Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Nov 1995There's something about Lars von Trier's prodigiously assured films that elicits indignation, as though their labyrinthine descents into the undermind of movie history were affronts to the sanctity of cinema itself. It's one thing to invoke Carol Reed or even St. Orson, but Zentropa, von Trier's third feature, insists upon a third auteur: Harry Lime, black market muse, at your service. Indeed, von Trier's work regards the audience much as Lime does his hapless chum (fishbait by any other name) Holly Martins-with bemused, affectionate disdain. Expectations are rakishly toyed with, idealism ridiculed, perversity converted into a sort of caustic grandeur. In von Trier, illusions travel by sleeping car, destined for a rendezvous with the bottom of a moonlit river. Like the man said when asked what brought him to Alphaville: "I came for the waters Which are everywhere here, from Zentropa's black-and-white Danube turned mass grave, to the virtually submerged police archives of The Element of Crime. The ornate Vienna sewers Lime fled into respected no borders; in von Trier's films, Lime's sewers stretch beneath the whole of postwar Europa. The offal of history backs up in its drains, a deluge-in-waiting oozing out of the walls and over the floorboards, pouring from the filthy sky. All the while the decrepit bureaucracies of Europa-Disney try in vain to quarantine the past, to recycle yesterday's shit as tomorrow's Perrier.
These conditions breed such stuff as fever dreams are made of -- rot, infection, madness, all the luminous metaphysical baggage aboard the Twentieth Century Ltd. as it carries its passengers back to the threshold of the Dark Ages. A virus incubates, metastasizes: the germ of Zentropa ('91) is already alive and gnawing away in The Element of Crime ('84), sure as Epidemic ('87) contains the cells that will mutate into von Trier's medical-supernatural TV miniseries The Kingdom ('94). The same sanguinely deranged motifs recur, strewn like the chesspiece talismans the murderer leaves behind in The Element of Crime: gnomic cues that mock the very idea of solutions. (In the chaotic department store of Europa, it is one big fire sale of the vanities, all solutions stamped FINAL.)
The detective brought back from exile in Clime pursues the child-killer by becoming him. A fanatical pathologist in The Kingdom winds up having the cancerous liver he wants to study transplanted into his own receptive body. With von Trier, a terrible intimacy is always present in the exchanges between the law and crime, medical science and infection, innocence and atrocity. In Epidemic's film-within-a-film, the doctor who travels into the plague zone only spreads the condition. Zentropa's American pacifist travels "through the German night" of 1945 to help rebuild the country, but instead duped into becoming a Nazi saboteur. Such deadly Samaritans aren't so much unwitting as half-witting: they adhere devoutly to the code of movie heroism just as Holly Martins meant to live up to the chivalrous pulp Westerns he churned out. Jean-Marc Barr's Herr Kessler is the lone rider of Santa Fe as one-man Peace Corps, trying to "build a better world" from Hitler's ruins through goodwill gestures, as helpful as the Disorderly Orderly in a burn ward. His purity of heart keeps him oblivious to the ironic machinations of both the Allies and the Nazi partisans, each side recognizing the strategic value of his naivete. Kessler's ideals fog up his glasses so that he can't see straight: he imagines himself bitten by the love bug when in fact he's contracted a fatal case of (Harry) Lime disease.
The symptoms are a trance state of malaise, dizziness brought on by being in way over one's head, a sense of being drawn into some infinitely beguiling spell of corruption. "You will now listen to my voice," beckons Zentropa's Nietzschean mesmerist, guiding us down into the abyss of the West. "The dead are happier dead," Lime reassures us with a smile, as we follow the caressing voice (Max von Sydow's) still deeper into a secret kingdom of the negative. "Europe has become an obsession to you," says the hypnotists at the beginning the The Element of Crime, hypnotic suggestion begin von Trier's other fixation. It's both his metaphor and his prescription for moviegoing experience, where somnambulist and detective merge, as though the dying lips that pronounced "Rosebud" had ushered us into a dream history we could neither escape nor be part of. Zentropa's spellbound Kessler (whether he is our surrogate or we are his is anything but clear) is taken through a grand maze of celluloid, a torrent of projection and conditioning that washes over him until it slowly dawns on the transfixed sleeper that he is not dreaming but drowning. "You want to wake up, to free yourself of the image of Europa," intones von Sydow, sardonically echoing detective Fisher's plea at the conclusion of Crime. The urbanely sepulchral von Sydow is the nearest living approximation of the Wells who introduced The Trial with Kafka's Parable of the Law -- like a sinister magician pulling an accused rabbit out of his hat. "But it is not possible," shrugs the narrator, dismissing all but the prospect of endless sleep. The dead are happier because they can relax and enjoy the show; they already know how it turns out.
For von Trier, hypnosis is a device that renders present and future alike as past-life experience: death comes dressed in a fortuneteller's costume. Von Trier doesn't give us characters so much as refugees from a catastrophic Tarot deck (Fool, Authority, Werewolf Fatale.) In turn, there walking omens serve as heralds of eternal return, whether of Fascism, Plague, or plain old Original Sin. It's remarkable how singlemindedly the director milks hypnotism gambit. Both Crime and Zentropa are framed by the sound of memory-salvaging prompters, scavengers of the repressed. In Epidemic, the doomed idealist of the film-within-the-film (played by von Trier) is even called Dr. Mesmer, while at the movie's climax its would-be filmmakers have an unfortunate girl hypnotized to enter their doomsday scenario. She will witness firsthand the ravages of the disease, but they can't bring her out of the trance: her shrieks presage by mere seconds the onset of the epidemic among the imaginary movie's creators themselves. (Dredged out of the psyche, medievalism isn't content with a percentage of the gross: it claims the right of final cut.) With The Kingdom, hypnosis recedes into the background (as a novel form of surgical anesthesia), replaced by its disreputable sibling the seance. Spiritualism divines the hidden guilt of rationalist orthodoxy, its protoplasmic fingers tugging at the sleeve of bureaucratic reality until everything begins to come undone.
Banished superstitions and dead gods return in toxic forms: the continuum of animal sacrifice and ritual murder in Clime, the Aryan tribalism of the Werewolves of Zentropa, the invasive past -- history as virus -- of Epidemic and The Kingdom. Beneath the edifice of the Marshall Plan and the Common Market lies a landscape closer to The Golden Bough, riddled with strange sects, evil spirits, crosses painted on doors. In von Trier, this is the living legacy of fascism -- "The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires" having gone underground, or more precisely underwater, out of sight but not out of mind. Like some millenarian synthesis of Mesmer and Caesar, Martin Luther and Henry Ford, Hitler rationalized the occult. His aborted kingdom put the pogrom on the assembly line, giving it the imprimatur of commerce and social hygiene. Defeated, Nazism dispersed the occult into the bowels of Europe, smuggled from zone to zone aboard trains full of displaced persons. Young Kessler, apprentice conductor, is escorted back through unknown carriages (including a boxcar full of emaciated Jews, as though the line's concentration camp timetables were still in effect) to help effect "a proper burial" for the industrialist Max Hartmann. The funeral procession resembles a nostalgic night rally, until the American military police scatter the faithful back to their catacombs.
But suppose the ceremony was all a ruse, that the coffin unloaded after Kessler pulled the emergency brake contained not Hartmann's body but some crooked hospital functionary from another zone who had outlived his usefulness. The true destination of Hartmann's remains then is to be Occupied Vienna, where the romance of lost causes can be converted into the hard currency of "international enterprise" (as the deceased described his beloved Zentropa railway -- the postwar dream of capital without borders). There waits a jaunty American, fresh from a funeral of his own, to broker the whole deal. Max Hartmann's final resting place will be fellow businessman Lime's waiting grave, on the theory that one good turn deserves another. Playing the stalemated powers against each other, Citizen Lime sees through the Cold War's ideological sham. "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings," he grins.
"They speak of the people and the proletariat -- I talk about the suckers and the mugs Still, this is posturing, public relations sleight-of-hand. "Go into the future," commands the voice on the soundtrack: it is already here, on this train, in this divided city, taking shape in the chasm between Kessler's lifeless form as the sewers bear it out to sea, and the resurrected Lime peering out from the shadows of history. Not only are von Trier's films a relentless series of variations on a theme (Wagner played on a zither sounds a lot like "Moritat"), their sense of cinematic correspondences add up to a recondite master narrative. The project called the Free World is to be constructed on the ruins of the old, the corrupt, the abominable one. "You will be there" at the sound of the narrator's voice; go forward and backward in time when the hour strikes midnight; be there when I say, "Cuckoo clock."
This dump of yours isn't Alphaville, it's Zeroville," said an exasperated Lemmy Caution; in The Element of Crime he is called Fisher. For in Crime von Trier elaborates the interstices of such modern legends. He locates Fisher (Michael Elphick) at the intersection of Alphaville and The Trial, in the wasteland where Akim Tamiroff once commuted between their respective (and complementary) dystopias. Hardboiled Fisher is Advocate, Examining Magistrate, and Executioner rolled into one: he is Lemmy C. whose mission is to become his own Josef K. Here, though, the polarities have been reversed, so that instead of crime sans punishment in the film's Year Zeroville there is crime without boundaries. In other words, totalitarian order has been superseded by a theology of annihilation. "Where did you get your training," mutters Fisher at an overzealous coroner, "Auschwitz?" His bullhorn-toting superior Kramer certainly could have cut his teeth there, gloating, "I've got the world by the balls Fisher diligently applies the system of his mentor, Professor Osborne; it spells doom for them both. "How're your theories now, Fish?" taunts Kramer at picture's end. Osborne hangs himself (or else is framed and hanged by Chief of Police Kramer, who hates loose ends as much as gruff old Hank Quinlan); the mystery is stamped SOLVED and the guilty Fisher is condemned to go free. The last decent man in Europe finds his method is at one with the irrationalism it opposes -- as Fisher drags back the terrified child he is ostensibly protecting, a monstrous aura of paternity envelops him as her twitching limbs grow still.
The atmosphere of burnished fatalism in The Element of Crime's sepia-toned noir composition is a bit too polished, too facile. (It's an apocalyptic elegy.) But the same could be said of Blade Runner, which it resembles after a deromanticized fashion. And certainly Alphaville and The Trial are both facile, if in different ways. Godard's city of tomorrow is cursory, austere -- a fluorescent abstraction of a beehive populated by cardboard drones. Von Trier goes overboard on everything but sterility; his flaws are closer to Welles in that he imparts a playful sense of dread. With The Trial Welles couldn't help jazzing up Kafka until the crazy-quilt array of proto-narcs, arbitrary bureaus, and pallid, jittery suspects suggests William Burroughs as much as the sainted Franz. (As Lime's Vienna is the precursor of Dr. Benway's Interzone, this is somehow fitting.) Of course Tony Perkins was miscast, yet who could begrudge Welles the wondrous, impudent joke of revealing the pride of Amerika, Norman Bates, as poor, tormented K.? Crime operates on a similar principle of poetic effrontery. Shot in English, but with a disembodied sound a la The Trial giving its voices the same quality of forlorn cries in a deserted building, it's a tone poem to crumbling Europe.
Von Trier's intertextuality turns cultural artifacts into alien runes. If in Crime he's too free with the mysterioso suggestiveness (pouring chaos atop ritual), it's still a beautifully assembled debut feature. Its callowness is leavened by the stirrings of a cosmic gallows humor -- the sense, out of Kafka, of the universe as a vast, inscrutable joke at the expense of humanity. When his Crime cameo is dubbed "Schmuck of Ages," he also shows a peculiar, latent affinity with another Kafka offshoot, namely Woody Allen. "Traitor, renegade, creep, quisling" goes the litany of insults heaped on his goggle-eyed Dr. Mesmer in Epidemic, which plays like a crackpot gloss on Stardust Memories. (Call it The 8 1/2 sup th Seal.) The scene in which von Trier's longtime co-scenarist Niels Vorsel recounts how he posed as a teenager to become the pen pal of American schoolgirls, then laughingly reads aloud their silly, earnest letters, is unflinchingly discomfiting, a true squirmfest -- a portrait of the artist as a sublimated serial killer. Where Allen is done in by his lust for respectability, his reverence for European high mucky-muck, von Trier has no such compunctions: the war finished off the comforting belief that tragedy ennobles.
Epidemic charts the progress of artists who "based their work on the suffering of others" -- their sense of immunity dissolves as the symptoms suddenly materialize at the dinner they give for their producer. (As they keel over -- one guests stabbing a fresh boil with a fork for good measure -- the dissatisfied producer gets his wish: instead of talking heads, a bloodbath.) In its b&w mixture of pseudo-documentary 16mm and pseudo-high-flown 35mm, Epidemic feels more like a first movie than Crime. It eats away at the premises of the "art film" -- who could watch something like Suture with a straight face after seeing this? -- while attempting to reestablish a beachhead for film art, even if it's as art against itself. One thing von Trier isn't, for all the severity of his images, is an ascetic. He's got a crypto-pop streak that comes out most blatantly in the odd, catchy theme songs he co-authors, like the disco anthem that concludes Epidemic: "The end is near / The plague is here / Bring out your dead. ..."
With The Kingdom he opts for a still more eschatological refrain: "O death where is thy sting?" This post-Twin Peaks miniseries (it's still in progress; only the first four-episode season is so far available) elaborates "The Hospital" section of Epidemic on a baroque institutional scale. Yet it's a laborious setup (even the jokes are ponderous; this is von Trier's most Danish work) for a payoff that never arrives, at least until all hell begins to break loose at the end of Part Four. There a dead ghoul is reborn in a gynecological version of Nicholson's "Heeeeeere's Johnny" entrance, but that's the only truly startling moment. The Kingdom is too familiar in terms of both von Trier and TV/movie conventions (as if St. Elsewhere were infiltrated by the restless souls of Poltergeist); he gives himself over to those conventions a little too wholeheartedly. Besides, the idea of the hospital as microcosm of society and society as incubator of infection (the fascist organism) is underdeveloped here, almost taken for granted. It seems quaint in the wake of The X-Files, which as a symptom rather than a diagnosis goes deeper into political economy of the occult. In X-F, paranoia takes on an evangelical hue: evil residing out there among inhuman Others (the figure of the vampiric Jew revamped according to the UFO gospel) and covered up by a secret society working within the government.
That milieu of occult history and the romance of conspiracy is the heart of Zentropa; it abducts you into the movie past and strands you in an upside-down world. You are alone, at the mercy of forces you don't understand. All the signposts of heroism, eros, and truth are present, but twisted into strange totems: the cross has been bent into a swastika. You are being given an examination, a test, but cannot concentrate. The questions, the protocols, are gibberish. Your thoughts turn to Katharina Hartmann, your Kate: her glamour and virtue got to you, but your white goddess was a terrorist. These things happen. You were sucked into a black market of child assassins, sympathizing priests, sweet Kate orchestrating the death of her father. Your head is going to explode. At last you snap; you will only be pushed so far. For any proper movie hero, the time comes to take a stand. Destry rides again -- so you detonate the bomb, extinguishing all those wretched dots. I'm afraid that was a bad idea, old man. Where did it get you but in the same boat with them? Wait. You hear a tune in your head, "Take the A-Train Tap your foot. Imagine it is half a century later and all of this history has been buried along with you. Above, a sleek Zentropa trans-Europe express is running right on time. In the first First Class sleeping compartment, movies are available. Today you could watch an American feature. An Aryan secret agent/family man saves the Fatherland and familie from a filthy Arab plot. For a moment, your head would spin, you could not remember who won the war (maybe the villain is an Arab because all the Jews were exterminated after all). The cinema's true lies suck you in and leave you no escape: its images are everywhere, especially inside you. Relax. Let them wash over you. No need to worry anymore -- the werewolves are hibernating. Sleep. It's just entertainment, old man. And besides, we're all carriers.
Howard Hampton wrote about David Lynch in our May-June '93 issue.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater will present "Denmark's Enfant Terrible: Lars von Trier," November 17-25.
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