Some weeks ago on a Saturday night, just after finishing my nighttime routine, I set up my video projector, lay in bed, and somehow knew I was ready to rewatch The House That Jack Built, Lars von Trier’s journey into the serial killer genre. Everything was perfect and then the fire alarm started to ring. As my roommates and I were evacuating the building, we decided to kill time at Timkin Hall and watch The House that Jack Built anyway. After midnight, some film major friends of mine decided to join along as well. This was the first time that I had watched von Trier with a crowd and I began to worry about their reactions. It made me quite nervous, if sweating is a sign of nervousness.

When the film was released on 2018, it attracted widespread attention for its controversial and provocative content. Critics have described it as the "most extreme and controversial" horror film of the year. It’s based on The Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century three-part-narrative poem The Divine Comedy. In the trilogy, Virgil takes the poet on a journey from hell to purgatory and, finally and gloriously, to paradise. The movie recasts this central storyline as a confession/conversation between our new Dante, this time the serial killer Jack, and Verge, the new Virgil.

Dante and Virgil as imagined by Corot

In a strange sense, von Trier joins a long tradition of Divine Comedy “illustrators” that begins with William Blake. Following Dante, von Trier jams everything into Jack. It’s an art thesis film, which includes elements/topics about sexual impotence, OCD, history, painting, image, mythology, literature, philosophy, etc., not to mention a psychological analysis of serial killers. It’s a masterpiece and I want to prove that Jack is not the Jack you think he is and that the “house” Jake is trying to build is…well, you’ll have to wait for that.

Jean-Luc Godard pointed out that film has three most significant contradictions as an art form: visual and narrative, fiction and record, abstraction and reality. In The House that Jack Built, von Trier handles these three opposing relationships in perfect harmony.

ONE: THE FERRY

The film begins with a relatively long black screen. The first expressive element is the sound of water, which von Trier will echo at the end of the film when Virgil leads Jack to hell. Whether it is Western mythology or other myths around the world, there is always a figure similar to a ferryman, especially the famous ferryman Charon in Greek and Roman mythology. Charon is the boatman of the underworld. His primary responsibility is to ferry the recently dead across the Styx to the underworld.

Charon, the ferryman

Still, to put it more bluntly, if you want to ferry, you must go to the other side, or shore. In Christianity, the other side is heaven and there’s a complex culture around what we do before we get there— reciting and singing hymns, as well as learning, thinking about, and creating doctrines. It’s what we do before we get on the ferry and what we think as the ferry takes us to the other side. In order to achieve the dreamland, people have to internalize the doctrines and the will of the rulers and that is what we might call morality. Von Trier's connection between the film's narrative structure and religion’s is an ambitious move, a bold provocation, and a mockery of the establishment. There were over a hundred walkouts at the Cannes premiere. The establishment realized that this ferry was not a ferry that could get them or anyone they knew to heaven.

TWO: IMPERFECT VICTIMS

Unlike the murders that follow, Jack’s first murder is relatively straightforward. Von Trier forces us to see the first victim (played by Uma Thurman) entirely from Jake's subjective perspective. Under the premise of needing Jack's help, she acts in two completely different ways. Outside the car or in nature, the victim asks Jack for help in a humble manner, but once she enters his car her attitude towards Jack becomes ridiculing and provocative.

The smirk of killable

From the character's perspective, you can undoubtedly regard the victim's sense of entitlement as way of protecting herself. Afterall, she’s a woman and alone. Still, the audience instinctively sides with Jack and is annoyed by this mean-spirited person. The audience may even expect this imperfect character, who does not practice any of the basic forms of social etiquette to be punished. At this point, von Trier’s first intention has been achieved, which is to make her an object of derision. Or, in other words, killable.

THREE: IMPERFECT VICTIMS PART TWO

Engineer or Architect, Castrated Desire

I take it all back, what I said earlier about you looking like a serial killer.

No, no, no, you don’t have the disposition for that sort of things.

You’re way too much of a wimp to murder anyone.

Jack smashes Uma Thurman’s face not because her character makes Jack mad, but because she reminds him of his mother. Just before Jack kills her, the camera language cuts back and forth from Jack to his perspective. Von Trier makes us see the tension between the damage that Jack feels and his desire for self-control. It also might be a pretty good metaphor for sexual impotence, but whatever the case von Trier gives us Jack’s motivation for killing in startling clear terms:

My mother was of the opinion that becoming an engineer was the more financially viable choice, but my really big dream was to become an architect. I purchased a building lot and since I was my own developer due to a substantial inheritance, no one could keep me from drawing up my own plans for my own house.

Von Trier sees Jack’s soul trapped in the difference between an engineer and an architect. At this point in the film, Jack is an engineer, but he is on his way to becoming an “architect.” So, what’s the difference between those two occupations?

Ayn Rand's fictional architect from the Fountainhead

An architect is someone who has received professional education or training and whose main occupation is the overall design of buildings, from office buildings to houses. In contrast, an engineer is a person who operates, designs, manages, and evaluates systems. The engineer obeys the will of others, and the architect establishes his will through others. It’s like the Hegelian master-slave dialectic; that is, the master satisfies his desires through the labor of the slaves without directly participating in production or changing the natural state, while the slaves are forced to fulfill the master's desire for things, thus losing their independence and autonomy.

In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory there are three realms or orders. These orders turn Freud's Oedipus Complex into a repetitive mechanism. First, children desire their mother (the imaginary realm); second, they obtain that desire from their mother (the real); and third they obtain the method of securing desire from their father (the symbolic order). Human existence is a continuous process of "killing the father and marrying the mother," completing one goal after another to fulfill a desire; that is, to obtain self-meaning and value from the symbolic order or social life.

Jacques Lacan knows you can't handle the real

A mother without a father is a dangerous relationship. It upsets the symbolic order and causes cognitive confusion. From this perspective, Jack can’t properly satisfy his desires because his mother wants him to become a middle-class slave. The mother destroys Jack's sense of self and is only capable of internalizing desire, empty symbols of modern order. In other words, he is an individual with only group order but no individual internal order. When a person only has group order, he is unified, but unity is sexless because sex is a subjective desire. After Jack’s mother’s death; that is, after his off-kilter symbolic order collapses, Jack seeks to destroy, accidentally, the group order, but he soon realizes that that’s not enough. He cannot access the greater symbolic order of the father, if he ever could. Instead, he destroys in order to feel. Jack begins with criticizing others, because if you exclude others, your individuality cannot be reflected in a vacuum.

FOUR: ORDNUNGSZWANG JACK

I suffered from compulsions as a child. I was completely hysterical about cleaning and could never leave a room that wasn’t perfectly neat and clean.

Ordnungszwang is a German word, and like many German words it catches a complex web of meanings, but generally people use it to describe a tendency toward order, discipline, or organization. The easiest translations would be "order," "discipline," "rule," "arrangement," "organization," or "system."

The walk-in freezer on Prospect Avenue. The sign has been broken for forever. So, no one really knew what the name of the street was.

Jack moves his first victim's body into a walk-in freezer he purchased on Prospect Avenue, but the sign has been broken for years so that only the “Pro” part is left. Right after Jack reinforces the walk-in freezer, the freezer becomes Jack’s “bank” for him to hoard his “wealth” and “material” for the house that Jack will build at the end of the film. I believe the broken sign is von Trier’s way of taunting the establishment in general. Prospect has many meanings, but here, I think von Trier means the act of looking forward. In a film that self-consciously mimics Dante’s journey towards paradise, the lack of prospects is a meaningful and stinging one.

This isn't paradise

At the end of the first incident/murder, Jack dumps the first victim’s car across a small brook that defines the state border. You can even glimpse the vehicle from the main road, but Jack calls it a “stroke of genius.” Because, by definition, the local policemen can’t see across an imaginary line. How ironic. “A fucking neurotic riddled with obsessive compulsions and a pathetic dream of something greater.”

FIVE: THE SECOND INCIDENT

VON TRIER - OCD – THE BIG OTHER IN HIS OWN MOVIE – THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

As soon as the second incident/murder begins, we notice how different it is from the first. It is no longer an incident; it is a novice predator’s first prey. The perspective of the camera still puts us in Jack's passenger seat and as it cuts back and forth from Jack through the car window, we realize that this is Jack's first real hunt, and there will be no more mistakes. Everything comes from Jack's initiative. Also, he is wearing a black raincoat because he knows what’s about to happen.

Don't let him in

When Jack talks to his second victim through a screen door at her home, von Trier’s use of the screen as a symbol of both movies and protection (not much) is overwhelming. The design here is fascinating. At this early stage, Jack is like a vampire. He can only enter the victim's house and show his true face when invited. He understands and exploits the weaknesses of human nature and social rules. So, when Jack enters the victim's house, he enters a free space.

You know being forced to, to stand out there, exposed, time and time again, have to be put in these situations. I don’t know why.

You know how humiliating it is? I am constantly being put in these situations. It’s just not fair.

From the above conversation, we know that Jack’s behavior is still forced or compulsive, but this contradicts von Trier’s cinematography. When Jack tries to kill her, but realizes she’s still alive, he doesn’t try to finish the job right the way but chooses to “apologize” or “take care” of her. He gets some donuts and prepares some chamomile tea. It seems like Jack is playing with his prey, but he’s really playing at a societal role. When she feels good enough to get up, Jack strangles her and plunges a knife into her heart. He then poses for photos with the body. There is an interesting shot: Jack takes out an old film camera and places it on the body. The next shot is of the moon outside the window and then the next is of the light next to the body. Only then does Jack press the shutter. After pressing the shutter, the next shot is the negative of the film taken by him.

Jack takes out a tarp from the car, wraps the body up, drags it into the car, and cleans up the scene. And this is when Jack's OCD spirals out of control. That’s because, although this is Jack's second kill, it is his first murder. Unlike his first murder this one is premeditated. He has broken the social order and that causes his OCD to go into overdrive. It goes without saying that his OCD is really the only order that he has, making him go back into the house and compulsively check for all the evidence that he imagines he left behind.

Iconic and Ironic

In introducing Jack's OCD, von Trier uses Bob Dylan's iconic song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" as a kind of ironic comment on the action. In a short film of the song Dylan stands to the right of the screen flipping through hand drawn cards of the lyrics, while behind him and dominating the screen is a street strewn with garbage. Von Trier reverses the shot with Jack leaning against his red van, dominating the screen, as he flips through a radically different set of cards. The background is as clean and cold as Dylan’s is grimy. But most importantly the signs that Jack holds are no longer a call for a society to rebel, but a cold symbol of his mental illness. Verge taunts Jack as a murderer with OCD and clean compulsions, but little does Verge know these two compulsions are perhaps what makes Jack the perfect predator in our modern society, or the first requirement for an uncatchable modern killer.

Before the police arrive, Jack drags the body out of the car and hides it in the bushes. After talking to the police Jack attaches a rope to his van, which he has already tied to the body, and drives away. As he steps on the gas, David Bowie's “Fame” begins to play, as if Jack were the coolest, bad-ass serial killer in the world.

SIX: THE RAIN

The great rain.

It washed away the long track from my escape.

Now, I don’t consider myself a decidedly devoted man of faith. Which, of course, is a totally crazy thing to say considering our present situation, but I must admit…I experienced the rain, the fiercest I have ever seen, as a kind of a blessing. And the murder as a kind of liberation. I felt I had a higher protector.

And in the reality, you were just terrifying perverted Satan.

But, did you understand, or even better, did you accept the connection to your own personality? That you yourself were a psychopath?

Well, I am not stupid.

That’s rather unusual. The psychopath will never accept his own diagnosis.

But I did.

The above conversation occurs after the “great rain” that washes away the trail of blood that Jack left as he was escaping the crime scene. I believe the fundamental question of this scene is why von Trier uses rain as a symbol and why any God or film director would cleanse this “terrifying perverted” Satan’s trail of sin.

Lars von Trier, the missing God?

But looking past the obvious God, director/screenwriter von Trier, who allows Jack’s escape, we might ask what the rain really is. And common sense tells us that rain is just one of those inevitable acts of nature. Jack’s escape is not the work of a God, but of a truly random event without meaning or sense. Jack sees it as a higher power or God's understanding and protection of his most murderous impulses, as well as, interestingly enough, a cure for Jack’s OCD. After the rain, Jack never wears the metal-framed glasses that correct his vision and align it with the dictates of modernity; instead, he adopts and accepts his own distorted view of what the world really is.

Do glasses really allow you to see?

The rain represents von Trier’s line in the sand. We all think Jack is a madman, but if you look at him from a societal point of view, you will find that Jack interprets external events as signs, symbols, or revelations. I still vaguely remember that my junior high history teacher, Mrs. Mahoney, talking about the dangers of Manifest Destiny and how the ruling class of the 19th century manipulated religious discourse to cover the aggression and atrocities of Westward expansion. In the Crusades, tens of millions died battling to control Jerusalem, which is still happening today. We moderns, who have no pressure to survive, mock and criticize Jack, a madman, so as to appease our sins. And the same is true of Jack. If a madman imagines rain as a symbol of God’s protection, what about us? Or what about the ruling class and the establishment? Jack constructs a rational world to justify his barbarism, just as the US Government manipulated religious beliefs to cover for the blatant aggression of Manifest Destiny. In this way von Trier’s Jack is merely a small functionary in the atrocity machine.

SEVEN: WHO IS JAKE? WHAT IS THE HOUSE?

Jack is not an ordinary mental patient, but one of the middle or upper-middle class. He’s educated and in von Trier’s vision, his illness is the illness of the world that he grew up in. Modern people are not afraid of ordinary madmen because they are easy to spot. Walking down the street, we avoid people who through strange body language, lack of selfcare, or screaming don’t fit in. We identify them through education and social indoctrination. What we are terrified of is madmen like Jack, someone who fits in, disguises his illness, and cannot be identified. Modernity is disguise and if we want to survive in the contemporary world, we learn to do it. We can easily exclude the disruptive individual, but the psychopath who presents well, well, that’s another problem. Jack is a modern man with a compulsion for misery. In the middle of the film, von Trier uses the relationship between street lights and shadows to represent Jack’s desire to kill, an unnatural movement between light and dark and a hallmark of our contemporary world.

A rather unusual house

The House that Jack Built is a movie that believes in Heaven and Hell, but definitely not God. Before Western society entered the modern age, theocracy was the imperial power, while in ancient Chinese civilization, imperial power always superseded the theocracy. Without faith there is no sin and all that’s left is disease. These people do not need salvation or they need all the salvation the world and God can muster. Jack is a simple and empty symbol, but he has a kind of internal complex philosophy that is a pure representation of modernity.

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FILM

LARS VON TRIER BUILDS A FILM THAT DEFIES OUR WORLD

the terror inside The House that Jack Built

By Bert Wang

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