1 - Mr. Rhodes' challenge
Some time ago, in your 'Rhodes Contra Lambda C' posting (your most
prolific to date, that we are aware of) you, Mr. Rhodes, directly
challenged us on the concept of Will to Nothingness and attempted to
counterpose this most concrete concept to what you termed _hope_. It
seemed to us that the discussion was of no little consequence to you,
given the significant amount of time and emotion you devoted to your
several compositions vis a vis your usual dry one-liners. Alright then.
Now, that we have had the occasion to watch Breaking the Waves, we
accept your challenge - to discuss the movie and its issues.
2. Cinema and fairy-tales
>In a recent post I had mentioned that _Breaking the Waves_ refutes the
>Nietzschean claim that all otherworldliness masks a will to nothingness.
>(...) _Breaking the Waves_ is essentially a fairy tale (...)
Let us begin by noting that although it is our understanding that to
refute is "to prove wrong by argument or evidence" you instead chose to
provide us with what is, admittedly, a fairy tale, in place of argument
or evidence for otherworldliness. By definition a fairy tale is: "a
narrative of adventures involving fantastic forces and beings (as
fairies, wizards and goblins)- (...) designed to mislead". You asked-
would we ban fairy tales? Heavens no, Mr. Rhodes! As you might have
remarked, we have no sympathy nor need for banning or censorship. Not
even for fairy tales... But it seems to us that what is of interest in
fairy tales is not whether they can be factual or not - obviously they
cannot, but rather the forces at work in them, the prescribed moralities
which they are intended, through caricature, to convey. Do not
misunderstand us, it is not that this film is void of interest; on the
contrary, it is a deeply moving film, even if, clearly, we are not moved
at all in the same fashion as you by it.
Perhaps the movie you saw is different from the movie that Callihan saw,
and the one we saw different still from either of these. But what there
is little doubt about in our mind, is that, if von Trier is deceitful
because he is a good 'painter', the deceit he chooses is a mediocre one.
Nevertheless, the film raises indeed some very pertinent problems that
deserve scrutiny. If we had the misfortune of teaching a cinema or
ethics class, we would not hesitate in screening it. We might even feel
like Jupiter devouring the little children. Breakfast for the spirit.
Directors enjoy the ambivalence inherent to describing, with the
appearance of objectivity, the movement of the real, either to undermine
it or to lodge in it somewhere. But the painting itself is already the
fundamental bias of a vision. Taking a form is accepting a bias - and
while sculptors only with great difficulty can hide behind the form they
sculpt, directors easily can in principle - as they are inevitably faced
with making the form flee in time, but seldom do we see them refusing
the aesthetic sentiment, that last dictatorship of the spirit - beyond
morals and ideologies (beyond the cult of truth and Reason, the cult of
beauty). So it is curious to see von Trier compose a movie that comes
close to constructivism and anti-aestheticism (Vertov-style hand-held
camera, fleeting pans, eye on top of the events, paucity of words,
naturalism of the actors, 'absence' of make-up, etc), yet the whole is
subordinate to the moral, ideological and aesthetic signifier Bells in
the Heavens which in turn subordinates life to a 'living Christianity'.
This is because that fundamental ambivalence directors enjoy most often
becomes a major disadvantage - unlike musicians, who can often hide
their idiocy and paranoia behind their music (all you need do is avoid
their interviews, etc), directors usually tend to come shining on in
their Mr. Glad-Bag armor. They can't resist the temptation of massaging
the spectator and, like physicians, playing God. Often they see deeply
into the constraints imposed by reactive life, but "the need to right
the world in image", such as arises from saleability of the image, most
often plunges them headlong into mediocrity. Lars von Trier is no
exception to the rule of capital cinema, to which he adds a little
sprinkling of that old recipe for a 'living Christianity', a 'true
Catholicism'. The cinematographic equivalent of the
'worker-priests'...The von Trier trick is no better than Parker's "Angel
Heart", and in the end, is just as senile and facile.
3. Discovering the body
Breaking The Waves is about everyday life in the modern world and the
discovery of the body. Granted, the point-of-departure, the scenario of
a stifling and stern Calvinistic _Free_ Scottish Church, is really passé
and it would be void of interest (part of the political correctness
needed to sell movies these days: "It is stupid that only men can talk
in the service", says Bess) were its counter-point not Bess's desire to
make love to Jan in the bathroom of the wedding reception. Bess Gets
Married (to a foreigner) can be read as Bess's attempt to find a way out
of the dreariness of life in a closed community; marriage then becomes,
not a formal exchange of the private property of genitalia for purposes
of reproduction (Kant), but Bess's synthesis of the moral and legal with
the sexual: not marriage to make children, but as entitlement to
sexuality. This was Bess's issue for the body, the satisfaction of her
sexuality with Jan's body. Having found no other avenue for her
sexuality and love, the effect _Jan_ contextually becomes for her the
only possible line of escape ("How could you keep away from the boys?",
"I've been waiting for you", she answers with the commonplace of every
preserved virgin). She _believes_ without him, she is doomed to the
protracted death of an overtly repressive community.
So, the starting point (marriage and life with Jan) is the old Christian
problem of the modern world: the split within the white-man's community
between those "who want to cling to the world and those who want to flee
from it" (in the words of the minister), those who don't fear life nor
love, and those "who love the law". And this, in our humble opinion -
and that of the minister, is a simple problem to solve - one cannot be a
good Christian unless one denies the reality of the natural world in
favour of an ideal world of shadows. To cling to the world is
incompatible with any church, even one that claims to affirm life.
Churches with bells and churches without them, are still the signs of a
reactive life. For the church is all about freezing becoming, denying
and betraying life, equating it, converting it, transforming it, coding
it, overcoding it and finally selling it in little fragments. There is
not a bit of free sexuality that does not threaten any and every church.
In a sense, what is really stupid is not that only men talk at the
service but that women too want to attend and talk at the service of an
imaginary lord of their souls. What is politically correct is not
politically intelligent. That is even the problem with your own
aptitude to judge Nietzsche a misogynist - it finds fashionable echoes
of correctness but little intelligence in perceiving Nietzsche's
affectations. Perhaps your becomings remain locked in the male
figure...
There is however a way in which the story of Bess is the story of women
trapped between the homosexual communities of men: the community of
fathers (elders), the insiders and their rigid ways; the community of
workers, the outsiders, with their macho, beer-drinking, joint-smoking
and ass-affairs; the hospital community of male doctors - with its
neuroleptic apparatus; and the rough and tumble community of the
sailors. But this is also the story of women trapped by other women who
are somehow mandated by these homosexual communities of men: a mother
who expresses the wrath of the Elders, scolds her daughter, beats her
(or would?), shuns her; the whore as the woman of the sailor (Bess will
go where the other "girls" will not); the sister-in-law (Dorothy) as the
nurse who administers Bess's pills and tells Jan - "She very
susceptible. She's not right in the head."
Jan's gift of a sensual dress to Bess before his departure to the rig
functions as a thread that keeps alive Bess's memory of her journey of
discovery of the body through their relation. The apogee of this
journey will come late in Life Alone, when they make love to each other
by breathing together over the phone. Their sympathy will never again
resonate in synchronicity. The phone booth sequence, marks the actual
moment of their separation.
4. Psychoticizing the process: the instances of repression.
We note that your short description of the film, if it captured the Von
Trier signifier, lost nevertheless the real element of the story,
specifically, the instances of repression that drown Bess's process.
After a glimpse of life in discovering the body, repression- social and
sexual, returns with force redoubled. The real pivot of the movie is
not the bells' theme, nor Bess's tempting of God, but the sequential
instances of social and psycho-somatic repression that follow the
discovery of the body and become mediated by the figure of Jan. For
Bess, this sequence is tantamount to a fall from Eden. The first such
instance is the conversation with Jan and her grand-father (?) at the
dinner table:
GF to J - "when are you going back?"
B to GF - "We're staying together because we're so happy!"
J to B - "Bess, come on..."
Here, however, the sexual repression is dissimulated within the material
conditions of survival. Bess may be 'unrealistic' regarding the latter,
yet she affectively perceives it for all that it is: a first instance of
libidinal repression where GF and Jan stand together against her (it is
to GF that Jan mutters - "I wish I could stay [with Bess]"): the rule of
survival against the n powers of life, against the mastery of one's
life, against the blooming of her sexuality. When she refuses to let
Jan go, she beats the machinery with a pipe and fights with the door of
the chopper. It is not yet Jan who stands for this repression, but the
"need that other people have for Jan's work"- in the words of Bess's
God. Note that, more than ever, it is here that von Trier's critique of
modern society squarely fails - the gratuitousness and tyranny of
labour, are a need (very Marxist...even if, at the rig, the oil turned
into hot air).
Life Alone marks the vitiation of Bess's process. Jan may not yet stand
as agent of repression, but already Dorothy (who steals Bess's calendar
and denies having done so) and the mother ("learn how to endure to be
alone") are at work to ensure that Bess will internalize the contents of
the repression. At stake is moral restraint of her affects, "control of
her moods", repression of the body and her sexual drives, inducement of
guilt for her desires and actions. After the eruption of Life with Jan,
Bess's sexuality returns to hysteria and infantilization, and the
schizophrenic voices take on the molar polarity of Man and God, Oedipus
and the Father, in this case the Little Girl and the wrathful God (She
promises to the mother and to God that she "will be a good girl"). Bess
also judges: "Anthony will go to hell, everyone knows that!" And God
judges Bess through Bess, echoing the sacred male directives of the
dreary, repressive and oppressive world of the congregation.
>God (Who, by the way, speaks through Bess, allowing us to think that she is merely making >these divine conversations up)
Interesting, the way you choose to phrase this, as it already betrays
the extent that you, as spectator, have already bit, lock, stock and
barrel, the bait of the director. It is internalization of this kind of
monologue which serves as foundation for the structure of
characterological armor. Praying, out loud or not, is precisely the
reinforcement of this continuous internal dialogue. Everyone today
undergoes this white-man process of socialization, yet it is considered
to be a clinical sign of mental derangement to publicly expose it in
oneself: Bess is caught between a neurotic content (reproach, guilt,
atonement and prayer) and a psychotic form (her relation to a punishing
God who serves as motor cause of events regarding Jan's state of
health). Only in your mind, Bess's mind - or that of von Trier, is God
talking to Bess, or "speaking through Bess". What speaks through any
Bess brought to this overt state of rupture, is the body, Bess's
unconscious in its cosmic communication with nature, not the hypostasis
of a metaphysical and anthropomorphic Being. But her unconscious is
neither on the side of the Little Girl nor on the side of God. It
stands against both of them, as that which creates the tension which,
unresolved, leads to reinvestment of infantile reactions. It is neither
Bess, nor God who make up these "divine conversations", _but the
unconscious state of tension in her body_.
Bess's request to God for Jan's return is thus but the expression of an
internal monologue that makes conscious her latent desires - which
remain undischarged, and serves as anchor for her self-deceit, the will
Bess has to deceive herself. In her desperation of desire, Bess has
finally turned Jan into the obsessive object of desire: by force of
repression, the escape turns into a molar line that will serve to
effectively block any other possible line of flight.
"...the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of
degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to
fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological
obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life,
which have remained intact, continually struggle with new experiments
and devices." (GM: 13)
That Jan comes back paralyzed can only be seen by Bess as the punishment
she 'deserves', from a Christian perspective, for having dared to
desire, for having asked God to permit the discharge of her desires, for
having tempted God (who, by the way, is a mean son of a bitch, the
paternal judeo-Paulinian God of vengeance: the contradiction inherent to
any church of love: the need to judge and condemn life). But Bess could
have just as well imagined that, just as she beat the machinery with a
pipe, the machinery had beaten Jan back with a pipe...The choice of
quasi-cause is arbitrary.
Bess's sense of guilt is aggravated when Jan himself becomes an agent of
repression. When the chopper is back with a paralyzed Jan, she touches
his hand-
J - "What are you doing?"
B - "Holding your hand."
J (without any sensation of touch) - "Don't touch it! Don't touch
ME!!"
And, at the hospital, when Bess comes to visit dressed up in Jan's gift,
as soon as his buddies leave, he turns to her -
J - "Will you do something for me?"
B - "Yes."
J - "Next time you come, wear something loose, so I will not have to
see your body."
When Jan goes back home from the hospital and is under Bess's care, she
tries to kiss him on the occasion of his birthday, but he turns away.
And when Jan is taken back to the hospital, Jan accuses Bess of trying
to make him feel guilty in front of Dr. Richardson and Dorothy, and then
exclaims: "You look fucking awful. Why do you dress like that? - like a
widow. I'm not even dead yet. Maybe you wish I was!" Classic examples
of the double-bind of desire, these events become determinant of the
eclosion of Bess's will to nothingness: the Jan effect, turned into a
molar line, now proves to be without any issue- other than
self-destruction. For Bess, much as Socrates did, chose to be
'suicided', not by Athens, but by God. How she was brought to this
point, can hardly be conceived as the mere result of Jan having a sick
mind (who doesn't in the entire movie?). It takes the collaboration of
many factors to bring Bess to such a decision, it is also a function of
Jan's accident as much as a function of his incarnation of the powers of
repression: the outsider becoming part of an inside, even more ominous
than that of the Calvinists: and under the vengeful counsel from Dr.
Richardson, Jan commits the ultimate act of betrayal of love and signs
the papers to have Bess locked up.
There is nothing left for Bess - all the instances of repression have
conjured to block her exits- all the mechanisms of power fall upon her,
church, family, marriage, psychiatry, police, even 'God' who stops
talking.
5. The cure's worse than the disease
Of all the cures, none can claim to be better than the disease.
Mother's counsel to endure in loneliness, surely is a counsel to accept
suffering, not the counsel of solitude to find one's independence from
sexual fixations, compulsions or obsessions. Dorothy's pills, they too
are no solution to the struggle between the base and noble affects
tearing Bess's body apart. The minister's advice and threats ("if you
do not obey the commandments of the Law you have no place at the Lord's
table") can only exacerbate the situation. We are left with the
psychiatric route or the descent into hell, all meshed into one in the
end as salvation.
How does this come about, in the movie? Bess's state of distress due to
Jan's accident collides with her revulsion of her own desires. When Mr.
Rhodes synopsizes-
>To be able to tell Jan about her having sex with other men, she becomes a prostitute and >does so with God's blessing.
this is grossly unfair to the reader. In fact, the first meeting Bess
has with Dr. Richardson and the first fight with Jan that follows it are
most illuminating. The young doctor is sincere when he refuses to
psychiatrize her grief -
Doc - "Why did my predecessor admit you some years ago? There is
nothing unusual in being upset about your brother's death or your
husband's illness..."
B - "I don't know. Could I have some pills?"
D - "I don't think that people should be given pills because they do
what is only natural. Showing what you feel is surely no disease."
B - "What happened is my fault. I prayed to God to send him home!"
D - "What powers you possess! Do you really believe you possess these
powers? You people believe a lot about yourselves! Bess, perhaps you
should do some grieving for yourself instead of for him. You should
come and see me if you like" (said as he grabs her hands)."
It is not out of malice, that either Richardson or Jan want _at first_
to lift Bess's self-imposed burden of guilt, but also out of love. Both
realize the double cruelty (to Bess and Jan) of keeping Jan alive but
paralyzed. When Jan turns away from Bess's kiss, his repression of her
desire is still but the expression of his own death instinct and the
sober realization that-
"I'm finished Bess. You could take a lover without anybody noticing
it, but you can't divorce me - they would never allow it"
Jan is not thinking of himself, not at this point - as he later still
asks Dorothy, to "help me set her free!" Jan has in mind and heart what
is happening to the flower in his garden. It is out of lucidity, not
voyeurism, that he wants Bess to find once more a line of flight that
might still balance the reactionary attachments that Bess has for her
own community and its morals. He can still love her by being her
accomplice in freeing her sexuality, in finding the independent path of
her own desires. But Bess carries the process of self-repression deep
in her body - she leaves the room troubled, saddened, then returns
impetuously to vituperate something like-
"Is that what you think I want!? You cripple!!"
Jan does not want to block Bess's lines any further. Pursuing this to
its logical consequence, Jan tries to commit suicide but fails as
Dorothy bursts into the room. No more than his love succeeded in making
him an accomplice of Bess, his requests for Dorothy to help Bess "go on
with her life" will go unheeded, and Jan ends back at the hospital, on a
respirator. It is only in the aftermath of his suicide attempt that Jan
comes up with the scenario that Mr. Rhodes refers to - now, however,
much has changed. Dorothy has exhorted Bess to "give Jan the will to
live - that's more than any doctor can do!" And Jan now pleads with
Bess that he wants to live but "if I die it is because love cannot keep
me alive. But I cannot remember what it is like to make love. If I
cannot remember how to make love, then I'll die. (...) I want you to
find a man to make love to and get back here to tell me about it. It
will feel like we're together again. Do it for me.". The simple change
consists in this: if you, or somebody else, jails a bird for a long
time, you cannot set it free, nor blackmail it into freedom. Nor will
you succeed by forcing the matter and taking it out of its prison. The
fear of escape has become dominant. So Jan opts for making the jail
larger - "do it for me", now that opening the gate and smashing the jail
have failed. And who knows, after all, what jealousy may do for a man's
convalescence? Admittedly, it is a bad passion...
It is in this context that the last-ditch twin cures, descent into hell
and psychiatrization, now install themselves with the full regalia of
their malefic powers. From now on, the voices of Jan, Dorothy, God and
others will conspire to entrust Bess with the power to save Jan's life
by degrading herself in a journey of self-annihilation. This journey is
the proof that her God demands of her - the proof that she loves Jan,
and, at the same time, the proof that God must objectively exist, as Jan
will get better. What a tortuous and tortured deal.
"The 'beautiful soul' "deformed sensuality, wrapped up in verses and
other swaddling clothes, as 'purity of heart' "- (GM, 14).
Bess initially believes sexual debasement will be the cure of her ills,
but she finally settles to offer God her life in place of Jan's. If it
could be true - by some stupid quirk, how 'good' would Jan feel- being
kept alive through this deal? This is but a cinematographic repetition
of the fantastic trick invented by Paul: a God that immolates his own
son to save mankind - all life yet to come will then be in eternal debt
to this God that can love mankind so much as to damn itself in the
flesh. What a damnation of life! And what an ironical fate for Jesus,
that only Christian, whose death was thereby rewritten: "This holy
anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners', _the
Chandala_ within Judaism to oppose the ruling order - in language which,
if the Gospels are to be trusted, would even today lead to Siberia - was
a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in
an _absurdly unpolitical_ society. This is what brought him to the
Cross: the proof is the inscription on the Cross. He died for his guilt
- all ground is lacking for the assertion, however often it is made,
that he died for the guilt of others" (TAC, 27).
"Christianity _needs_ sickness, almost as much as Hellenism needs a
superfluity of health-_making_ sick is the true hidden objective of the
Church's whole system of salvation procedures" (TAC, 51)...including
Bess's martyrdom.
Lastly, there is the clinical milieu, demarcated by a certain science,
the law and morality (ethics, medical doctors call it). Here, the role
of Dr. Richardson is most illuminating. For he too is in love with Bess
(how dangerous love is!) and, after all his liberalities, when he is
confronted with Bess in a raw state, he can neither love her nor talk to
her, other than in a repressive and authoritarian ('professional') tone:
indeed, initially Bess does make an attempt at finding a lover in
Richardson and comes to his house to dance, and then to have sex. But
as he says, the young doctor too "does not know what to do with" her.
This illustrates the pathetic nature of medicine, and psychiatry in
particular. And it brings to mind Mildred Brady's virulent
denunciations of what she construes to be Reich's 'orgasm therapy'. For
what many millions of Besses and Jans are starved for is life, love and
the exercise of their powers of creation. Masses of lonely individuals
who know not how to live or love, nor how to pursue their desires, and
are objectively denied access to the material conditions that could
permit the realization of these desires. Even a therapist that knows
how to dismount the elements of the armor, one by one, and awaken
vegetative urgings and the unimpeded flow of energy in the body, will be
confronted inevitably with the patient's desire to be loved, with the
dearth of love as cause of neurosis: stretched in Richardson's bed, much
to his horror, Bess says - "You can touch me now. You can have me now."
"For instance, I was reproached because I married a former patient of
mine, Annie Pink. It turned out very badly. Rado married a patient,
Emmy. Others married patients. There was nothing wrong with that.
What was wrong, however, was the hypocrisy present in many treatments-
directly there- on the spot. And that created a bad conscience. And a
bad conscience creates, as you well know, malignant behaviour. You make
somebody else bad in order to free yourself from responsibility. We
call that the Emotional Plague" ("Reich Speaks of Freud", p. 105).
If doctor and patient learn to love together, they too, all they have
left _within_ society, as borderline issue, is marriage. Consider those
oedipalized into believing their homosexuality is a fixed figure, like
that of the molar heterosexual, claiming marriage as solution. For any
therapist to cross the line and not resist desire is to refute the
professional world that sells the cures, the world of the mechanisms of
power and the social institutions, including marriage. Richardson's
horror deprives him of any ability to engage Bess- in any fashion-
without "making love" to her. There is no way back from this. It is
like a revolutionary who talks loudly but refuses to takeover the local
barracks when the moment comes. The hypocrisy lies in believing that
there can be a cure which does not come burrowing through- from within
the disease. The real cure is the natural process of convalescence, but
the doctors are just as sick and unable to love as their patients.
To be continued...
Lambda C
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