‘Nymphomaniac’: An Analysis - The Climactic Crescendo of the Danish Provocateur, Revisited

Table of Contents

Note: throughout this review, I will be referring to ‘Nymphomaniac’ Volumes 1 and 2 as one coherent entity or work, as I believe it is quite clearly intended to be seen and understood this way.

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A Strange Beast of Hot Complexity

Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ is a complicated beast. Let’s start by discussing its basic structure: the film opens with blackness and nothingness. First, we hear sound, then we see images. These sounds are slow-building, immersive, meditative, almost serene, and peaceful. Raindrops dripping, wind blowing, the sounds of an empty, abandoned shell of a city. Then the image comes gray, shadowed, melancholic shots of gritty stone and misshapen brick, droplets of water rolling down in gutters, down cement walls. The entire thing, the synthesis of these sounds and images, comes off as dense, packed with thought and outspoken verbality. The wide aspect ratio adds to this sense of wholeness. And before we have a sense of person or circumstance, we have a sense of setting.

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What we are about to dive into is a long and winding tale of self-reflection, discovery, and destruction told through a series of chronological vignettes of one woman’s life and sex addiction, but it is told like a piece of folklore, like a timeless fable. We move through this story through two archetypes of characters: one is Joe, an outgoing and well-spoken woman with a determinate and insistent mindset. Joe is our main character, and she tells us the story; she is our guide and our storyteller, and she insists that by the end of the story, we will understand and agree with her point of view. The other is Seligman, an introverted and awkward man, well-read, highly intelligent, nervously obsessive about ideology and fact. He argues with her and disputes the points that she raises, offering a listener’s reactionary point of view to the story she is telling. Seligman is our stand-in, he is the storyteller’s audience, and he is the primary, firsthand consumer of Joe’s ideas and information.

The Premise is the Retrospective of a Lost Soul’s Life Story

Joe tells the story of discovering her sexuality as a child. Then Joe tells the story of losing her virginity to Shia LaBeouf’s Jerome. One story about a competition between her and her best friend on a train: who can have sex with the most men in the span of the train ride? She tells the story of falling in love. She tells stories of abuse, sadism, and sexual exploration. She tells her lovable, if not a little off-kilter, new friend Seligman the story of her father’s nightmarish delirious death process; they compare it to the death of Edgar Allen Poe. A young Mia Goth is introduced as a new love interest later on.

This film would be smut if it was not in the hands of von Trier. Most audiences do seem to view it as smut. I went to a live screening where the audience filled what would have been stiff silence with laughter and cheering at the most grotesque and difficult scenes in the film. Oh well, the film has uncomfortable scenes. Human beings laugh together when they are uncomfortable, it’s not a sin.

But the film is so well-spoken and articulate with its ideas that I don’t think anyone can deny that it has some really serious existential claims that it handles effectively. It’s brutal. It is. But that brutality is never mean, it is simply necessary. Some of the subject matter in this film could be shown in the silliest of pornos, and as Americans let’s admit to ourselves: we have a lot of trouble being sexually frank. A lot of the hardest moments in this film are simply difficult because they are so taboo in our mainstream culture that we object at even a physical level to what we are seeing on-screen. When watching the extended cuts, for example, in a theater, numerous people had paid for tickets and knew perfectly well that they were walking into a six-hour screening. A scene of a woman performing an abortion on herself came on screen and a good handful of people walked out. Some ran!

I remember thinking to myself at that moment that Lars von Trier (who I am a pretty big fan of, and have been since seeing ‘Dancer in the Dark’ and ‘Dogville’ years ago) was a sadist himself who enjoyed indulging his audience in sick and twisted images. I remember thinking, he wants us to be upset, he wants us to run to the bathroom throwing up.

With further thought, I don’t believe that to be true at all. Does anybody want to see an underground abortion up close? No, of course not. But it’s about that necessity. Such things take place. They just do. We rarely get a film brave enough to confront such taboo subjects in a way that forces its audience to be aware to a virtually first-person extent.

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What Does the Film Consist of?

Joe’s main argument is that she is a bad person. Seligman refutes this time and time again and recontextualizes her stories into more sympathetic perspectives. He is our stand-in. He reacts as we may. She tells a bit of her story and he sits, thinking, trying to chew on this subject matter just as we are. He assists us in carrying such a burden of conceptual torment.

Lars von Trier’s films have ranged on a scale most easily broken down into political and emotional. A lot of his work is very feminist-oriented: Bjork and Nicole Kidman give endearing and profound performances in ‘Dancer in the Dark’ and ‘Dogville’ respectively as both films chronicle the lives of women being oppressed, used, and unjustly condemned. Later on in his “Depression Trilogy” (which ‘Nymphomaniac’ concludes), Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst carry that torch as extremely intelligent heroines, both admirable and terrifying.

‘Nymphomaniac’ is an impressive integration of his earlier political work and the emotional devastation that comes hand in hand with the trilogy. Seligman makes a good point at the end of the film: if a man had been in her position, no one would blink an eye. She is labeled a “nymphomaniac” because she is a woman using people for sex, chasing dragons of love and heartbreak. At the same time, the film shows the true nature of a lot of human interaction, which in von Trier’s eyes is the use of emotional manipulation to extract a sexual transaction. We also see examples of the opposite, where Joe uses sex to extract emotions.

The title of the film is eye-catching and exciting. The film was popular mainly with young people and cinephiles, and it’s not hard to see why it would fall mainly into those categories. A movie starring Shia LaBeouf called ‘Nymphomaniac’ certainly has a draw to it; but in the smoke and mirrors of popularity, marketing, and collective social perception, it was easy at the time of its release to categorize it as a fun or pulpy piece of sexy, daring, freaky movie to throw on with friends at a slumber party.

The film provokes constantly to the point where it pushes its viewer away; there are scenes where it may be easier to laugh than to stare straight at the screen and sit with what’s happening.

Really, ‘Nymphomaniac’ works because it is a vastly unique piece of media, told by an auteur filmmaker who has many ideas that we can see and feel him working out and chewing on throughout the film. At times, the dialogue between Joe and Seligman feels like a debate between different parts of von Trier’s psyche. While Joe is the protagonist von Trier has chosen, Seligman seems to be von Trier’s imagined idea of an audience consuming her (and in turn, von Trier himself) in yet another transaction between human beings.

Credit is due as well for the structure of the whole thing. It plays out like a classical novel, with each segment of the film and each portion of Joe’s life represented as chapters. I mean, simply consider the plot’s circumstances: a socially inept man takes in a damaged, mysterious woman and in the confines of a small dingy apartment, in the yellow light of a shadowy bedroom, they debate multiple philosophies of existence as they move through the story of a harrowing life.

Lars von Trier is No Stranger to Epics

Lars von Trier is no stranger to epics. Most of what he does feels grand. Even more minor character films like ‘The House that Jack Built’ have an aesthetic of epic proportions. What von Trier does is take individual, fleshed-out characters, form intimate connections with them, and involve them with his philosophical and existential wanderings, bringing empathetic characters into a place where they can represent ideas or internal conflicts. A lot of the plot points of ‘Nymphomaniac’ as well as his other works can be seen as externalizations of the internal conflicts of himself and his characters.

‘Nymphomaniac’ is a different level of epic. It does come across as an explosive climax of all of von Trier’s ideas eclipsing into one long, strange, and powerful work that will leave an audience shaken and disturbed into a deep state of contemplation that’s hard to brush off. Ten years after its release, it has lost none of its power, and its notoriety hasn’t gone anywhere.

If this was the director’s finale of his “Depression Trilogy,” it also seems to be the final word on a lot of the themes he has explored throughout his career. This is a film that will be remembered as one of the most powerful films of the 2010s, and standing out from its peers the way it does will only further heighten its place in the canon of the world’s great films.

Pornographic, violent, even frightening, ‘Nymphomaniac’ is not about sex. It is about life and death, the decisions in love and heartbreak that we make along the way, and the lashings we are willing to receive for the pleasures we lose ourselves in.

By Ben Brown

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Ben Brown

Ben Brown is an aspiring writer-director located in Burbank, CA. Born in Rochester, NY, he studied film for four years at Ithaca College before moving to California to follow his dreams. As a writer at The Hollywood Insider his goal is always to discuss and dissect all forms of art, his greatest passions. His mission statement is to talk openly and philosophically about film while always elevating and never putting something down for the sake of negativity. There is talent around the world to be celebrated and praised, through facts, not gossip or rumor, and that is Hollywood Insider’s mission. Ben is also a screenwriter and film director and actor, as well as a published author from a very early age.

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Ben Brown

Ben Brown is an aspiring writer-director located in Burbank, CA. Born in Rochester, NY, he studied film for four years at Ithaca College before moving to California to follow his dreams. As a writer at The Hollywood Insider his goal is always to discuss and dissect all forms of art, his greatest passions. His mission statement is to talk openly and philosophically about film while always elevating and never putting something down for the sake of negativity. There is talent around the world to be celebrated and praised, through facts, not gossip or rumor, and that is Hollywood Insider’s mission. Ben is also a screenwriter and film director and actor, as well as a published author from a very early age.

Ben Brown

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‘Nymphomaniac’: An Analysis – The Climactic Crescendo of the Danish Provocateur, Revisited

A Strange Beast of Hot Complexity

The Premise is the Retrospective of a Lost Soul’s Life Story

What Does the Film Consist of?

Lars von Trier is No Stranger to Epics

Author

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