Back Door To Hell

February 19th, 2010 by Nagypál Tamás

Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves tells the story of Bess, a simple minded, deeply religious girl, member of a small and secluded Presbyterian community in Scotland, marrying Jan, an oil rig worker from the south. The village and her family, already suspicious about the outsider, turn more and more hostile as Bess immerses into the euphoria unleashed by her sexual awakening. She just loves her husband too much, as she herself puts it, so when he has to leave for work on the oil rig, she has a hard time coping with his absence. She prays to God to bring him back early, a wish that is unexpectedly granted due to a tragic turn of events: Jan gets paralyzed in an accident on the rig. Feeling guilty for causing the accident, Bess is ready to do anything to make her husband live. Thus when he asks her to have sex with other men and then tell him the stories in detail so that he’ll feel better, despite her initial resistance she finally accepts the role that will lead to her total exclusion from the community.She becomes more and more isolated as her obsession that having sex for her husband can actually make him walk again grows. In the end she visits a ship of known criminals, putting her life consciously at risk, an endeavor she gets out barely alive, only to hear that Jan did in fact not get better after her self-sacrifice. She dies in self-doubt, despair and total abandonment. The religious leaders of the village proclaim her a sinner at her funeral; the doctor’s report classifies her as a sexual pervert. And yet, after her death, Jan miraculously regains his ability to walk. With a group of friends he steals the body of Bess from the morgue and sets out to the sea to give her a proper burial. After, however, they put her to eternal sleep, another miracle happens: church bells start to ring from the sky, as if God himself wanted to announce the glorification of Bess.

My question would be: is this an antifeminist movie or not? Zizek makes a convincing case that it is in fact the presentation of an authentic feminine act[1]. He builds his argument on Lacan’s formulas of sexuation[2] where the feminine and masculine position is defined in relation to the phallic function. According to his reading, all men are caught in the phallic function precisely because they maintain a subjective distance towards it, that is, because phallic signification posits its own exception.[3] This exception, the semblance of an impossible fullness presented as the real Phallus “merely ‘gives body’ to the impotence/inconsistency of the big Other.” By contrast, Lacan’s famous feminine non-all can be interpreted as the position where the subject “’sees through’ the fascinating presence of the Phallus, that she is able to discern in it the ‘filler’ of the inconsistency of the big Other.”[4] This is how we should read, Zizek claims, the paradoxical formula that not all women/not all of woman is caught in the phallic function precisely because all women/all of woman is submitted to it without exception. This is why he argues that in the final sacrifice of Bess, “she undermines the phallic economy and enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it”[5]. Such an act can be directly opposed to the feminine masquerade where the illusion of the feminine mystique, of a hidden treasure behind all the masks is maintained and thus caught in the phallic logic of constitutive exception. It is only when Bess is able to give up this Beyond, the moment coinciding with her total subordination to Jan’s wishes in her last suicidal mission, that is, her “subjective destitution”[6], when she performs the ultimate sacrifice of love.

Such a reading is criticized by Christopher Craig Brittain, who reproached Zizek, along with von Trier, for creating an aesthetic spectacle of Bess’s suffering, being only interested in the pure idea of sacrifice that they can view from a comfortable distance, without giving up any of their male privileges.[7] Andreas Huyssen makes the same point about Flaubert’s identification with Madame Bovary: such a fetishization of imaginary femininity can go hand in hand with sharing a historical period’s hostility towards real women[8]. Or as Brittain argues, such an approach serves as a great excuse not to examine and politicize the social conditions that destroy the lives of women like Bess. Although I find the somewhat hysterical demand that films should depict the suffering of actual people disconcerting, I agree with the author’s conclusion that von Trier’s cinematic style, the one that Zizek celebrates, is deeply problematic[9].

Von Trier justifies the film’s minimalistic, anti-Hollywood documentary style by claiming that without it, the story would have been too suffocating[10]. For Brittain, this translates as a (futile) attempt to mute Bess’s suffering[11]. He, however, doesn’t mention a crucial element of the film’s cinematic form: the way the director’s gaze enters the diegetic reality. Von Trier accomplishes this by instructing Emily Watson (the actress who plays Bess) to look directly into the camera for fleeting moments. Most of the time, but not always, these shots are followed (after a little delay) by a subjective shot of Bess to mediate the evoked tension. However, the uncanny effect of this procedure is not simply the taking away of the edge of whatever hardship the character has to go through on screen, but also the evoking of a real gaze outside of the film’s symbolic reality that she is ultimately performing for (that of the camera). The reaction the director thus provokes from the spectator is that “she is only acting”, that is, deceiving everyone in the film.

Theoretically this position attests to what Zizek calls a typical misreading of the Lacanian formulas of sexuation, according to which woman “is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond the Phallus about which nothing can be said”[12]. At the narrative level we see Bess’s entanglement in a masquerade for male desire but through the cinematic form, we see her acting for another gaze simultaneously that seems to give her control over her acts in the diegetic space. One could argue that she doesn’t know about the camera, that is, she doesn’t rely on a real gaze supporting her true femininity. When she looks at us, it simply signals the gaps within the symbolic order, as does the feminine masquerade itself. This, however, is not von Trier’s position. It’s almost like his whole filmmaking enterprise was aimed at making the gaze of beyond exist, materialize in the cinematic space. This “answer of the Real”[13] occurs with the emergence of the church bells in the end, a kind of a cynical note from the director underlining that she was acting for him (for the male gaze) all along, that the mysterious woman of beyond is just another male fantasy.

Von Trier’s cynicism challenges many theories about the fleeting nature of femininity. Sue Thornham argues, for instance, that 19^th century paintings of women which elevate them into representations of transcendence try in vain to eliminate their actual individual presence, threatening to disrupt the male fantasy[14]. In the case of Bess, however, the male gaze wins a double victory, first through her idealization in the big Other (as the village doctor puts it: “she was good”), then through destroying the illusion of her freedom from the symbolic when appearing as the Other of the Other, the cynical gaze identifies her (the message of the church bells could be: “she really was good”). This also challenges the definition of feminine masquerade as “taking control of the mask”[15].

I find Angela McRobbie’s notion of the “postfeminist masquerade” more useful in dealing with von Trier’s challenge. She identifies it as a “new form of gender power which re-orchestrates the heterosexual matrix in order to secure, once again, the existence of patriarchal law and masculine hegemony”[16]. The new masquerade involves constant references to its own artifice (Bess looking into the camera), renouncing the powerful figures of the lesbian and the feminist (Bess’s sister), performs an excessive spectacle of femininity (Bess’s promiscuity) and signals submission to an invisible authority (Bess praying to God). Analyzing fashion photographs, McRobbie also warns about the dangers of presenting women as indifferent to their lack, feeling free from subordination to men while still entrapped in the patriarchal society. Her idea is that while a photo can represent a playful relation between the carefree and self-sufficient woman and the remnants of phallic authority (like the ‘Church Father’ statue in the background of a Vogue photo showing a woman in a black dress and high heels), the very framing of the picture serves to contain and limit the female universe[17]. Such a photograph, I would argue, is framed by the patriarchal symbolic twice, just like Breaking the Waves where the church bells function as the inexorable closure and redoubling of Bess’s playfully addressed imaginary God.

There is a more affirmative reading of the relation between Bess and God possible, however, as Frances L. Restuccia demonstrates in his Impossible Love in Breaking the Waves. He argues that the shift Bess is going through is from hysteric to the Woman who doesn’t exist, the latter being the inherent excess of the hysteric’s position. The usual aim of the hysteric is to keep her desire perpetually unsatisfied by finding the lack in the phallic Other and trying to plug it to create real phallic potency. The paradox is that her very activity, were it to succeed, would undermine the aim of her act: she would be exposed to the “satisfaction of utmost pleasure”. Thus normally, she just pretends that she wants to be the object of the Other’s desire and she actually moves from one man to another. But it is possible, as Restuccia shows, that she goes to the end of the hysteric’s logic by identifying with the real-impossible object of male desire (with the Lacanian object a), thus becoming the Woman who doesn’t exist through self-annihilation, “paired with the Man beyond castration”[18] According to the author, in the end of Breaking the Waves, Bess and Jan becomes such a couple through Bess’s ultimate act of love in her self-sacrifice.

What Restuccia doesn’t see is that Bess’s heroic insistence on the realization of the impossible sexual relationship is already framed by the director’s cynical gaze, not only offering a mediating meta-level, a god’s view from where the couple is seen as completing each other but it makes Woman exist as well, enter the diegetic reality, precisely as the Woman who doesn’t exist: we only see the gaze supporting her existence in the form of her funeral bells. Another way of saying that the good woman is the dead woman.

References

Bjoerkman, Stig, “Naked Miracles: An Interview with Lars von Trier” Sight and Sound vol. 6.

Issue 10 (October 1996)

Brittain, Cristopher Craig: Christopher Craig Brittain : ”That is a strength he does not possess”: Slavoj

Zizek and Breaking the Waves

http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo99.papers/Brittain99.htm

Holland, Samantha: “Negotiating Fluffy Femininities” in: Alternative Femininities. Berg, 2004

Huyssen, Andreas: “Mass Culture as Woman” in: Modernism’s Other. Indiana University Press, 1986

McRobbie, Angela: “Illegible Rage: Post-Feminist Disorders” in: The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009

McRobbie, Angela: “Top Girls? Young Women and the Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence” in: The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009

Restuccia, Frances L.: “Impossible Love in Breaking the Waves” in: Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed.Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York: Other Press, 2004, 187-209.

Thornham, Sue: “Fixing Into Images” in: Women, Feminism and Media. Edinburgh University Press, 1996

Zizek, Slavoj: “Death and the Maiden” in: The Zizek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 206-221.

Zizek, Slavoj: “Femininity between Goodness and Act” in: Lacanian Ink 14., 1999, 26-37.

Zizek, Slavoj: The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 1996