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Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac:
Polypho-nic Anatomy of a Cruel Film
Elena Del Río
Abstract
Sexual experimentation in Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac functions as a vehicle for a devastating critique of moral and conscious man. This critique is enabled via the integration of two models of Nature: Spinoza’s vital reserve of affects (a vision woven around the film’s analogy between trees and human souls), and Artaud’s idea of Nature as cruelty (a debt that is immanent to life before it is sadistically levied on our bodies by others). This essay focuses on the film’s unresolved tension between a seemingly affirmative model of Nature and a much darker vision of cruelty.
Résumé
Dans Nymph()maniac de Lars von Trier, l’expérimentation sexuelle sert de métaphore à une critique impi-toyable de l’homme en tant qu’être moral et conscient. Cette critique est rendue possible par l’intégration de deux idées de la Nature : celle de Spinoza sur le réservoir moral des affects (le film élabore cette vision à travers une analogie entre l’arbre et l’âme humaine), puis celle d’Artaud sur la cruauté de la nature (quelque chose qui est immanent à la Nature avant d’être sadiquement imposée à nos corps par d’autres sujets). Cet essai se concentre sur la tension non-résolue entre un modèle apparemment affirmatif de la Nature et une idée plus sombre de la Nature comme cruauté.
Keywords
42 Desire never hindered anybody; doctrine hindered everybody.
Artaud, Oeuvres complètes XVIII: 21
The plague takes images that are dormant . . . and pushes them to become the most extreme gestures.
Artaud, Oeuvres complètes IV: 34
Chapter 4 of Nymph()maniac (2013), “Delirium,” transitions into Chapter 5, “The Little Organ School,” via the concept of polyphony and its relevance to Joe’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sexuality. Looking for any object in the room that would help her move into the next Chapter of her story, Joe notices the cassette player in Seligman’s (Stellan Skarsgård) room. The music of Bach’s piece, “The Little Organ Book,” launches Se-ligman into one of his intellectual digressions, this time about the concept of polyphony structuring this piece. Polyphony, he says, involves a diversity of melodies working towards a harmonious whole. Immediately, Joe relates polyphony to “the quality of nymphomania . . . the relation between various intercourses.” Joe’s appropriation of this concept to her own sexual life pushes the idea of nymphomania beyond its phallocentric boundaries. Whereas common knowledge might define the nymphomaniac’s sexuality, in symmetry with the male “Don Juan”, as a compulsive, abstracting repetition of the same act, Joe’s sexuality is rather a polyphonic ensemble made of differences. What she feels is “the sum of all these different actual experiences, so that in a way [she has] only one lover.” Moreover, as we confirm in Chapter 5, Joe’s description of the qualities or over-tones every lover contributes to her sexuality is concrete and sensual in the extreme, each hardly superfluous or lost in an undifferentiated whole. Besides utilising the notion of polyphony to account for the non-Oedipal, machinic dynamics of Joe’s sexual desire, Nymph()maniac more generally mobilises polyphony as befitting its own discursive and philosophical style. The film weaves together three major philosophical strands to
ac-commodate an exceedingly complex understanding of Nature1:
Nature as inert rhetoric, mainly expressed through Seligman’s heavily cerebral responses to Joe’s tale; Nature as vital reserve, spun through the singular, in many ways conflictive, affects of Joe’s sexuality (and strengthened via the ongoing analogy between trees and human souls); and finally, Nature as cruelty ─ a sort of payment or debt all humans incur, a payment that is immanent to life before it may be sadistically levied on our bodies by others. Discernibly different, these three perspectives on Nature are by no means neatly com-partmentalised in the film. For instance, the representational reduction of Nature is noticeably identified with Seligman’s studious point of view, which the film ultimately exposes as inadequate. Yet, Nymph()maniac’s aesthetic and intellectual richness, its packed eventfulness, benefits enormously from Seligman’s
encyclopae-dic framing of Nature.2 Furthering a similar promiscuity of points of view, Joe’s tale is as embedded in
Spino-zan vitality as in the rigorous destiny of Artaudian cruelty. Even more confounding, given the film’s ending, is the fact that Seligman’s reductive responses to Joe’s story are sometimes tinged with an expansive, amoral view of (human) Nature that, like Spinoza, considers affects purely from the perspective of their capacity for
1 As Marcos Norris argues in his reading of Nymph()maniac, the film places Nature at the forefront of human life, thereby coun-tering “constructivist accounts of subject formation” that have been the focus of film theory since the 1970s (Norris 2015, 4). 2 With Nymph()maniac, von Trier claimed to have inaugurated the genre of “digressionism,” a style where the story is constant-ly interrupted and re-interpreted via the film’s addiction “to language, narrative [and] image-making” (Romney 2014, 29).
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sadness or joy. In sum, although I would argue that Nymph()maniac leans more heavily towards the cruel side of Nature, the film’s polyphonic structure seems to be aimed at dissuading us from believing too much in a single thing, instead making the various systems of thought cross over from one discursive territory into ano-ther even at the expense of its own philosophical coherence.
The aesthetic and affective resonances between von Trier and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty have already been noted by authors such as Linda Badley and Nikolaj Lübecker (Badley 2010, 140; Lübecker 2011, 162). My own interest in examining Nymph()maniac as a cinematic instance of Artaudian cruelty is an extension of the Deleuzian study of contemporary cinema’s propensity for negative affects—a study I have undertaken in The
Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas (2016). Although my study of extreme cinemas is
more centrally informed by Spinozan ethics than Artaud’s cruelty, both methods for thinking extreme events encourage us to engage with negative affects in a productive and creative way rather than simply ignore or oppose them out of a reactive, moralistic impulse.
Nymph()maniac’s polyphonic construction is less intent on harmonious unity than Bach’s baroque music
and more in tune with an experimental appetite for cruelty and discord, disruption and equivocation. As this reading will show, much of the film’s dependency on an Artaudian method of cruelty hinges on its shocking dénouement and the way this rewrites our former reception of Joe’s tale as mediated through Seligman’s largely tolerant response. At different points in the film, the camera gives us a reverse shot of our own spec-tatorial look, as it zeroes in on the one-eyed gaze of a female portrait hanging about in the room where Joe and Seligman take us through the film’s narrative and philosophical web. Presiding over the entire procee-dings, its lucidity at times becoming obvious to the spectator, this female gaze ironically embodies the film’s anticipated knowledge of Seligman’s sexual assault of Joe in the film’s last moments. Highly impersonal, the ironic cruelty levelled by this gaze is worlds more devastating than it may be suggested by the film’s own de-terministic circular structure. Joe’s bruised and battered body lying in the sewer-alley is visible to us, hence its violence potentially assimilable, from the film’s opening scene. Thus, our familiarity with circular narratives and melodramatic clichés prepares us to expect a certain horrific outcome. But the film’s cruelty is so rigorous as to push itself and us beyond the clichés we devise to endure the extremities of life, as if to say: We are not there yet. In this sense, Nymph()maniac’s final scene, in which Seligman forces himself on Joe, is the ultimate foreclosure of closure itself, hence of epistemological and existential security. The film’s final act reaffirms its cruel foundations, in a perspective where, as Bill Schaffer puts it, “every point of closure must also be an opening, every inside must . . . communicate . . . with its outside . . . . plague must be the enemy of organised digestion . . . . an unstoppable reflux that . . . threaten[s] to shatter all recognisable forms from within them-selves” (Schaffer 2002: 143). Vis-à-vis the gaze of the female portrait, we, like Joe and Seligman, become “a body seen by an eye that anticipates and avows its . . . fall, the loss of any vantage point” (Schaffer 2002, 146).
Nymph()maniac is only superficially the story of a woman’s sexual excesses. More precisely, it is the story
of the outside irrupting from within the inside, an impersonal cruelty disorganising and surpassing the limits of human sadism, a treatise of (human) Nature shattering the titillating expectations raised by a film purportedly
about sex. We are not yet disabused of our illusion. We are sovereign of nothing. We are not yet thinking.3
3 In Cinema 2, Deleuze uses this statement to refer to Artaud’s point of view regarding the cinema’s ability to make us think. Deleuze says: “Artaud turns around Eisenstein’s argument: if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it . . . it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself, thought
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Nature: Inert Rhetoric
Seligman’s reference to Joe’s loss of her orgasm in Chapter 6, vol. II, is followed by two parallel images of Joe and Seligman representing their respective, disparate natures. A photographic cut-out of Joe’s naked body at a younger age (Stacy Martin) is superimposed over water, while a similar image of Seligman’s fully dressed body lays over an ocean of books. Their bodies are both static and drifting, having lost the desire connecting them to their elemental natures. These images reveal in the simplest of ways the tension that builds through their seemingly amicable exchanges: whereas Joe’s desire is defined by sensation, Seligman’s is defined by cognition. Seligman’s reception of Joe’s tale sets up a correlation between sexuality and nature that initially seems to bode well for a productive, non-judgmental perspective on nymphomania. His references to all man-ner of natural phenomena ─ analogies based on animal behaviour, mathematical formulas, scientific
experi-ments, and the like4 ─ remove the film’s consideration of human sexuality from the transcendental spectres of
morality and its crippling distinction between good and evil. And yet, Seligman’s rhetorical tactics soon reveal their own blind spot ─ the basic fallacy of defining the body “by its biological faculties or by its intellectual and cognitive attributes” (Beaulieu 2002, 519). As in Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler (The Contemplative
Man’s Recreation) ─ the Romantic Nature Bible Seligman relies on for his comparison of young Joe’s fucking
experiments with fly-fishing ─ his analogic and metaphorical digressions reveal a concept of Nature that al-lows man to maintain sovereign control. From an Artaudian standpoint, such an effort to tame Nature utilises language as “detritus . . . tomb . . . the very betrayal of life” (Weiss 2002, 104), as it attempts to capture and represent the world rather than acting upon it in a performative sense (Stern 2002, 80).
Cut to the measure of human desire, Seligman’s Nature is ruled by the harmony of systematic logic. By contrast, the Nature gradually emerging through Joe’s tale presents the non-human side of a cruel and chaotic universe based on discordant affects and ruled by very few consistent principles. Thus, for example, when Joe experiences the loss of orgasmic pleasure as downright existential crisis, one that will propel her into a wild experimentation with the boundaries of pleasure and pain, Seligman has no problem packaging this affective loss by reference to Zeno’s paradox. In his mind, Achilles’s impossible catching up with the ever elusive tor-toise can readily explain away Joe’s unfulfilled pursuit of pleasure. Joe is outraged by his comparison. “My cunt simply went numb and immediately we have to hear about this ridiculous mathematical problem,” she retorts to Seligman, “You get excited about mathematical crap, not about the story.”
Two of Joe’s episodes in particular widen the rift between Joe and Seligman, as they pose an unsurpas-sable challenge to his reliance on representational myths. The first one is the orgasmic levitation and vision a twelve-year-old Joe (Ananya Berg) experiences while on a school trip in the hills. Joe’s first orgasm, which “came upon [her] without the slightest touch,” and is accompanied by her body levitating some few feet off the ground, is followed by a vision of two mythological women: the whore of Babylon and a more ambiguous
which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed” (original italics) (Deleuze 1989, 167).
4 In his exuberant references to the human amassing of scientific and artistic knowledge, von Trier resembles Russian direc-tor Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom von Trier dedicated his film Antichrist (2009). The Pieter Bruegel painting “The Hunters in the Snow,” a central reference in both Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1974), also appears in von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The levitation episode in the library scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris might perhaps have been referenced in the levitation young Joe experiences in Nymph()maniac, not to mention their shared passion for classical music, and Bach in particular. Despite the strong resonances between the two filmmakers, a far more pessimistic attitude towards civilization emerges in von Trier’s films. Whereas for Tarkovsky, these human achievements are to be lauded and preserved, for von Trier, they merely seem to pro-vide a temporary shield against the paramount cruelty of life.
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figure that Joe associates with the Virgin Mary in the Andrei Rublev icon on Seligman’s wall. Seligman qui-ckly proceeds to disabuse her, alleging this elusive woman is none other than Valeria Messalina, wife to Em-peror Claudius and “the most notorious nymphomaniac in history.” Since Joe’s vision does not fit any existing cultural grid in its clumping together of the religious and the profane, Seligman doubts its veracity. Instead of accepting the story on its own terms, perhaps an original combinatorial of previous images and myths, he declares it unequivocally “blasphemous.”
But more than any other episode in Joe’s tortuous narrative, it is her self-performed abortion that leaves
Seligman utterly speechless and effectively dismantles his intellectual edifice of Nature.5 Seligman endlessly
protests the “unnecessary” lurid detail in Joe’s narration of the procedure. All images, analogies or myths from his bottomless reservoir fail him as potential buffers for the carnage and the unalloyed pain conveyed by Joe’s words (a carnage, it should be noted, doubled up for the audience via the very extreme images we alone have access to). Joe’s abortion cannot withstand the illusion of the theatre of representation; instead, it becomes the stage of cruelty, directly lacerating body and brain and wiping out all rational alibis and justifications.
A certain dynamic begins to emerge out of Joe’s recounting of her abortion. If Seligman “keep[s] inven-ting complicated and false excuses for [Joe’s] despicable and selfish actions,” as she claims, it is not out of a desire to absolve her morally of any sense of guilt. Rather, his “complicated and false excuses,” in the form of so many bits and pieces of encyclopaedic lore, are the very crutches that permit him to circumvent the raw affect of Joe’s experiences. The extremely graphic scene of Joe’s abortion ironically brings together medical knowledge (one she acquired during her medical student days) and affective intensity, yet only to drown the former in the excruciating rawness of the latter. Joe’s cool, mechanical approach to the procedure (as she gets the knitting needles and hangers into boiling water, spreads a white sheet on her kitchen floor, drinks some vo-dka, takes a pill, and washes her hands and arms thoroughly) soon turns into a scene of self-inflicted brutality. To supplement our external view of Joe inserting each successive needle and hanger into her vagina, the film deems it necessary to show us X-ray images of the inside of her body as each of the three needles, and then the hanger, reach up into her uterus and finally succeed in removing the foetus.
Seligman distances himself from the affective extremity of Joe’s description in two ways. On one hand, he aligns himself with the politically correct man who claims a thorough understanding of the woman’s choice to have an abortion, while at the same time he declares that, “when it comes to the method, the less said, the better.” By alleging that “a man can [n]ever comprehend the situation or the pain,” he can maintain his safe distance while pretending deep concern. Seligman’s reliance on such clichés infuriates Joe, who would rather have him express empathy and join her in facing up to the cruel dimension of life. Joe’s acknowledgement of the necessity of her act does not come at the expense of ignoring its cruelty ─ she knows full well that one life’s freedom may be gained at the cost of curtailing another form of life. Furthermore, Joe makes clear that the cruelty inherent in this act would not have been altogether dispensed with had her abortion been conducted in a safe professional environment.
After Seligman accuses Joe of “provocatively insist[ing] on showing the gory details,” Joe does not relent
5 The abortion scene, together with the surrounding dialogue between Joe and Seligman, is part of a long portion of vol. II that was excised from its theatrical version due to censorship pressures. The uncut version of Nymph()maniac vol. I debuted in the Berlin Film Festival in 2013. The Venice film festival screened the uncut version of vol. II. The complete 5-hour-and-twenty-six-minute uncut version of the film premiered in Copenhagen in September 2014.
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in the graphic qualities of her account, which this time ironically arise in the “aseptic” context of medical research. In order for the foetus to be properly removed from the woman’s body, she explains, a “very impres-sive instrument is being developed by the medical community.” This medical contraption, the “nutcracker,” is yet another disturbing physical detail Seligman doesn’t “need to know” about, adding that the knowledge of such details would only outrage the public, thereby harming the chances of women getting abortions in cases of “real” need. Thus, we see that when Joe’s affective extremities prove too wild for Seligman’s aestheticised representational systems, he hides behind the arguments of political correctness, which very soon (as we see from his distinction between “the really serious abortions” of women “far from our social spheres” and Joe’s “luxury problem”) unwittingly devolve into moral judgement. In this regard, Joe’s affective openness, as ex-pressed in her conviction that “taboos are damaging for people,” becomes a vehicle for von Trier’s attack on political correctness and his blurring of the line between the latter and what Joe consistently refers to as “the morality police.” As we shall see, although Seligman’s rhetoric of Nature, as dead knowledge cut off from living affects, seems innocent enough on first inspection, his fatal move on Joe’s body in the film’s closing scene is hardly unrelated to it. It is Nymph()maniac’s masterstroke to turn Seligman’s claim to sexual inno-cence into a dangerous alienation from Nature and to avail itself of this implicit irony to deliver its cruel blow on the audience in its final act.
Nature: Vital Reserve
To understand Nymph()maniac’s proximity to Artaud’s method of cruelty, we first need to examine the important place that a Spinozan vision of Nature occupies in the film. Although the latter does not exactly coincide with Artaudian cruelty, Spinoza and Artaud share a few fundamental principles ─ a rejection of me-taphysics, a critique of morality and a general attack on the illusions of moral, sovereign and conscious man. We may regard these principles as a bridge between Spinozan Nature, encompassing both the possibilities of sadness and joy, composition and decomposition, and extreme manifestations of cruelty such as madness, delirium, deformation and aberration.
Nymph()maniac deploys two contrary images to establish the human relation to Nature. The first one,
shown only for a few seconds, features an anthropomorphised hamster in a cage furnished with a bed, chair and TV set. The second one is not limited to a single image, but spins a complex discursive chain that runs throughout volumes I and II: the analogy between humans and trees. If the purpose of the first image is merely to mock the projection of our “superior” humanity onto the animal world, the second line of thought not only models the human upon the non-human/tree, but it also posits a single plane of Nature that accounts for all living beings: “the universe as a whole is a single existing individual” (Deleuze 1992, 236). As Susan Ruddick notes, Spinoza’s concept of Nature “den[ies] the possibility of elevating the human condition above the rest of nature” (Ruddick 2010, 42). In effect, what makes us human is not our humanity, but the natural processes by which we became human. Each body in Nature is part of a process of composition and decomposition of forces/affects that, in its effort to persevere in existence, always involves “a quest for what is useful or good for [it]” (Deleuze 1992, 240). According to this logic, “there is no Good or Evil in Nature in general, but there
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arising from encounters that generate joyful affections, is that which augments our power of action, whereas the bad acts in the manner of a poison, “like a toxic or indigestible matter” (Ibid, 247) that decomposes the relation of our parts.
The disappearance of a moral distinction between good and evil in no way makes all beings equal (Ibid, 254). On the contrary, the banishing of moral opposition gives rise to infinitesimal variation in the ways each body combines and expresses its capacities to affect and to be affected. Deleuze sees in Spinozan monism ─ his concept of the univocity of Being ─ the basis of real ethical difference, “a variety of multiplicities and modalities that . . . generate infinite difference” (Blake 2011, 177). The irreducible singularity in the way each body is built up of “aggregates and conglomerates of [affects] in an infinite variety of combinations” (Blake 2011, 185) leaves no room for the imposition of moral judgements that assume the existence of a “common”
human nature.6 The exchanges in Nymph()maniac between Joe and her father (Christian Slater) on the topic of
trees beautifully express the idea that each body’s affective composition is immanent to nature and cannot be considered right or wrong. The peace and luminosity radiating from Joe’s memories of these moments, origi-nating in her childhood and remaining vivid all the way to the present, are about the most affirmative forces in Joe’s life, and their affirmation lies in the capacity of the analogy tree-human to assert the immanent value of difference. The father refers to the naked tree trunks as human souls: “twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls,” he says, “all depending on the kind of lives human beings lead.” The father’s descriptions of the ash tree, the lime tree and the oak tree develop three major themes: the unique attributes of each kind of tree; the idea of the bad as a social invention based on normative expectations (“When the ash tree was created . . . you couldn’t say anything bad about it”); and the baring of the soul under extreme conditions (“It’s actually the souls of the trees you see in the winter . . . It’s one long struggle for survival”).
The ash tree’s black buds are to the tree as nymphomania is to Joe: not an aberration of the natural order, but the distinctive mark that expresses her singularity and makes her who she is, hence her staunch rejection of a normalising therapy based on the inherently judgemental idea that “here, everyone’s the same” (meaning, “we’re all perverts”). Although the ash tree is so often mentioned in Nymph()maniac as to become identified with Joe, she does find her own “soul tree” towards the end of her story. This time, the tree is left unnamed, but it is significantly described as all bent to one side, having two trunks like her father’s (its original trunk having been broken when young), extremely solitary and naked, and rooted in stark rock. Like P’s (Mia Goth) deformed ear (and propensity for violence) or the paedophile Joe meets in her debt collection job (Jean-Marc Barr), Joe displays an abnormality or deformation of sorts: From a social standpoint, her so-called abnor-mality would be to “demand more from the sunset” than is deemed appropriate and to express this through her extraordinary quest for sexual pleasure. Joe’s empathy towards others whose affects are aberrant such as racists, paedophiles and mass murderers is certainly provocative and makes her the target of Seligman’s (and our own?) politically correct criticisms. At the same time, her affinities with those who are deviant allow the film to articulate a different relation between the normal and the pathological (Beaulieu 2002, 516), one that
6 Precisely because the laws bodies follow in their affective compositions/ decompositions are exceedingly complex, we find innumerable instances of apparent contradictions in Joe’s actions, words or experiences. Thus, for example, Joe finds herself sexually aroused while in the presence of her father’s dead body; she marvels at the apparent incongruity of saving snails, yet being capable of removing a foetus from her body; and her arguments are sometimes irreconcilable under a moral perspective that expects consistency: she can say at one point that we should forgive our executioner, while later arguing that for humans killing is the most natural thing.
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would advocate the awareness of our own violent instincts while rejecting their unconscious projection onto deviant others.
The less a body’s affects conform to the normative ideal, as in the case of Joe and others in the film, the more that individual will be considered aberrant or deformed. In a Spinozan sense, the singular affections that compose each body, more or less distant from a moral ideal, may be experienced as passions. Although passions entail a passivity that is always a less perfect form of power than actions, they are not negative in themselves, as they can either augment our power (joyful passions) or diminish it (sad passions). As Aurelia Armstrong explains, unlike the Stoics, who regard the passions as “the primary obstacle to human flourishing” and present them “in terms that evoke their susceptibility to remedy” (Armstrong 2013, 8), Spinoza’s Nature “precludes the possibility of a total liberation . . . from the passions” (Ibid, 13). Passions may “support our stri-ving to increase our power” (Ibid, 17) or they may deplete our power. Joe’s pursuit of sexual pleasure encom-passes both these possibilities. While her sexuality becomes increasingly tinged with sad affects, and, disabled by its own excessive activity, reaches a point of numbness and physical impairment, the possibility of joy does arise in several episodes in vol. I. The most remarkable of these are the “fucking competition” between Joe and B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) in the train ride (“You flew on that train,” Seligman tells Joe), and the polyphonic, playful interweaving of Joe’s intercourse with three of her lovers in “The Little Organ School.”
In committing herself to therapy, Joe in effect embarks on a project of self-erasure. Advised by her thera-pist, and implicitly emulating the Stoics’ belief in the extrication of the passions, Joe goes to irrational lengths trying to “remove incentive and reduce exposure” to sexual desire. To this end, she turns her apartment into a virtual coffin of padded surfaces and opaque mirrors and windows, the film clearly identifying the removal of her sexuality with her own extinction. Ironically, it is her own mirror reflection that saves her from affective suicide, when at one of the group therapy sessions where she’s supposed to acknowledge her “addiction,” she glimpses a reflection of her young self in a mirror and, prompted by this image’s vital promise, ends up as-serting her difference and her love of her filthy, dirty lust. Yet, it is the prior scene where she covers up every piece of furniture in her home that contains even stronger material evidence of the impossibility of her efforts at eradicating her sexual passions. After she concludes her metaphorical self-burial, Joe lies dressed on her bed. To sooth herself, she begins to flip through the pages of her leaf scrap-book, and, moved by the auto-erotic charge of her own saliva-dipped fingers, she performs a most inventive form of intercourse, using her fingers as a phallus to penetrate her mouth-vagina. This act suggests that, as Spinoza understood, no effort of the will may allow us to manipulate or control our affects (Armstrong 2013, 21). Short of obliterating her existence, Joe cannot stop herself from being sexual.
“Ridding myself of my sexuality is now my goal,” Joe tells Seligman at the conclusion of her story, “I will start up against all odds, like a deformed tree on a hill.” For all her sincerity and her real need to move past her excesses, how Joe will be able to live as a non-sexual being is left appropriately unanswered, although a cruel hint may in fact be provided through Seligman, her non-sexual interlocutor turned failed rapist at the end of the film.
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In its “Delirium” Chapter and other notable moments, Nymph()maniac uncovers “the frightening text of natural man” (my translation) (Dumoulié 2007, 27), which exposes the body to its own impotence in the face of extremity. Suffering from brain damage and a terminally-ill, out of control body, Joe’s father undergoes a frightfully violent state of delirium; under these circumstances, Joe’s father is very much still a part of Nature, his aberration (like Joe’s nymphomania) only deemed aberrant from the point of view of human interest. The idea that Nature is not tailored to human convenience, as Spinoza reminds us, already contains a seed of im-personal, Artaudian cruelty.
Although very significant differences separate Spinoza and Artaud’s philosophies of the body, the notion of “appetite” enjoys a prominent place in both cases ─ as the basis for cruelty in Artaud and of conatus (power of existence) in Spinoza. The differences between Spinoza and Artaud may be gauged through their disparate notions of good and bad/evil. While Spinoza entertains a very practical approach, as discussed earlier in this essay, Artaud’s notions are more dramatic, and his idea of evil (for Spinoza, a human invention) belies his strong attachment to myth. For Artaud, cruelty is defined as life’s appetite for creation and destruction, but, unlike Spinoza, he favours the destructive impetus, an emphasis which he sees necessary in order to counter the pacifying illusions of civilization. These are Artaud’s words: “I employ the word ‘cruelty’ in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity . . . a living whirlwind that devours the darkness . . . that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue; good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil is permanent” (Artaud 1958, 102). Ultimately, I believe Artaud’s “evil” is more subjectively filtered through his own mental and physical condition. For Artaud, the action of theatre must be directed at confronting the audience with intolerable extremity so that we are forced to give in to a sound beyond language and a body beyond the self. To this viewer, the scenes in Nymph()maniac that carry out this cruel mandate most directly are Joe’s self-conducted abortion, discussed earlier, Joe’s exchange with the covert paedophile in vol. II, and, trumping every other form of cruelty in the film, its devastatingly ironic resolution. Both the abortion scene and the encounter with the paedophile express the rigorous force of cruelty that takes bodies to the limit of what they can do, feel or think. These scenes perform a shocking erasure of the line between pleasure and pain, transforming these opposites into an undifferentiated intensity that defies classifi-cation. During her abortion, Joe’s erogenous zones turn into the site of self-inflicted pain and savage mutila-tion. This moment, visually parallel to the wounded and disabled state of Joe’s vagina after years of excessive sexual intercourse, prompts us to think of the reversal that all extremes produce. The abortion turns around the pleasure-seeking act of fucking, extraction undoing the effect of penetration, yet, in another ironic turn, Joe’s head is thrust backwards in a posture reminiscent of the ecstatic sensation that attends orgasm. Clearly, a similar seismic shifting of the line between pleasure and pain and their normative meanings occurs during Joe’s sadomasochistic sessions with K (Jaime Bell), a central chapter in the film that, unfortunately, I have no space here to discuss fully. As in Artaud’s theatre of cruel healing, Joe’s pursuit of ecstatic affects beyond pleasure and pain disorganises the limits of the well-adjusted bourgeois body.
It is out of the skills Joe gains in the (de)territorialization of pain and pleasure while at the hands of K, but also out of her own deep acquaintance with cruelty, that she can find a job in the debt-collecting business run by L (Willem Dafoe). And it is no coincidence that the final chapter, “The Gun,” works towards the unveiling of the film’s cruel method through the metaphor of debt collection. Unlike the pacifying metaphors offered by
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Seligman, the film’s metaphoric discourse here aims to denude the affects, separating the body from metaphy-sical judgement. The shocking episode involving Joe and the paedophile/debtor aims, in fact, “to have done
with the judgment of god,”7 as Joe confronts this man, and by extension Seligman and us, with the necessity
of a debt that is immanent to life. It is through the becoming of our own actions and affects that we incur this debt. Cruelty demands our payment not as sinners, but as beings whose consciousness is no match for life. In this sense, cruelty is not exceptional (just as, for Spinoza, the aberrant is a particular composition, and not really a deviation from Nature). In the scene in question, Joe and her two thugs visit a man to collect a debt he owes. Neither the thugs’ unimaginative coercive techniques nor Joe’s stories of sexual deviance appear to work on him. At last, Joe hits on the man’s trigger: his paedophilic tendencies. The man is helplessly strapped to a chair, his fly open. As Joe begins to relate his imaginary encounter with a child, his penis becomes erect, and, unable to bear the shame and the pain this arousal is causing him, he promises to pay. In a real sense, the man’s promise of payment turns into a performative speech act that relates to an existential payment, since, affectively speaking, Joe’s violent extraction of his repressed desire exposes him to the cross he bears in life and therefore extracts the debt he owes in being who he is. Joe evidently feels a strong sympathy for this man, who she sees as “carrying the same cross” of loneliness and marginalisation as herself.
From an Artaudian standpoint, the final episode in Joe’s narration, where she meets her former lover Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) and P in the alley and is viciously beaten up, peed on and forced into watching a repeat sexual act of her deflowering by Jerôme, is altogether less consequential. As Schaffer remarks,
Artaudian cruelty . . . is . . . not fundamentally vindictive . . . The plague is not an expression of sadism by one towards another. It is not a face to face violence, but an affirmation of that inhuman violence which announces the unrecognisable and destroys all secure enclosures . . . Which announces. . . the other within myself, death within life. (Schaffer 2002, 145)
From this angle, Jerôme and P’s sadistic vengeance upon Joe would simply amount to a perversion of life’s fundamentally innocent cruelty (my translation) (Dumoulié 2007, 17), as carried out by the weak against life itself.
The film’s conclusion couches its impersonally-levelled cruelty in shattering irony:8 the weak preys upon
the strong, the virgin creeps upon the nymphomaniac. But Joe, like Grace in von Trier’s Dogville (2003), is a survivor, and her countermove is decisive. If her gun didn’t work as a weapon of jealous revenge upon Jerôme, it does work as a weapon of the most rigorous necessity upon Seligman. Is Seligman like the fish he once lectured on, which, though not hungry, is moved to act given the right bait? Has Joe miscalculated the provocative potential of her story, carelessly assuming Seligman’s asexual nature? Has she forgotten her own
7 To Have Done With the Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu) (1947) was Artaud’s last work, an au-dio-piece commissioned for the radio featuring an anguished rant against society filled with scatological imagery, screams, anti-American invectives and anti-Catholic pronouncements.
8 The film’s cruel irony is closely related to what Peter Schepelern has identified as its general aesthetics of detachment. For Schepelern, detachment is the affective category that dominates in Nymph()maniac, one that permeates not only Joe’s personal relationships but also the film’s approach to life in general (Schepelern 2015). However, his narrative-centered reading of the film prioritises the subjective or psychological aspects of detachment. In my view, von Trier goes further in attributing detachment to the workings of the natural world, which, Spinoza also insists, is unconcerned with human interests. Von Trier’s stark approach thus avoids a judgmental perspective that might perceive detachment in a negative light.
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conviction that “sexuality is the strongest force in human beings,” regardless of its tortuous circumventions and sublimations?
Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing is certain: Nymph()maniac does not punish its heroine out of some kind of misogynistic perversion, as some scholars have argued von Trier relishes doing (Romney 2014, 30; Williams 2015, 22, 23). That Jerôme and Seligman are phallocentric bastards is a given, but it would be a sad oversimplification to leave our analysis at that and overlook the film’s further reaching critique. If there is a politics of gender in Nymph()maniac, it is one that expresses a woman’s capacity for cruelty, not as a passive sufferer, but as a subject who, unlike her male counterparts, possesses the affective strength to live through it. Thus, if we think of the end of Nymph()maniac as the film punishing Joe’s excessive sexuality, we are not moving past a moralistic fable, the very point of view targeted by all of von Trier’s films. As it discounts the moral dichotomy of good versus evil, Nymph()maniac also rejects the conventional narrative closure strategies of reward and punishment. More precisely, the film proposes a disjunctive synthesis of predator and prey, terms rooted in an ethological (as developed through the fly-fishing analogies), rather than a moral vision of Nature, to account for the affects/powers exchanged in human interactions. From this etho-logical standpoint, we are all predator and prey, the distance between the two sometimes indiscernible. Like Spinoza and Artaud, von Trier offers an amoralist thesis of provocation (Deleuze 1992, 251). Here, any talk of rewards and punishments only “reflects our ignorance of the true [immanent] relation between an act and its consequences” (Deleuze 1992, 254). Joe’s pursuit of pleasure does come at a high price of pain, but, beyond positivity or negativity, she survives. Seligman’s insulation comes at an even higher price: his reduced capa-city for suffering is paralleled by a reduced capacapa-city for joy.
The film’s cruelty, then, involves a method of action, neither a judgment nor a fiction. At the end, cruelty jumps off the screen and seeks us out in our self-congratulatory tolerance of Joe’s aberrant behaviour and our search for ultimate meanings. Like the inexplicable moves made by the fish in Seligman’s stories, caused by unpredictabilities of weather, barometric pressure, fish psychology, or like the pale reflection of the sun that finds its way onto the building across from Seligman’s, his move on Joe’s unsuspecting body defies a simple explanation. Seligman is not moved to act by a conscious will, but by unconscious, immanent causes and forces. Yet, a blind man could have seen these forces gathering all along. A one-eyed woman gazing at Joe and Seligman did see it coming, and tried in vain to warn us. The signs were there to be felt from the beginning: his protestations at Joe’s most graphic descriptions, his strenuous efforts at neat packaging life, his many repre-sentational ruses and projections, his final, feminist-flavoured absolution exonerating Joe of all the bad in her life ─ all culminating in his stunning syllogism: “But you fucked thousands of men!” Did we ourselves lean on Seligman’s stories to soften the blow of Joe’s extremities? And, if Seligman so thoroughly misunderstood Joe’s story, will we fare any better? Nymph()maniac’s ending is not about Joe or Seligman, now little more than distant, washed up ghosts. It is rather about us, summoned to account by cruelty, turned into the film’s virtual object of desire. After a long night’s journey, it is now dawn. Yet, our awakening will be brutal. We are not yet thinking.
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Elena del Río is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Deleuze and
the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh, 2008) and The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas (Bloomsbury, 2016).
