Horrible

So gruesome is this film that to write this piece I’ve had to forget most of its scenes. Lars! You go too far. What am I to do? Get my own back, of course, for those wretched weeks these images tortured me; all those hours on your celluloid rack. But I’ve beaten you, man. Yeah! I hired a bulldozer, and rode right over the house that Jack built. It’s rubble, you old beast. Dust. What do you think of that?

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Remember Good Will Hunting? That had a Matt. What a film. Have you seen it? Good Will Hunting, a genius inside a janitor’s boiler suit. Cheap popcorn shovelled down the throat,  followed by the inevitable stomach ache. Awful stuff. This guy is so bright, you know. Wow! dude, we worship the wrinkles of your heavenly forehead. Yeah, it’s a stupid movie: a dull folks’ fantasy about what they think clever folks are like. Do we mention the great American cup-cake we are expected to scoff without scoffing; if you take my meaning. All that rags to riches nonsense; the old American con trick of giving tongue while the hands French kiss the pocket. This poor brat is so much smarter than those rich profs. It’s nature, innit. Half-way through I visit the toilet to evacuate the bullshit. I hear it through the bloody door! Grabbing at the door handle, my foot catches in my trousers, my head going down on the wall. Too dazed to worry about a multiplex of possible puns - head and butt: got it? - I’m stretchered to the ambulance to a chorus of self-regarding claptrap. Turn it off! They won’t listen. It’s only a film after all. And what do I know? He’s a fan of Lars, you know that odd Danish chap who nobody likes. You know, he tells those really bad jokes about Hitler. Lars von Trier? Never heard of him mate.

What it’s like to get inside the head of a real brain-box, eh? Well, here’s Mr B.

• Incident 1: The genesis of an artist. Spontaneity; inspiration; the artist discovers his metier.
• Incident 2: Attention to detail; obsession; repetition; getting it right and learning the craft.   
• Incident 3: Taking it further; making it new and original; shock and awe; perfection of form.
• Incident 4: Doubt; the artist essays his limits and finds them wanting whilst still producing original work.
• Incident 5: Descent into parody; at the end of the creative arc, the art is in danger of  becoming banal; he is going through the motions, appropriating ideas from others. Absurdity and a frantic attempt to recapture the spontaneity of the early years.

Not bad. We’ll come back to Mr B. Let’s stick with Lars for the moment. Lars is a genius, I’ve said this before. He’s decided - the generosity is extraordinary - to let us wander around inside his head. It’s a privilege, and I’m grateful, though I should have read the health warning at the entrance gate. A genius - the mistake Van Sant makes in his movie - is not simply a more extreme version of you or me. The great puppet master may love his puppets - Pavlov, they say, was sentimental over his dogs - but that won’t stop him tearing their limbs apart when the experiment demands it. And they can really enjoy, you know, ripping a friend’s face off. Bastards.

‘An animal can never be as cruel as a human being, as artfully, artistically cruel’ (Ivan Karamazov, as quoted in Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich)

This movie is so clever it is sickening.1 A case study in pathology, where the audience is at the scene of the crime. Worse. We are to witness these crimes from the inside, Lars having very kindly placed us in Jack’s head. Yeah, so kind, as he gently settles us into the soft leather chair, and locks the belt around our shoulder. Have a front seat, my old chap, is the avuncular message. The bastard is even smiling. And suddenly, there we are, looking through the windscreen, as Jack drives his victims down. Sitting in the same car, right next to the madman, as he goes about his horrible business. We could be committing these murders. Yes, Lars, you have made us complicit in this carnage. While there is no Verge - the Charon of this film, taking the hero across the River Lethe - to evict the sociopathic psyche that lodges like a bad tenant in the front room of our brain. We watch the horror, then go to bed and have nightmares. 

The first murder is an accident. A woman vocalises her worries about being in a strange car with an uncanny man. It is a bizarre and brilliant scene; up there with Will Self’s Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, and the boat trip in Norman Lewis’s The Tenth Year of the Ship. The uneasiness of being stuck in a closed space with a stranger; and the tendency to project our own psychopathology onto them…you look like a serial killer, she says. She says it again. Poor lady, she can’t stop herself. It drives Jack crazy. He lashes out with a car jack, smashing her face to pulp. It is an epiphany. Jack has discovered himself. Saul on his way to Damascus. It was the grace of that swing. A born serial killer.

Through this woman’s mashed face Jack has found his vocation. Up to now he’s been an unfulfilled soul, an engineer dreaming of becoming an architect. Engineers, he insists, design buildings too. It is rarely so. You prove the point Jack. The first house he designs - he has acquired some land and constructs a home - is banal. Yes, as vapid as Van Sant’s execrable film. Gotta to get that in, give it a good headbutt for wasting two hours of my time. Jack: you’ve got no talent. Clever is all you are. 

‘I have stopped reading Oxford philosophy. I have gone on to other things. It has become so trivial. I don’t like Oxford philosophers. Don’t like them. They have made trivial something very great. Don’t think much of their apostle Ryle. He’s just a clever man…

‘When I was an undergraduate…there were many boys cleverer than I, but I surpassed them, because while they were dégagé, I had passion and fed on controversy.’ (Bertrand Russell, quoted in Ved Mehta’s Fly and the Fly-Bottle)2

A word describes our man: technician. Jack understand things and can articulate them. Jack makes plans, then carries them out. He follows instructions and completes them to the letter. This is an efficient photocopier. You protest? He is extremely clever, you say; fast thinking; super-verbal; almost total recall… We should be impressed? I’m not. This is no mind thinking, creating, making. Do we mistake a computer for Einstein when it calculates our expenses? No-one denies Jack’s cleverness. The cleverness is the problem. This obsession with detail misses the big picture: it’s all content, very little form, and that form is badly copied from elsewhere. This man has no taste because he has no feel. Jack wants to be an artist, he desires national celebrity - Mr Sophisticated is the moniker - a regular in the fancy galleries. The best he can do is trashy karaoke in dark and dirty bars. How can you be an artist if you are completely alienated from ordinary human sensibilities? This question has a simple answer: you can’t. Jack treats other people as things. This impresses himself; and there are others - Clinton, I believe, likes the Good Will - who are also impressed. To Lars he is a joke. Cleverness? A caretaker who sweeps the corridors of genius.

As suddenly as a sketch of a car accident had inspired the ideas in Tractatus, so a gesture of an Italian friend destroyed them. The gesture that divided Wittgenstein I from Wittgenstein II was made some time in the year 1933… ‘One day (they were riding, I think, on a train), when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same “logical form”, the same “logical multiplicity”, Sraffa made a gesture familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like dislike or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand. And he asked: “What is the logical form of that?” Sraffa’s example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same “form”. This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a “picture” of the reality it describes.’ It was many years before Wittgenstein II worked out his new ideas, but the old views, which at one time had finished philosophy for ever, were discarded on the train. (Ved Metha, quoting from Norman Malcolm’s memoir of Wittgenstein.)3 

Here is a mind that transcends clever. It has a spirit that adds richer, more complex layers of invention onto the world; creating new things which are subtler, deeper, more beautiful - more vivid - than the dull soap opera of eating, working, passing the time. Genius, to twist Verge’s meaning a tad, is to add love to the world; injecting energy into the bloodstream stimulating the sensibility. (Enlightenment may follow, but that’s a bonus.) Genius is a constructive force. Cleverness, unless tamed by others or domesticated by institutional routine, is apt to be destructive. Thus Jack, freed by that one moment of grace, the unconscious swing of the jack - the most beautiful moment in his life was an accident - is to follow the natural trajectory, the instinctive flow, of his clever mind: to destroy whatever it conceives.4 Jack, of course, thinks he is creating works of art; serial killing a variety of painting that uses blood rather than oils and gouache. The clever are not known for their self-awareness.

The art talk is impressive. It is kitsch. He begins with Gould. Of course he does, having no culture he knows of no other pianist. And how does he end? With the death camps. What else? The clever lacking in taste, its subtleties of feeling, its sensitivity to the shades of artistry and atmosphere, forever oscillate between the obvious and the extreme. The death camps, or so the argument goes, is the ultimate use of human material for aesthetic purposes; degradation and decay - the putrefaction of dead bodies - the essence of the artistic project. This wasn't any good when it was first espoused. The argument hasn’t got any better with age. Art as industrial death. Yeah yeah yeah. Like all clever men Jack has redefined the very terms of the subject until, as in this case, it means the opposite of not only ordinary usage but what the term actually denotes. No Jack. Art is meaning, form and a shot of energy: art is life not death. And you, despite all those clever ideas, cannot persuade us otherwise. You are hopeless. Changing the words isn’t going to change the facts of aesthetics. Jack: you have no talent. Look at your house: I can do better, and I’m not even an engineer. Your attempts at meaning and form? What, that clumsy and hideous object - the stuffed child? Or that kitschy attempt at formal design - the dead family laid out in a crass emulation of the embroidery patterns of a woman’s magazine? Come on Jack, I thought you were smart. An artist! You’d fail O level in the subject.

William Blake. Glenn Gould. Gauguin… Always it is the big names. This is a tourist dazzled by the sights of Paris, London, Rome. For sure he can regurgitate their words, explain their meanings, even add his own spin: he’d make an excellent tour guide. There are times we admire this cleverness. In a scintillating scene he compares the process of serial killing to walking between lampposts at night. The shadow smallest and most intense under a lamp lengthens in front as you walk away; it is the pleasure of the kill as it fades out; then, at the mid-point between the two lights, the shadow switches to behind you; it’s decreasing length the escalating pain until you arrive at the next light, the next murder. No question. Jack is brilliant. It is just that he is no architect. An engineer only. He can build a bridge, but he’ll never design a decent one. An engineer with a coke problem, I suspect - these lampposts a metaphor for art or for an addiction? Poor sod. We feel for his delusion. The spirit that animated a Gauguin or a Blake is beyond this man. They had access to realms of human sensibility that Jack doesn’t even know exist. He lives on the surface of life, and can never plunge into the depths where true creativity germinates. To use an old philosophical distinction: he is all analysis, there is no imagination here. George Eliot, in a fluster, her petticoat around her knees, rushes into the room: he can only draw the diagram not the picture. Spot on, my dear.

The first murder is his best. In a real sense he didn’t do it. This woman manufactured her own death. She is the artist of this scene. The broken jack is more than just a symbol….  

Through each subsequent murder Jack becomes increasingly self-conscious about his performances; so that by the end they have become overly-elaborate, and are to finish in farce. The last murder attempt leaves reality far behind. Up to then, each killing, though extreme, and touching on the absurd - Jack compulsively cleaning-up after the first one - is close enough to Jack’s character to feel real; though the results are the inevitable cartoons of a clever but crude mentality; there is a touch of the Gulley Jimson here: it is life seen from the inside of a funhouse. OCD cleverly defines Jack’s character. Fixated on the minutiae he is apt to make mistakes or get the big picture badly wrong; thus checking for imaginary clues he panics on seeing a policeman; to then drive away leaving a blood trail that only the lucky accident of rain removes. This is horrible. And shows the limitations of the man. Mr B says it’s a death wish, and quotes Jack confidently.5 Listen to Jack? Really, sir? Is a bad driver courting death or is this the divorce between skill and performance…. We will return to Mr B. For now my conclusion. Locked in his own mind, unaware of its aesthetic poverty, the artistic spirit incarcerated in technique, Jack does not see how his efforts, though ingenious, are but bad caricatures: Civvy Street drawn through the bars of a prison cell. He cannot look at the work from the outside. This is narcissism not virtuosity.

The last serial killing is supposed to be a masterwork; a re-creation of a supposedly epochal American event. The result is burlesque. It is the inevitable climax of this man’s ‘artistic’ growth. That first moment of grace long gone, he is left with an impoverished cleverness; a precocious child makes the Taj Mahal out of chicken legs and meringue…. Ah Mr B, welcome back.

• Incident 1: The genesis of an artist. Spontaneity; inspiration; the artist discovers his metier.
• Incident 2: Attention to detail; obsession; repetition; getting it right and learning the craft.   
• Incident 3: Taking it further; making it new and original; shock and awe; perfection of form.
• Incident 4: Doubt; the artist essays his limits and finds them wanting whilst still producing original work.
• Incident 5: Descent into parody; at the end of the creative arc, the art is in danger of  becoming banal; he is going through the motions, appropriating ideas from others. Absurdity and a frantic attempt to recapture the spontaneity of the early years.

Isn’t it wonderful to read intelligent criticism? Not like the stuff we get in the Guardian, with the likes of Bradshaw and Kermode. Like all the best criticism it’s worth arguing with. As for B & K; scrumpled up and thrown in the bin, and then, as the paper unfolds, doused with the dirty ketchup and filthy oil from an English breakfast. I throw in a used fag to add the authentic Jack touch. Mr B’s interpretation works if we take Jack as representing his creator. True? Lars creates masterpieces, Jack makes kitsch. The intellectual trajectory maybe similar but these men are on different creative continents. The serial killer certainly contains elements of the artist; and Lars likes to work his themes though diptychs and trilogies, which risks repetition and parody. But to think of Jack as our great Danish director…Mr B, I know it will be difficult, but I think you going to have watch the film again.

It is a genre movie. This is our clue. Consider how Lars plays with the formula: as black comedy. He does not take the genre seriously, thus the absurdity of many scenes; the vast gap between the narrator’s intellectual pretensions and the actuality of his murders; then the final farce, with its jerry-built house. What is Lars doing? He’s poking fun at Hollywood. Think of those acres of real estate that produce tomatoes with no taste and oranges the size of footballs, whose skins are leather, their juice air. All that professionalism to make…films technically perfect but with no artistic soul. Corpses not characters appear in these movies. A suburban multiplex a mausoleum, where we entertain ourselves with the dead. Good Will Hunting. Mr B is right that Lars has written a parable of the artist, their development and final fall.6 But this is done within a satire of a cinematic industry that prefers to kill creative artists rather than nourish their talent. Jack is Mr Hollywood, who thinking he makes films murders them. To tell the biography of the artist and use it for lethal satirical effect…. So clever Lars. No. An effing genius!

(Review: The House that Jack Built)

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1. This gets around the problem of all ‘serious’ horror movies: how to realistically portray a killer without entertaining the audience. This problem satirised in Harlan Ellison’s Ripper story, The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World (in Dangerous Visions).

2. There is a wonderful scene in Die Zweite Heimat when Olga condemns Alex for being just clever. No artist this, only a failed man.

3. If only this scene were the inspiration for that first murder…are you going to tell us Lars?

4. A provocative statement, which I rigorously argue in Pass the Glue Please. Having dissed the analytic mind I use it in Reason’s Virgin to defrock the cleverness of Simone Weil.

5. No doubt Mr B will quote Harlan Ellison, who makes the same point about Jack the Ripper (in Dangerous Visions). Ruminating over Ellison’s story I eat the grass of foolish speculation: is Jack’s house the abode of genre; his ugly edifice the home of the Ripper's progeny?

6. It is also a parable for art. An art movement develops from the simple to the complex; starting as a primitive reaction to the over-sophistication of the present, it quickly evolves its own complexities until, at the last, it is a mere exercise in technique; the original spirit fading away to leave only the workings of a too rational mind. The art movement begins with artists and ends with intellectuals and bureaucrats (Train Them Good).