villagers, and we hoped they would pay. And the gangsters deliver, brutally, systematically, like soldiers wiping out a village in 1941 Russia or 2004 Iraq, murdering every single person.
This is the cruellest twist of all in Dogville; we actually want the characters we once sympathised with to die,to be disciplined and punished, to die, in as violent a fashion as possible. We crave blood in revenge, blood for blood, for what the villagers did. It is a brilliant use of catharsis, to continue applying Aristolean dramatic logic: it is not an uplifting purification, or necessarily a confirmation of a desire for life, but it is a deeply emotional experience, one in which we are actually encouraged to embrace our hatred, our desire to death and destruction, for revenge. Like good catharsis, we as
audience are allowed to viscerally feel our destrado rage and boil; unlike the generic bloodlust of action films, where the act of killing, of horrific violence, is stylised to such an extent it becomes meaningless, and unlike a documentary or the news where the presentation is often sanitized enough and repeated so often, or features such anonymonity that (despite the outrage we might feel at dead Iraqis) it is hard to get a visceral rise. Dogville brutalises the viewer by spending three hours crafting sympathetic characters, characters we like and want to watch, and then reducing them to such collective depravity that our release can only come by an equally collective destruction. And so the film wins again, because afterwards, I was left stunned, by my giving in so easily, and consciously to bloodlust, in such a guilty way; I felt guilty, too, because Dogville made me an inclusive part of the moral argument at the heart of the film.
Ethical Problems
In Aristotle’s Poetics, moral and ethical divisions were assumed to be the heart of any tragedy, in that questions of how to act, or how not to act, as an individual in society were the most important topic, and ultimately led to the tragedy. Aristotle also believed that social issues, or blaming a character’s tragedy on their social position or on the Gods was not tragedy, because it removed man’s free will from their hamartia. Dogville has at its heart questions of ethics, not only about action and morality, but also about whether the individual or society is to blame for human action. A debate between Grace and her father, the mobster she escaped at the film’s beginning, and played by James Caan, plainly states the points:
BIG MAN: A deprived childhood and a homicide really isn’t necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can blame is circumstances. Rapists and murderers may be the victims, according to you, but I – I call them dogs; and if they’re lapping up their own vomit, the only way to stop them is with the lash.
GRACE: But dogs only obey their own nature, so why shouldn’t we forgive them?
BIG MAN: Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time we obey their own nature.
Grace argues that sympathy, understanding and forgiveness are necessary to deal with people like the citizens of Dogville who have been brutalised by poverty and ignorance. She argues that circumstances beyond their control made Dogville act the way it did, and most shocking of all, she actually contemplates going back to her enslavement and mistreatment by the villagers, to prove her point. She does not know, however, that the villagers were rallied by Tom, in the final betrayal, to hand over Grace for the reward money offered earlier, the reward money for the dangerous fugitive Grace that had first began to turn them against her.
Her father argues that Grace’s stance is profoundly arrogant:
BIG MAN: My God! Can’t you see how condescending you are when you say that? You havethis preconceived notion that nobody – listen – nobody can possibly attain the same high ethical standards as you, so you exonerate them. I cannot – I cannot think of anything more arrogant than that. You my child, my dear child, forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself.
By the Big Man’s standards, the people of Dogville failed to live up to a moral baseline, shared by all people, and deserve their position at the bottom and their eradication. Morever, humans MUST be held to a high standard, and must be responsible for their own behaviour. If not, like a dog, they must be trained by authority to respect and abide the peace and morality. As a little boy in the movie argues, trying to get a spanking (a very creepy scene in its own right): “it’s got to be hard or it isn’t punishment.”
By making the audience actually crave the death and destruction meted out by the gangsters and by making the inhabitants of Dogsville morally culpable for their crimes, and thus deserving of punishment, the film explicitly seems to reject Grace’s argument; it is seen to be absurd, and ineffective; compassion, the film says, will only lead to exploitation and abuse, naivete and forgiveness lead only to being taken advantage of (literally, in the case of the film).
Commodity
There is much more to this film that makes me question its explicit conclusion as being against structuralism or socialist, or Left-wing at any rate, views on poverty. That is, the Aristolean understanding of the movie can be, if not rejected, then modified by an understanding of the social criticism going on.
The first inklings I had that something was up relates to Tom Edison, Jr. His name, for one, is the same as Edison the inventor, a archetype of intellectual leadership and the American spirit; it is surely no coincidence that they share the same names. Tom is extremely complex, true, a moralist, a would-be author, if he only got off his tail, but profoundly incapable of doing anything to help Grace; as things get worse, he is immobilised, inchoate, completely unable to save her or convince the townsfolk; his moral misreading of them, and his spinelessness, seems to me a statement about intellectuals in general when it comes to the very real problems of poverty and exploitation unfolding before their eyes. Tom is independently wealthy from his father, and so exists outside of the more grinding poverty of the rest of the town;
he has time to sit around and think, rather then work himself into a grinding stupor. Despite Grace’s belief, and his own self-confidence about his intimate knowledge of the town, it is clear from his misreading of the town’s generosity. He cannot understand them, and proposes nothing to change their psyhical circumstances or material conditions; he only exhorts them to retain a higher moral standard, a popular trope today amongst preachers and conservatives who argue that the poor must raise themselves up, and that only good morals and values will save them.
What is more, because I was left to wonder about how I would act if in Tom’s position, a seemingly ridiculous question, I was forced to face my own fears and anger: Tom is very much like me, a writer barely working on ANYTHING, someone concerned with the moral and social problems of his society, intelligent, seemingly ethical…so, we judge Tom, as a failure, a weakling, an ‘ivory tower’ intellectual, a preacher who takes no action…but if he could be me, would I act more fiercely to protect and aid the exploited, or am I just as guilty as him, writing essays about art films that few of the actual poor and oppressed might watch?
American critics hated the movie, and saw it as being an unfair and inaccurate criticism of American society from someone who has never been there. That alone is enough to convince me more is going on.
Tom’s symbolic role can be spread to other characters, none the least Grace herself, who as Andrea Brighenti argues in the essay ‘Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law‘ is a kind of homo sacer, a human outside law, with no legal status because she is a fugitive from law, forced to live amongst people who consider themselves ‘law-abiding’ and with no community status, because she is a stranger. Thus, it is easy to exploit her, and indeed as the movie progresses, the villagers, who could turn in Grace or let her flee, instead use their power as hosts to force her to continue working, and use their leverage over her to force more work and sexual favours from her; she is hated and reviled as being different and strange. Her situation reminds me immediately of Hispanic illegal aliens, or Eastern European immigrants to Britain and France, who occupy an analogous positions: abused as illegal, ‘stealing’ jobs from the ‘natives’ (or nativists), strange, violent, thieves (no surprise that Tom’s theft of money from his father, to help Grace escape, is pinned, with Tom’s consent, on Grace) against the law, and outside legal protection; because of this however, they must work that much harder to survive, and the capitalists who want their labour, because their illegality makes them both pliant, willing to work for less (because their lack of citizenship is overlooked) used, abused and harassed, forced, like Grace, to do the work no one else will do, for no reward but the promise of not being turned over, not being ejected from their hosts bosom, being given a place better than, say, Mexico (or in Dogville Georgetown where the gangsters are).
From the rape on, Clare becomes, incrementally, a commodity, as Adam Atkinson in his essay “On the Nature of Dogs, the Right of Grace, Forgiveness and Hospitality: Derrida, Kant,and Lars Von Trier’s Dogville“, argues; she becomes something to consume for her labour and for her sex. Grace is a commodity, to be consumed and used; although the villagers and Tom initially frame their acceptance of Grace as a test of character and a chance to get to know her, what has
happened is essentially a contract: Grace will work to prove her value against her risk, and to prove she is worth the risk. The contract is essentially capitalist: she will receive room and board, and some food, in exchange for her labour, Of course, the economy of Dogville is bad and dependent on apple picking, lens grinding, truck driving and selling nicknacks, but eventually enough labour is found for Grace.
The village, though it grows more afraid from the threat posed by Grace, cannot rid themselves of her because of the work she does; every attempt to run or evade means that they clamp her up (rather then, say, get the reward money) becomes slave labour, to be mistreated, kept in her place, treated like the dog her father describes. But still she is being paid for her work; she is part of a cash economy, and her labour and sex become just another part of the economy, like those immigrant workers i mentioned despised but too important to be removed. It should be said then no hope of serious morality or understanding or sympathy could ever have been arrived at according to Tom’s naive theory; Grace’s presence in Dogville is mediated by capital, pure and simple, and capital knows no morals and cares not for “ye huddled masses, yearning to be free” unless they can work for it.
There is a rich vein of feminist criticism about this movie to be mined, so much so I think another essay would be more proper than stuffing it in here. A few of my feminist friends have had a few things to say about it…so I’ll see what I can do.
I should remark that though the villagers are clearly culpable of crimes that it is difficult to excuse, and the film certainly leaves the question of whether they should be excused or not wide open, Grace is certainly no innocent either, as is revealed in the ending; she can kill, lie, cheat and manipulate better than the people of Dogville, and that final twist is almost certainly meant to strip away the last vestiges of sympathy we have for ANYONE in this film.
Finally, the end titles show a series of captures and photos of the destitute and ravaged poor of America, with David Bowie’s “Young Americans” playing loudly. This is the harshest and most direct criticism yet, and it would seem to confirm what I saw: the American dream, and the rule of capitalism as the supreme arbiter of social relations in the United States, will also produce the blasted savages of grinding poverty.
It would be easy and glib at the end to argue that Dogville is a symbol for America. That much should be fairly obvious. It was certainly intended that way, but it would be unfair to state that this film is not wholly innocent of either bashing the United States, though in a complex fashion (after all the film is part of a trilogy called America – Land of Opportunities) or that my own reading of the film’s social criticism is too generous, and that Lars Van Trier is actually quite serious about mankind being dogs and monsters. That is best left for the viewer, but I am quite certain that Dogville is one of the better films I have watched in the last few months. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have spent weeks pondering the movie’s meaning, being disturbed and angered by it, and going to the length of writing this essay.
