The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

A good friend of mine, cinephile Ryan Wu, once compared Lars von Trier's Dogville to a beautifully baked piss pie. The craft is impeccable, and by all reasonable judgment it is the best possible piss pie you could ever hope to encounter in the annals of baking. But, you know, it's made of piss, and so it's never going to be any good no matter how much care and attention is lavished on it. Ryan was speaking mostly of Lars' ethical / moral stance, which a diehard liberal like Ryan found predictably odious. 

I, however, have tended to be on Team Lars. I don't think he's a cheap provocateur, even though the man certainly knows how to work the P.R. machine and get himself noticed. His worst films have always been the ones that relied on the simplest tools for disturbing the peace and causing bourgeois discomfort: making fun (sort of) of the mentally disabled (The Idiots), considering present-day slavery (Manderlay), and creating the ideal simpleton in order to kick the shit out of her (Dancer in the Dark). These were artworks clouded by Lars' disdain for the culture around him, both the Danish middle-class and the domination of American neoliberal values, and as such, they represented kicks against the pricks, but not very well-considered ones.

When Lars is on point, he is a Nietzschean voice of anti-reason, a scathing critic of liberalism from the left. One American retrospective of his films was entitled "Well-Meaning People are Dangerous," and this sums up, in part, a particular chapter in Lars' intellectual history. Films like Dogville, The Five Obstructions, and arguably the "Depression Trilogy," are at least in part about the ways that society tries to manage its outcasts, by propping them up and expecting them to simply go with the flow. Someone always thinks they know better, and eventually that opinion becomes a righteous fist of power.

The House That Jack Built is, allegedly, an autobiography of sorts, although one could argue that numerous other of Lars' films contain heavily autobiographical elements. Does Lars question his own sanity? Is he a sociopath, incapable of basic human empathy? Does he torture other people for the sake of his art? This is a stacked-deck inquiry, since Jack (Matt Dillon) offers his victims / art material no say in the matter. Sure, Lars may have bullied Björk on the set of Dancer, but she could have walked away, and she was paid. This is not to dismiss the power differential between actress and director, or the gender imbalance in the bullying. But for Lars to "interrogate" himself in the form of a serial killer is, in essence, to let himself off the hook, because his onscreen avatar is always far worse than he ever could be.

Besides, much of The House That Jack Built is based on corny humor that undercuts its seriousness as introspection. Jack kills his first victim (Uma Thurman) with a jack. His second "incident" is a maladroit series of screw-ups, tedious and self-exculpatory. (As he gets better at killing, his debilitating OCD goes away, which is highly convenient.) But above all, there's something achingly literal-minded about The House, in that Jack creates set-up after set-up, like a director, only to create works of "art" that he alone (and perhaps God) will see. As the Epilogue makes clear, God gives Jack the big thumbs-down, so what was the point? 

Lars behaves as if he / Jack exist in a bubble of secrecy and compulsion, when in fact von Trier has written manifestos, done big-budget TV, given infamous press conferences... He would never hide behind the veil of anonymity, and certainly not a moniker as ridiculous as Mr. Sophistication. (The tip of the hat to Killing of a Chinese Bookie seems particularly pointless.) Whatever Lars has done, he has demanded an audience. But somehow, here, he left us out of the equation, preferring to pitch his manic creations as Holy Writ.

Ultimately, this is a slog of a film, without growth or narrative motility. It accumulates, but it doesn't go anywhere. Except straight to hell, which, if that's where Lars thinks he's been for the last few years, join the club. That's no excuse for this grim exercise in self-regard.