The Idiots (Lars von Trier) 2000
“Now
Lars von Trier, one of Dogma's founders, has used these techniques to produce a
two-hour, semi-pornographic Mentos commercial.” – A.O. Scott, The New
York Times
Lars
von Trier is, to me, one of the most consistently intriguing media figures of
the last few years. He’s so determined to carve a niche for himself in film
history that he seems to be guaranteed one, at very least, due to his
grandstanding. Critical reception to this self-proclaimed genius is certainly
mixed. It’s not surprising that he is usually able to alienate a good portion
of his audience before they even view his film. Others, like Scott, seem unable
to get a concrete grasp on what they’re watching. For my money, the film is a
masterpiece. Combined with his other 2000 U.S. release, Dancer in the Dark,
von Trier has proven his self-proclamations of cinematic genius to be true.
Clearly,
The Idiots, von Trier’s first - and quite possibly last - Dogma film
challenges the viewer. I don’t mean to say that it’s a film that requires a
great deal of thought to understand. Rather, I mean it actively challenges the
viewer’s sensibilities. More than any of his other films, it seems to have a
political and aesthetic agenda. That agenda seems to be to punish the viewer for
having the desire to see what most filmmakers give us willingly. Perhaps punish
is too strong a word. Many find von Trier's filmmaking sadistic, but it's
actually quite giving. Although he shocks us in this film by showing us hardcore
sexual penetration when we get excited by the prospect of an orgy, or by
continuing to show us his tribe's initially hilarious idiotic behavior well past
the point where it makes us uncomfortable, he's actually considerate enough to
point out the lapses in thought that result in having these desires in the first
place. It's
quite responsible of him artistically to point out the fallacies in deriving
pleasure in the gross-out comedies that are currently experiencing a resurgence.
The
film also makes us focus on our social mores as we watch the film's tribe. In the
first scene, we have no idea that the "spazzing" is just an act. Our
initial reactions to the first scene's inappropriateness is embarrassment for
all those involved. When we see that the spazzer was faking, it's galling and
intriguing. Much like the film's creators must have felt with their Dogmatic
style's challenges, the troupe of idiots doesn't much know what the end result
of their work will be. We watch them as they continually escalate the level of
their pranks, with harrowing and humorous results. The film teeters between
being the most unwatchable and the most watchable film ever. It never tells us
how to feel about its characters, and it certainly seems at once to be
chastising and endorsing the behavior on display. Perhaps it's because von Trier
has previously demonstrated himself as such a cinematic provocateur, that we
feel up to the film's challenge. When the group's leader eventually throws down
the gauntlet, and challenges the group to take their spazzing home, a lot of the
group's ideological flaws that have been accumulating since the film's start
become destructive. We realized that the group, and the film was full of it, and
it is good to see that von Trier does not try to make us believe otherwise. The
film's ultimate resolution is satisfying (which seems to mimic Dreyer's Gertrud),
since it doesn't necessarily endorse a conviction in a specific belief system,
but, rather, belief in general.
****
- Masterpiece
September, 2001
Jeremy Heilman
