Critics | perverts belong to serial killers, and art belongs to von Trier

Reading tip: It really brings a precise blow to the beautiful utopian imagination created by human beings in past times.

Written by Han Haoyue

"This Room Is Made by Me" is a bad translation, and this crappy translation is easy for the discerning audience to miss. Fortunately, the film's director, Russ von Trier's name itself, has a strong appeal, although this attraction also contains a certain rejection and disgust.

This movie was translated as "Jack's House" in Taiwan, which is easy to think of "Jack the Ripper" - but the Jack in von Trier's film is different from many versions of the cold-blooded killer Jack in the history of cinema, this Jack IQ and modus operandi are not high, or even calm, cold-blooded, and connect murder with artistic creation, which makes him another serial killer in film history, combining perversion and artistic temperament most closely.

In this fictional story, perversion belongs to jack the serial killer, and art belongs to von Trier. Von Trier didn't bother to excuse Jack, he just used the image of Jack to vent his artistic bit. In the film, Jack poses and takes pictures of the corpse after killing people, which is not enough to confirm that his pursuit of "art" has become so urgent that it is perverted, and everything is only due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder and cleanliness.

Childhood trauma allows Jack to gain inner peace by killing people, and the meticulous cleaning work after each killing allows him to escape again and again - if he cuts von Trier's forced intervention in the film's artistic display as an author, this is a gripping crime film, and the film's restrained display of criminal psychology and the tense portrayal of the criminal process are enough to make it an excellent commercial film. But if you are proud of making commercial films, it is not von Trier.

When "This Room" premiered in Cannes in 2018, hundreds of people left the scene, including the protest of Jack's shooting of his wife and children during his outing, but the audience who insisted on watching the premiere still gave von Trier applause. The audience who gave the applause was because they understood the expression of von Trier - in addition to crime, "This Room" clearly conveyed a kind of survival and moral dilemma related to loneliness - "the weak is justice", "the indifference of the group", "criticism in the form of killing", von Trier took up the film as a weapon in response to these three points, and did not hesitate to remind modern people of the overall meaning of human existence in the form of offending the audience, and not to let self-isolation bring about the ravages of atrocities. This is a bravery that ordinary directors and even most commercial films and literary films cannot have.

The reason why "This Room" has been disliked by a large number of audiences, including the low evaluation on foreign professional scoring websites, is because it has really brought a precise blow to the beautiful utopian imagination created by human beings in the past era. Across the globe, people are optimistic that life is full of modernity, that business is the biggest rule that can help make order more stable, that information, technology and intelligence can help people unload heavy burdens...

But "This Room" reminds the audience in a standard classical approach that highly developed technology and commerce have brought about more suffocating centralization, and people often neglect to pay attention to morality and ideals when they are highly dependent on order. The only woman Jack loves in the film, who opens the window and makes a sharp cry for help when she is on the verge of being killed, but no one in the community is full of people, is one of the morals that best represent von Trier in creating this film. In the end, Jack and Virgil, who he had created in his own mind, came to the boundary between heaven and hell, and found that heaven was actually the scene of the adults who he witnessed as a child mowing the grass collectively, Jack chose to redeem himself, but fell into the magma of hell, which was also a rare political correctness of von Trier.

In fact, "This Room" was filmed to this extent, it is enough, and it is also in line with the trend of film development, von Tyre has no need to pay tribute to Pasolini, it must make people feel seriously uneasy and offended. The original reproduction of Delacroix's 1822 oil painting "Dante's Ferry" is more suspicious of showmanship. In a film, too much "insertion" of painting, music, history, religion, art and other elements is no longer avant-garde, but an old-school or pedantic.