Lars von Trier Beyond Depression: Contexts and Collaborations

by Linda Badley

Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the start―but in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013–14), and The House That Jack Built (2018) brandished the cinematic virtuosity von Trier once banned under the Dogme 95 Manifesto while subjecting audiences to “extreme” cinema. Following von Trier’s experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the director’s controversy-courting public appearances.

Playing against widespread assumptions, Linda Badley takes a reparative approach, offering an in-depth examination of these four films and the contexts that produced them. Drawing on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside access to archival materials, she provides a thorough and comprehensive account of von Trier’s preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Trier’s artistic touchstones from Wagner, Proust, and the Marquis de Sade to Scandinavian erotic cinema and serial killer genre tropes. She considers his portrayals of mental illness and therapy, gender and sexuality, nature and extinction, shedding light on the thematic concerns that unite these films as a distinct cycle. Offering nuanced readings of these films, the book emphasizes the significance of von Trier’s work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, “dark ecology,” and the postcinematic.

Genres: Film

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2022

Reviews

[Brian O'Connell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful approach to von Trier’s thorniest batch of horrors through the lens of the collaborative contexts and influences that produced them. That approach is weakest with Antichrist (the most troubling and perhaps the most difficult of these four films), which Badley mostly contextualizes in terms of von Trier’s Wagner project, but it yields impressive dividends in the enlightening sections on Melancholia and German Romanticism, Nymphomaniac’s polymorphous blends of literature and genre, and the self-reflexive discourses on art and creation that form the basis of The House That Jack Built. Ample notes and sources to dig into, too. Probably a must for von Trier obsessives (like myself).

[William Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly indispensable reading