Movie Review – Dogville

Dogville (2002)
Written and directed by Lars von Trier

I remember where I was when I first saw this film. That was twenty-one years ago. It was not until today that I really understood what the message was. Lars von Trier is a controversial figure, to say the least. His art has always been profoundly confrontational & abrasive from my perspective, but I don’t feel upset enough to not want to engage with it. He has undoubtedly spoken without thinking first, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong. I do believe translation between languages plays a big part. I have thought things but cannot articulate them with precision for years. Perhaps the argument should be made that artists have a tremendous gravity in choosing their words carefully, but who determines what it means to “choose words carefully.” Whose feelings are we being told to spare? Those in power have certainly co-opted the language of the oppressed to twist much of our perceptions into seeing the victimizer as the victim. It’s so insidiously done, so precise & sick. 

Told over nine chapters and taking place in a stark theatrical stage setting, Dogville tells the story of how a tiny town in the Rockies built around a now-abandoned silver mine brings Grace (Nicole Kidman), an outsider, into their community only to gradually turn on her, revealing they never really viewed her as a human in the first place. The supposed hero of the story, Tom (Paul Bettany), is the local philosopher who has intellectualized his community’s inability to grow. This is not because these people are inherently bad or have something wrong with them. Instead, it is the result of generations brought to heel by the people we never even see, the institutions of the world that determine who is & isn’t worthy of dignity, respect, and humanity. The film’s conclusion, which has stuck with me for two decades, is Grace’s decision to kill them all. This is a very challenging idea to wrestle with, and without realizing it, last night, I began to understand my response to this film and the beginning of a continued journey of education I will have.

If you are aware at all, then you know there is an atrocity being committed in the Middle East at this moment. While a ceasefire has been called, reports are rolling in of IDF snipers and other soldiers on the ground finding ways to continue the terror against the Palestinian people. I have been struggling a lot in the last month to reckon with the reactions I have seen to this fact. The most recent being the firing of Melissa Barrera from the Scream franchise. The next day, Jenna Ortega exited the project, and while news reports are adamantly claiming these two things are unrelated, it doesn’t make sense. The excuse given about conflicting schedules on the calendar makes no sense, as neither Scream VII nor Wednesday Season Two have production calendars out yet. Ortega did an act of solidarity with her co-star, and it is being covered up.

On the flip side is a cavalcade of people whose art I believed I had enjoyed that I cannot stomach any longer. I found Brett Gelman’s nightmare comedy quite funny, but now I wonder how much of it was an act and how much he was finding a way to show his true face to us, that he is those monsters and enjoys it. His Stranger Things co-star Noah Schnapp has similarly lost his mind, raving about how good Zionism is in response to the Palestinian slaughter. Paul Scheer & June Diane Raphael, a comedy couple & co-hosts of the How Did This Get Made? podcast have both taken to social media to talk about the horror of Israeli hostages but not the piles of Palestinian bodies that have been piling up for 75 years. Jordan Peele & Aubrey Plaza co-sign letters thanking President Biden for his support of Israel, meaning his continued support of the genocide. 

I will entertain no comments from people seeking to defend Israel’s actions. Your comment won’t be approved, so every key you press will waste time from your life. I am a big believer in stopping fires by removing the oxygen from the room. I asked myself a question last night, and it led to me having what felt like, and still feel, like the worst thoughts I have ever had. To some, this might sound naive. You have perhaps fully contemplated the weight of these ideas, but it was my first-time last night, and I experienced ego death. The concept of my Self as separate from the rest of Reality was gone for a time; the word that popped up in my mind during this time was “Nirvana.” I have never felt as connected to the universe as I did at that moment. 

Yet, I am a person of reason and want to reason with you what went through my mind. Perhaps you will hear a thought you never thought of before, too? I tried to understand why I was able to look at images of children torn apart by bombs in every configuration you could imagine and feel pain in my soul, but other people, fellow “Americans,” could look at the same thing and revel in it, see those deaths as a cause for celebration. That is when I came upon this idea: “Fascists do not see all humans as people.”

I understood that intellectually, but I had never felt it at the core of my being until now. I looked at my wife, a beautiful Puerto Rican woman, and for the first time, I consciously thought: “There are people in this world, people I have lived beside, worked beside, broken bread with, that would likely not see my wife as a person.” My first reaction to that thought was the most pure I’ve ever felt: “I would kill those people.” I felt no compunction about that thought. If someone did not regard my wife as a person and saw her as an animal, I think I really might kill them. But then I stopped because this formed a contradiction.

“How do we determine where ‘person’ stops and ends?” If I can move the line of “person” here, why not move it further? I asked myself, what in this universe do I see as an animal that is actually a person, capable of complexity of thought just as vast as mine, but perhaps from processed in a way that I would struggle to understand? Isn’t that how the first White European colonizers engaged with indigenous people? They convinced themselves to see those people as nothing different than local fauna, and in their heads, they were utterly convinced of their correctness.

My murderous thoughts were a contradiction then. How could I easily dehumanize the dehumanizer to see them as unworthy of life? “I do not accept the responsibility, nor do I believe anyone can have the right to determine who is and isn’t a person.” That exact thought seared across my brain. I had known it, but now I felt it. We have a right to defend ourselves from those who seek and do harm to us, and in those cases, you may need to kill to survive. But, if there is any chance of talking through these things, that must be paramount. That does not mean we should allow predatory fascists to take the language used to liberate and turn it into a form of suppression. That is what the West did to the survivors of the Holocaust, dropping many of them into the Middle East to help hold land for petroleum interests. They have brainwashed & tortured successive generations into seeing the world the way the German fascists saw it, where some humans are not people.

Because I could not see the line between myself and any other type of life at that moment, I felt disconnected from the Self. It did not matter; the way I interacted with the things in this universe was all that did. What I took & what I gave. But this is where we get back to Dogville’s central thesis.

The first is that Tom, the pompous intellectual, is just as awful as the rest of them for all his supposed enlightenment. He’s convinced himself he’s above these people and sees Grace for who she is. It becomes clear that in the end, all Tom wants is to fuck her, to use her like all the other people in Dogville have. He has lied himself into thinking he sees her as a person when he, in fact, does not. Tom is the worst of them all, and so too are the Americans who “reason” themselves into seeing humans not as people but as animals. 

The second is the deaths of the Dogville citizens. I am still determining how I feel about the decision to execute them all, but there is a caveat von Trier provides. The dog Moses, who exists as a sound effect, barks, and before one of the gangsters can kill it, Grace stays his hand and says, “He’s just angry because I once took his bone.” At this moment, the dog becomes an actual dog on stage. This also counterpoints with the images shown over the credits, photographs from the Great Depression era with David Bowie’s “Young Americans” playing. I didn’t understand what that meant when I first saw this movie, but I am starting now. 

The feeling I had last night that terrified me was that the thoughts I’d had intellectualizing the Holocaust suddenly felt present & palpable. The horror of that is that nothing that is happening right now is new; it has been going on since before I was born. That doesn’t mean it cannot be stopped.

While I can’t go down von Trier’s very cynical but reasonably angry response, I understand him. I leave you with the words of Jewish professor Norm Finkelstein, the child of Holocaust survivors. He is a man who has contemplated these ideas for longer than I ever will be able to. In his words, I find truths about humans, such as that all humans are people. Full stop.