MS: I read a couple of reviews that did the whole “while it looks good on paper…BUT” thing and to be honest, two and a half hours of a reprehensible person doing a 25th Hour-energy rant isn’t my idea of a good time. But I think the gambit that makes the film watchable is that there’s a tongue in the cheek the whole time: that this is not someone to be admired. That this is a despicable person operating under the delusion that he’s a genius.
AS: Can we talk about Uma Thurman and the broken jack? Badum tss intended?
MS: I feel terrible for saying this, but there were aspects of the Thurman character that made me think about this modern serial killer/true crime craze we’re in the middle of. The kind of dark glee she has when she tells Jack that he looks like a serial killer.
AS: “Here’s how you’d kill me!”
MS: There’s a…let’s say…rejection of that perspective. The baseball card-ification of true crime.
AS: Speaking of true crime, right after Jack I watched Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. I think Jack’s time period and the Pacific Northwest setting suggest a strong connection to Ted Bundy.
MS: Wasn’t it Bundy too who was famous for pretending to be hurt to trick victims into getting into his van?
AS: Yeah, which is what Jack does. Bundy’s the big thing right now with the Bundy Tapes and Extremely Wicked. I get the true crime thing. But I also think the way that it’s become sort of trendy does a disservice to the good reasons that people are interested in this stuff. Extremely Wicked’s whole deal is “here’s this guy who appears normal but is secretly a monster.” You don’t need to spend an hour and a half being like: “hey, a guy who appears to be very nice and normal can actually be a monster.” Like, we know. Women know this.
MS: Yeah no shit.
AS: One thing that stood out watching the two films back to back was the lamb metaphor in Jack: the lambs having the honor of living forever in art. The idea of victimhood being this preserving thing. When you have a film like Extremely Wicked that’s so basic and surface level, no matter how much of that surface is dedicated to telling part of the story of someone like Bundy’s long-time girlfriend Liz, she’s still just the lamb forever in art. Extremely Wicked doesn’t really show the crimes, which is a choice that I expect people will praise the film for; because you know, if you don’t show the violence then you’re not being exploitative. But I think there’s a dishonesty to that.
MS: This has been the hill that I have been dying on for eight months. And it’s kind of fucked my life up a little bit in terms of the content I consume. After watching Jack, one of my bigger takeaways was that there was something sour and uncomfortable about the criticisms of the violence in the film. I never want to see a true crime film where the murder of children isn’t repulsive and disgusting. I never want the serial murder of women to be palatable. I never want it watered down or simplified; I want it to make my skin crawl. I want to be disgusted, grossed, and un-endeared.
AS: Exactly.
MS: I think that there’s actually a weird political value in a certain level of not being able to turn away from something. Which is von Trier’s whole thing. Like, “I’m going to make you fucking watch this. Look.” And it’s difficult to disentangle the cinematic edge lord exhibitionism from this point, that actually, if we’re going to talk about serial murder, especially of women, that shouldn’t be an easy pill to swallow.
AS: It’s very hard to know what you can take and what you can leave.
MS: When I would talk to people about this they would tell me that I was giving von Trier too much credit. I don’t know if that’s true, or really if that even matters. The film hit me that way. It just did. And since watching it, I’ve had a hard time not feeling repulsed by the commercialization of serial killing. It’s a fandom. I don’t think I realized how dangerous that is. How it’s cute and edgy to be obsessed with it. I get that there’s value in using humor to take power away from despicable people. But I also want to make space for the role of exploitation in the sense of transgression. It’s an integral part of it. Not showing the transgression is kind of reprehensible, I think.
AS: Yeah.
MS: That Jack goes as hard as it does, that the most violent cut was the one that got out to the public first—it’s the wrinkle that’s fascinated me the most. This film held my feet to the fire, not so much in terms of justifying unwatchable violence, but being more accountable about thinking through what unwatchable violence is doing. Whether von Trier intended it or not, it made me think a lot about how tame we’ve made serial killers. And I don’t know how productive that kind of domestication is.
AS: There are enough nods to serial killers in Jack that it makes me think he’s done his homework. There’s the Bundy stuff.
MS: And the Ice Man. I love that part. Unprompted Jack drops a fact, like: “well you know the Ice Man always inhaled his victim’s last breath.” And Verge goes like, “JACK!” Like, you can’t drop these facts like they are IMDB trivia. It’s kind of gross to be a smart ass about this shit. I think that people perceived this film as being flippant about these things and I think it was doing something much more interesting.
AS: There’s also a connection to Dahmer where Jacqueline goes out to the cop and tells him “this guy I’m with just told me he murdered sixty people,” and the cop’s just like “ma’am have you been drinking? Go back inside with your boyfriend.” That literally happened to one of Dahmer’s victims. There is something very real that von Trier is getting at in the way that cops ignore victims.
MS: Absolutely.
AS: I used to listen to true crime podcasts. And I just got to the point where I felt like “there’s enough bad shit in the world, I don’t need to be consuming this all the time.” When you get to that point I think there’s almost a temptation to want the palatable version. I think that’s a terrible thing to pretend that this stuff is easy. A friend of mine checked out during the child-hunting scene, and his take was “I get what he’s trying to do, I understand why this is so brutal, but it’s just so fucking hard to watch and I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to be seeing this.” And that’s a super valid take!
MS: Yep!
AS: And I told him: the fact that you felt that way is good.
MS: Exactly! Critics who take onus with certain parts of Jack being hard to watch—Yeah! You’re a fucking human being! If you didn’t find it hard you’d be no better than Jack.
AS: I think my thing is that I’m never going to tell anyone that they need to watch this movie. They don’t. Especially if they know that it’s going to be beyond a point of what you’re willing to see. But if you’re going to watch a movie about a serial killer, it should be this movie about a serial killer.
MS: I want to jump in make a very clear distinction because I can see us Thelma and Louise-ing off a cliff. I think what we’re talking about it starting to sound a lot like the dessert wine rant. And I’m worried. Because I do think that what we’re saying and what Jack says in the wine rant are two different things and I want to fortify that barrier. We’re not saying that grotesque stuff is some great art that justifies its grossness.
AS: Absolutely not.
MS: It’s that grotesque stuff is gross. Full stop.
AS: Right. And that representations of that grossness have to be honest, or else we become complacent and don’t realize how gross it is.
MS: The dessert wine rant is this like, cascading word vomit of musings where Jack talks about gross horrible shit, the kind of gross horrible shit people think about when they think “Lars von Trier movie.” Jack talks about decay as being this breaking-down that lifts things up to become part of an artwork, that there’s this kind of value in ruins, which leads him to the power of icons. And he ends up going down this path where Jack talks about the world being disinclined to give credit to those who create icons, which is accompanied by a montage of dictators. Why I think that von Trier isn’t necessarily using Jack as a 1:1 mouthpiece is that the other time Jack mentions “icons” is the “small icon” of the hideous, rotting purse he makes out of Jacqueline’s severed breast. That is not a powerful icon. It’s pitiful.
AS: It’s not “higher than a masterpiece.”
MS: No, it’s human and it’s horrid. It’s also during this point that Verge really stands out for me as more than just a strawman figure or a platonic interlocutor: when Jack is going down this path, talking about iconography and the artfulness of big obscene gestures, it’s the angriest Verge gets. He screams at him and tells him to stop and calls him an antichrist. Verge brings up the counterpoint that there can’t be art without love. And that Jack’s works are devoid of love. And to hit home the point that decomposition is not the way to salvation, he brings up the house that Jack never builds.
AS: Alternative title: The House That Jack Tries Very Hard to Build and Never Does.
Related Topics: Double Take, lars von trier, Opinions, the house that jack built
