Tiny Little Lars

Letters

Vol. 26 No. 9 · 6 May 2004

From Vincent Deary

Here's the story depicted in a recent film. A woman comes to transform a small world by teaching its people, through extravagant example, about love, forgiveness and mercy. She has come from a 'Father' who is much more inclined to wrath, judgment and punishment. She is initially welcomed as a redemptive gift by the community, but then the people turn against her and subject her to degrading and sadistic punishments, which she endures without reproach. Following a final humiliation, during which she is forcibly tied to an immovable object, she returns to the Father to assume her inheritance – the kingdom and the power of the Father. The film is Dogville. Only in its ending does it differ in plot structure from The Passion of the Christ. In Dogville there is a second coming, a judgment day: having assumed the Father's power, the redeemer returns to judge the world and consigns everyone, except the dog, to the fire. Lars von Trier, Dogville's writer and director, even calls his heroine 'Grace'. In her review, however, Joanna Kavenna can see in Grace only a hapless masochist and, in search of the spiritual significance of her story, makes the ungainly suggestion that 'she may have shifted religious archetypes, from madonna/whore to avenging angel' (LRB, 15 April). Most other reviewers also missed the parallel with the Passion. The active, redemptory act of sacrifice is perceived, when performed by a woman, as an act of masochism or the exploitation of a helpless victim.

Vincent Deary
Edinburgh

Vol. 26 No. 11 · 3 June 2004

From Joanna Kavenna

My main point about Dogville was that it was an incoherent amalgam of religious archetypes, Hollywood violence and dodgy fantasy, masquerading as avant-garde cinema. Vincent Deary suggests that the film is a coherent 'parallel' to the Passion, with Grace as Christ (Letters, 6 May). I don't recall Christ saying: 'Suffer the little children to come unto me and be gunned down by my daddy's henchmen while I blast a hole in my lover's head.' Equally, I can't remember Christ being raped by his neighbours. Deary suggests that I misunderstand Grace's 'active, redemptory act of sacrifice' as 'the exploitation of a helpless victim'. It's not clear to me how being chained to a bed and repeatedly raped makes Grace 'active'. And who do these rapes 'redeem' – the rapists? Grace herself? Faced with these un-Christlike elements, Deary picks out another 'parallel' in Dogville – to Judgment Day. Had he gone on, he could have read Dogville as a 'parallel' to the whole Bible, with Tom and Grace as Adam and Eve, the gangsters as cherubim and seraphim, Grace as Moses, Grace as Job, Chuck as Potiphar's wife, Tom as Ruth, the gooseberry patch as the burning bush, Jack as Lazarus, Tom as John the Baptist, Vera's children as the Pharisees, Grace as Mary Magdalene, Tom as Judas, Tom's father as Pontius Pilate, Chuck as the Whore of Babylon and the gangsters as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I can only assume that the Dog would, in this parallel, be God.

Joanna Kavenna
Oxford