The House That Jack Built
2018, directed by Lars von Trier
In the epilogue to The House That Jack Built, as Virgil guides Jack deeper into Hell, the two men are ferried across the mythical river Styx. Their crossing is a tableau vivant reproduction of Eugène Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante, almost as if Jack were riding on a painted canvas instead of a boat. This effect is no accident. All the sidebars in Jack’s narrative link his downfall to art itself.
Right after the first killing, Jack stands in the road with his bloody fingers outstretched like a pianist. The shot then cuts to a clip of Glenn Gould, who Jack says “represents Art.” It’s evident that Jack regards his violent act with some pride. The murder weapon was a jack, like his name, underscoring how closely he identifies with the deed. He goes on to say that it was just before this first murder that he had bought the lot for his house, so that his career as an architect precisely parallels his career as a killer. Only at the end of his earthly life do we find that his architectural output is no more nor less than the total results of his killing spree, rendered as a house made from his victims’ bodies wired together.
The common denominator in Lars von Trier’s films, at least across the middle phase of his career, is a critique of humans’ eagerness to play God. Von Trier might seem to shift emphasis in Melancholia, but the contrast there is between a protagonist gifted with creative powers and the uncreative people around her whose arrogance is akin to playing God. If we grasp the paradox, we should understand that genuine creativity, despite its resemblance to a divine act, is antithetical to power or self-importance – rather it makes modest transformations that respect and contribute to existing reality. In this respect, Jack is totally unlike Justine. He wishes only to be an Artist, with whatever status that carries; his wish does not extend to the betterment of the world. Like Hitler (who aspired to be a painter) he’s a creative failure who channels his energy into violence.
In his confession to Virgil, Jack says that his five incidents are “randomly chosen”, but his insistence on their randomness should call attention to the logic that connects them:
The 1st Incident reveals Jack’s original sin. As annoyed as he is, he doesn’t kill the woman until she wounds his pride, telling him he’s “too much of a wimp to murder anybody.” Jack’s subsequent disquisition on art is a further expression of his pride, including his drive to be an architect despite his mother having pushed him into becoming an engineer.
The 2nd Incident is a dialectical reversal of the first. Here Jack is acutely aware of his own failings. He approaches his victim awkwardly and complains about his humiliation. He fails in his first attempt to strangle her, worries excessively about the evidence he’s left, and only escapes detection by the grace of a rainstorm that washes away the bloody trail. His obsessive cleansing of the crime scene betrays a wish for purity.
The 3rd Incident synthesizes the first two, combining a sense of superiority with a desire for purity, expressed in the act of culling, which Jack likens to ethnic cleansing. At this stage it’s not enough to kill his victims; he must dominate them, corrupt them, and torture them.
The 4th Incident extends beyond isolated crimes to depict the breakdown of a whole society. The tension begins when Jack calls Jacqueline from her bedroom, and they’re connected by a taut phone cable which he will soon use to tie her up. A telephone is symbolic of social connection, but Jack corrupts its purpose. The scene makes a major point of society’s unwillingness to restrain Jack’s violence: neither the policeman outside nor the neighbors who hear the woman’s screams make any effort to help her. The sexual union (a building block of any society) is also corrupted, both by Jack’s misogyny and by the physical violence to Jacqueline’s breasts.
The 5th Incident descends from social dysfunction into full-blown fascism, as Jack attempts to recreate a Nazi experiment on a row of men, of whom the most visible are a black man, an Asian man, and an old man.
During production, Lars von Trier announced that the film would be about the rise of Homo trumpus, presumably a personality type lacking in empathy driving a global surge in far-right politics. The political allusion becomes all too clear at the start of the 3rd Incident when Jack hands out red hats to his followers, but Jack fits the allusion all along: the easily offended narcissism, the lying and conning (when trying to get into Claire’s house), the fear of contamination, the way he turns on his followers leaving them dazed and compliant (in the hunting scene), the degradation of women, the self-pity, and the absolute psychopathy. At the hunting picnic, tight close-ups of apple pie and corn on the cob tie the allegory to the United States, and the setting in Washington State takes advantage of the place’s name, which points to the nation’s founding father.
Lest we take the analogy too far, however, von Trier’s inclusion of the genus Homo should remind us that the film casts a wide net. Although its most specific individual target first became famous for building homes, and his penchant for gilded luxury is analogous to artistic pretense, he’s also a product of a society that elevates his values. It’s not enough to call out the obvious – the film traces political trends to a widespread conception of art whose influence is far from innocent.
From Jack’s hands poised like a pianist after the first murder to the final construction of his iconic house, Jack conducts increasingly shocking artistic experiments with his victims’ bodies. After the first clip of Glenn Gould, the woman’s smashed face is equated (presumably in Jack’s mind) with a cubist portrait. In the 3rd Incident, Jack arranges his human quarry with a murder of crows in a geometric pattern like traditional European hunting trophies, and he transforms one of the children’s corpses into a depraved sculpture. In the 4th Incident he draws on Jacqueline’s breasts and sews one of them into a coin purse. By comparison his photographs in the 2nd Incident seem tame, but it’s there that he reveals his guiding metaphor. His real interest was in the negative photo, through which “you could see the real inner demonic quality of the light – the dark light.”
This symbolic reversal, which makes light out of darkness and vice-versa, sums up the perversity at the heart of Jack’s being. The idea gets the last word, as the film concludes with a negative image of Jack’s ultimate descent toward the molten rock at the bottom circle of hell. The same perversity shows itself in Jack’s invocation of a “higher protector” after the rainstorm, in his praise of putrefaction, and in his reading of William Blake’s lamb and tiger: “The tiger lives on blood and murder, kills the lamb, and that is also the artist’s nature.” The most direct expression of Jack’s perversity comes at the end of his lecture on Blake, when he declares that “art is divine.”
Given the extent to which our society worships art, Jack is clearly not alone in his opinion. People tend to be religious in their allegiance to their favorite music, films, books, etc., and we enshrine our most valued paintings in buildings that look like temples. This idea that art engenders a kind of idolatry is not new – it appears, for example, throughout the films of Carl Thedor Dreyer, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Luc Godard. In Vivre sa vie Godard argues that this idolatry is at the expense of whatever subject art means to express. The House That Jack Built finds in the idolization of art, at least by implication, a fertile ground for the political perversity that allows society’s cruelest elements to seize power.
Toward the end of the 4th Incident, Jack describes his admiration for a Nazi warplane and for Nazi architect Albert Speer’s “Theory of Ruin Value”. He tells Virgil that Speer “constructed his buildings using both weaker and stronger materials so that they, in a thousand years, would appear as aesthetically perfect ruins.” It’s easy to overlook how much of the appeal of Nazism was aesthetic as opposed to ideological, and the same susceptibility to purist or idealist notions of art still influences our politics today. Jack’s romantic reverence for ruins comes back ironically to bite him at the end, when he falls into the most agonous pit of hell precisely because he’s trying to circumvent a ruined bridge whose most vulnerable material eroded away centuries ago.
CONNECTIONS:
Vampyr – Implied link between art and death
Detour – Violence with a telephone cord points to the degradation of social connections
Orphée – Art as a perverse obsession with death; negative imagery; descent into the underworld
Vivre sa vie – Perversity of elevating art above its subject; segmented narrative; ironic twist at end
Band of Outsiders – Critique of the hubris of making art
Pierrot le fou – Equation of art with death
Dancer in the Dark – Setting in Washington State, whose name points to the founding of the United States