Spazzing: Lars von Trier's THE IDIOTS

I love The Idiots (1998) because it believes in absurdity as a necessary mode of living. Danish filmmkaer Lars von Trier understands the reality of the joke.
I think when he does all his films he can't help but understand that we're captive to sincerity. Honesty, at least in his films since in the mid-90s he found out his father wasn’t his real father—honesty has become the most important aspect of his cinema. What moves you can ultimately be the joke on you. Everyone in his films seem to see themselves as some sort of victim. They all seem to be working with that fact in different ways. Usually, as in this second film of the Golden Heart trilogy (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer In the Dark), von Trier creates characters who are naive, even at their own expense. I like this aspect of his films. His main characters cling to a naivete that’s almost childlike. The “adult world”, the social sphere, is filled with hypocrites and people who want to control and cheat you.

Unlike the two films that bookend this trilogy, von Trier creates a safespace for the characters in The Idiots. They're at a sort of commune, pretending to be retarded and having spells known in the film as "spazzing".Von Trier should get the innovative filmmaker award of the 90s for coming up with the concept of "spazzing". It involves personally breaking the line between sanity and insanity. It incorporates personally humiliating oneself in the social sphere. The film starts out with one of the character's spazzing in a fancy restaurant. He gets to leave without paying for his meal. Genius. All films should prescribe usable techniques like this.

The Idiots aims to provoke. That's part of Lars von Trier's cinema. But I never feel he provokes in a way that demeans his characters or the honesty of his story. His whole thing is that there's a story his characters are set up against, which is comprehensible and safe and casts them as victims. His lead characters in the Golden Hearts trilogy, but especially in The Idiots, stubbornly refuse to operate according to social codes. You could say the basic premise in The Idiots comes down to: why can't I have a seizure in public? Drool in public? Fuck whomever I want in public?

The last question points to a particularly explicit and controversial segment in the film--where all the characters at the commune engage in an orgy at a birthday party. Watching a bunch of people act like retards, tearing off their clothes and fucking each other hard core, and running naked around the premises, I think, says something about where images and maybe cultural problems were headed in the nineties and even today. I think von Trier's the Idiots is one of the most genius message films out there, as I think are some of his best films. For Dancer In the Dark, it's simply "follow your heart." (As Selma (Bjork) is being hanged, Catherine Deneuve shouts “Follow your heart!”) For the Idiots, it's "be yourself". Part of being yourself is being unrestrained, von Trier seems to say. If you look at von Trier's work in light of these cliché terms that have been so prominent in the self-help era, and in light of his own psychological troubles, you might find a trace of misanthropic genius. If you’re yourself, you do so at the expense of organized society. Von Trier’s commune in The Idiots is a refuge, a place where troubled people cope with their problems by being occasionally mentally retarded, childlike, and taking off their clothes and drooling. It seems better than pills.

A decent primer on von Trier can be found here.

Bought and Sold: Lukas Moodysson's LILYA 4-EVER

What is intriguing for me about Lukas Moodysson's 2002 feature, LILYA 4-EVER is it's pumped-up honesty. This is a film about a bored Russian girl, who is impoverished and lives in the suburban slums. Whose mother deserts her to go off and live with her boyfriend. Who is broke and has to become a prostitute to at least engage in the capitalist dream of buying whatever she likes at the grocery store. And her story is infused with a vicious clubber track, 9-volt jolts of synth-charged excitement that help keep the story moving along. Helping it to offer some quick rush of escape. It's directed by a Swedish director that's only traveled "a little bit" in Russia. LILYA 4-EVER strives to tell one of those "it's only going to get predictably worse" stories that Lars von Trier is so good at. And like von Trier, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's film seems to be about the capitalist dream, the romance you'll see in a Hollywood movie or the satisfying release that shoppers find in commercials. Just hours before Lilya jumps off a Swedish highway bridge into oncoming traffic, she says to herself "I want a doll, a pencil to draw with, and a handbag." Moodysson's films are tuned into this sort of frequency. He fills his narratives with the flustered, obsessive awe of commercialism. All his films seem to be lists of wants.

Take his 2006 experimental film, Container. It starts out: "I don't want to be locked up inside this disgusting body anymore. Everything bleeds and stinks." You could look at Moodysson's films as a confrontation between the commercial dream and the reality. That capitalist comes at a cost. And that the cost isn't broadcast; isn't typically the subject of so many films. But I think Moodysson's work says it ought to be. And he comes to film with this sort of critical social consciousness.

"You remain dead for all eternity, but you're alive for only a brief moment." Lilya's younger friend tells her, in the form of an angel come back from the dead while she's enslaved as a prostitute in Sweden. She's contemplating her suicide. Maybe that will undo her suffering. The whole film is essentially a portrait of Lilya's suffering. Lilya in the commercial landscape. As someone who won't be known. Who is faceless. Who is the girl in the hundreds of thousands of pornos made each year that's forced into it by a relentless industry. Who is persecuted by the police when she's running around in a foreign country without papers or identification.

LILYA 4-EVER is sort of genius in the way that Moodysson tackles such an apt-for-exploitation, could-be-sentimentalized subject. He shoots Lilya as the face of the girl who is like the waste by-product of commercialism. This is commercialism's worst face. When she's pale and undernourished later in the film, and is forced to go out with a client, she goes to the bathroom and chops her hair off, smears lipstick over her face like a clown. It's one of the most effective moments of the film.


Moodysson, like von Trier, chooses the subject of the commercial dream and it's errors. In the end, Lilya ends up in a sort of heaven on a roof in the Russian industrial ghetto, playing basketball with her dead friend, who also killed himself. According to THIS Moodysson interview, Moodyson claims that ""Lilya" is a statement about human dignity, a quality that is constantly being eroded and corrupted in the world today by forces like political systems and a materialistic culture that allows anything and everything to be bought or sold." The film is also a fuck-you to the system.

Incidentally, just a few days ago Moodyson released the trailer for his latest film, Mammoth. It seems to track some of the same themes that appear in all his work: the industrial landscape, desensitization, excess, etc. Check out the trailer below. It looks promising, as all Moodysson trailers do.