Assault

What is it about?

This chapter opens with an analysis of Lars von Trier’s Dogville in order to demonstrate the ethical potential of the feel-bad film. It argues that Dogville pushes spectators between immersion and distanciation in an attempt to eventually bring out our desire for destruction and revenge. Von Trier thereby uses the movie theatre to reveal (and warn us against) our anti-social impulses. A second part develops this argument by considering other examples of this manipulative approach, found in films by directors such as Michael Haneke and Simon Staho. It also introduces Jacques Rancière’s essay on The Emancipated Spectator in order to discuss whether the ‘aggressive moral didacticism’ of these directors is emancipatory or restrictive. It is argued that Rancière’s theory of spectatorship does not sufficiently recognise the differences between the art experience and the intersubjective relations we wish to find outside the sphere of art. Finally, a similar objection is raised to de Palma’s visceral, anti-war film Redacted. This is a film that blurs the relation between fiction and reality; it is a feel-bad film that goes too far in its provocation and mystification of the spectator.

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