I Would Like to See It: The House that Jack Built

“I’m not stupid,” says Jack (Mat Dillon), the film’s eponymous serial killer, moments before we see him bluff his way into a woman’s (the great Siobhan Fallon Hogan) home by first claiming to be a police officer who’s lost his badge, then pivoting to revealing himself as a pension manager conducting some kind of obtuse double-blind survey. As the film is explicitly a series of recounted memories and Jack is by his own admission completely without trustworthy qualities, one imagines a fair amount of embroidery accompanies his account of outfoxing implausibly stupid woman after implausibly stupid woman. The psychopomp Verge (Bruno Ganz), presumably short for Virgil of The Inferno fame, even questions the veracity of Jack’s reporting, and before long the sense emerges that what we’re seeing is a clumsy reworking of the real events, an idiot’s version of a clever manipulator’s actions laid inelegantly over the squalid reality.

von Trier’s film is steeped in this sense of confabulation, its episodes of misogynist brutality as concerned with revealing in negative space the architecture of their author’s fragile ego. Is he a taciturn thug driven to murder by vapid, abrasive women? A Bundy-esque predator who feigns vulnerability to lure his victims into abusive relationships before killing them? A steely-eyed family man to whom women and children are game to hunt? In the end, we know only what Jack tells us he’d like to be. Like the house he continually redesigns and tears down only to begin again, his vision of himself is incoherent, a narcissistic farrago of smug superiority and idle daydreams. Perhaps his one honest moment lies in the recounting of his childhood in the rural Midwest, which begins as he mutilates a duckling and then shows us the one moment of peace Jack inhabits throughout the film: listening to the synchronized inhale and exhale of men reaping grass in a field. Order and purpose are the things he craves, but he can impose them only in hindsight, and then without skill.

The titular house itself appears only for a moment, and then only in a dreamlike state of quasi-reality implied to occur after the police break into Jack’s cold storage facility and gun him down, but in that moment it condenses the film’s yearning for structure and its random, ever-changing variations on destructive stupidity into a single image as simple and as violent as anything in von Trier’s filmography. A house, literally, of the dead, and through it a journey into the depths of literal, physical Hell where the air is thick with the high-pitched buzz of billions of the damned screaming in simultaneous and unrelenting agony. This is the structure, the belonging, to which Jack’s half-baked pursuit of art through murder leads him, but even on the threshold of damnation he fails to grasp the most basic truths about himself. Like the photo negatives of campfires which so entranced him as a child, Jack is a creature of the black flame, a thing which exists only as a distorted shadow of humanity, unthinkingly aping behavior which it recognizes but cannot comprehend. There's your genius serial killer.