Finally came Lars von Trier's annual controversial work "The House That Jack Built" (The House That Jack Built).
At the Cannes Film Festival, this demon work caused an uproar, and countless fans were eager to see it! At the film festival, some people praised it as a masterpiece, and some people dismissed it as worthless. During the screening, nearly 100 spectators left the stage halfway because they could not bear the excessively realistic torture scenes in the film.
Lars von Trier, anti-Christian, anti-human writer, Nazi sympathizer, believer of death... He always loves to show and release the human subconscious in various dream-like scenes in the film. prototype of desire. Through the filming method, the original sin and the unconscious image presentation are realized.
He hoped that the audience could see the concrete "evil" in the film, in order to reversely explore the gleam of good in the dark. In the 150-minute feature film "This House Is Made By Me", the many chapters passed through it express the secret world of the serial killer's heart in great detail. This is unique in the history of film, and many scenes in the film completely trample the bottom line of film morals and ethics. Looking at the whole film, in fact, those scenes of torture are not much bloodier than many mill movies and horror movies. The most terrifying part of "This House Was Made By Me" is the subversion of ethical common sense. That is, death is wonderful and killing can be artistic.
The film kills morality with reason, distorts ethics with literature, and uses art above all else to trample human nature to the point of worthless. This is the most terrifying part of "This House I Made". The film progresses layer by layer in the form of chapters, telling the hero Jack, from killing on a whim, to premeditated killing, to killing in order to confirm science and literature.
In the film, Jack is portrayed as a person who has cleanliness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, no empathy, anti-humanity, but has a persistent pursuit of art.
On the surface, he is an architect; but inside, there lives a demon.
"This house was made by me" meticulously depicts the process of many murders. From the first rise to murder, smashing a woman's head with a jack; then, sneaking into a single woman's home, clumsily strangling the other;
For his lover, he chose to cut off each other's chest, and use one of them as a wallet, as a nostalgia. In the last scene, he kills the red-eyed man. The murder is to prove whether the infamous "high-efficiency killing method" during World War II works.
However, if you think that "I Made This House" only has these R-rated pictures, then you will underestimate Lars von Trier. The fear sent by Lars von Trier has always been heart-wrenching. He will use various subtexts, peculiar narrative structures, and rich arguments to subvert your cognition, drown your judgment ability, and make you fall into the abyss in a way similar to brainwashing, unable to save yourself. In the middle of one murder after another, Lars von Trier gives one after another, seemingly absurd, but you can't completely refute it, and ponder the inference. For example, in the form of animation, the film explains the tension between the excitement and guilt before and after the murder, and vividly illustrates the inner fluctuations of the murderer.
What is even more unprecedented is that the film also pre-explains the logical choice of the killing sequence in the way that hunters kill their prey, and finally, in a self-deprecating way, equates killing and killing animals.
The most chilling thing is that the film created a new word "noble rot" in a literary way, that is, noble rot. Through the scientific explanation of wine brewing methods, based on the decay process of plants, it is proved that the decay of animals and humans is equally wonderful and worthy of recognition. It is also a gift from nature, a symbol of human intelligence, and an artistic creation.
The film even directly excuses the Nazis, concentration camps, and the Holocaust, believing that it is an artistic representation of "noble rot".
These arguments, one after another, cover numerous cultural, artistic, scientific, and psychological theories, leaving people speechless and sweating. I believe that many viewers choose to leave halfway, because those murderous images and these sophistry but persuasive theories are too lethal. This has almost the same logical path and powerful dissemination effect as the propaganda of the Nazis back then. The audience's instinctive resistance is also because they are afraid that if they watch for another second, they will fall into it unconsciously, or even suddenly agree.
With a huge amount of information and an advantageous amount of knowledge, Lars von Trier has caused emotional and cognitive crushing to most of the audience, which is the most fundamental reason for the controversy of this film. On the one hand, to cope with the visual impact of those rare killing scenes, and to prevent being brainwashed by the theoretical spirit that is explained, the audience is indeed tormented when watching the film. Lars von Trier is still not satisfied, and he has to make a big fuss about the subtext and narrative structure, trying to push the effect to the limit.
"This House Is Made By Me" adopts a composite narrative structure to highlight the tension and magnify the effect. "I Made This House" comes from an English ballad This Is the House That Jack Built. The first three lines of the ballad are: "This is the house that Jack made; this is the malt that was in the house that Jack made; this is the mouse that ate the malt that was in the house that Jack made , gradually into a progressive state, the amount of information increases, and the number of elements increases.
In the third sentence, the connection between the elements of "rat" and "jack" is actually quite fragile. And as the clauses continue to be superimposed, the connection between the new element and the old element will become weaker. This kind of layered structure is the basic method of the narrative of "This house is made by me". Lars von Trier used this ballad for the first time in his feature film debut "The Elements of Crime", but only borrowed words and meanings to highlight the theme in an intertextual way. In "This house was made by me", he directly used this method in the narrative structure. In the film, there is a very important narrative element - architecture.
The male protagonist Jack is an architect by profession. The film begins with the source of the church spire, and then talks about the materials used in construction, the development of aesthetic values and functionality.
With the increasing number of killings, Jack overthrew the house he painstakingly built many times, changing its shape and using materials. He was always dissatisfied and could only overthrow the past.
Until, at the end of the scene, reminded by another person, Jack finally builds the ultimate house with a spire, satisfying him, both functionally and aesthetically, out of the corpses of the victims. That in This Is the House That Jack Built has a specific signified for the first time, and achieves the fixed unity of the signifier and the signified in the film. This layered structure provides space for those homicide theories to be filled in, so that between the seemingly fragile elements, a definite inference is finally drawn: homicide is a representation of art.
In order to prevent the chaotic side effects of superposition of meanings, avoid the sliding of the signifier, and the excessive floating of the signified, Lars von Trier directly applied the novel structure of Dante's "The Divine Comedy", as well as many high-concept literary symbols. In the film, the scene parodying Eugène Delacroix's masterpiece "Dante's Ferry" fully shows the film's clear reference to "The Divine Comedy".
Also, the dialogue structure established in the film from the very beginning, the "Vege" who constantly talks with Jack and only appears in the last scene is the incarnation of Dante's hell guide in "The Divine Comedy" . This is fully demonstrated in the portrayal of those obvious hell scenes in the final section of the film, "Total Destruction". "The Divine Comedy" uses hundreds of characters with different personalities in hell to metaphorize the reality of the society at that time. Dante hopes to improve the status of poetry and break the control of religion, so that literature is no longer a single form of religion. read. "This house is made by me" undoubtedly emphasizes the construction of metaphors, and also provides a map of interpretation for the endowment of meaning through the layered structure. The ending of the film, Jack's hell tour under the leadership of Weegee, and the choices and results when he faced the abyss at the end are actually providing logical proof for the closure of the theme. Although it is also metaphorical, it is at least very obvious and occupies a lot of space. Videos a lot of time.
That sentence, "There is a land of bliss, and we are not qualified to go there."
The bridge that went out of hell and led to UP (earth or heaven), but was broken, is undoubtedly a rather pessimistic expression of Lars von Trier. Turns out there was a bridge, but that was before "I" was born. This "I", the "my time" used in the film, is probably Lars von Trier's most powerless self-mockery, as well as profound guilt and disappointment with humanity.
According to the way and path he closed the theme in the film, it seems that human beings can only wander in hell after all and become one of the builders of hell. Like Jack, they want to cross the bridge and lead to heaven, but in the end they will only stumble and fall into Endless abyss of hell.
"This House Was Made By Me" is a master class in terms of narrative structure, meta-narrative construction, and photography techniques, but its overly sadistic thematic interpretation method is probably only acceptable to a small number of audiences. After all, very few moviegoers experience pain and gain truth. In the hearts of many audiences, movies are hallucinogens that bring entertainment and narcotics to escape reality, but "This Room Made by Me" delivers high doses of sober drugs.
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