nouvevague

Dogville by Lars von Trier is once again one of those films that simply have to leave an impression. With his dissertation on capitalist society, von Trier creates yet another masterpiece. Xenophobia, possessiveness, competitive thinking and above all the destructive dynamics of false morality and hypocrisy are put on unconditional display. On a radically reduced theater stage, Lars von Trier dissects how a seemingly good-natured community, under the cloak of helpfulness, gradually slides into sadism and total exploitation. The film works like a ice-cold economic experiment: over the course of the story, morality is degraded to a pure currency. As soon as the risk of hiding the fugitive Grace rises for the villagers, the capitalist principle of supply and demand kicks in. The price of Grace's safety is driven up immeasurably, all the way to the physical and psychological enslavement of her labor and her body. Von Trier exposes the American Dream and the idea of the free market as a cynical illusion, in which contracts between equals cannot exist when one party is trapped in total existential dependence. Yet this astute critique of capitalism is inseparably interwoven in Dogville with a deep philosophical layer that can be read perfectly as a cinematic parable on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of morality. The village acts out of a deep psychological weakness, a slave morality born of pure resentment. The villagers cannot bear Grace's initial moral purity and humility, and they use the capitalist system of exploitation as a tool to exert power over someone who is actually superior to them. At the same time, von Trier deconstructs the Christian ideal of unconditional forgiveness as what Nietzsche called the ultimate arrogance: by forgiving the villagers every cruelty because they "don't know any better," Grace denies them moral responsibility and arrogantly places herself above them. When this system of suppressed will to power and sanctimonious morality finally collapses in the furious finale, Nietzsche's will to power breaks free in its purest, most archaic form. Grace sheds her role as a victim, becomes an absolute judge herself and wipes the village off the map. Dogville thus impressively proves that the mechanisms of unrestrained capitalism and the abysses of the human psyche are two sides of the same coin, held together by the thin, hypocritical wall of a bourgeois morality that, in this masterpiece, literally consists of nothing but chalk lines.