To your professor, you enumerate what you think could be the alternatives in how to "sort out"
the options for understanding the character of Bess as presented by Von Trier::
>You could simply regard her as a pathetic, gullible naif, nay, you could regard her as insane,
>as schizophrenic-(...) and the film would trouble your rationality not. You refuse to do so
>because, I believe, you see in Bess the epitome of Kant's good will, of Kant's good heart.
>Bess's good heart is what you admire. If only it could be harnessed by the mighty power of
>the Categorical Imperative, if only Pure Reason could universalise it for our world (...)
>Finally >alle Menschen werden Brüder under Bess's gentle smile! Cold, callous Indifference
>and petty Selfishness would cease! (...) Bess's abundant, overflowing, wild love, if only it
>could be controlled by our reasonable Ethical Theories, oh, would that not be the
>fulfillment of every wet dream of every Ethics Professor in this world! Nietzsche's deepest
>wish would come true: we would make Caesars with the souls of Christ. But, my dear
>Professor, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. Bess's
>good heart as Christ's soul is not of this world. (...) Bess's good heart belongs to God, and
>you resent that it does because you want it for this your world. If you can't have it, then
>no one can, not Jan, and certainly not God.
We summarize- Bess must be 1) "insane" (and therefore unworthy of consideration- discardable) 2)
lack sufficient ethical formation (domestication, harnessing) or 3) be the epitome of Kant's
"good heart" as "Christ's soul" and be in direct communication with tinkerbell, sorry, god. Pick
a card, any card... as long as it's A, B or C. Madness, Reason or Mysticism... (You opt for the
latter.) A most dreary triangle in our view, but the precise triangle that the Catholic Von
Trier, as metteur en scéne, has set his audience up to position as the only possible parameters
in this all too familiar snare. And he places his Scotsman god, as the "something shiny" in the
gourd, designed to trap the monkey. No, his project was not a "Justine ou les Malheurs de la
Vertu", let alone a Nietzchean struggle for will to power in the brilliancy of creation of the
eternal return, or a Toltec path to knowledge and awareness; it is not a line of flight of any
sort, for that matter. It could never have been, for Von Trier is as trapped as his protagonist
Bess. And this is precisely where Von Trier's opportunistic cynicism lies. Having scathingly
portrayed the traps of desire; created the possibility of escape in Jan's encouragements for Bess
to find her own miraculating powers, to love him by first loving herself and her own vibrant
sexuality (her real "overflowing, wild love")- to discover her own lines of creation; and
illustrating Bess's _learned_ incapacity to take up the challenge, her will to nothingness which
has overtaken her will to power- he lacked, in the most abject of fashions, the courage to face
Bess's decisions. He also thereby relinquished any analysis of the forces which gave rise to
them.
Further, to your professor, you wrote:
>For the sake of your Ethics, Jan must die, is that it? I do not know what sacrifice is more
>frightening, my dear Professor: the sacrifice that God demands of Bess for the sake of her
>love or the one that you demand for your Ethics.
We do not speak for your professor. But as far as we are concerned these are not the real
sacrifices of the film- which could instead be enumerated as- the sacrifice of the life and
vitality of a community to a dismal, repressive sexual morality; the sacrifice of its children to
its ascetic cynicism; Jan's sacrifice of his love and health to the unchallenged logic of the
axiomatic of capitalism (in not fleeing away with Bess, rather than returning to the rig) in a
process of mutual healing and discovery; Bess's sacrifice of her own will to an unimaginative,
mythical wrath of god, and last but not least, Von Trier's sacrifice of his artistic honesty.
And as for Bess's sacrifice, this was demanded only by Von Trier and the will to nothingness he
portrayed in Bess. "God", demanded nothing and moved not one finger.
>(...) a few critics have dismissed the horror of this scene, claiming that the audience is in no >doubt that divine Providence will set everything right. I can only wish that one day I can
>have such an easy faith as these critics and the alleged audience they write about.
We do not doubt, Von Trier is emboldened to conclude his work with such a blatantly preposterous
ending precisely because he is aware that there is nothing the miserable masses desire so much as
the fantastic happy ending, ŕ la Hollywood to their own personal, self-made tragedies...In spite
of everything, or rather, _because_ of it, they may all live happily in the great hereafter. How
comforting. Catalepsy of the will.
"We can no longer conceal from ourselves _what_ is expressed by all that willing which has taken
its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and
more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness
and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from
longing itself- all this means- let us dare to grasp it- _a will to nothingness_, an aversion to
life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life ..." (GM: 28)
9. Bess's Sacrifice
Mr. Rhodes wrote-
>Yes, yes, I heard God tell Bess that He was with her, but I could only see her being
>butchered. (...) I could not help but think what I could do to keep her from the boat--I
>would have done anything--, but even if somehow I could have been put into this
>contrafactual, I would have been able to do nothing for Bess's faith is too great to subdue.
>She must go to the boat and be butchered. This sacrifice is frightening because it is
>inevitable.
Get a grip, hombre!! You did not hear God, dear sir, you heard Mr. Lars Von Trier speaking
through his cinematic character Bess. (Good grief - it's contagious!) Bess's sacrifice _was_
predictable, given the context of the film and the bent of its director, but hardly _inevitable_.
This disease which you and Von Trier call "faith" and "inevitability" is really nothing more
than a lousy excuse for suicidal nihilism. And it is precisely this brutish and coy acceptance
of the inversion of all values which has got us into this present mess of emotional, cultural and
ecological catastrophe; it is this cynical, priestly, righteous "innocence" ("good conscience")
parading off to the slaughter which, to us, is frightening.
>Yes, but my emotions are just human(...)
No comment
>Would a tragic figure smile so gently as she meets her doom?
Yes, if it's in the script. But beyond this, one could, with Nietzsche, ask: "Is it not dreadful
to make every necessary and regularly recurring sensation into a source of inner misery, and in
this way to want to make inner misery a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon in every
human being!" (DB: I. 76) Why not smile then when this torturous work is finished and one is at
last face to face with the vast unknown? (the infamous Doc Holliday's last words as he finally
succumbed to his tuberculosis: "This is funny!")
Bess's beatific smile at the hospital, might have been described by H. Miller, it too was like
the distillate of a poison-
"There was something which hung on the fringe of memory, some enigmatic smile which expressed
serenity, beatitude, beneficence. But there was also a poison, a distillation which exuded from
that mystifying smile. And this poison I had quaffed and it had blurred the memory. There had
been a day when I had accepted something in exchange for something; on that day a strange
bifurcation had taken place." (Sexus, 333)
>After the Incarnated Word, there is no tragedy because we humans can be more than
>human: Death has lost its sting. And, therefore, smiling faith is possible. I am not
>claiming that I know this. I can only repeat what I memorised of my catechism, but
>somehow I know that Bess knows this--somehow.
You "only repeat what (you) memorized in your catechism", yes, we noticed. But this is not "all
(you) _can_ do". It is all you _choose_ to do. It is your decision to do no more. We submit,
on the other hand, that there is no other force in History which has abetted in the reduction of
life to being "only human", human all-too-human, than the ruse of the "incarnated word" and it's
memorization.
"Suffer
Suffer as he suffered on the cross
for it is the will of God
And anyone believes what they hear over and
over again
so the poor instead of bread made do with a
picture
of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ
and prayed to that image of their helplessness
And the priests said
Raise your hands to heaven bend your knees
and bear your suffering without complaint
Pray for those who torture you
for prayer and blessing are the only stairways
which you can climb to paradise (...)" (Marat/Sade)
>Even though I may think her sacrifice a horrible tragedy (...)I dare not think this too loudly
>lest I insult Bess's intelligence. And in insulting Bess's intelligence, I would be insulting
>Bess herself. I cannot bring myself to insult someone whom I admire and love. Therefore,
>as agonizing as her sacrifice is, I am nonetheless forced to take comfort, however thin and >brittle this comfort may be, that Bess genuinely knows something that I can only parrot.
No one is "forced to take comfort" in parroting, even if, as young children, they might have.
The comfort is "thin and brittle" exactly because it is an empty locus, an insult to the
intelligence and to the senses as well. There is nothing more stupidly dangerous and dulled
than the fearful nature that takes comfort in following and parroting what it has been taught by
other fearful and disingenuous parrots. It is not so much Bess's intelligence you seek to
defend, but your own. Like the character Bess, you prefer to feel that you are only a leaf at
the mercy of divine vengeance and that you and the world could not be otherwise (you are only
human, after all). And, as for love and admiration, what is there to love and admire in what
Bess inflicts upon herself? One could have loved her laughter and curiosity, but not the
inadequate ideas of her organism that saddened her to death. In the end, it is this suffocation
which von Trier admires. We could have loved her spirit which revolts against the collective
death instinct of her family, elders and peers but how can we love her capitulation to it, even
if we might understand it? No, it seems what you here call love is nothing more than a feeling
of 'mutuality', of pious Christian pity for Bess and for yourself caught in the spider god's web
of inevitability. It is a debilitating, reactive exercise. And is there not too a voluptuous,
spiritualization of cruelty inflicted upon the self and the other in the so-called inevitable
mystic tragedy?
"Here to be sure, we must put aside the thick-witted psychology of former times which had to
teach of cruelty only that it had its origin in the sight of the sufferings of others: there is
also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment of one's own suffering, of making oneself suffer- and
wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the _religious_ sense, or to
self-mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general to desensualization,
decarnalization, contrition, to Puritanical spasms of repentance, to conscience-vivisection and
to a Pascalian _sacrifizio_dell'intelletto_, he is secretly lured and urged onwards by his
cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty directed _against himself_." (BGE: 229)
Mr. Rhodes concludes his missive to his professor-
>I must remark once again how odd and, if truth be told, perverse all this is: you want a story
>with a joyous ending to be instead a rather pointless tragedy. I say "pointless" because, to
>put it crudely, without the miracles there is no pay-off. We cannot but conclude that Bess's
>most cherished belief was simply wrong, that this woman threw herself to slaughter to no
>purpose other than to satisfy either the mad delusions of her mind or of her husband's evil
>fantasies or the whims of a cruel, sadistic God, none of which point to anything we should
>desire or hope for.
No, Mr. Rhodes, the perversity lies in idealizing a "happy" ending where none is possible. You
paid your money to be entertained, you were given "the payoff" of the "cheap miracle" and you did
not have to consider any of the other options. You could go home from the theater the same as
you arrived, if somewhat exhilarated with this entwining of the image of the bleeding Christ with
the face of a woman you found yourself attracted to. Would you have been so impassioned by this
film if Von Trier had selected a fat, ugly, bow-legged Bess sporting a testeronic beard as his
heroine? Bess serves as Von Trier's implement of seduction and temptation to self-sacrifice.
Finally, you judge your professor-
>you are not only condemning Jan to death but Bess and all the charms and great power of
>her love to utter utter hopelessness. Whereas Bess sacrifices only her self and that is horrible
>enough, your sacrifice seems a thousand times more awful for you are sacrificing hope.
It's interesting, though, how you chose to phrase this, "Bess sacrifices _only_ herself"... Only
herself? How magnanimous of you, Mr. Rhodes. Given that this is all Bess, or any one of us has,
she has sacrificed everything. And you and Von Trier would have this desiccated desire, with a
wave of the ecclesiastical wand, transformed into "hope". How wonderful! How genial! The toad
transformed to a prince. Thanatos become the very keys to paradise. Von Trier's project is an
old one. It would almost be comic were it not also so devious.
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses." (Sexus- p. 35)
Lambda C, in reasonably good humour- Pick a card, any card, Mr. Rhodes!
PS-
All the other worlds are in this world, and _this_ world _is_ all the other worlds. In short,
theological dreams of otherworldliness betray the nothingness of the will, because they are just
that, stupefying dreams.
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