Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
Tax the Rich

 

Movie Monday

 

This is the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan and the day after another terrorist killed a group of people in the US. Others have tread this ground with polemics more wisely than I can but unfortunately all this just adds to the many examples that tell me our species may be fatally flawed. But thinking a lot about the evolutionary crap-shoot which endows some homo sapiens to think through this absurdity called human existence, I had a minor epiphany. You know those beavers who are always building dams? Well, who says they are? Us? The observing "other" species who is not the actual specie doing the work? So I looked at those dams again and realized that beavers are not building dams, they're just gnawing wood and dumping the used wood in the stream bed. Building dams, my eye! This is their "bellying up to the bar" and then smashing their glasses on the floor under them

 

On to the movies: Let me do a long overdue, review of Dogville  and Manderlay; basically so I can delete them from my recorder. Both are directed by Lars von Trier who also directed Melancholia . I had major problems reviewing these movies because I first thought they were book ends of the human condition as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are. (AHOV - bad man trying to be good and EP - good man having to be bad.) But they are not that and yet they do tell the human story.

 

First, there's a tremendous "visual" problem for me with both movies since in the earlier movie, Dogville (2003), Nicole Kidman plays Grace, the mob boss's daughter and the focal character. This is chronologically followed by Manderlay (2005) with visually younger Bryce Dallas Howard as the older Grace. I don't know if you needed the same actor in both movies but the age difference "jarred" the movies apart for me so I couldn't see Manderlay as continuing the story of the Grace I knew from Dogville. They are still very good movies though the "Our Town" sets, while catchy in Dogville, appeared more strained by Manderlay. By that movie, it felt like von Trier was having function follow form which makes the artificiality more glaring.

 

A short summary of what happens in these movies: Grace, the daughter of a powerful mob boss flees him into remote Dogville, Colorado where, through no fault on her part, her relations with the townspeople deteriorate harshly to a brutal denouement. Finally accepting rescue from Dogville by her father, they and the mob travel on to Alabama where Grace discovers a plantation stuck in the time of US slavery. Deciding to stay behind to "make things right" with some mob muscle as back-up, Grace gets an unexpected lesson in how the world should work versus how it really does.

 

You can see the continuation of Grace's Christ-figure role from Dogville into Manderlay. If you accept that the Caan/Dafoe mob boss characters in each movie represent the angry, vengeful god of old, then you can find a connection between both movies as Grace, daughter of this god, wandering her forty days in the wilderness of  Dogville and Manderlay. However, it's pretty obvious that von Trier's main purpose in Manderlay is holding US racial problems up to glaring light; always a provocative theme when done well, and it is here.

 

OK, I've come this far, so let me really stretch my thoughts to breaking. Finally, we have von Trier's Melancholia (2011) which is the story of the end of our planet. Has von Trier morphed Grace into Justine here? Could Justine, who is obviously mentally unstable, be the damaged Grace after her psyche-shattering experiences in Dogville and Manderlay? With these three movies is von Trier saying: The world is absurd and can and will damage you beyond repair. But you must do the best job of living as you can. And then is he visualizing this statement when it is Justine, the most damaged and least stable member of her family, who calmly accepts their fate and is the comforting influence for the others?

 

And that folks, is why I can't give up on movies. How they are presented as an art form angers me often  and you must sift through a lot of dross to get to any gems. But they are an art form like a painting or a book which inspires you to look beyond the obvious; and it's not always the message the artist had in mind which you take away from his work.

 

You don't have to enjoy Dogville or Manderlay, or even Melancholia, they may even make you uncomfortable, but they are all well worth your viewing and thinking.