About a year ago, I put up this post about Dogville and Dancer in the Dark and how I struggled through my viewings of those films. I'm not quite sure why I thought I'd be in for something different with Von Trier's 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, but I was lured by the blurb: "A paralyzed man asks his wife to satisfy his sexual desires by seeking out other men." I mean, there is potential here for an alternative love/sexuality story that exceeds norms and leads to some sort of liberation for all involved. But, alas, Emily Watson's female lead, Bess, is another of Von Trier's cherubic, innocent women who allows herself to be destroyed because she has so little agency of her own.
Where this movie is different, however, is that, as Bess becomes more debauched and ruined, she becomes the vehicle of redemption and recovery for her husband. When Jan (the husband) becomes paralyzed, she begins to bargain with God, giving herself over to all sorts of behavior that makes her feel degraded, in exchange for Jan's recovery. And with every so-called sin of the wife, the husband does, indeed, recover a little bit. And in her ultimate death, he walks again. Blockbuster Online blurbs the film, saying, "With Breaking the Waves, director Lars Von Trier fashions an often disturbing tale of the singular power of love." Again, it's no wonder I was misled, because, I would argue here that the real subject of this movie is not Bess' overarching love for Jan, but Jan's vampiric, though not entirely conscious, abuse of Bess. And that's why this is a Von Trier film.
In last October's post, I talked a lot about the sick thrill an audience of one of these films receives as we watch the ruination of yet another image of female innocence (and interestingly, female stupidity) progress. Again, I have two problems with this filmic conceit. The first being that there is no representation female goodness without rendering the character as a simpleton, as is the case with Kidman's character in Dogville, Bjork's character in Dancer in the Dark, and again here with Bess.
And then, the second is that a conventional ideal of moral virtue is equated with victimhood. Now I don't really know if Von Trier's second contention here is true or not. In some ways, I think it is, but there are also plenty of examples of innocent ignorance being an active, rather than passive, destructive force-- like in Genesis, maybe? Also coming to mind is a curious little novel I read when I was in high school called Photographing Fairies, in which supposedly innocent little girls went around picking off male fairies as they attempt to fuck female fairies, because the girls are "innocent children" and therefore do not understand the generative quality of the act. But, I'm getting derailed. Von Trier posits that female goodness is a liability. And then he takes great joy in proving this notion, through an extended degradation of one such innocent. And again, I'm troubled by the fact that my role as audience member makes me feel complicit in his thrill. It seems I haven't really moved past this problem in the year since I saw Dancer in the Dark.
So, now, this brings me to a fascinating paper I just read about representations of sexuality of Kubrick's much critically maligned film, Eyes Wide Shut. Now, I could go on and on about how I think there's good stuff happening in that movie, even though the critics pretty universally panned it, but that's not really why I'm bringing it up now. The paper discusses at some length this notion that, in modern western culture, there has been a "sexualization of love" --i.e., a conflation of sexual desire with relationship and affection--and how this has been a heretofore unknown concept (because it's been only recently that people starting pairing off for reasons relating to affection and/or desire-- throughout history, it's been about money, property, family and/or bloodlines, right? ) But then, Deleyto makes a very interesting point that I think is relevant to Von Trier's overriding perspective:
"Torben Grodal [a film critic] has recently challenged this perception [that until recently, sex has not been a culturally available solution for women in the throes of marital discord], taking issue, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, with the contemporary tendency to reduce all types of emotions, particularly, love and desire, to a single origin, namely sex. For him, love and desire are clearly differentiated emotions that have different historical origins and that may interact with each other in historically specific manners but must be kept apart in cultural analysis. Film genres reinforce this division, with romantic films being about 'personalised bonding' and pornographic films about 'anonymous desire.' That is, for him not only are the two emotions different in theory and in people's real experience but cultural discourses such as films also keep them separate, in spite of the insistence of ideological critics who tend to either collapse the two or categorise them according to fixed ideological apriorisms: that love is repressive (for women) and desire is liberating, or, in other words, that the only liberating way of conceiving love is by equating it with desire. In his view, the fashionable link of love with patriarchy and desire with emancipation, fluid gender roles, and the body does not stand up to historical investigation."(Emboldening is mine.)
So, if I'm understanding correctly, Deleyto is saying that Grodal is taking issue with the popular "academic" notion that love is stultifying for the female, but sex is not. And I suppose, I had never considered the idea that this was a fashionable, though flawed, concept-- but now that I do, I see some truth to the labeling it as such. On a side note, I would argue that Grodal is missing something however, in that he does not address how, in many popular discourses (let's just toss Black Snake Moan back into the pot for a moment, shall we?), female sexual liberation is seen not as liberation at all, but as acting out and/or trying to solder over some psychic wound-- that a woman cannot be sexual for the sake of sex unless she's damaged in some way. But again, I'm digressing.
Where I think Grodal and Deleyto are onto something, though-- and where it applies to Breaking the Waves-- is that I think, perhaps, Von Trier espouses this "fashionable" idea that love is repressive of the female (OK, OK, if I'm really being honest, I must concede that sometimes I espouse the self-same thought. Juries still out on whether or not I actually believe it.). Here, I'll point out that Deleyto pretty consistently uses the word "love" as a synonym for "relationship," rather than as a synonym for "affection"-- big frickin' difference, eh? The character of Bess destroys herself because of her love (read: relationship) for her husband-- and for her god. Because she has a pre-existing condition of being in love, any sexual experiments outside of her marital relationship are not freeing, but horrific and they happen ONLY because she is enslaved by her relationship with her husband-- and by her relationship with her god. And so, her only moments of happiness occur when her emotions of love are conflated with her feelings of sexual desire as directed towards her husband.
Deleyto goes on to say that Grodal's arguments eventually fall apart on one level: "While no doubt encouraging and inspirational for people whose alternative sexual habits have previously been socially denigrated, the insistence of much of film theory on equating heterosexuality and/or romance with conservativeness and patriarchal oppression runs the risk of becoming just as oppressive and inhibiting for many other people." And I guess I think this is where Von Trier's perspective falls apart for me, too. If I'm feeling generous and assume that Von Trier is after more than getting his kicks from telling gratuitously salacious stories about ways in which sweet, simple girls are abused-- and that he's really after proving how our culture treats what is commonly perceived as a feminine predilection toward romance in a consummately predatory fashion, well, then, I can't help but feel that there IS something oppressive going on there, too. Perhaps I feel this way because Von Trier writes a story in which activities that have the potential to be liberating for Bess wind up being used in service to her deference to her husband. So, if all of her motivations stem from her need to maintain romantic connection with a man who, though seemingly kind and affectionate, does not have her best interests at heart, Bess becomes a victim of the, uh, what shall I call it? The Patriarchality of Love? An to this end, it is not the love that's so important, but rather, Bess' victimhood. And therefore, Von Trier is necessarily complicit in her subjugation. And I, as voyeuristic audience, am as well. That, in a nutshell, is my problem with Von Trier-- he offers no way out in which people can be both sexual and be in love. More to the point, he offers no way out at all, especially if you are good-hearted and a woman.
And this brings me right back to the idea that, in the cultural discourse, being a good woman is perceived as a) not possessing a faculty and/or desire for sex for the sake of sex itself (i.e., un-entangled with the desire for love/relationship) and b) as being necessarily disempowered. Fuck! This is so blasted frustrating! My blogging is taking on the characteristic of something vicious and cyclical. I just can't get away from harping on this one point, time and time again, now, can I?
This is why I need to go to grad school again, write this damn book that's in my head, and hope I can make some peace with my little demon-in-the-discourse. So, OK, critical film studies programs-- you're on notice. I'm coming. Sooner or later, I'm coming!
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