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The House That Jack Built
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A strange detail in the lead-up to the finale of The House That Jack Built fatally
distracted me. Jack (Matt Dillon) has just gone to great lengths to secure a
particular, single bullet in order to execute a line of guys tied up in a row
inside a gruesome storage facility containing every corpse this serial killer
has so far toted up. To get the right focal distance (note the reflexive
reference to a camera lens), Jack has to force open a door to a room he – in a
plot detail heavily signalled much earlier – has never been able to access. In
the darkness of that room, just at the point of firing his rifle, Jack is
interrupted by the now-familiar (to us) voice of a spectral visitor – “Verge”
(short for Virgil), played by Bruno Ganz. Meanwhile, faceless cops – in a vague
show of “suspense” rare in this movie – are in the process of breaking into the
facility to nab Jack. Verge, in an inexplicable moment of empathy, counsels
Jack to “follow his materials” and “build his house” at last – a structure
assembled with corpses. As the cops break through the iron door and start
firing (not great police procedure!), Verge and Jack slip through a hole in the
floor and begin their trek along Limbo.
The detail I’m talking about: what about those poor guys
tied to the bar, anxiously awaiting death? Are they spared, are they rescued,
are they relieved, are they accidentally shot by cops? Although we’ve had many
glimpses of their mortal agony, the film couldn’t care less about them now;
they have become irrelevant. There’s a gun poked through a door, and there’s a
hole in the floor letting light play on mystical water: nothing else matters at
that point. It’s a fast transition to the Afterlife.
This detail made me ponder von Trier’s aesthetic –
especially since Dancer in the Dark (2000), a film I greatly admire.
When he first started abstracting narrative worlds in such an extreme and
brutal way – filming any old landscape as “America”, or having his stars act on
starkly minimal theatre-boards as the ultimate Brechtian dress-down of
representational illusion – the procedure was intriguing and exciting. Why
bother to “fill out” what is imaginary in the first place? Why not use bold
short-cuts, strictly “notional scenes” (as Raymond Durgnat called them, après Godard), symbolic abstractions? As
we’ll see, symbolic/philosophical abstraction is where The House That Jack Built really wants to go, after all.
But, long before we can get to that, we have a plot, a
character, a world. Has there ever been a flimsier approximation of all that
necessary “filler” than in The House That
Jack Built? Nothing has any illusionistic weight in this film. Chopped up
into key (I guess they’re key, or at least representative) “incidents” in the
life of this dogged killer, nothing really accumulates, refers backward or
forward (apart from clumsy devices like that locked storage facility door). At
the end of the first murder (of Uma Thurman, given some of the worst “If you
were really a serial killer …” dialogue ever devised), Jack refers to a
“border” between states, territories, countries (whatever) that allows him to
get away with murder (and corpse disposal). This so-called border is like a
piece of sky-writing, pure rhetoric; it has no circumstantial reality, no
weight in the story.
The same goes for virtually every element in the main
storyline. Jack has OCD – leading to a long, long scene of him going back to
the scene of Incident 2’s crime over and again, grimly played by von Trier without
any feeling for potential black humour – but then, at a certain point later on,
his condition just “disappears”. Hmmm. In Incident 1 just mentioned, a coda
refers to a mechanic never letting on what he saw – but the mechanic is just a
cipher in the tale, included once and never again. At one point, Jack is seen
deciding to work on faking/mimicking emotions before a mirror, with the aid of
a surreal-looking photo collection for reference – and there’s a solitary flash
back to this during one of the Incidents – but we’ve already seen a relatively
natural range of facial expressions in Dillon’s performance long before this
supposed change or “development” in the killer’s behaviour and demeanour.
Later, the Incident-episode involving Riley Keough
begins in medias res: he’s been
having some relationship with her already (when, exactly? – narrative time
doesn’t exist here), and it’s even something like “love”. Hard to believe! And
so on, and on. All throughout, traditional plot hooks – aspects relating to
danger, suspicion, the amount of dead bodies he’s accumulating, the prospect of
being caught, law-enforcement agencies on his trail and tracking him down – are
blithely suspended. Above all, the world that Jack inhabits has no solidity, no
co-ordinates, no reality whatsoever, in national, geographic, cultural or any
other terms: it’s just Jack in his van bowling down an “American” road, Jack
and his victims in a few suburban or flophouse rooms and caravans, Jack in his
storage facility that nobody ever notices until he personally hijacks a cop car
and keeps the siren blaring and light flashing outside his lair. And it’s not
all “inside the mind of the killer”, either, à la Bret Easton Ellis’ American
Psycho (the novel more than its film adaptations) – that alibi doesn’t fit
to explain the rampant disconnection between elements. It’s just, and only, the
film-fragments that von Trier strictly needs to string this contraption
together, to “build his house”. But let’s suspend the temptation to “projective
interpretation” for a few minutes longer, and stick with the aesthetics for the
time being.
Auto-critique: am I being unfair? (Note: having
started watched the complete Fanny and
Alexander [1982] by Ingmar Bergman the following day, I’m a little bit
intoxicated by the intricate way a great filmmaker can conjure a complex
fictive world.) Von Trier is not interested in realism – this much is clear. He’s
using ellipsis, fragmentation, stylisation, distanciation – just as Jon Jost
did in his serial killer portrait Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), and as Maurice Pialat would surely have done if he had lived to re-realise
his abandoned 1977 project The Murderers (made by Patrick Grandperret in 2005). OK. But why, then, do the basic staging
and shooting procedures for the bulk of the film remain stolidly realistic/naturalistic,
as do almost all the acting performances (Ganz excepted)? In fact, this strikes
me as a sign of von Trier’s dreadful laziness as a director: it’s not as awful
here as in the unbearable Melancholia (2011), but his default recourse to handheld camerawork, jump-cutting and seemingly
absent or semi-improvised scene-blocking kills all mise en scène stone dead. There are striking images (the more
pictorial-painterly, the better), some strong cuts, some crazy sound-design
atmospherics (that buzzing sound of souls in the torment of Hell!) – but no
“bodies in space” in any engaging or pleasing way.
Yes, I know that The
House That Jack Built – and most von Trier, period – is not aiming to
“please” anyone terribly much. It’s meant as a provocation – on an ascending
scale of provocations across the director’s career, as his public persona rises
ever more to the occasion of providing the worst that the public (including its
most unsympathetic, unforgiving segment) expects of him. So, I take on board
the basic “dare” of this project: to “stick with” a serial killer – to
empathise, paradoxically, with a psychopath incapable of empathy – and to treat
him (in the director’s words to Cahiers
du cinéma) as someone who “has a life, a soul – just like the rest of us”. I’m
willing to put up with the film’s wilfully sadistic element (indulged in some
scenes, mercifully skipped over in others – as if von Trier himself was
undecided or even squeamish about the application of this template). I accept
(provisionally!) the “murderous crime as art” theme, familiar from many a B
movie, and here rather wonkily rigged up through the link to architecture and
its history (cathedrals, etc) – another awkward disconnection or mismatch of
levels in the film’s nominal world. And I’m even willing to overlook the patent
red-rag-to-a-critical-bull of the film’s flirtation with the ideology of Nazi “perfection”
(Albert Speer, the extermination camps, etc) as a way of characterising Jack’s
“sublime madness” – and its fleeting montage-link to von Trier’s own
oeuvre-in-review. Other commentators (from The
Guardian to Positif), I am well
aware, are happy to stick their “woke”-knives in at that level, and leave the
matter be. But, to be fair, The House
That Jack Built – which is rather better than anything von Trier has made
since The Five Obstructions (2003) and The Boss of It All (2006) – has, I believe, something else
on its mind beyond the usual bad-boy moves.
Is it just gamesmanship or oneupmanship that pushes
von Trier, here, to anticipate and include in his filmic text some of the
critiques he is most likely to receive? Why are the victims female? Why are
they so stupid? What’s all this stuff
about the beauty of perfect, rational construction? – all of these doubts are spoken
aloud in the film and, at times (confusingly), they even seem to alter the
course of its overall narration, as when Jack suddenly switches from targeting
women to setting his sights on the extermination of all (any) men, or humankind
in general. (Following the lead of demon-angel Zoë Lund in Ms .45,
perhaps!) But the stakes are higher than polemical frivolity or simply stirring
public controversy in the bogus name of “free speech”.
In The House
That Jack Built, von Trier aspires – more than ever, although it has always
been a tendency in his work from its earliest days – to a fully allegorical,
almost medieval, quasi-Biblical form of narrative cinema: the type of sparse, spare
construction that Erich Auerbach patiently elaborates (in relation to writing
and literature) in the early chapters of his masterly Mimesis (1946). Von Trier’s attraction to this form takes a new
turn in The House That Jack Built,
because the film is constructed – or tries very hard to construct itself – as a
kind of agora, a public debate, an
open argument between life-world, philosophical positions. It is certainly intriguing
to note this unusual trend to staged-conceptual-dialogue in a very diverse
range of recent films, working at various levels: José Luis Guerin’s The Academy of Muses (2015), the
Canadian oddity My Thesis Film (2018) and Joseph Kahn’s
wonderful rap-battle special, Bodied (2017).
There’s no doubt that where the film arrives to – over
a rocky plunge down to the fires of Hades! – is where its best elements have
been taking us, all along. The rhetorical framework of the aural flashback – Jack’s
dialogue with Verge – contains its best dialogue, its best direction (in a
beyond-strict-mise en scène sense),
and its best acting: Ganz is particularly good in a role that demands the use
of solely voice for five-sixths of his performance time. Verge mocks, queries,
counters Jack’s psychopathic visions at (almost) every turn – while also
confessing himself intrigued, drawn, even swayed for a second or two (hence his weird buddy-exhortation to Jack to “build his
house” in the penultimate scene).
That said, there are, shall we say, lingering semantic problems that bug me in this
film. I react badly to the evident dissociation between von Trier’s “committed”
use of a generic-trash format – the serial killer thriller – and his quite
obsequious genuflections, throughout, to High Art: Goethe, great paintings,
poetry, classical music, all the rest of it. My objection is not to this art in
itself – I love some of it, too – but in the loading that the film’s “argument”
gives it: after all, Virgil’s case on behalf of Love, Truth, Beauty, etc, rests
almost entirely on these references (rather than to, say, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1986/1990]!). Robert Bresson did not stumble on this
problem in making his serial killer
movie, L'Argent (1983) – every Great Director
should! – largely because he was never as grandly pretentious (or obvious) in
his dramatic/conceptual design as von Trier has often been.
I also found the cinephile references, inter alia, incoherent: alright, so
there’s a twist on Ganz-the-Angel from Wings of Desire (1987),
but the “Mr Sophistication” tag from The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978)? I don’t get it – and I suspect von Trier doesn’t, either.
MORE von Trier: Breaking the Waves, Zentropa, The Kingdom © Adrian Martin 16 December 2018 |
