Now of course, this was not my first viewing of Dancer. I saw it in the theater just about exactly 20 years ago. I was living in New York at the time, and I saw it with an ex-girlfriend while she was visiting me in the city. I'd hoped we might get back together, but that wasn't her intention with the visit. So Dancer had the function of feeling additionally sad to me.
IMDB says the movie was released on October 6th of that year, but I'm pretty sure my ex's visit was not until November. I wasn't so fixated on seeing movies immediately after their release back then, so it's perfectly plausible we were only just catching up with it a month after its release, which would make this pretty much the 20th anniversary of my first and only viewing of the movie.
Although I loved Dancer in the Dark -- it was my #6 movie of 2000 -- I have since come to see it as a "one-timer." In other words, a movie so hard to watch that you can't bring yourself to endure it again. At least, I thought that explained why I had never sat down for that second viewing.
Really, though, the notion of the "one-timer" is something that makes a lot more sense for other people, not me. I've watched movies like Irreversible and Requiem for a Dream multiple times, so apparently the experience of marinating in human misery is not something I really object to recreating.
As I was watching the movie, though, it occurred to me that part of my feelings of despair about its world are retroactive, and a function of how I have come to see the movie's director, Lars von Trier, in the ensuing years. I was surprised to realize that this was not, in a lot of ways, the von Trier I have come to know and steadily detest.
The stories of how hard von Trier is on his female actors, in an effort to get the kind of gut-wrenching performance that Bjork gives here, are legendary. Misogyny has come to seem like a feature of von Trier's films, not a bug, as he subjects his female characters to all sorts of brutality and sacrifice. It's a bit complicated as he wouldn't make women the main characters in his movies if he didn't also have some kind of empathy for them or intuitive sense of their interiority. It certainly warrants an in-depth discussion, but not here or now.
In my memory, Dancer in the Dark was a story of how a good woman is destroyed by a terrible world. I was surprised to find that this is anything but the truth.
Spoilers for Dancer in the Dark to follow.
Bjork's Selma is a self-described day dreamer, drifting away into flights of fancy in her head that von Trier depicts as glorious musical numbers. The settings of these musical numbers -- a factory, a prison cell block -- make them very von Trierian, but they also reflect Selma's real world. Selma is also going blind, so working in a factory with heavy machinery is precisely the wrong place for a person with her already distractible nature.
That Selma is headed for a crash is inevitable, but it's not for lack of others trying to ward it off. I was amazed at having to jump to a second hand when counting the people who try to help Selma, well beyond what is required of them.
First there is her friend and fellow factory worker, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), who knows Selma needs the job as she is saving money for her son to have a surgery that will prevent the same degenerative eye disorder from which Selma suffers. So Kathy helps Selma continue to work in the factory, both assisting with a doctor's appointment where she has to pass an eye test, and working a night shift (without getting paid) to make sure Selma does not hurt herself or destroy the equipment. (Alas, Selma does destroy the equipment.) Kathy also helps during Selma's rehearsal of the local production of The Sound of Music, making an "accidental" entrance on stage in order to determine how many steps Selma must take to reach her mark. It's not the only time in the movie Kathy takes the blame for something so Selma can continue upholding her charade. Kathy gets frustrated with Selma sometimes, but she never gives up on her, even after Selma is imprisoned for murder. In fact, I found Kathy's emotional journey -- which is all a selfless act of helping a woman live her life on her own terms -- to be the thing that moved me most on this viewing.
Then there is Jeff (Peter Stormare), a lonely misfit who lives in town and always shows up at the factory at the end of Selma's shift to offer her a ride home. He knows Selma has vision problems and that riding her bike home is no longer really a viable option for her. But Selma is proud and she does not want to lead Jeff on, so she tells him she doesn't want a boyfriend right now. This does not deter Jeff, but not because he wants to break down her hesitancy. He's in love with her, and has a bottomless well of kindness to offer her, even with no hope of the reciprocity he wants. In fact, having no hope only seems to make him kinder toward her.
When Selma is in prison, she is doted on by Brenda (Siobhan Fallon), a kindly prison guard who may also (sort of) be in love with her, but more than anything is just under the spell of Selma's core goodness. Interestingly, von Trier does not show us the seeds of Brenda's endearment toward Selma. The first time we meet her, she is already fully besotted, eager to do anything within her means to make Selma's stay on death row slightly less horrible.
Even two characters who ultimately do Selma wrong have an empathy toward her at their core. Her foreman at the factory fires her only with an extremely heavy heart, after a number of warnings and after a whole day of productivity at the factory is lost when Selma breaks the equipment. Before that we see him being kind and jovial with Selma, even though he knows she is a "problem worker" and he's in a results-driven business. And then her director on The Sound of Music, who ultimately calls the police to let them know where she is after the film's central act of violence, shows excessive deference to her as well. When she makes the difficult decision of telling him she can no longer play Maria -- again, not referencing her eyesight -- he understands what's happening with her and finds a different, less-demanding role for her in the show. He tells her she will always be his Maria.
Okay, so I didn't get to that second hand. But no fewer than five characters in this film do all they can to help a woman whom life has dealt a harsh hand. And they do it gladly.
Even the film's two real sources of evil -- Selma's landlord Bill (David Morse), a policeman, and his wife Linda (Cara Seymour) -- only do what they do because of their human frailty. Bill believes his wife will leave him if he does not have enough money to support her expensive shopping habits, and he's really desperately afraid of this outcome. So he makes the unforgivable decision to steal Selma's life savings, saved for her son's operation. When he's caught later on, he's so miserable that he asks Selma to kill him. We only get third-hand accounts of Linda, and never know for sure whether she really would leave Bill, or if this is just his paranoia. But she is actually kind to Selma before beginning to suspect her husband is having an affair with their tenant, and her own actions start to spiral from there. She chooses to believe her husband's version of his interactions with Selma, and she also sees Selma apparently having shot Bill in cold blood upon trying to steal his money.
Instead of the exercise in misanthropy I thought I remembered this film as being, it is, paradoxically, one of the more humanistic films I have ever seen.
Suffice it to say that von Trier has never made a film like this again.
This November also marks 20 years of Lars von Trier in my life, as I believe I did not see his earlier breakout Breaking the Waves until after this. Although I have liked other films von Trier has made -- Dogville and Melancholia chief among them -- no film he has made since then has had anything like Dancer in the Dark's optimism about the capacity for good of human beings.
What happened, Lars?
Dogville, the film with the minimalist set design and Nicole Kidman as the tortured heroine, is kind of like the misanthropic version of Dancer in the Dark, where a town collectively destroys a woman instead of mostly trying to save her. Antichrist is about the horrors a husband and wife visit upon each other as they grieve the loss of their infant child. Melancholia represents a slight uptick toward humanism, as the behaviors of these characters are largely a function of trying to cope with depression, but there is at least one character (the one played by Charlotte Rampling) who is a source of concentrated malevolence. And then both of the Nymphomaniac films are basically four hours of something like malignant narcissism, and everyone is pretty much awful to each other.
Von Trier completed his descent into total abject faithlessness in humanity with The House That Jack Built, in which Matt Dillon plays a sociopath who kills for sport. This film has victims, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't really have any characters who are good. I may not remember correctly, though, because I have mostly blocked it out.
No wonder I had not scheduled another viewing of Dancer in the Dark before now.
But I'm so glad I did. It reminds me of everything of which von Trier was capable when he was at his best. And since I myself am an optimist, I believe he can get there again. We're still within ten years of a von Trier movie I really loved (Melancholia).
Unfortunately, I think it's much more likely that he will remain in the dark.
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