Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac

It’s taken a while to process this movie. It’s not an art-house version of Thanks For Sharing, and neither, thank God, is it a art-house version of the execrable Shame. It’s not a study of sex addiction or nymphomania, and actually is not about sex at all. If you want to see a movie about sex, download something from Kink. You will never see a film about sex in the mainstream cinema. There are penises (erect and flaccid) and vaginas, and what looks like people having sex, but a lot of that is digital compositing. I’m also assuming that the bit where Jamie Bell’s K hits Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Joe with a glove stuffed with coins is not real, otherwise it would have had to have been one take and Gainsbourg would have been un-filmable for a week while the bruises went down. Nah. Likewise the whipping sequence: that’s either a body-double or a prop.

So what is it about? It’s about someone who behaves in some unconventional ways because she chooses to. We should twig that the whole thing is some kind of half-metaphor when Joe explains that, in her early twenties, she was having sex with ten men a night. Do the math. That many plates can’t be kept spinning. And yet again, she has a recurrent case of one-itis for Shia La Boeuf, as would be understandable in a healthy young woman. One-itis and plate spinning don’t go together. It’s also a satire on men’s need to rationalise women’s sexual behaviour.

Right at the start Joe insists to Stellan Skarsgård's Seligman, that she is a bad person.

 

Now, let us remember the rules. Women are never bad people, and if they do something that if a man did it would be a bad thing, it’s okay because, you know, patriarchy. Seligman therefore refuses to believe her, and throughout the film attempts to rationalise every bit of her behaviour, even, for heaven’s sake, in terms of Walton’s The Compleat Angler. There’s even a you-go-girl speech towards the end about how she was “exploring” and “demanding her rights”. The bit where Seligman, having heard how the guy who took her virginity by three strokes from the front and five up the rear, after turning her over like a sack of potatoes, explains that 3 and 5 are Fibonnaci numbers, is so truly silly that we must assume that von Trier did it deliberately: “look at how silly this guy has to be to understand what happens to her”. (Either that, or von Trier is truly weird.)

In return for all this listening and attempted understanding, Joe kills Seligman, as right at the end, he attempts a half-hearted rape. In most cases a simple “What the frack do you think you’re doing”, followed by a hefty dose of shaming, would do. Seligman is an old man, and he’s not holding her down. The last time I looked, it wasn’t yet legal or even morally acceptable, even in Denmark, for women to kill men who were attempting to rape them. (Kick them in the nuts, sure, but the legal principle is that the force used in self-defence must be proportionate to the force used by the attacker.) However, I suspect it’s a device to end the movie, which has no other real reason for stopping.

Oh yeah, she’s a bad girl. Prima facie, the scene in the SAA meeting is a little unconvincing: from Joe’s denouncements of the other women in the group, we get the idea that sex addicts are rather pathetic women driven to use sex to fill an emptiness in their lives. This is to set up the contrast with Joe, who likes her desires and urges. As a way of making Joe’s acceptance of her own agency clear, it does the job. She’s the drunk who decides they would rather be drunk than sober and leaves an AA after-meeting coffee session with a little speech to that effect.

I’m not suggesting that von Trier is making any Red Pill points. But he’s a provocateur, and so it’s not surprising that he takes a dissenting view on the morality of his character. He's clearly not speaking about all nymphomaniacs, as Steve McQueen was doing about "all" sex addicts, and that's why von Trier's film is a flawed art movie, whereas McQueen's is propaganda disguised as seriousness.

As a film? Von Trier is a film-maker first and foremost. The stories and characters come afterwards. Of course the plot is silly, just as silly as the idea that a planet would whoosh past Earth and then turn round within three or four days and collide with it.I think it’s better than his last two, especially as he keeps the scissors out of Gainsbourg’s hands (yep, you just winced at that, didn't you?), even if this time he gives her a gun. You don’t read late-period Henry James to find out if the girl gets the guy, and you don’t watch a von Trier for a cracking yarn. Some things don’t have to make sense, they just have to work their magic on you.

It will be on Curzon Online for a long while yet. Go watch.

March 2014 Review

Back in the autumn of 2009 I got a new manager, call him X. Under whom, despite a slightly shaky start, I flourished. X recognised what I’m good at, and what I’m not so good at, and once hit me on the arm when I was a little less than tactful with a help desk guy who was being especially obtuse. The fact that I remember it tells you that it was the right thing to do and spoke a lot about our relationship. I enjoyed working with X, as I enjoy working with any manager strong enough to recognise their weaknesses and hire people with those things as strengths.

Now X has gone over to Another Bank. They are looking for a New Guy, and until then, I am reporting to the Director. Which speaks volumes about how I’ve developed, because two years ago, I would have been hidden from the Director by at least one, if not two, layers of intermediaries.

I took a week off after X left. Not the best weather. I only really started to unwind the Thursday and Friday. I stayed at home and went into town for the gym. It was then I decided, for no reason except Why Not, to do six days in the gym for six weeks. Week one was last week: Sunday, chest; Monday, shoulders; Tuesday, weights and spin; Wednesday, chest; Thursday, yoga; Friday, swimming. After the weights bit, there is always a 1km jog on the treadmill, pull-ups + other back, and abs. No all I need is to get the diet bit exactly right.

I saw Sara Baras, Gala Flamenco and Farraquito at Sadlers Wells; Non-Stop and Captain America at the local Cineworld; Under The Skin, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Nymphomaniac I and II at the Curzon Soho; the British Masters series on You Tube; and Mister John and 8 Weeks Idle via Curzon Online. DVDs included Californication S4 and Burn Notice S5, and I finally saw Godard’s British Sounds, Lotte in Italia and Pravda.

I slogged my way through Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night; read Jan Sokol’s Thinking About Ordinary Things; finished Maldoror; read Pedro Ferraria’s history of General Relativity, The Perfect Theory; Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Worlds Without End; Imogen Edward_Jones’ Hospital Babylon, and an Aerofilms book, A History of Britain From The Air, which is excellent if you have no sense of what this country used to look like even eighty years ago.

The back garden got a spring-clean one Sunday. I had a visit from the kitchen fitters, who measured up and found the plans were 100mm out, so I had a another visit from the planners. All while I was on holiday. Sis and I had supper at Picture - fast becoming my favourite restaurant - for her birthday, and I ate at the bar at Hix, and had lunch at Jamies Italian Trattoria in Richmond (the pizzas are really good).

And I had a minor revelation about complex one-forms, the real meaning of Cauchy’s formula, and why closed curves are more fundamental in complex analysis than points are.

Oh. And prunes. Every day. I say no more.

Owens Field, Islington

Owens Field is a really small park about a hundred yards from the Angel, Islington, near the City and Islington College Centre for Applied Sciences. These photographs make it look larger and more pleasant than it really is.

There should probably be some comment about the value of urban spaces here, but the thing is, right across the road is a bunch of flats that look like this...

... and no amount of greenery is going to make that a heart-warming sight to return home to. We are not talking "leafy" anything here. But then I've never got the attractions of North London.

Piccadilly Circus Sunday Morning

Sunday 15th March to be exact. About 09:00. I love London first thing in the morning. This is what I see on the way to the gym Sunday. At the weekend the streets are empty until around 11:00.

Looking down Lower Regent St to St James' Park; count the traffic lights on the Circus; the famous illustrated advertisments; the view up Regent Street. Notice the lack of traffic. Even buses.

Here's A Plan

For the next six weeks, until my birthday, I will live simply. I will:

go to the gym every day except Saturday;
get as close to the reducing diet as I can;
get as close to eight hours’ sleep as I can;
read books I want to read, not books I think I should read;
watch my way through the box sets in the evening.

Let’s just live it.

Five Tear-Fests

Over at Jeff Goldblum’s Laugh, they have a list of five movies guaranteed to set loose that self-pity that’s straining at the leash and bring self-indulgent tears to your eyes. Didn’t agree with one of them. But I know what they mean.

At number one is this song from Rent. Wrecks me every time.


Then there’s a film I cannot watch again. Ever. You want the bit between 1:00 and 4:00, where Alan Rickman comes back from the dead to comfort a grieving Juliet Stevenson. You really need the set-up first, in parts 1 and 2 of this to get into the state of mind.


I have no idea where Stevenson got those tears from, unless within herself, from the memory of some irreplaceable loss of the kind that one can only learn to stop awakening, because it is never going to go away.

There’s the end of Blue is the Warmest Colour.

 

How many times have I left a social occasion where I felt totally unconnected with everyone, especially since there was a someone I wanted to be connected to? How empty and hollow it feels to be talking to the people there? The moment of decision to leave, the slight hesitation as I pass through the door, and then the turn into the empty side street, the cigarette, the firm pace taking me away. As she approached the turn, I was thinking “Don’t walk down that street, don’t do it” and when she did, I teared up in the darkness of the Renoir. I had to rush back into the West End and eat ice cream and cake and coffee. The rest of my day was a mess.

There’s the end of Mahler’s Second. You do need to sit through the whole thing, which meanders and wanders and seems directionless for a long time, until the last ten minutes, when it starts to build, and in the final two minutes, he reaches into your chest and crushes your heart. (Don’t skip to then end, or it won’t work)



I first heard this at a Prom, up in the Gallery, and when the organ and the bells come in, I just thought “Good God above, how is music like this even possible?”. Not quite as articulate as that at the time, because the hairs were standing on the back of my neck and there was a bloody great lump in my throat.

Which brings me to the last one


Yep. Mastersingers. I saw this at the ENO and teared up in two places. First when that overture (the single best piece of music ever composed for orchestra) ends, the curtain rises and the choir starts. And then, of course, at the end, when the Boy gets the Girl, having overcome all the small-town silliness in-between. I swear people all around me were wiping their eyes.

Songs With Flutes

Songs with flutes are special. Many are by Traffic or Jethro Tull, few were made after 1970. The flute is, in the context of rock / pop / dance, a jazz instrument, and dropped out when the influence of jazz was no longer felt in rock music. All these songs are slightly wistful, elegiac, outside, and that’s what the flute did.

The uber-song with flute is of course

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followed by anything by Traffic, of which I offer this especially stoned example

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This is so famous that the flute itself is in some kind of Hall of Fame museum

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And if you haven’t discovered After Bathing At Baxters, listen to this and then You Tube the rest

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and while we’re doing San Francisco psychedelia, let’s throw in

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and some good solid stuff

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