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?