The House That Jack Built

The provocative Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s latest film, ‘The House That Jack Built’, was released this week in the Cannes Festival. The film, which chronicled the story of an American serial killer, resulted in controversy, just like any of the previous films from this spectacular filmmaker. There were reports saying that as many as 100 viewers walked out halfway during the screening as they could not swallow the extreme brutality in the film. It is also interesting to note that the reviews so far have been extremely polarizing, with some critics reprimanding not only the content of the film but also going personal on von Trier himself; and then there are critics who has looked beyond the surface and praised the strong points of the film. As a big fan of Lars von Trier, I would like to give my views on what I know so far about the film, and maybe suggest some questions for everyone to think about. Just like many of his great films, ‘The House That Jack Built’ is one that will lead to a lot of discussions and debate for the years to come.



Pondering with ... murder?!

Before we touch on this controversial picture, there are two points I wish to be clear about. First, there are no justified reasons for homicide. No matter the victim is a woman, a child, or a man, that is simply wrong to take another individual’s life. No matter what sort of artistic merit one can get out from ‘The House That Jack Built’, no one should ever identify with Jack, the serial killer in the film, even if he could provide any rhetorical or ‘philosophical’ explanations he could come up with from his twisted mind. That is a bottom line of morality we have to establish before we really look into the film. Second, I have concerns, like many others, that Jack has found killing female victims particularly appealing and significant. I am worried about that because as a big fan of von Trier’s cinema, I feel that this can be a knockout blow from the detractors, and that will undermine any potential discussions regarding the merits of this film. It may sound insensitive for von Trier to show this film at the epoch of the ‘MeToo’ movement, yet that can also be a deliberate act from the provocative filmmaker, because he despises political correctness as hypocritical. What I will try to do is to analyze this issue within the context and style of the film, and I wish to express that, no matter what von Trier has shown, that is his artistic freedom and he has to bear the consequence of alienation from certain viewers. Yet, to jump to the conclusion of reprimanding Lars von Trier as crazy, misogynistic or evil is just unfair for the artist.

Where's the killer?

In a nutshell, the film is about Jack, a serial killer who has murdered about 60 individuals. During most of the time, Jack was talking to a mysterious figure Verge, and he tried to rationalize why he wanted to kill. Drawing on all sort of analogies from history, culture, and philosophy, Jack believed his murders had artistic merits. Yet, Verge was playing devil’s advocate – he tried to challenge and debate with Jack about the validity of his claims. Jack has selected 5 significant incidents that served as milestones to his murderous rampage, and ironically, not only they were mainly about women, the brutality of each murder intensified.  It is important to note that the story was seen from the point of view of Jack. He was clearly a psychopathic individual, and therefore he could not behave in anyway that resembled a normal individual. Notice also that the story took place in the 1970s – a time when ideas like equal sex or equal opportunities were not mature ideas. Jack was an individual who would not show any compassion to others, and he would not have the ability to step into other’s shoes and feel for them. I have the feeling that von Trier created Jack not merely as a crazy character, but as the embodiment of a bundle of attributes of humanity – the darkest aspects of human nature. Jack could represent the controlling forces of patriarchy, institutions, and manipulations, which were all issues that von Trier has criticized throughout his films. The filmmaker is just reflecting the harsh and ugly reality in the real world. Jack’s worldview only reflected his limited and narcissistic perspective towards the environment around him, and one would expect, for a psychopath like him, the only way to cope with that was to strive for control and manipulation on those around him. In his twisted sense of psyche, that meant taking away other’s life. One should not blame von Trier for this, because all the scenarios he portrayed in the film was based on reality. There are far more outrageous actions in the world -genocide, child slavery, war crimes – and yet people can be indifferent to them. All von Trier was trying to do was to reflect the harsh reality in an honest way, and I would find that hypocritical if they merely criticized von Trier while being oblivious to the horror in the real world.



To hunt or be hunted. One of the most controversial scenes in the film.

While Jack has killed men, women and children, that was his murder and sadism towards women and children that has generated controversy among the viewers. This is an issue we have to analyze with care here.  First, I do not agree to the observation that certain critics find that the female characters in the film are portrayed as shallow or uninteresting. I have come up with a reason why Jack has to harm these characters, as there is something common among them other than the fact that they are all women - they signify the positive attributes of human nature, which are often embodied within von Trier’s female characters. I cannot accept the shallow observation that von Trier hates women and therefore he has to make these characters suffer. If Jack represented the force of evil inherent in human nature, then it would make more sense that he killed these few women in particular because he despised what these characters represented. If we fit this idea into von Trier’s cinema, there one will find it fits very well with von Trier’s general theme. I find it weird why some writers say ‘I like every von Trier films except this one’. It may just be the reassurance moves that they would not be seen as someone who did not understand art, yet if one looked at the scenario in ‘The House That Jack Built’, it was just a similar scenario one could find in his other films, like ‘Breaking the Waves’, ‘Dancer in the Dark’, ‘Dogville’ and ‘Nymphomaniac’. The only difference here is that we are viewing from the bad guy’s point of view.

The moment when you find out your boyfriend is a serial killer.

We should be aware of the fact that, of the significant incidents Jack was proud of, the victims had some interactions or even relationships with him, because they had no knowledge of his monstrous side (thus he was not a stalker). This was an exemplary characteristic of a psychopath – they tended to put on masks that made themselves charismatic, and therefore people might not even aware of the gaps in their personalities. Psychopaths like Jack were also emotionally manipulative, and that was best illustrated by his sadistic attitude towards his victims. He not only wanted to kill them, he moreover wanted to torment them mentally, and played with them as if they were puppets. And I guess these suspenseful moments were more distressing than the outrageously violent scenes, because they really got into the emotions of the audience. I maintain that the female characters not only were not portrayed peripherally, they were demonstrating some of the great aspects of humanity. Uma Thurman’s character might appear whiny, yet she was merely being friendly and humorous, and tried to interact with Jack during the lift. She was plainly unlucky that her humor has provoked the crazy killer and led to her demise. Sofie Grabol’s character was courageous because she was a widow who had to raise her sons alone, and her interaction with Jack was ill-fated because she likely wanted to compensate for a father figure that the kids lacked. For Riley Keough’s character, known as ‘Simple’, that was the most heart-breaking and would generate sympathy from the audience. I guess Keough’s character was the most representative of von Trier’s theme, and the character resembled that of Bess (Emily Watson) in ‘Breaking the Waves’ or Selma (Bjork) in ‘Dancer in the Dark’. Without any knowledge regarding Jack’s true nature, she had a relationship with Jack, just maybe because she found him fascinating or so. She treated Jack as a genuine human being, and was compassionate to him, though this mercy was not returned by Jack. I did not feel Jack to be a loner on the verge of explosion – because when he hid his monstrous side, he could co-exist and interact with other people. It was his psychopathic tendency that has got the better of him and led to destruction, and eventually his own. As I have said, Jack’s character might represent the nastiness of human nature. With the female characters, who brought beauty to a harsh world, they could very likely be destroyed by the dark forces represented by Jack – be it patriarchal structures, institutions, or just our darkest impulses. They were the martyrs in a secular world, very much like Bess and Selma in their respective stories.

The psychopathic showdown!

If you are interested in the film, then I recommend you to give it a go when it shows later this year. It is OK for one to be disgusted or hate this film, yet you have to watch it and give your own contribution to the discussion. If one just blindly follows other and says ‘That is trash because many viewers say so’, then it will no way be constructive to anyone’s understanding. If this film, like any of von Trier’s previous work, can provoke intense debate regarding the way we look at cinema, then I think von Trier has served his purpose.

Film Analysis

The Conformist, Part 2

Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’ is a multi-faceted film. If the audience wants to make sense of the meaning of the film, they will likely find themselves among a number of possible interpretations, which may even be at odds with each other. Through the use of expressive poetic images and an elliptical narrative structure, Bertolucci and his co-workers have woven a brilliant film about the different dimensions that can impact an individual’s life. I think this attribute of ‘The Conformist’ is one of the most important elements of European art cinema in general – the refusal to give the film a single definitive meaning or answer. Many great films, not only those from Europe, derive its continuing fascination from the audience because of the multiple layers of meanings the audience can get from them, and that demands the active participation from the audience.

Through the film is obviously a critique of Fascism, I believe Bertolucci has placed a significant focus on Marcello’s conformist attitude, and the filmmaker was trying to explore the origin of this belief, which even led to a character’s death. True, there are interpretations which focus more on the political contexts of the 1930s, and there are also theories that synthesize psychology with politics (say, the Frankfurt School). I bet the most important take-home message that most audience can easily appreciate is the destructive effects of conformism on individuals. Even if Fascism did not even at all in Marcello’s world, his character flaw and past trauma would likely lead him to conform to any major ideology of his time, and at the end of the film Bertolucci showed that Marcello definitely had this ability to fit in. It was exactly this flatness the filmmaker wanted to caution us about.

Marcello conformed to whatever the mainstream agenda of his time was. In a sense, he had no personal beliefs of any sort, and all he wanted was to hide inside his comfort zone, and to make his life easier. The irony about the protagonist was that, while he possessed the intellectual capability (ok, he has changed the title of his thesis but he has graduated anyway) to think about the issues around him, he was most willing to conform to his political surroundings so that he could have a sense of fitting in. He did not ask questions, and that was not because he did not have the ability to. He refused to ask questions due to his self-interest.

Yet, the complexity and brilliance from Bertolucci was that the origins of Marcello’s personality could not be rationalized politically or instrumentally alone. Bertolucci was just as interested in psychological as much as social issues, and one could easily see a Freudian influence from many of his films. Marcello did have his own taste of childhood trauma. Because he was born in a relatively affluent family, he has often been picked on by the other kids because his status and character was very different from those around him. Finding a friendship from his chauffeur, the experience proved to be traumatizing because the chauffeur was likely to be homosexual (and also implied to ‘like children’ a bit too much), and the young Marcello went as far to put a bullet through the chauffeur’s face after a severe conflict, and wrongly assumed the chauffeur died from that. Marcello has been scarred by this incident, making him sexually confused and he started to believe in the power of violence and aggression. At the same time, he also learnt that he could not afford to stand out from the crowd due to the psychological distress. The fact that he had to fight his inner demons and the development from that was the factors that have led to Marcello’s character when he grew up, and it was obvious it has gone a perverse direction.  

One of the most memorable and widely discussed sequences in the film was of course when Marcello and Professor Quadri met in a room in Paris, and involved a discussion of Plato’s Cave. The scene was atmospheric because of the unique lighting and composition, and Bertulocci / Storaro’s innovative play with light and shadow illustrated the power struggle between 2 conflicting ideologies. The issue regarding the cave also served as an organizing symbol for the whole film and allegorized Marcello’s situation nicely. There are a few viewpoints I can think of about the allegory. First, the idea about Plato’s cave is that the men in the cave are not allowed to see the real world outside the cave, and all they can see are shadows. Bertolucci nicely illustrated that through the light-and-dark play, by having Marcello seeing his shadow on the wall a few times. What Plato was trying to say was that if one could not escape the cave, they would never see the thing-in-itself (the ultimate reality), and could only see the phenomenal world, which he believed was not the most real one in a metaphysical point of view. He further stated that most of the people would conform inside the cave and happy with receiving what they saw inside the cave, without having the courage to step out and figure out what the reality looked like for themselves. This was similar to Marcello’s case, where he simply conformed to the predominant, Fascist thinking of his time and was not trying to examine whether that ideology was justified in the world or not.

A second viewpoint is that Plato seemed to imply that the people in the cave was misled to believe that what they saw inside the cave was the reality, and therefore they probably did not feel that was a need to verify whether that was true or not.  The case bore resemblance to Marcello’s, because his childhood trauma led him to connect the dots erroneously and believed that his conformist and normalizing tendency were the consequence which originated from that, and eventually led him to more evil deeds.

I can think of a third viewpoint. The presence of the shadow reminds me of Carl Jung’s ideas, the fact that there is always a shadow behind everyone’s psyche. The shadow on the wall represented what haunted Marcello – his darkest urges and trauma. He has tried hard to escape from the clutches of his shadow, the dark side inherent in every person. Yet, his character and attitude meant that he could not be able to defeat that, and Quadri’s additional lecture to Marcello also could not save himself, too.

Marcello and Quadri also discussed Marcello’s unfinished doctoral thesis about Plato’s Cave. Quadri lamented that Marcello could not be able to finish the thesis as he felt Marcello was a gifted student with potential, yet Marcello pointed out that the reason why he did not finish it was because Quadri left the school in the first place, leading to his abandonment of the thesis. While this chick and egg scenario took a cyclic irony, it also had Freudian implications because it represented the theme of abandonment. Maybe both Quadri and Marcello served some responsibilities for Marcello’s dark personality. If Quadri has been able to educate and inspire Marcello better, he might have prevented Marcello from turning to the dark way, and that would of course prevent his own demise at the end.



After Mussolini failed, Marcello and one of his comrades gathered to think about what should be the next thing to do. The conformist nature of Marcello meant that, when he saw the anti-Fascist movement was rising, he went to change his opinions to an anti-Fascist stance in no time, and criticized his comrade’s old belief. He could be seen as a chameleon in human form – it was just his nature to fit into the big picture no matter the cost. The flatness of this character was what made him a soulless individual, making him easy to be manipulated by ideology.

When I watch ‘The Conformist’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’, I can’t stop having the feeling that Marcello and Paul have a number of common aspects. Both characters were the victims of their past, for which they were traumatized by events they were not responsible for. True, maybe Paul’s character flaw was what made his wife commit suicide in the first place, yet it could not be all his fault. Both Marcello and Paul could appreciate well the problems they encountered, yet foolishly and tragically, they confused the nature of their problems and combated them in the wrong directions, leading to a self-destructive end. Thus, both stories had psychological elements amidst the other factor. All Paul wanted was someone to care about him, yet he mixed up lust with true love and compassion; all Marcello was to live a normal life and not to stand out from the crowd too often; yet he mixed up being normal and being conformed to something, especially when the idea was horribly wrong. The tragic consequence was that not only they could not achieve more well-being at the end, they have also harmed or traumatized others as a side-effect.   

Such aspects represent Bertolucci’s brand of cinematic pathos.

-End-

(2/2)

by Ed Law

Film Analysis











The Conformist, Part 1

Are you willing to step out of your comfort zone, to embrace in beliefs that may be contentious to others? Are you feeling desperate just to fit into the picture? Are you aiming for a form of flatness in life, which is not subject to any form of perturbations? These appear to be confrontational questions, yet they were exactly the questions Bernardo Bertolucci wanted his audience to think about in one of his most famous films – ‘The Conformist’ (1970)!

‘The Conformist’ was the film that has led Bertolucci to international stardom as a filmmaker in the early 1970s. Having won a number of awards around the world and an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, the film is memorable for being one of the most visually brilliant films in the history of cinema. I can say that is already pleasant by simply looking at the film images alone – the vibrant images constitute an organic unity of visual poetry that prove to be rare in cinema. Other than Bertolucci’s genius, the effort and creativity offered by the director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, was also essential for bringing ‘The Conformist’ to such a status. In fact, ‘The Conformist’ could be considered one of Storaro’s most iconic works, and Storaro is the rare sort of cinematographer that has its own photographic style, which I will discuss in the later passages of this article. No matter which filmmaker he has worked with, you can likely detect his presence through his signature style. Again, ‘The Conformist’ is a beautiful film one can easily fall in love with – and what is the problem if that is a really great one?

The story concerned Marcello, who lived in the Fascist era of Italy. He became a correspondent of Fascism, and his mission was to assassinate Professor Quadri, his teacher during his college years. Quadri, currently living in Paris, was involved in some political resistance against Fascism, and therefore was marked as a target for termination. The story was told in flashbacks, which explored the social, cultural and psychological reasons why Marcello became a Fascist and has developed an attitude of extreme Conformism to the political setting around him.


When one watches ‘The Conformist’, how can one not notice the stunning visual aspect of the film? While Bertolucci has been largely responsible for delivering such an impressive mise-en-scene, the achievement would not be possible without the hard work and vision of Vittorio Storaro, the director of photography who has collaborated on numerous occasions with Bertolucci. Storaro can be considered as the rare sort of cinrmatographer who has developed a unique and recognizable visual style as original as any filmmakers. Indeed, ‘The Conformist’ can be seen as one of Stararo’s major achievements, and the film can serve as a textbook example of how to do brilliant cinematography.



Storaro’s camera style has a few notable characteristics. First, that is the fluid and mobile camera movement, and that is so smooth that it appears as if the camera is dancing, and that gives the audience a flowing and liberating feel. He is also known for a narrative use of lighting effect, and often uses high contrast lighting effect to enhance the atompshere. His choice of colour and light usually led to expressive effects that contributed to the narrative and atmosphere of the scene. Storaro was particularly noted for a combination of colour tune consisting of cold blue/warm yellow, giving very contrasting and expressive results. Having a sound understanding of colour temperature, he has been able to make a number of beautitul Technicolor films with directors including Bertolucci.

Bertolucci and Storaro have drawn influenced from the artistic style most associated with Fascist Italy, in order to lead the audience into that particular political climate in the 1930s. Notice that the preferences were not merely visual gimmicks. The visual and camera or lighting style also served a narrative purpose. It illustrated the exaggerated situation of Marcello and the Fascist beliefs he attempted to embrace and conform to, much like the decors of Expressionism were used to externalize the madness of someone’s mind.

The film has a unique style of having contrasting light and dark/shadow often in the same shot, rather than a balanced or natural arrangement. This style was deliberate from the filmmakers likely because they tried to show the co-existence of conflicting ideologies, and most of all, good and evil that fought for control in the world.



The filmmakers have used light and dark to represent the Freudian conscious and unconscious respectively. They have decided to shoot the Italian scenes in a more claustrophobic way, and the color tone was dry and institutional, to show Marcello’s entrapment in the Fascist regime. In contrast, the French scenes were more balanced with light and dark, and the space was more open, as if offering Marcello an opportunity to escape – which of course he failed to grasp.

Before we finish here, I also want to divert a bit from ‘The Conformist’ and talk about Storaro’s impressive work in 2 other films, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and also Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. Of course, a common element between the two classics is the presence of Marlon Brando, and both films include a our-of-this-world monologue respectively – the one about Paul’s recollections in ‘Last Tango’, and Colonel Kurtz’s ‘Horror’ monologue in ‘Apocalypse’. Storaro seemed to have been using a similar style when he shot these two scenes, with an emphasis on the contrast of light and shadow, so that at some point Brando’s almost close-up face were in the dark, and then reappeared at the next moment, giving that a ghost-like quality. This approach seemed nicely with the message the directors were trying to convey, namely, the difficulty to access one’s mind in ‘Last Tango’, and the duality of Man in ‘Apocalypse’ - which, is very much the theme of 'The Conformist'.

(1/2)

by Ed Law

Film Analysis