ARTvonTRIER
Author: Malou Lykke Solfjeld
Co-Author: Christian Kortegaard Madsen

Dogville: Escape

“Just as Dogville had done from its open, frail shelf on the mountainside, quite unprotected from any capricious storms or other ill weather, Grace, too, had laid herself open. It was not Dogville’s fault that it lay as it did, and it was not Grace’s fault. But it had happened all the same. And there she dangled from her frail stalk like the apple in the Garden of Eden. An apple so swollen that the juices almost ran.”6

Tomorrow’s Eve, as the android created by Thomas Edison is called, in the novel by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, was born in 1886 in literature, and has today become our trusted companion in the shape of Siri, Alexa or any other smartphone device we carry with us as our extended consciousness. Meanwhile, the contemporary Eve that Grace represents, where woman is objectified as an exchange commodity to be used by men, is probably the scariest thing since Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, also touching upon similar issues of production value in a totalitarian society. Whereas Atwood’s story is written in the 1980’s (a century after The Future Eve) as a dystopian near-future tale taking place in 2005, Lars von Trier’s Dogville came out in 1991 and unfolds in the 1930’s. Unfortunately, both of them, in each their way, reflect the reality of today, where women are still experiencing assaults, which is why this image of Grace is extremely relevant as a reminder of the way in which the biblical myth of the Fall of Man continues to repeat the story of woman as a sinner, and therefore inferior, dangerous and guilty.

Before her arrival, the village was a secluded society, a micro-cosmos, where everybody through generations played their roles. Naive, beautiful and good, Grace is, as is the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, a temptation the village people cannot withstand. Grace’ presence tips over the fragile balance and brings forth deeds of pure evil under a cover of the charity, which is no longer generously given, but rather something she has to earn.

The short philosophical fiction The ones who walk away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin written in 1973 tells the story of a perfect town, Omelas, characterized by a constant state of serenity and splendor, where the happiness and delight amongst its citizens is unbelievable, “like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time” the narrator explains.

The only catch is, that the town’s and the people’s prosperity depend on the perpetual misery of a single child. The other children of the town are unaware, but as they grow up, they are presented with the harsh reality and forced to make a choice: Do they wish to stay in Omelas well-knowing that their superior life in a fairytale town lean on the suffering of this one child, or do they refuse to take part in the collective terror? The latter option means, that they will have to walk away.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”7 the story ends.

In Dogville we witness a similar ethical dilemma play out between the inhabitants, and not least in the mind of Grace herself. After being released from her captivation, thus transforming from the child in Omelas to the young adult aware of the true nature of her captors, she not only decides to walk away, she even takes revenge, with the words: if there is any town that the world would be better without, this is it.

The story of Dogville is said to be inspired from the song Pirate Jenny (written for Berthold Brecht’s Three Penny Opera, a capitalism-critical play from 1928) in which the young maid working in a hotel ends up taking revenge against the townspeople’s bad treatment of her, by burning down the whole town before she sails away with pirates.