Lars von Trier: filmography and directorial style

Lars Von Trier

The Concept of Good in Trier's Films

If you have never watched Trier films, you are likely to get extremely confused by the subject matter or purpose of a film like Breaking the Waves. This is because the film is deceptively simply where story is concerned but it explores so many contentious issues and highlights such deeply buried controversies that one wonders why the movie was made at all. What exactly was the purpose of making such a movie? But if you are familiar with Trier's past films, you are in a better position to answer that question because then, you might be well aware of the fact that Lars Von Trier just loves making movies, which are different to the extent of becoming eccentric.

Most of his work is smugly different and since the Nouvelle Vogue techniques of filmmaking are used, not everyone is likely to fall in love with it. But one thing is certain, you cannot forget his movies too easily not because of the story itself, but mostly because of its disturbing contents and the issues it makes you think about. How many time would a viewer come out of the cinema with one million questions in his mind, each of which appears to have no obvious answer. That is what happens with Trier films; and with Breaking the waves, you can simply double the number of questions it will leave you with. Why did Bess do what she did? Was she really a good woman? Was she truly in love with her husband? Did her husband respect her or did her simply use her for his own pleasures? And the list goes on.

In this paper, we shall deal with only one of those questions and the answer might help resolve other issues as well. We shall now discuss the theory of 'good' as presented by the director and see if Bess was indeed a good person in religious, moral and social sense.

In the epilogue of the movie, the director makes it easier for us to study his film from this aspect when the coroner asks Dr. Richardson to cite one cause of Bess death. First the coroner studies the body and relates the diagnosis details that had been given to him. He says, "You have described the deceased as 'an immature, unstable person. A person, who, due to the trauma of her husband's illness, gave way in obsessive fashion to an exaggerated, perverse form of sexuality." This is an important statement, which must be borne in mind for later discussion. To this diagnosis, Dr. Richardson replies,.".. If you asked me now, instead of 'neurotic' or 'psychotic', my diagnosis might quite simply be... 'good'." This helps to make the basic idea of the film clearer. "You wish the records... To state that from the medical point-of-view the deceased was suffering from being 'good'? Perhaps this is the psychological defect that led to her death? Is that what we shall write"

These dialogues help to explain a lot. For one it shows that an average viewer would be tempted to dismiss the character of Bess as a neurotic sex-starved psychopath. However this would be absolutely cruel to the character, the film and the filmmaker to discard this important figure so easily. Instead the director wants us to go a little deeper than this and study this character from the viewpoint of 'good'. What exactly constitutes good in the society and religion? Can there be more than one definitions of a good person. How would we categorize someone who is doing something horrible just to please a dying person? These are the questions put forth by the director in this movie.

It is due to this epilogue that we are likely to re-examine Bess' character to see if she was really a good person or simply a social misfit. My answer to the question is that the real cause of her death was indeed her desire to be good. Once that is established, we shall go on to prove why this answers contains weight. Bess grew up in a society, which frowned about women who dared to be different. In this strictly devout Christian community, every woman is expected to be demure and respectful. They are not allowed to compete with men and are absolutely not seen as equals. They are more acceptable in the roles of wives and daughter than mistresses or prostitutes. Bess is expected to become a good wife and a good person altogether. Her decision to marry an oil-rig worker, Jan, is staunchly opposed by her family. Though on the surface, Bess fights for her rights and decides to marry Jan against the wishes of her family, internally her guilt-ridden conscience must have been telling her that she did something wrong by disobeying her parents.

Growing up in a family as strict as hers, it is only too obvious that she had religion deeply engraved on her mind. She wanted more freedom and the only way she could get it was by violating certain fixed rules of the community. But she knew this violation would come with heavy fine. Bess' social conditioning made her believe that she couldn't get away easily with this. As Kaplan in her book, Female Perversions, notes, "For a woman... To explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her" (528) She had to pay a heavy price for her expression of freedom in the shape of guilt which later made her do weird things.

When her husband Jan meets a severe accident in which he becomes paralyzed from waist down, Bess feels it is her time to pay the price for her past actions. She desperately wanted to be good but since she had failed once, she did not want to fail again. Bess believes that by disobeying her parents, she had missed an important opportunity to prove that she was good, and now that God was giving her a second chance, she couldn't possibly displease him again. And thus she tries to do everything in her power to make her husband happy. In her pursuit to be considered a good person, she prostitutes herself as per her husband's wishes. She believes she is doing this purely out of love. When Dr., Richardson lashes out at her husband and calls him 'Peeping Tom', she replies "Jan and me have a spiritual contact.... I choose for myself.... To give Jan his dreams.... I don't make love with them. I make love with Jan. And I save him from dying." As ridiculous as her beliefs may sound, we must understand that Bess was doing all this to satisfy herself that she was indeed a good person who cared about someone else so much so that she could even risk her own life.