I KNEW I’D SEE Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark, so I decided not to read Don Wallingford’s excellent Tablet review-essay beforehand. I should have. That way, I’d have known it’d be two and a half hours long, and would have a scene of almost unwatchably graphic violence at its midpoint.
What I knew about the movie when I went in: It stars Bjork, in a Cannes festival-prize role. It alternated hyperrealistic dramatic scenes (in von Trier’s handheld “wobbly cam” style) with musical numbers shot with 100 stationary video cameras, featuring Bjork’s current style of orchestrally-augmented techno. Her character is slowly going blind, and so will her character’s son if she doesn’t save up for an operation.
And it’s set in rural Washington state in 1964.
As one who’d lived in rural Washington state in 1964, I was of course curious to see how well von Trier could capture the look and feel of the place, especially since the film was mostly made in Sweden. (A few minutes of location footage were shot here, by a second-unit director).
Von Trier got the look almost exactly. The cars and trucks weren’t all shiny, collector-restored ’64 vehicles but lived-in working vehicles from several prior model years. The costumes were appropriately rural salt-O-the-earth. Important props held accurate regional touches (an Almond Roca candy tin, a Great Northern freight train).
There’s even a subplot about a community-theater production of The Sound of Music, with a reference to the cranky-nun character (the role played in the Sound of Music movie by Seattle’s own Marni Nixon, better known for dubbing the leading ladies’ songs in that and many other film musicals)!
And the characters (despite the cast’s half-suppressed Euro accents) were pure Nor’Wester–country but emphatically not redneck; modest folk of quiet self-respect and unassuming centeredness.
(The only thing that looked out of place was the Scandi-modern architecture of the eye clinic.)
Into this well-realized setting, von Trier weaves a tale that’s pure fantasy, about the clashes of fantasies among (and within) individuals.
Bjork’s character, Selma, claims to be enthralled by old Hollywood musicals. But she’s built her whole life and personal identity around another Hollywood formula, the tragic heroines of three-hanky weepers such as An Affair to Remember or Dark Victory. Everything Selma does is in the spirit of self-sacrifice and in a view of her life as a predestined, linear path toward certain doom; from which song-and-dance fantasies are the only, temporary, escapes.
Almost until the end, Selma could have gotten off of her mostly self-imposed trajectory.
She could have allowed her wannabe suitor into her heart. She could have let more people know of her condition and her son’s need for a sight-saving operation. She could have allowed friends to help her raise money for the operation. When her landlord steals the money she’s been saving up, she could have walked away from his demand that she kill him. At the resulting murder trial, she could have told the truth on the witness stand. In prison, she could have accepted a highpowered attorney’s offer to take on her case, and figured out some way to pay for it without giving up on the son’s operation.
But Selma had come to America envisioning it as the land of the movies.
And in the movies, at least in the old-Hollywood movies of Selma’s fascination, there’s no divergence from the script.
MONDAY: Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics–or is he?
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
ELSEWHERE:
