I used to avoid Lars von Trier’s shitty experiments called films, as they usually tend to be manifestations of his mental insanity. But I happened to decide to watch Dogville (2003), despite not liking Nicole Kidman in the least. Better late than never, they say.

I’m still not sure what to believe about it. It’s certainly one of a kind. It has its merits, but it also has huge flaws. It could have been made a true horror movie, but it’s not one. For having tried, and for the performance of the actors, I rate it 7/10, so my criticism might surprise you.

The YTS (YIFY) torrents are broken for several minutes after 1h20m, but both these torrents and some streamers use as a source the Blu-ray issued by Concorde in 2019 and thus have the chapter titles in German. Some looney who like to make things up believe that Lars von Trier used German chapter titles in Dogville in homage to Bertolt Brecht, but this is rubbish. It’s just that Concorde’s Blu-ray has a cover that’s 100% in German, and chapters have been left also in German, with subtitles. The theatrical release and two DVD editions have these titles in English.

On the other hand, the setting is indeed Brechtian; the movie is no real movie but a play (and an abstract one at that!) with an excess of voiceover and symbolism, so maybe a late extra nod to Brecht has been added. But it’s not obvious, and it wasn’t there initially.

Furthermore, Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, includes, among others, The Ballad of Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny. There are shocking parallels between the story of Seeräuber-Jenny and Dogville. So, in the end, Lars von Trier is almost a plagiarist, except that the story in Dogville is actually perverse. (I just learned that von Trier has explicitly stated that Dogville was directly inspired by Pirate Jenny. Oh, well.)

The first thing I did was to read Roger Ebert’s review, because I knew he strongly disliked the movie. This is not the first time that Ebert disappointed me, but it was usually that he liked something that I didn’t; this time, it was the other way around.

He might be right that one can find faults with the execution, especially given the length (almost 3 hours!), but what the famous critic objected to is that “in his town, which I fear works as a parable of America, the citizens are xenophobic, vindictive, jealous, suspicious and capable of rape and murder.”

Apparently, von Trier never visited the United States (“since he is afraid of airplanes”), but even so, he “could justifiably make a fantasy about America, even an anti-American fantasy, and produce a good film, but here he approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner.”

Ebert cannot accept what he sees as the message of this film: “What von Trier is determined to show is that Americans are not friendly, we are suspicious of outsiders, we cave in to authority, we are inherently violent, etc. All of these things are true, and all of these things are untrue. It’s a big country, and it has a lot of different kinds of people. Without stepping too far out on a limb, however, I doubt that we have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town.”

This must be one of the most foolish reviews I’ve ever read!

Yes, there are so many “Americas.” I only saw a tiny portion of it “in the flesh” two decades ago, and we all saw hundreds of fictitious cinematographic representations of it. Then, there are novels. Documentaries. Docudramas. There are ways to see that America is kaleidoscopic.

But my take is that von Trier’s choice of an imaginary small town somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in the early 1930s was merely symbolic.

That “the actors (or maybe it’s the characters) seem to be in a kind of trance much of the time,” or that “they talk in monotones” as if “reciting truisms rather than speaking spontaneously,” cannot be denied. But that’s the whole point!

No, I don’t agree with the artistic choice. But I’m not a fan of Bertold Brecht. If I were to make a movie that gives you nightmares for a month, I’d have made significant changes.

There’s nothing wrong with the minimalism of the set. But I’d have graduated it much better.

My version would have started with the same stiff, unnatural oversimplification. Simpletons but harmless, right?

Then, as time goes by, the characters should become less and less unnatural (if not absurd), monotonous, and “tranced.” Every single threshold in ignominy passed by this small community would have brought a change in the colors (increasingly vivid and natural) and speaking style (more and more rational and plausible). The way Dogville was made, there are a few major thresholds that seem too abrupt, despite the vast estate of available time. (Time management is a bitch, eh?)

Von Trier committed entirely to artificiality to distance the audience emotionally and force them to focus purely on the mechanics of moral rot. My version would have been more of a psychological trap that would have gradually pulled the audience out of abstraction and sunk them into the terrifying reality of the abuse. (The nightmare machine.)

I get it (I hope). Von Trier means to say that any community and literally any individual, regardless of their appearance of insignificance, modesty, righteousness, or mild benevolence toned down by an understandable suspicion toward strangers, can and will become a beast. The collective vicious beast of a small, quasi-isolated community is an old trope. Oh, the horrors that can happen in small-town America, where the sheriff is a monster or the head of an evil organization that “disappears” any stranger that passes by! I’ve watched countless such movies of variable quality.

And this could be extrapolated to any place on Earth. Somehow, an American set has been found to be more persuasive and even natural in all its reductionism. Had he placed it in Patagonia, Mexico, Italy, or Denmark, it wouldn’t have convinced. The time and place are brilliant, but I hated how Ben, the truck driver, always had a dirty face. Oh, and Tom Edison? Phlease!

On the one hand, it’s great that the film is not “yet another small-town horror movie,” but on the other hand, it requires too much imagination, something that Joe Sixpack might lack. Make it gradually become more realistic, and you have a blockbuster! (Well, not really; not at three hours, but you got the idea.)

Once the sexual abuse spree starts, it’s really not credible enough. Graduation, graduation, graduation! Then, the captivity comes too abruptly, too, although I’m not sure how it could have been otherwise. Of course, there was also plenty of non-sexual abuse. “From a business perspective, your presence in Dogville has become more costly. Because it’s more dangerous for them to have you here … since they feel there should be some counterbalance, some quid pro quo.”

Too much monotony, dialogues that are constantly scattered with absurdity and non sequiturs, and other debatable choices made me grumble.

Then, the last chapter! “In which Dogville receives the long-awaited visit and the film ends.” Also, in which every single unknown is revealed to the viewer.

The last chapter is even more ill-devised than the others.

The whole talk about “arrogance” is grotesque.

The Big Man: “Rapists and murderers may be the victims, according to you. But I, I call them dogs, and if they’re lapping up their own vomit, the only way to stop them is with the lash.”

Grace: “But dogs only obey their own nature, so why shouldn’t we forgive them?”

The Big Man: “Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey their own nature.”

Grace: “So I’m arrogant? I’m arrogant because I forgive people.”

The Big Man: “You, my child, my dear child, you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself.”

Grace: “Why shouldn’t I be merciful? Why? … They’re human beings, Dad.”

If in chapter seven Grace used the word “stoicism” twice, now we sense in her some sort of a Stockholm syndrome packaged as “being merciful.”

Grace: “The people who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances.”

No shit.

The transformation came after some artifices that I found boring. Everyone was expecting it (at least, I did!), and here it comes: “Shoot them, burn down the town.”

The Big Man said that, but Grace was the executioner. Literally, in one case. “Some things you have to do yourself.”

Revenge? Punishment? Retribution?

Is Lars von Trier saying that stoicism is wrong and revenge is good? Or, maybe, that corruption eventually affected even Grace, who, influenced by her father, metamorphoses from a slave into a true master, an Übermensch?

I have absolutely no idea what the final message is. That we’re all corruptible seems to be an axiom. That some viewers would experience satisfaction with the ending—that’s a certainty.

Or, perhaps, this is an affront to both Stoicism and Christianism; who knows?

Of course, I’m stupid. There’s a “canonical” interpretation that it’s indeed theological: the opposition between the unearned love, forgiveness, and salvation commonly called “grace” in the New Testament (hence her name, Grace) and the Old Testament’s justice (represented by the Big Man).

The queer thing is that, when Grace regresses into “The Old Law,” what happens isn’t just revenge. She is granting the townspeople “humanity” (they were “dogs”), thus holding them accountable for their sins. Unfortunately for them, the penalty for their sins is execution, very much in the spirit of the Old Testament.

Dura lex, sed lex. Forgive the dogs, but kill the humans. I love cynicism.