Dancer and Rashomon

Dancer in the Dark was all kinds of emotionally potent for me. Rashomon, on the other hand, had me going on like Spock. Not unemotional, per se, but so matter-of-fact that to get to the heavy stuff was the easy part. Sifting nature and truth together until I hit on something that sounded plausible was very doable.

Dancer, though, requires a few different modes of thought to digest it properly. In order to be emotionally moved by it the first time you see it, you've got to forgive a few weak links in the story (Come on, was telling Gene he might go blind really going to make it happen sooner? Why keep it a secret from the authorities?) and follow the characters along until you start to care about them. In Selma's case,  you're apt to care a lot. She's just so plucky and adorable, and at the same time so naive and dim-witted that your first instinct as a compassionate human being is to put out your hand and save that idiot child from hurting herself and the ones she cares about, simply because she's stubborn and self-sacrificing. The scene where Kathy and Jeff watch Selma stumble her way to the railroad tracks (nearly getting hit twice on the way) is so hard-hitting because you look at Jeff, who's maybe a little dim himself, and Kathy, who is really just a stellar friend (Even when she "gives up" on Selma she's back to work the night shift with her a few hours later. Do friends like that even exist?? Somebody take my nightshifts with me!!) and you watch them get sucker punched with the very emotions you're experiencing as a viewer: horror, pain, disbelief. 

While the screaming and laughing (or intentional lack of it) was shocking in Rashomon, it wasn't as emotionally cutting as Dancer because we didn't feel we personally knew the characters. They were actors, players on a stage, and this was intentional for the "crime drama" part of the film that appealed to thousands. The actors in Dancer, however, feel real. You're there with them while they're whispering secrets to each other, you get glimpses of their raw moments, when they descend into that awful mental state that creeps over you and whispers, I don't know if I can do this. Of course, Selma never goes very far down that path. She never gives in to despair, except perhaps at the very end when her singing doesn't produce the color and mental other-where-ness that her previous songs did.

Why was Dancer so emotionally raw, yet filmed as a documentary and presented as a musical? The three styles of film work together fluidly in some places, awkwardly in others. Is this intentional, to illustrate that Selma's defense mechanism--dancing and song--wasn't completely effective? I'd like to think this, but I'm also leaning too towards the simple fact that art is rarely perfect, and it could be a hiccup in von Trier's design. Still, even musicals don't go so far as to hang their adorable main characters. The day is usually saved. In Dancer, it isn't. It just gets worse and worse. What does this mean in the conversation of institutions and the individual? Of course, usually the individual doesn't deal with real life by imagining vivid musical numbers and withholding life-saving evidence. (I'd also like to point out that the second lawyer was willing to be paid the exact amount Selma saved for Gene's surgery, when earlier she begged that that amount be enough for the doctor. What, doctors aren't institutionalized? I beg to differ. So are lawyers. But she still could have pleaded for pro bono. The weak links in this story are irritating.) If again we want to excuse this, von Trier could be trying to present the court system as a life-or-death situation in some cases, where prejudice is stronger than evidence.

Curious to see what people ask about in the forum this week. Still irritated with Dancer. It looks like Rashomon has my top billing for our international film list.

Bjork and "Dancer in the Dark"

This one took me a few days to digest in my head.

I remember a conversation in class we had last fall that centered around the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I remember being annoyed. It's an open-ended, rhetorical question. The only conceivable answer that even resembles an ending to that argument is that it happens. It exists. Bad things happen, and sometimes to good people. We can only agree to acknowledge the question.

What are we even doing with a question like that? But it applies to Dancer interestingly. Selma is a good person, most people could agree. She seems to have some set of morals that make her believe that protecting others goes before protecting herself, which is a little odd, if you think about it.

In certain lights, Dancer is emotionally manipulative, almost to Hollywood-like extent. Selma's flaws only make her more endearing: she's a little awkward, she daydreams, she's too kind, she's going blind, she lies to protect other people. This is almost a problem. She's adorable. She's so cute and determined and good that once I get over being traumatized by her death I'll be disgusted.

But only for a little bit. I can see that this is one of those films that you absolutely love or absolutely hate. I for one was a goner from the minute Selma started singing Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music is a family favorite). I mentioned in the forum that I liked the Dogme45-esque style of filming with a handheld camera. The only scenes that aren't shaky and jerky in this way are Selma's trances/musical numbers. Now, Bjork's got a trippy, gorgeous voice. But the musical numbers, while kind of amusing, were at the same time mildly uncomfortable, unsettling, wrong. We're watching Selma's coping mechanism as it appears in her head. We see what she sees (except, of course, as she goes blind, the viewer can still see. That would have been interesting, to go blind as Selma did). But the rest of the film is so steeped in realism, the musical numbers just come out of nowhere, making you kind of reel back, confused. And it takes us a fourth of the way through the film to even get to one, whereas a traditional musical would have belted out a song or two in the first ten minutes.

Selma defends herself emotionally with her musicals. Does she do the same with her blindness? Is she in the right because she's making a sacrifice for her son, even though it will cost him his mother? As to "Why musicals?", maybe the film is making a point about musicals' ability to transport you far away from reality in exchange for handing over your disbelief and just 'going with it.' The Sound of Music is a three hour movie, but it doesn't feel that way (at least, not to me) because by the time you're in the gazebo with the Captain and Maria listening to them sing about love, you're pretty invested. Music is how the von Trapp family deals. It's how Selma deals, too. But as for society as a whole, for institutions, why aren't musicals as comforting? Is it because musicals are too mushy, or because society's too cold?