From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 01:56:27 -0500
Subject: No, von Trier and you are delusional!


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>Gee, Bess thought she did what she did because she loved her husband, but I
>suppose she should have read Lacan and Adorno and then she would have been
>saved from her delusions.  I don't suppose you are taken in by crap like,
>"Greater love hath no man..."

The director thought that his Bess would do what she did because she
loved her husband.  In reality, any Bess would only do what she did out
of a vitiation of her desire to live and love.

"Bess initially believes sexual debasement will be the cure of her ills,
but she finally settles to offer God her life in place of Jan's.  If it
could be true - by some stupid quirk, how 'good' would Jan feel- being
kept alive through this deal?  This is but a cinematographic repetition
of the fantastic trick invented by Paul: a God that immolates his own
son to save mankind - all life yet to come will then be in eternal debt
to this God that can love mankind so much as to damn itself in the
flesh.  What a damnation of life!"
(...)
For what many millions of Besses and Jans are starved for is life, love
and the exercise of their powers of creation.  Masses of lonely
individuals who know not how to live or love, nor how to pursue their
desires, and are objectively denied access to the material conditions
that could permit the realization of these desires.  
(...)
 When even the smallest and most insignificant moments of life are
denied access to their material conditions for existence, one can either
resort to a healthy violence and attempt to redress those conditions, or
from then on, any line of escape will be bound to turn on the spot, in a
void, captured by the apparatuses of expression.  It is little wonder
then that those who live most intensely are often won over to suicide in
their early years.
(...)
At bottom, one would find that only Jan was real for Bess, and only
Bess  for Jan.  They were touched by the chance of sharing an inhuman
becoming between them.  As one withered, the other did the same, and
their last  act of love, only too human, was to share a will to die. 
Thereby they  aborted their journeys and became ephemeral to each
other.  The line of escape became prison, and turned into
self-abolition."

Lambda Maud Montgomery

PS - By the way, Lacan and Adorno are fairly useless.


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