155

SEC 9 (2+3) pp. 155168 Intellect Limited 2012

Studies in European Cinema
Volume 9 Numbers 2 & 3
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.9.2-3.155_1
Paula Quigley
Trinity College Dublin
The spectacle of suffering:
The womans film and lars
von Trier
absTracT
Many of the films of Lars von Trier can be situated within the context of the
womans film and, more specifically, within its subgenre of the maternal melo-
drama. However, the films intensification of the investments typically demanded
by the womans film could be said to function as a form of provocation (Nobus
2007). This opens up a space within which to explore the spectacle of suffering in the
womans film in general and in von Triers films in particular.
Many of the films of Lars von Trier can be situated within the broad context
of the womans film or, more precisely, within its subgenre of the mater-
nal melodrama. This is most obvious in relation to Breaking the Waves (1996)
and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Elements of the womans film are evident in
Idioterne/The Idiots (1998) also and, in a more complicated way, in Antichrist
(2009). This curious appeal to a female genre has, unsurprisingly, attracted
the attention of a number of influential feminist film critics, amongst whom
opinion regarding the value of these films to a feminist agenda is deeply
divided. Debates have centered primarily on the apparent misogyny of the
films themselves. For many, their intense scrutiny of the extreme (and often
sexualized) suffering of the female protagonist is particularly problematic.
Keywords
Lars von Trier
the womans film
maternal melodrama
Stella Dallas
Breaking the Waves
Antichrist
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In addition, von Triers peculiar take on the gendered structures of power
intrinsic to the genre itself intersects with complex issues of cinematic invest-
ment and spectatorship already at stake in feminist film theory. These discus-
sions have focused quite specifically on the spectacle of female sacrifice and
suffering in the womans film and its implications for a female spectatorship.
However, while the scenario of female sacrifice is typically idealized in main-
stream film and popular culture, von Triers provocation

(Nobus 2007) is to
push this to its extreme, to the point where the depiction of the womans
suffering becomes so excessive that it can no longer function as cathartic.
Consequently, these representations are much more resistant to being recu-
perated as positive.
My suggestion is that this intensification of experience, both on the part of
the female protagonist and of the spectator in the cinema, opens up a space
within which to explore the spectacle of suffering in the womans film in
general and in von Triers films in particular. In order to consider this, I will
revisit briefly some of the key contributions to the study of the maternal melo-
drama with a view to bringing this to bear on more recent work on von Trier.
My intention is not simply to rehearse familiar arguments however but to
move in a direction initiated by Dany Nobus in his 2007 article, The Politics of
Gift-Giving and the Provocation of Lars Von Triers Dogville. Appropriating
some of the insights offered by Nobuss discussion of the Derridean dynamics
of gift-giving within Dogville in a different context allows us to approach the
issue of spectatorship from a slightly different perspective, one that acknowl-
edges its crucial role in witnessing and in a sense facilitating the spectacle of
female sacrifice or loss on screen.
I will argue, extending the application of Nobuss ideas around Dogville, that
the act of spectatorship makes room for the act of love to be recognized as an
act of giving (2007: 31). This is not to ignore the gender-politics inherent in this
operation however. On the contrary, my suggestion is that giving the impos-
sible gift of love (2007: 30) is persistently aligned with a feminine position and
that the privileged tableau for the impossibility of a system of true reciprocity
is the spectacle of female sacrifice. However, the audience of the womans film
is implied as female, raising the question of our own collusion in this scenario.
As such, bringing together feminist theories of spectatorship and aspects of
Nobuss discussion of the dynamics of gift-giving in Dogville may give us a way
to approach the issue of female over- and under-investment in the film image,
so frequently invoked in feminist readings of the womans film.
In Dogville, Grace (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful fugitive seeks refuge
amongst the good and honest people of Dogville. She offers her labour in
return for shelter and the townspeople agree to this arrangement. However, as
it becomes clear that Grace is not only missing but wanted as well (despite
the fact the townspeople know she could not have committed the crime she is
wanted for), their attitude towards her gradually worsens until they routinely
physically and sexually abuse her. After an attempted escape, Graces status
as a slave is confirmed when she is chained to a large iron wheel and made
to wear a collar with a bell. Finally, her whereabouts is revealed to her father,
who is a gangster. When he arrives in the town to get her back, he tells her
that she is arrogant for not holding the townspeople to the same standards
as herself. Eventually, Grace agrees and orders the destruction of the entire
town, sparing only the dog, Moses.
Nobus focuses on the extraordinarily cruel exchange that takes place
between Grace and Vera (Patricia Clarkson) during two key scenes in the
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film. During a night of girl talk, Vera destroys Graces seven expensive china
figurines as punishment for Grace having been repeatedly raped by Veras
husband, Chuck (Stellan Skarsgrd) (Vera blames Grace for this). Vera tells
Grace that if she can control her emotions while watching the first two figu-
rines being smashed as a demonstration of her knowledge of the doctrine of
Stoicism that Grace is teaching Veras children, she will spare the rest of the
figurines. Grace fails to restrain herself and has to watch while the remain-
ing five figurines are destroyed. Grace repays Vera for this in the final scene
of the destruction of Dogville by replicating the scenario, this time with the
destruction of Veras seven children, claiming I owe her that. If Vera does not
react while watching her children being killed, the remaining children will be
spared. Vera of course does react and the rest of her children are murdered
before her eyes.
Nobus situates this scenario in the context of a Derridean politics of gift-
giving as an impossible act that resists all attempts at true reciprocity. The gift
is impossible as it must not be acknowledged as such by either the donor or
the donee if it is to remain pure. Nobus returns to Lacans famous definition
of love as giving what you dont have; in these terms, love epitomizes the
impossible gift (2007: 30). As Nobus argues, this is not the same as saying
that giving love is impossible, rather that love cannot be recognized as a gift if
it is to survive as such:
If love were to be perceived and ascertained as a gift-object by one or
more of the loving parties involved, then the act of loving would instantly
be annihilated and re-integrated within an economically sanctioned
process of commodification and exchange reduced to the provision of
a social service. The act of loving simply does not tolerate the object of
love being identified as a gift, neither by the lover nor by the beloved.
[] [F]ollowing Derrida, we also need to acknowledge that the refusal
to identify the love-object as a gift is precisely what allows it to persist as
a pure, uncontaminated, free gift-object and what makes room for the
act of love to be recognized as an act of giving.
(2007: 3031)
Though the violent exchange between Vera and Grace appears to defy any
commonsense notion of gift-giving, Nobus argues that what these scenes
provoke is a realization of the radical impossibility of reciprocity in the
relationship between the giver and the receiver (2007: 33). The fact that
neither the figurines nor the children functioned as gifts during their exist-
ence means they can maintain their purity as free objects for which there
is no equivalent exchange. It is only when Grace realizes what the figu-
rines mean to her (they are described by the voice-over as the offspring of
the meeting between the township and her) that they acquire a value and
thus re-enter a system of symbolic exchange. Grace realizes what she had
and what she has now lost. Thus, Nobus argues, a system of quid pro quo
becomes inevitable, even though there can be no equivalence between the
objects of exchange. This is not because Veras seven children are automati-
cally worth more than seven figurines. On the contrary, Nobus suggests that
Graces figurines could be considered more precious than Veras children
as the figurines mean more to Grace when smashed than Veras children
did to Vera when they were alive (that is, of course, until she lost them)
(2007: 33).
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Accordingly, Nobus identifies the real provocation of the film as our real-
ization that:
the installation of a symbolic system of exchange on the basis of solidar-
ity, reciprocity, quid pro quo, counterbalance and friendship does not
lead to the development of stable community life, but to the gradual
deterioration of the social fabric into a structure of retaliation, punish-
ment, revenge and outright hostility.
(2007: 34)
In short, the ruthless principle of quid pro quo, though apparently fair, can
only ever lead to a radically unfair society that constantly seeks to exact its
due. In this way, Nobus argues that Grace herself personifies the gift and its
inexhaustible ability to provoke a destabilization of the existing structures of
power, a provocation that the inhabitants of Dogville are unable to rise to.
While this gives us a fresh and provocative perspective from which
to view Dogville, a film that is more usually discussed in terms of its tech-
nique (Brechtian) or politics (anti-American, apparently), what I wish to add
to this analysis is the fact that this exchange takes place between women and
it involves the loss of their children (albeit figuratively, in Graces case). The
women destroy each others offspring and force each other to watch. In a
horrific revision of the scenario of maternal loss in the womans film, they
confirm their status as real women (they cannot help but cry) and as moth-
ers (ultimately, it is their offspring that matter the most). Understood in these
terms, when Grace says I owe her that regarding the brutal murder of Veras
children, it can be read as something other than revenge. It can be under-
stood as Grace visiting upon Vera the same opportunity for suffering that she
herself endured earlier (Grace had already indicated that she knew Vera could
not help but cry). What ensues is a harrowing spectacle of maternal loss that,
in a restaging of the act of cinematic spectatorship, Grace forces herself to
watch, through the window-screen of a car, having agreed to the curtains that
obscure her view being opened.
Approached from this perspective, these scenes can be read as a perverse
illustration of a painful system of spectatorship between women in cinema
whereby each bears witness to the others loss. In order to consider this
dynamic further in relation to von Trier, I will return briefly to a key womans
film that has similarly divided feminist film critics, King Vidors Stella Dallas
(1937). When film theorists first turned their attention to the maternal
melodrama, much of the work focused on the 1930s and 40s. Within this
context, Stella Dallas emerged as a privileged text. If we accept Stella Dallas
as a paradigmatic example, this gives us a place from which to consider what
happens to the narrative and generic conventions of the maternal melodrama
when appropriated in a manner that seemingly goes against the spirit of the
womans film. It also provides a platform from which to consider feminist
theories of spectatorship and to extend their scope to include a discussion of
von Trier and his treatment of the maternal melodrama. Indeed, returning to
Linda Williamss influential article, Something Else besides a Mother: Stella
Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama (1984), may be particularly productive as
it anticipates many of the insights that have since been applied to the problem
of aligning a female spectatorship with a position of power in discussions of
von Trier, as encountered for instance by Caroline Bainbridge (2007) and Suzy
Gordon (2004).
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Essentially, Stella Dallas revolves around Stella (Barbara Stanwyck) making
a show of herself, both literally and figuratively. A small-town working-
class girl who aspires to the glamorous lifestyle she sees at the movies, Stella
marries a wealthy man only to find that her penchant for excess in the style
stakes and her love of fun mark her out as dclass. Reined in by her disap-
proving husband, Stephen (John Boles), and by motherhood with the birth
of her daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), Stella is suffocated by the upper-class
context she longed to belong to. Her lack of good taste distances her from
her husband who eventually leaves her and marries a more suitable woman,
Helen (Barbara ONeil). Stella instead devotes herself to her daughter, who
becomes the love of her life. Realizing that her lack of class is harming her
daughters chances of a good marriage, she deliberately alienates her, only
to finally watch Laurels wedding to an upper-class man, alone in the rain,
through the window of Helens home.
The fundamental problem for feminist critics here and again in rela-
tion to von Triers films is how to reconcile the debasement of the female
protagonist with a progressive gender politics. This problem constitutes the
crux of the exchange between Williams and Ann Kaplan in Cinema Journal
in the mid-1980s. In a nutshell, the debate has to do with whether or not
Stella Dallas resists or insists upon patriarchal norms of maternal sacrifice,
with particular emphasis on the significance of the ending of the film. While
Williams accepts that at this moment Stella becomes an abstract (and absent)
ideal of motherly sacrifice (1984: 16), she also asserts that the female specta-
tors response to this may not be one of straightforward acceptance of Stellas
fate, but instead may be characterized by a double vision, a recognition of:
the contradictions between what the patriarchal resolution of the film
asks us to see the mother in her place as spectator, abdicating her
former position in the scene and what we as empathetic, identifying
female spectators cant help but feel the loss of mother to daughter
and daughter to mother.
(1984: 18)
For Kaplan, on the other hand, this is an idealized reading of the process, one
that is available, on reflection only, to an educated, feminist academic in the
1980s, but certainly not the default position of a hypothetical female spectator
of 1937, who is brought by the film to accept the necessary loss (1985: 40) of
mother to daughter and vice versa.
Despite their different positions regarding the possibilities for resistance
afforded by the film, both Kaplan and Williams identify Stellas transition
from spectator to spectacle and back again to spectator as a key narrative
trajectory. Speaking of Stellas desire to be one of the stars she sees in the
film that so fascinates her, compared to the mere spectator she becomes by
the end of the film, Williams argues that Her story will become, in a sense,
the unsuccessful attempt to place herself in the scene of the movie without
losing that original spectatorial pleasure of looking on from afar (1984: 12).
Both Williams and Kaplan therefore see Stella as somehow reduced in her
status as spectator within the film, although they disagree on the spectators
response to this in the cinema.
Certainly, the film does signal Stellas position as spectator in the last scene
of the film. The curtains drawn by Helen allow her to see Laurels wedding
through a window creating a scene reminiscent of the movie screen, as has
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been frequently noted. However, this is not her final moment. The last shot
of Stella walking towards us finally instates her as the star of her own show,
a status that is reinforced by the films title. In this context, Stanley Cavells
reading of Stella Dallas invites investigation. Cavell refuses to accept a femi-
nist reading of Stellas destruction under patriarchy, saying: I deny that she
is eradicated as a woman and as a mother (1996: 216). Instead, Cavell argues
that at this moment Stella is finally transformed into the movie star she so
aspired to as a young girl:
Her walk towards us, as if the screen becomes her gaze, is allegorized
as the creating or presenting of a star, or as the interpretation of star-
dom. This star, call her Barbara Stanwyck, is without obvious beauty
or glamour, first parodying them by excessive ornamentation, then
taking over the screen stripped of ornament, in a nondescript hat and
cloth overcoat. But she has a future. Not just because now we know
we soon knew that this woman is the star of The Lady Eve and Double
Indemnity and Ball of Fire, all women, it happens, on the wrong side of
the law: but because she is presented here as a star (the camera show-
ing that particular insatiable interest in her every action and reaction),
which entails the promise of return, of unpredictable reincarnation.
(1996: 219)
As such, the fundamental paradox of the film is that in erasing herself Stella
finally becomes a star. For if, as Cavell suggests, Stella has not been eradi-
cated as a woman and as a mother, it is because, according to the terms of
the maternal melodrama, the spectacle of her self-sacrifice confirms her as
both. Stella has proven herself as a mother precisely in her capacity to give
the impossible gift of love. However, as the impossible gift of love cannot
be acknowledged by either Stella or Laurel if it is not to be reduced to a mere
social service, then our responsbility as spectators is to witness the act of
love and recognize it as the gift it truly is. However, this exchange between
women is not without pain. If we witness, and thus facilitate, Stellas sacri-
fice and consequent stardom through our act of spectatorship, has Stella
not also facilitated the suffering (as the result of the loss of her much-loved
mother) and witnessed the consequent stardom (as the result of her good
marriage played out on the surrogate screen) of her own daughter? Like
Grace and Vera, Stella and Laurel bring about the loss of the very thing that
the other values the most. In Stella Dallas, the compensation for this sacrifice
is a certain kind of stardom that confirms their status as women and (poten-
tial, in Laurels case) mothers. It is this profoundly problematic idealization
of the female protagonist as a consequence of her self-sacrifice, rendered in a
powerfully cinematic way, that returns us to von Trier, and the scrutiny as well
as the suffering to which his protagonists are subjected.
Caroline Bainbridge (2007) suggests that its proximity to the womans film
offers a way of understanding von Triers assertion that the Gold Heart tril-
ogy is a feminine trilogy (2007: 103). She argues: the films might be seen as
feminine despite the fact that they cannot realistically be described as feminist
(2007: 120). Certainly, Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark all
reconfigure the feminine scenario of loss and sacrifice central to Stella Dallas.
For instance, in Breaking the Waves, Bess (Emily Watson), a childlike young
woman living in an austere, pious community on a small Scottish island,
sacrifices herself to save her dying husband, Jan (Stellan Skarsgrd), who has
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been injured in an accident on an oil rig. Paralyzed and sexually impotent, Jan
asks Bess to have sex with other men and then to tell him about it. Bess agrees
and has a series of sordid sexual encounters until finally she dies having been
brutally raped by sailors. After her death, Jan recovers.
The Idiots has a less straightforward relationship with melodrama, though
the dramatic culmination does involve the revelation of maternal loss. The
film tells the story of Karen (Bodil Jorgensen) who joins a group of people
pretending to have learning difficulties (spassing) for a variety of reasons
and with various effects. In the final scene, Karen returns home and spasses
in front of her family. It is here that we learn of the death of Karens son
and her inability to attend his funeral and here that we witness the disturb-
ing effect her spassing has on her family. Dancer in the Dark, on the other
hand, is more obviously indebted to the maternal melodrama. Selma (Bjrk)
is an immigrant factory worker approaching total blindness. She is saving for
an operation to save her sons sight. When her neighbour steals the money
intended for her sons operation, she kills him during an altercation and is
tried for murder. She refuses to spend the money she has saved for her son on
legal fees in order to save herself and is found guilty and hanged.
Thus, all three films depend upon the womans loss and, in another sense,
her victory, to conclude the drama and upon closer examination we find that
the endings resonate with that of Stella Dallas in unexpected ways. At the end
of Breaking the Waves for instance, we see a shot of huge bells pealing in the
sky, a moment that, coming after the hand-held proximity of most of the film,
speaks to an almost Sirkian sensibility in its fantasy resolution to a horrific
chain of events: Besss heavenly sacrifice effecting Jans miraculous recov-
ery. Likewise, the scene of Selmas hanging (also featuring curtains closing,
again calling to mind a movie screen) finally rewards us with the crane shot
so characteristic of the American musicals Selma loved, a perspective that had
been withheld from us, and her, until then. Thus, Selmas suffering is not in
vain and she becomes, to appropriate Kaplans phrase in a different context,
something else besides a mother; she becomes a star.
In this sense, the aesthetic of these films, although pushed to an extreme,
appears to replicate Cavells description of the sensibility inherent in Stella
Dallas. The ending functions to make a star of the abused woman, the
camera already having shown that particular insatiable interest in her every
action and reaction (1996: 219). It is obvious though that this insatiable inter-
est is of a different order than that of Vidor and his contemporaries and that
its excessive nature marks its protagonists out from the long line of suffering
women that have populated the history of melodrama.
Bainbridge, for instance, believes the trilogy to be marked by an excess
that operates both at the level of the films stories and in terms of an exces-
sive mode of filmmaking, one that is made memorable by the insistent use
of large close-up shots of the protagonists faces in scenes of heightened
emotional fragility (2007: 111). While close-ups of the female face have
always been a key feature of melodrama, in the trilogy we are conscious
of an unusual level of intrusion into the intimate space of another persons
suffering. Bainbridge situates this intrusion in a narcissistic post-modern
cultural context of a desire for an ever more elusive authenticity. In this
sense, von Triers manipulation of the maternal melodrama and his intensi-
fication of its emotional affect occur in the context of a culture where a sense
of self is always mediated and can only be authenticated through the act of
being witnessed (2007: 112).
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Bainbridge recognizes the significance of the fact that we are witnessing
female suffering however, saying:
Von Trier appears to elide femininity with masochism and therefore
to perpetuate a patriarchal view of femininity as irrevocably other.
However, it is also arguable that he is responding to cultural assump-
tions and dominant perceptions of what is to be understood as femi-
ninity. Von Triers work can thus be seen to draw attention to the way
femininity often exceeds the boundaries imposed on it by patriarchal
systems.
(2007: 138)
Thus, for Bainbridge, in its very excess the womans suffering becomes some-
thing other than simply evidence of the directors misogyny. Suzy Gordon
(2004), too, sees something else at work in this. Gordon argues against read-
ing Breaking the Waves (1996) as a bad film from a feminist point of view.
Instead, she argues for a reading of the film that recognizes the ways in which
it complicates the very categories of good and bad themselves.
Gordon approaches its negativity in terms of Melanie Kleins thesis
of recognizing the violence inherent in an ethics of goodness or love.
Recognizing both love and hate as primary impulses, Klein identifies a
dynamic whereby the childs inherent capacity for love and compassion
is dependent upon his belief in the power of his own destructive force.
The child wants his destructive impulses to be stopped, not only because
he could cause harm to others but also because the attendant anxiety and
remorse will cause himself more suffering. Thus, goodness and badness
are simultaneous and contradictory and it is impossible to establish the
primacy of one over the other. According to Klein, women epitomize this
tension, in that they possess an inherent capacity for self-sacrifice to social
and ethical tasks (Klein quoted in Gordon 2004: 220). This can be under-
stood as simultaneously a genuine impulse towards good and as reparation
towards loved people who in phantasy have been harmed or destroyed
(Klein quoted in Gordon 2004: 220). According to Gordon, The stakes for
the woman are all too clear: naturalizing her sacrificial qualities displaces
any recognition of the womans violence and aggression onto an approval of
her capacity for self-damage (2004: 221).
As such, for Gordon, Breaking the Waves participates in the dynamic
inherent to the feminine position as well as disclosing the contradictions
in feminist accounts of female spectatorship. Bess participates fully in her own
annihilation; indeed, it is at this moment that she is most effective. Gordon
identifies this aspect of the film as most resistant to recuperation by feminist
critics, despite feminist film theorys own history of interrogating the internal
contradictions thrown up by mainstream and/or misogynistic film:
What apprently makes Breaking the Waves most inimical to feminism is
its association of a womans will with her subordination. [] Viewed
this way, the challenge of Breaking the Waves might be what is perceived
as bad (convention, conformity, self-sacrifice) cannot be prised apart
from what is good (power, autonomy, agency). [] Breaking the Waves
disputes the idea that we can distinguish easily between bad patriar-
chal forms and good feminist modes. It complicates the possibility of
positing a good object for feminism, insisting instead that the good is
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necessarily contaminated by the destructiveness the badness it hopes
to diminish.
(2004: 211)
To support this, Gordon cites the violence and aggression that Bess
displays showing her love for Jan by attacking him, beating him when he
is late and so on and points to the fact that Besss belief in her own power
of destructiveness (she believes Jan was injured as a result of her begging
God to bring him home no matter what) is matched only by her belief in
her own goodness (love can save Jan). A double burden is thus placed on
Bess: she must stand for pure uncontaminated goodness and as the origin of
the destructiveness that the film must rectify (2004: 21112). According to
Gordon, the film deals with this difficulty by ensuring that redemption (i.e.
Jans recovery) is possible only with Besss eradication, a double punishment
as it were for in dying Bess never learns of Jans recovery.
Gordon suggests that insisting on the womans active assent to her own
dissolution returns us to image of the woman as both passive spectacle and
over-invested spectator, here dramatized by the scene set in the cinema. In
this scene, first we are shown Jan and Bess watching a film from the point of
view of the screen and then we are shown Jan looking on indulgently at Besss
immersion in the image. The cut from Bess as spectator to Bess as spectacle
retraces a well-worn and particularly difficult path for feminist film theorists,
as per the discussion of Stella Dallas outlined earlier. Interestingly, Gordon
looks to the modernist writer H.D.s response to Carl Dreyers La Passion de
Jeanne DArc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) as a way of thinking through
this problem of female over- and under-investment in the image in cinema.
Dreyer organizes his film around a painful proximity to the suffering Joan
(Maria Falconetti). This torments H.D., who is deeply affected by the agony
she sees on screen yet powerless to prevent it. Gordon cites Lizzie Frankes
response to Breaking the Waves as similar, as Franke too is pained and frus-
trated by the films unbearable proximity at the same time as she can do no
more than observe (Bjorkman and Franke 1996).
Clearly, then, many theorists have been troubled by the intimation of
passivity in relation to female spectatorship. As Gordon notes, this concern
was articulated most influentially by Mary Ann Doane in The Desire to Desire:
The Womans Film of the 1940s (1987) and other feminist film criticisms of the
1980s. However, if we return to Nobuss discussion of love as the impos-
sible gift that can never be recognized as such by either party, then within
this context the act of spectatorship must be passive, for to intervene would
be to deny the protagonist her right to perform her femininity. However,
as I have argued, the payoff accorded to the female protagonist of the main-
stream womans film is what we might call a sense of cinema. In her self-
sacrifice she becomes the star of the show and the reward for the spectator is a
powerful cinematic investment that alludes to and idealizes a figure of loss.
For Gordon, the inclusion of this scene of spectatorship in Breaking the
Waves serves to amplify the demands made on Bess:
Breaking the Waves [] makes that link between debilitating proxim-
ity and a female spectator. Held within the male gaze of a lover whose
later sexual demands motivate her to engineer her own violation,
this moment not only profiles the classic alignment of the male gaze
with sadistic voyeurism and the female spectator with a self-effacing
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masochism, but adds the proviso that the woman assume responsibility
for the mans sadism, that she take the matter of suffering into her own
hands. All this makes the problem of proximity even more devastat-
ing than we might once have imagined. The films thesis on goodness
therefore requires more than the womans complicity alone. It demands
that she claim as her privilege the terms of her annihilation.
(2004: 213)
This idea of pain as the womans privilege engages my own thoughts on
the spectatorial bond between suffering women so frequently alluded to in
cinema: women watching other women suffer on screen and women watch-
ing this suffering in the cinema. We need only think of Godards Vivre Sa Vie
(1962), a familiar, if defamiliarized, tale of a beautiful young womans descent
into prostitution and her ensuing destruction. Here, we as spectators are
moved as we watch Nana (Anna Karina) watching Dreyers Joan of Arc, crying
as she bears witness to Joans anguish in anticipation of her death at the stake.
Though Nanas status as an image is frequently underlined and in the process
interrogated by the film, she is denied a similar spectacular martyrdom. Her
death in the film is a fairly perfunctory affair, rendered briefly in long shot.
The suffering of Joan, on the other hand, is profoundly cinematic not only in
the sense that Dreyers film is organized around close-ups of Joans anguished
face but in the sense that its primary purpose is to be witnessed. Like Bess
(and Selma), Joan is a young woman whose self-belief is matched only by her
self-destruction and, like Bess (and Grace and Selma) her goodness consti-
tutes a provocation that those around her are unable to rise to.
This comparison is clearly not without its problems however. Despite
the obvious points of contact between the two filmmakers, unlike von Trier,
Dreyer is rarely accused of misogyny, despite the close-up agonies to which
Joan, and we as spectators, are subjected. There is clearly something else in
von Triers films that undercuts the satisfaction of our own status as spec-
tators, witnessing the gift of love. As noted earlier, one way of approaching
this is by identifying an excess, something that goes too far in von Triers films
and in so doing becomes obscene. In this sense, Antichrist surely constitutes
a tipping point.
If we accept Gordons reading of Bess as the origin of both goodness and
destructiveness in Breaking the Waves, we can see that this holds for several of
von Triers other protagonists also. For instance, in Dancer in the Dark, Selma
has passed her son Genes (Vladica Kostic) condition onto him. The deteriora-
tion of his sight is genetically inherited; Selma wanted a baby to love, so she
went ahead and had a child despite knowing he would be similarly afflicted.
Furthermore, her refusal to participate as required in the legal system, as well
as her refusal to use the money that she saved for legal fees, brings about once
more the loss of much-loved mother to child. Thus, Selmas self-sacrifice is
not without its painful consequences for those around her and once again her
victory is simultaneous with her loss. Thus, much as Stella visits a violence
upon her daughter Laurel when she leads her to believe that she has rejected
her, the womans self-sacrifice is not without its destructiveness and nowhere
is this more starkly realized than in the character of the grieving mother
(Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist. If Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the
Dark ultimately privilege the womans goodness over her badness however,
Antichrist inverts this and makes the womans destructiveness the source of
all evil.
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The spectacle of suffering
165
In Antichrist, as a result of the womans atypical (i.e. ferocious and unre-
lenting) grief after the death of their child, a couple retreat to their house in
the woods (Eden) to try to come to terms with their loss and to attempt to
bring the woman to a point of acceptance. The retreat gradually deteriorates
into an orgy of violence however, with notorious scenes of sexual violence and
genital self-mutilation, culminating in the womans death at the hands of her
husband (Willem Dafoe). So, once again, Antichrist is concerned with mater-
nal loss; however, the sleight of hand that the film performs is to identify the
grieving mother as the architect of her own annihilation. This is achieved by
segueing from the terrain of the maternal melodrama to its inverse, the dark
and dangerous realm of the monstrous feminine (Creed 1993).
As in Stella Dallas, the problem of reconciling a sexual identity with the
maternal role is central. This time however, the link between the mothers
active sexuality and the destruction of her child is made explicit in the opening
sequence, cutting between the couple having sex and their child climbing out
of his cot and falling from an open window to his death. The film then moves
from its initial presentation of the woman as sympathetic in her grief and
the man as curiously detached to its final depiction of the woman as sexually
rapacious and monstrously violent, while the man manages to remain rational
in the face of insane provocation. Early indications of the womans madness
are achieved primarily through an escalation of her sexual demands, showing
how her sexual appetite has increased from a source of comfort in the wake of
her childs death to a violent and voracious desire that can never be satisfied
and threatens to consume her husband.
The fundamental conflict between the womans sexual self and her role as
a good mother is underlined by subsequent revelations. Her admission that
she knew her son could climb out of his cot initially seems like the self-torment
typical in the aftermath of such a terrible accident. This admission becomes
more ominous however when we learn the results of her sons autopsy, which
reveals that the bones of his feet were malformed. The mans scrutiny of an
old photograph then reveals the child to be wearing his shoes on the wrong
feet. Though the woman passes this off as an innocent mistake, further detec-
tion on the part of her husband reveals that his shoes were always on the
wrong feet and a flashback confirms his suspicions. We see the woman forc-
ing the wrong shoes on her sons feet, ignoring his distress. The implication
is clear: there was some abusive element in her relationship with her son that
situates her sexual activity on the night of her sons death in a more explicitly
guilty context.
This in turn is situated in the broader context of an equation of women
with evil. Before her sons death, the woman had been writing a Ph.D. thesis
on gynocide and, again, through her husbands eyes, we see that this topic
may have become an unhealthy obsession. Disturbing depictions of violence
against women line the walls and her notebooks show her increasingly erratic
handwriting. Thus, it is slowly revealed to us that the womans madness
predated the death of her son and at the same time her grief becomes some-
thing monstrous. The film suggests that the sexually rapacious destructiveness
given free rein in the aftermath of the accident was both incipient and inher-
ent to her gender, a point that is reinforced by the use of anomic characters,
suggesting a universality that is less emphatic in von Triers earlier films. In
keeping with its insistence on female irrationality, the film has the woman
espouse this position herself (women do not control their own bodies
nature does) while the man tries to make her see reason. This ensures that
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Paula Quigley
166
identification of the female with an irrational destructiveness comes from the
woman herself and thus the responsibility for her elimination is her own.
Arguably, Antichrist is the point in von Triers oeuvre where the womans
idealized self-sacrifice becomes grotesque self-harm. In one of the most
controversial scenes in the film (after she bores a hole in her husbands leg
through which to drive an iron bar with a heavy wheel attached) we see the
woman mutilate her genitals with a pair of scissors. The painful proximity of
von Triers earlier films here gives way to surgical close-up and the image of
genital mutilation is a violent intensification of von Triers earlier representa-
tions of a specifically female capacity for self-damage. That her self-mutilation
is sexualized is no coincidence however. Like Stella before her, she has failed
her child and the only appropriate response in this generic context is the exci-
sion of her sexual self.
Thus, in moving from the realm of maternal melodrama to the realm of
the monstrous feminine, Antichrist exposes the extent to which one is held
in the other, as well as the extent to which each is invested in the spectacle of
female suffering. Like Bess and Selma before her, the womans destructive-
ness is ultimately directed at herself. However, given her monstrous nature,
it falls upon her husband to kill her and only then can order be restored.
Significantly, after strangling her, the man burns her body on a pyre. In a
sense then, like Joan of Arc she is burned at the stake; however, unlike Joan,
she is the witch she is suspected of being. As such, if one of the most prob-
lematic aspects of Breaking the Waves is its presentation of suffering as not
only the womans destiny but her privilege (Gordon 2004: 203), the explicit
collapse of the maternal into the monstrous in Antichrist makes the womans
suffering a requirement.
In the maternal melodrama, for the woman to be denied the privilege of
suffering is to be denied the right to perform the maternal role. As such, in
Breaking the Waves, by giving over control of her own sexuality to Jan, Bess
effectively becomes mother to him in that her sexual sacrifice nurses him
back to health and ensures his survival. His return from impotence to virile
masculinity is in inverse proportion to the violent destruction of her own
active enjoyment of sex. In this sense, Selma is perhaps the best mother in
the Gold Heart trilogy as she has no interest in sexual liaisons at all, focus-
ing all her energy on her child instead. In Antichrist, then, the idealization of
maternal self-sacrifice evident in von Triers earlier films and the suppression
of the violent tendencies inherent therein (as argued by Gordon), is inverted,
and the destructiveness apparently inherent in female sexuality is given free
rein only to once again guarantee its self-destruction.
Williams identifies the mixed messages of joy in pain, pleasure in
sacrifice that typically resolve the melodramatic conflicts of the womans
film (1984: 2). From this perspective, one of the many questions raised by
von Triers films is: what happens to the familiar narrative and generic conven-
tions of the womans film when appropriated in a manner that seems exces-
sive? This is not simply a question of what happens when a male director
appropriates a female genre. The established masters of the of the genre are
all men D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, Douglas Sirk, to name but a few and
so questions of authorship and/or spectatorial investment cannot be linked
to gender in any straightforward way. That said, the intensification of affect
characteristic of von Triers films reflects back on our own fascinations with
more mainstream images of female suffering and makes the conventional
investment of the spectator much more problematic.
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The spectacle of suffering
167
As I have argued, one way to re-think the prescribed role of the specta-
tor in the womans film is as inhabiting the crucial role of witness, recognis-
ing the inherently impossible gift of love. We must remember however that
in Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark the scenario of self-
sacrifice is persistently figured as feminine and that the female protagonist is
often abused by her community as a result. In these instances, the womans
effectiveness is dependent upon her capacity for self-destruction. However,
instead of accepting the Kleinian position of imagining women as inherently
more amenable to self-sacrifice we must think this through in terms of the
gendered positions available within a social and cinematic system such as
our own.
In short, my suggestion is that in our own profoundly gendered social
system governed by a principle of quid pro quo, the feminine scenario of
self-sacrifice is naturalized and idealized on screen in the image of the suffer-
ing woman. This is situated in a social and cinematic context that is already
profoundly invested in the spectacle of woman (as has been extensively
argued elsewhere) and already fundamentally conflicted as to the compat-
ibility of the sexual and maternal roles. And so, in the womans film, spectacle
and sacrifice coalesce in powerful ways that identify the womans femininity
precisely in her capacity to give and ergo, to lose. In the maternal melodrama
this is condensed into the image of the de-sexualized mother who claims
self-sacrifice as her right and through the exercise of her inherently destruc-
tive capacity for love ensures the perpetuation of this cycle. As I have argued,
this is idealized in mainstream cinema in ways that transform the suffering
woman into a star, engaging our fascination and ensuring our complicity
with its consequences. However, perhaps in going too far, von Triers provo-
cation is to bring us closer to the painful realities of our own investments in
the spectacle of female sacrifice and suffering on screen.
references
Bainbridge, C. (2007), The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice,
London: Wallflower Press.
Bjorkman, S. and L. Franke (1996), Naked miracles: Breaking the Waves, Sight
and Sound, 6: 10, pp. 3637.
Cavell, S. (1996), Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown
Woman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis,
London: Routledge.
Doane, M. A. (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Womans Film of the 1940s,
Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.
Dreyer, C. (1928), La Passion de Jeanne DArc/The Passion of Joan of Arc,
France.
Godard, J.-L. (1962), Vivre Sa Vie, France.
Gordon, S. (2004), Breaking the Waves and the negativity of Melanie Klein:
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Kaplan, A. (1985), Ann Kaplan replies to Linda Williamss something else
besides a mother: Stella Dallas and the maternal melodrama (Cinema
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Nobus, D. (2007), The politics of gift-giving and the provocation of Lars Von
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Vidor, K. (1937), Stella Dallas, USA.
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Paula Quigley
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Von Trier, L. (1996), Breaking the Waves, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Netherlands, Norway, Iceland.
(1998), Idioterne/The Idiots, Denmark, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Italy.
(2000), Dancer in the Dark, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, United
States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway,
(2003), Dogville, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands,
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suggesTed ciTaTion
Quigley, P. (2012), The spectacle of suffering: The womans film and Lars
von Trier, Studies in European Cinema 9: 2+3, pp. 155168, doi: 10.1386/
seci.9.2-3.155_1
conTribuTor deTails
Paula Quigley is a lecturer in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
Contact: Film Studies Department, School of Drama, Film and Music, Trinity
College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
E-mail: [email protected]
Paula Quigley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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