Justice, Revenge, and Unexpected Theodicy in Lars Von Trier's Dogville and Euripides' Medea

Abstract

Lars von Trier's 2003 film Dogville shares extensive plot parallels with Euripides' Medea. Through elements such as classical and Biblical names (Jason, Achilles, Grace) and Greek words scrawled on a chalkboard, von Trier invites his viewer to read the film against its classical intertexts. Most prominent is the film's Medea-like plot, in which a female protagonist seeks refuge within a strange community, gradually comes to be abused by this same community, is confronted with patently fantastical and sophistic attempts to rationalize this abuse, and, in a significant departure from the audience's understanding of the rules governing the dramatic universe at the outset, is revealed to possess unimaginable power to judge and punish those who have wronged her. In a final scene resembling a Greek divine epiphany, this female protagonist appears: in Medea's case, as a deus ex machina, and in Grace's, as a female reimagining of Christ in Judgment, capable of wreaking horrific vengeance on a group of complicit abusers who believed their power to be unquestioned and unassailable. Through these extended parallels with Euripides' play of 431 B.C.E., von Trier explores the nature of Hannah Arendt's famous paradox of the banality of evil: how do seemingly open, well-intentioned, and democratic communities commit and conceal from themselves the most evil crimes against humanity?