Imagine you’re looking at a blank page, which is the beginning of your screenplay, the beginning of everybody’s screenplay. You can write anything here, whatever you want. You roll your sleeves up, give a Carrie Bradshaw look into the middle distance, which is where you find all your best ideas, and begin writing. Your film, which is to be staged by a crew, voiced by actors and recorded on film for the purposes of being seen in the world: what will it be? You can write a film that requires the dead bodies of women to be arranged in comical poses, as an arch metaphor for your own tyranny — or you can write something else. You choose.
Caspar Salmon, “This Is Not a Review of Lars Von Trier’s Repulsive ‘The House That Jack Built’“, Pajiba
I haven’t seen The House That Jack Built. But then, the interesting thing about Von Trier is that I don’t have to have seen The House That Jack Built. The problem is not really in any one Von Trier film. The problem is that Von Trier has been telling the same story since as early as the (incredibly tough, genuinely moving) Breaking the Waves. Since arguably as early as Medea. The problem is that anyone could be surprised why we would ask, at this point, a seemingly very obvious question:
At what point does a vivid, passionate interest in the abuse of women not really point to an obsession with abusing women?
Especially when, as Salmon aptly puts it here:
“And, incidentally, the abuse of women is a poor metaphor for the abuse of women.”
(via sarahbatistapereira)
this is why I am perpetually and infernally enraged by Lars von Trier