Introduction: The Lacanian Woman and Lars von Trier’s Cinema

Abstract

Chapter 1 constitutes an introduction to the book. It states, first, that the book discusses the corpus of Trier’s cinematic production from 1996 to 2014 in order to raise some questions about woman, the deployment of female sexuality, desire, and the idea of subjectivity. In this, it turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis and a number of its contemporary exponents such as Slavoj Žižek, Todd McGowan, Jacques Hassoun, Frances Restuccia and Anna Kornbluh, who offer new Lacanian aspects of ideas of subjectivity, female sexuality, the gaze, melancholy and love. Based upon these, the theoretical perspective about the cinematic experience has significantly changed in recent years, according to the evolution in Lacanian theory itself and its relation to analyzing cinema. Second, it states that the work adopts the view that the era of looking solely at form or stylistics in analyzing film is over. This mode of making and viewing films is no longer rewarding for the contemporary viewer whose time is now being spent mostly in front of various screens, and who therefore wants something more from a cinematic film, something relevant to his/her life, to justify the effort of going to the movies or time spent watching it. Visual effects, graphics and digital tricks can be found, after all, in other, much more interactive, leisure-time activities, such as story-based video games on the touch screens of advanced computers and smartphones. Third, it states that the book’s idea is delimited to analyzing the figure of woman in the distinctive cinematic production of the Danish director Lars von Trier, and that the book’s argument goes against both the popular view that von Trier’s films are misogynist in nature and the feminist view that they seek to empower women or advocate femininity. Instead, the book argues that woman in the cinema of Lars von Trier stands for the very impossibility of becoming a woman in the Lacanian sense. In other words, woman as portrayed by von Trier’s cinema is always an attempt at presenting the viewer with an image of a genderless subject par excellence who is not inhibited by the confines of ideology and culture, and that this attempt itself is always already a failed one. This failure is precisely what constitutes the element of enjoyment in of watching the films of Lars von Trier. It is also what gives them their political importance, elevating them above accusations of misogyny, as well as elevating the director himself above the accusation of being a mere provocateur. It finally states that the book is based upon a certain Lacanian view, which maintains that woman is a master signifier in language that has some relation to something that is outside language, outside the symbolic order, and threatening its collapse at once. Through looking at the female figures created by Lars von Trier in his films from 1996 to 2014, it attempts neither to explain what woman is in any traditional sense nor to wonder what woman wants in any Freudian sense, but to look at what woman, as a nonexistent being, does in/to Lars von Trier’s cinema and the effect of that on the viewer.