In The House That Jack Built, Its Wild Ambitions Fall Victim To Its Own Nihilism
The Murderous Lars Von Trier Film Is Incapable Of Articulating A Meaningful Message When It Devalues Anything That Could Have Meaning
Tristan Young @talltristan
Watching The House That Jack Built, the serial killer meta commentary of a film by the prodigiously provocative filmmaker Lars Von Trier, may feel like the logical- if excruciating- conclusion to the idea that all art is intrinsically political. In that any piece of work, even the most superfluous of movies, is making a statement of sorts; be it explicit or tacit. Such a theory is motivated in part by the optimistic approach to art in that anything is worthy of discussion or interpretation so long as someone took the time to make it. After all, any piece of art is inexorably an extension of the miasma of emotions, intentions, and desires of the person or people that produced it. Certainly one can and should consider their observations of The House That Jack Built in this context, should they choose to observe it all. However when a movie is so self serving, so agonizingly impressed with its own cynicism, and so obnoxiously assured of its own philosophical proselytizing, it makes one reconsider our appetite for digesting film on such a thematically interpretational level. This film’s moralizing and intellectual posturing are so noxiously arrogant and narcissistic, masquerading as a condemnation on modern society but really no more than the indulgence of its director’s most infantile pathology. Ostensibly a journey into not only hell but the black hole of an id from a truly malignant person, The House That Jack Built wants to be an overly prescriptive reading on where art and suffering merge and inform each other, but instead reveals itself as thinly veiled excuse to engage in its creator’s worst impulses in a manner that could be construed as iconic, beyond their obvious repugnance. Still, dichotomous depictions of humanity at its most soulless and the literal representations of religious judgement suggest the possibility of ethical uncertainty and fear on the part of Trier that is worth exploring. Really all of The House That Jack Built is worth exploring; you just might not like what is exhumed among its innumerable corpses.
The trajectory of Trier’s career, now so ominously steeped in controversy and malfeasant voyeurism, be it of the visual or rhetorical variety, was not always so assured. His introduction to the larger film community, even it its independent and more autonomous forms was the harrowing, but emotionally sincere film Dancer In The Dark. While a daunting experience, it earnestly endeavoured to explore concepts of perseverance and empathy to impressive, if esoteric results. In the intervening years however Trier has eagerly indulged in his exploration of violence, cynicism, and dead end nihilism. His films Antichrist and especially the slog of a movie Melancholia, over took Dancer In The Dark as the thematic markers that represented the artistry and id of Trier. His notoriety extended beyond his work in 2011 when his gallingly flippant and dismissive comments about the holocaust, as well as borderline sympathising with the aggrandizing and egotistical ambitions of Hitler got him banned from Cannes Film Festival for a number of years. It’s only with The House That Jack Built that he was tenuously welcomed back. The film does little to alleviate concerns about the deviant psychology that informs his narrative choices. In The House That Jack Built we witness the purest synthesis and indeed apotheosis of his casual cruelty, virulent nihilism, and runaway narcissism. That the film too has an unhealthy focus on and appreciation of the culture of the German War machine reveals that those were no mere extemporaneous thoughts he had about Hitler and the holocaust, but that his admiration for something at least adjacent to neo fascism really is present in his work.
If this all sounds like a lot, yes that is undoubtedly correct. The House That Jack Built is an intimidating collection of thematic and artistic threads embedded, to their credit fairly gracefully if inefficiently, into the story of serial killer’s exploration not only of his own neurosis but hell itself. The story is of our titular Jack (excellently played by Matt Dillon) an insular man that straddles the line between engineer and architect, recounting five curated incidents in his life that meaningfully developed his evolution as a sadistic serial killer. These incidents are recounted to an off screen character Verge (Bruno Ganz), who despite being off screen does provide some lively and occasionally droll feed back and commentary on Jack’s confessions and justifications. It’s only towards the end of the film do we see Verge and understand the journey he is leading Jack on. After disclosing, with overly granular and perfunctory detail, the five murders he wishes to highlight, the film takes a wild swing into becoming a cinematic remake of literally The Divine Comedy. It becomes succinctly clear that Verge is in fact Virgil from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s epic and seminal poem. In the poem Virgil leads Dante through the various circles of hell eventually implanting him in the seventh. The film takes a similar tour in ways literal, abstract, and impressively terrestrial in what are the most nerve-wracking parts of the sequence. Long story short- and it is a long story- Jack ends up in hell, but not before a spirited back and forth on the meaning, impact, and relevancy of Jack’s heinous work.
It’s in this context that The House That Jack Built reveals itself as an arrogant and indulgent extension for Trier’s own violent pathology- and appears proud of it no less. The film and its outlook is oppressively cynical and nihilistic as previously mentioned; Trier admitted that part of his motivation for the film and its depiction of humanity was born through the xenophobic and racist cultural revolution brought about Trump’s assent into politics. We’ve covered the idea of art being informed by the deleterious impact of Trump here before, but in this case it seems more an excuse to go wild- a narrative Purge if you will- then a genuine response to something traumatic. That cynicism mostly manifests in Jack’s dehumanizing attitude towards people. As a person who awkwardly operates at the intersection of art and engineering, he views people as nothing more that raw material for his works. In storing his corpses in a large purgatory like freezer, he photographs them, poses them, and dabbles in taxidermy and the like. The fruition of his exploration of the body as a material for art is too ludicrous to describe here, but it is visually striking.
The problem here is that Jack’s viewpoint on art and humanity is borderline paradoxical. He routinely lavishes attention on artists like the famous pianist Glen Gould, ostensibly so the film can lend itself some overly pretentious clout of the classical variety, yet consistently disregards the human contribution to making art. There is something incongruous about a person so incredibly nihilistic that he looks as humans as nothing more than material, while also being obsessed with the primacy of art. To him art is iconography, existing separate of the vision and intent of those that make it, with the material being far more primary. It’s as if art is divorced from those who make it, willed into existence- even though he himself has first hand knowledge that to make his own art, be it his house or committing murders, takes a lot of hard work! A person can only hope to achieve relevancy, as he endeavours to in his own perverse way, by being associated with the art they create- they have no human value beyond that. And if Jack’s art is of heinous murders, than in his view his victims should be so lucky as to be part of his divine work. That idea of divinity often comes into play as Jack describes the nature and self-proclaimed grandeur of his work- but that too is highly dichotomous. Jack views humans mostly as soulless husks, but repeatedly cedes the notion to a god or higher power, indeed one that appears to be on his side. That the film ends with a literal journey through hell would suggest that Jack’s debilitating nihilism was at least partly misguided. As arduous as the journey through hell is, that repudiation of Jack’s outlook, even if he is far too hubristic to understand, is slightly refreshing.
It’s in these regards that Jack’s ideological or theological outlook seems tritely cheery picked, an ad hoc rendering of a person’s psychology that doesn’t actually create a coherent picture, only the verisimilitude of one. This facile depiction is even more obnoxious in its egregious exploration of murder as an art form. The House that Jack Built is very enamoured with the idea of cruelty and violence being synonymous with philosophy, ideology, and art- as if wanton acts of insidiousness are worthy of being elevated into a higher discourse and therefore fertile ground for intellectual musings. Jack discusses the aforementioned works of Gould, evolving theories on architecture, the artistic suffering in something as mundane as trying to build a house, and likens it to his murders. But these are surface level connections at best. It is a bricolgae of intersecting pop culture and high culture, but they don’t intersect in meaningful ways. Jack likens his work to that of great artists but has no interest or even awareness of the empathy and humanity that is required to engage in any kind of meaningful artistic endeavour. What he does is nothing more than satisfying indulgences. It reveals the shallow intents behind the film’s authorship, less so much the exploration of suffering and joy cohabitating within a single experience, and more a series of contrivances where Trier’s worst instincts could hypothetically be considered noteworthy, apart from merely vile.
In failing to reconcile this aspirational naivety with even basic attributions of self-awareness and empathy do we get to the heart of Jack’s dementia; he’s little more than a next level narcissist. The film perpetually has Jack dabbling in varying forms of neurosis: incident two has him consumed by out of control OCD that compels him to anal retentively scrub his crime scene for example. Elsewhere we see childhood mental instability foreshadow his sadistic ways. There are multiple scenes in which Jack runs through the gamut of his psychological ailments in a recreation of the famous Bob Dylan video Subterranean Homesick Blues- yet again another superficial conflation of pop culture into this work that says absolutely nothing. The film suggests a motive for his acts being an alter ego that dictates his deeds, the nefarious Mr. Sophistication. But we seem him simply make up the idea on the spot, with all the casual laziness of someone half assing a homework assignment. The film is repeatedly, frustratingly uncommitted to excavating or interrogating the psychology of a person that would do these things. In the end he is little more than an arrogant man obsessed with his own indulgences.
Whereas Jack himself seems uncomfortably adjacent to Trier’s own unrequited desires, it’s Verge’s reliably dry wit and subtle rejoinders that inject some much needed intellectual scrutiny into the film, as well as providing it with hints of self awareness. In doing so it suggests some conflict behind the rationale of telling this story, and thus something far more worthy of engagement and interpretation. As Jack tells the tales of his gruesome murders, diving deeper and deeper into what will actually really be Hell with Verge, he peppers his anecdotes with metaphors and allusions meant to serve as justifications for his actions, or at least contextualization. Verge quite often is having none of it. In a scene with Jack pondering the utility and value in the lamb being slaughtered by the tiger as a pathway to becoming a piece of art, Verge succinctly points out, what if the lamb didn’t want to become art? Later Jack stridently depicts his murderous habits as a mental disorder for which he is unable to control in the vein of a shadow dissolving into the distance or firmly blotting out the light above you. Such an allusion is so broadly generic and lazily prescribed that it seems downright galling it would make the film’s final cut; until you realize that’s the point. Verge calls him out by saying you could apply such a banal depiction of Jack’s psychology to literally any mental disorder. There’s nothing special or unique about Jack’s views on the matter, certainly nothing that would justify his murders. The film acutely admonishes Jack’s psychological underpinnings at the start of the film, before one can truly grasp the totality of what it means. Upon Jack asking if he is allowed to speak during the journey into hell. Verge, who like in Dante’s Inferno has taken countless individuals on this journey, has said he has heard it all and that, “not all if it can be said to be of great rhetorical quality”. He glibly puts Jack in his place with, “Don’t believe you’re going to tell me something I haven’t heard before”. In a movie that belabours over the same points over and over again ad nausem, it’s perhaps unintentionally the best and funniest line in the film. It’s the derision of Jack that gives the story a more sincere and thoughtful dimension.
Too often however the film backslides into its own resolute certitude in the efficacy of its nihilism. This is articulated several times over with the story’s egregious fixation with the Third Reich. Focusing on things as prodigious as Nazi dive bombers, its architecture that was arrogantly meant to be evocative of ancient Greek structures, or a Nazi concentration camp beset by an ornate oak tree of historical import, once again suggesting a suspect juxtaposition between natural beauty and man made suffering, Trier gives voice and a platform to the most dehumanizing ideological experiment in history. The extended incident four sequence in which he taunts his victim into screaming for her life, only for no one to care is indeed a scathing indictment of humanity in its modern form. But one once again has to ask if these are honest depictions or just contrivances Trier is manipulating to make a very subjective point. Is Jack truly endemic of an irredeemable society or so aberrant that even Verge is shocked and appalled by his candour? The film bounces back and forth along this opinionated spectrum and can’t seem to commit to one idea or the other. Jack’s befuddled journey into hell, one he is too delusional to understand the implications of, perhaps serves as a conclusive stand on the issue. But even as Jack explores the various levels of hell, he is more confused and intrigued than anguished. Even in such calamitous depths, he is not compelled in the slightest to reconsider his actions or seek anything like absolution or contrition. Right up to and including him slipping in the deepest circle, supposedly to face punishment by Lucifer himself, he hasn’t really learned anything. He still foolishly thinks he can just climb his way out. From this perspective Jack’s character arc is woefully incomplete, as does the film fail to suggest any moral commentary on his actions. The absence of that commentary is in of itself a tacit endorsement of his actions so long as one can loquaciously assure that it is all for a greater good- whatever good that is.
That’s the gnawing question The House That Jack Built’s blunt and abrupt ending leaves you with. What good did any of this do? When a film’s sole existence is to paint our most vile indulgences as something akin to intellectual providence and thus worth ruminating on, do we really need to consider that message? A story that is so pretentiously wordy and grandiose, a hackneyed exploration on the meaning of humanity just so it can launder its core value of- it sure would be fun to commit some elaborate murders- through the lens of artistic efficacy can only exist in a dearth of justification. While it was meant to say something about us as whole, The House That Jack Built says much more about Trier. About how he views art existing not because of its own intrinsic value, but to elevate and indulge him. In that regard he looks at art as something cynically transactional, a Faustian bargain of notoriety in exchange for humanity, a fitting metaphor as the relationship between Jack and Verge is also very reminiscent of Faust and Mephistopheles. The similarities end there however, as at least Faust learned a lesson at great cost. Right up to the final moments of The House That Jack Built, Jack- and Trier- are just so damned impressed with themselves. We don’t have to be.