Dogville by Lars von Trier

I watched Lars von Trier's film Dogville the other night and was impressed. How was I impressed? The only film I'd seen of his previous to this was Dancer in the Dark, with Bjork. It was really slow developing and it had a romantic view of a factory worker, but there are scenes from it that still come to mind now and then: when Bjork would be overcome with music, pulling together the sounds of the factory to create her own symphony. P.T. Anderson used this motif in Punch-Drunk Love, where it was also very effective. But everyone who had seen DitD knew Anderson was just ripping it off.
So how was I impressed by Dogville?
1) the film is set in a small American town in the Rockies, but the town is only sparsely constructed. Most of the town remains as chalk lines on the floor of a film studio.


2) the genre of the film is a mix of Winnie the Pooh like Narration (I think I can call this a genre) - tons of voice over, which implies that it is an adaptation of a novel, though no novel exists. The voice must be the writer/god. Indeed this confusion is encouraged because the film is anti-realist and mostly told in a "mythical" type mood. Everything is universal. Particulars are erased from the script so that the message can extend as far as possible. This relates to the minimalist stage.
3) the one exception to Dogville's universality is that the film makes a big deal about being a commentary on America. The end credits are all pictures of the down and out from the depression, complemented by more pictures of the down and out from later on - in colour. This is all set to David Bowie's tune "Young Americans".
4) Nicole Kidman plays a character named "Grace" who comes to a small town - dogville - which doesn't want to keep her because there is someone on the look out for her - seems like a gangster. The town comes to love her (Palm Sunday), then comes to hate her (very last supper - even Judas shows up). Then something very interesting happens and we have a scene between "Grace" and her Father (I don't know where the spirit was during this). Then Grace does something that seems a bit odd given her name. She refuses the Atonement. (Kidman gives a great performance, as does Paul Bettany, James Caan and Ben Gazzara)
5) The refusal of the Atonement (I will not tell you the details), seems to be the part that von Trier wants to pin on America. This is the only part of the film that seems bogus. The rest of the film is exceptional, but the use of the Christian mythos for an explicit critique of America (which I am not broadly against, just particularly in this case) seems to limit the effect of the film's penetration of the social problems that humans 'naturally' come by. Not just American humans.
6) Grace thus seems not to be the transcendent grace of Christ, but a specifically American reincarnation. This makes the film explicitly political and twerps the myth (which can still be political).

Go rent this three hour film. You'll enjoy it, but you may have the same problems as I did. I found this review to be quite good.
Drop me a line if you had similar problems with Dogville.

One last moment of praise for von Trier. This film does things with metafiction, the ability for a story to expose the fictional mechanisms of the narrative which pervade it, that I haven't seen rivaled by any other film. The device is so obvious and at the same time it is a stroke of genius. I'm speaking of the minimalist stage carved out with chalk lines and various props. Dogville draws a direct line from Marxist theatre, through the postmodern, and into what ever Dogville is. It doesn't seem postmodern , because it insists on truth. This story isn't about relativity folks.

The Legitimacy of Modernity: Blumenberg, Lowith, Schmitt, Milbank and the Pomos

How did the Modern world emerge? Is it, as some claim, a disobedient child of modernity, or does it have a legitimate identity of its own, independent of Christendom? This is what Robert Wallace, translator of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of Modernity has to say:

“Blumenberg makes it clear here that while the modern age is not the result of a transformation (whether through ‘secularization’ or any other process) of something that was originally Christian, this does not mean that it sprang into existence spontaneously, as though into a historical void. The continuity underlying the change of epoch is, he says, a continuity of problems rather than of solutions, of questions rather then of answers. Instead of remaining forever fixated on ‘doctrines’ or ‘ideas’ as the stuff of our tradition, we need to learn to relate these to the human activity of inquiring, of questioning, which gives them their relevance and concrete meaning. When we do so, Blumenberg suggests, we may find other kinds of continuity besides those of rightful inheritance or illegitimate misappropriation, and other kinds of novelty besides that of unprovoked ‘creation from nothing’” (Robert Wallace xviii).

Blumenberg wants to see modernity as springing from a Christian context, but what springs has to have a different composition then what fell. His critique of Lowith is on grounds of continuity. In emphasizing the illegitimacy of progress (bad providence), Lowith highlights how progress fails where providence didn’t. Blumenberg wants to claim the opposite. That progress is not deprived providence, but that providence was such an insufficient prototype of progress that we cannot highlight their identity; we must emphasize their difference, the rupture of Christendom. How did this rupture occur? 1. Science moved beyond Scientia; Bacon et al overcame Aristotle. 2. The literary arts overcame classicism (Wallace xvii-xviii). Both of these innovations occurred in the 17th century.
Do I agree with Blumenberg? Partially. I think that Blumenberg is right to complicate the genealogy of progress. If we stress continuity too much then we oversimplify the context and the issues that lead to progress. However, I think that Blumenberg is trying to smuggle Lowith’s thesis back into this text, by demonstrating how continuity is a mistake, but by linking providence and progress through a more complicated narrative.

However, I think that we need to turn to Carl Schmitt and consider how the idea of the nation state has emerged from Christendom. Blumenberg might have more on his hands then he thinks?:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God become the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Political Theology 36).

What becomes clear in Schmitt’s analysis is that he is using analogical reasoning, which recognizes that when we highlight a similarity, that similarity is couched in a great number of differences (I want to say infinite here but I fear I may be misusing the term). I sense that Blumenberg has adopted a flat view of being, univocity, which interprets all things with being, as being of the same genera. Analogy would claim that there is always a difference between different orders of being. That we must preserve this distance between Being (of God) and being (of man). This complicates Lowith’s thesis on continuity – progress is analogously related to providence. The state is analogously related to the Church.

It struck me that Milbank’s interpretation of the liberal subject and the secular realm is relevant to this discussion. Milbank claims that the secular realm is not only related to the Church, but that it is a theological construction which emerges from Medieval thinking (religious and secular realms and priests). He also claims that the creation of secular space in protestant settings was firstly a theological creation. Milbank claims that Locke and Hobbes argued for private property by considering Adam's mythological position in the Garden of Eden. Milbank extends his argument to the providence in Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market place, and to socialism in de Bonald's (and Saint-Simon's) positive (and Catholic) state.

There is another level, or context, for this general argument – the relationship between Christendom and Modernity - that I we need to consider: Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have launched a full fledged deconstruction of Christianity (and Foucault had an implicit argument about the relationship between Christian confession and modern subjectivity). Why do we need to deconstruct Christianity if Modernity is legitimate on its own? I think Derrida, Nancy and Foucault have sided with Lowith in claiming that Modernity is still intimately related to Christendom, so intimately that it must still kill the Christendom Father in order to evade its shadow.