Unwriting the Body: Sexuality and Nature in Lars Von Trier's Nymph()maniac and Toni Morrison's Sula
2015; Issue: 96 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoDeciding to leave town, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the protagonist of Lars von Trier's coming-of-age film, Nymph()maniac [2013], ascends to a mountain top and discovers a lone, drunken tree, twisted and reaching out toward the horizon. Joe's discovery causes her to turn back, prompting a series of violent events that eventually land her in Seligman's (Stellan Skarsgard) bed, where, under his care and thoroughgoing observation, she recounts the story of her erotic life. Joe explains to Seligman that she had discovered her soul tree on the mountain, a concept her father explained to her as a child: It's actually the souls of the trees we see in the winter. In the summer everything's green and idyllic, but, in the winter, the branches and the trunks, they all out. Look at how crooked they all are. (1) Emboldened by her discovery and accompanied by the memory of her father, who himself identifies with oak trees, Joe resolves to murder Jerome, a former lover who seduced P, her girlfriend and professional protege at an illicit collections agency. It's said to be difficult to take someone's life, Joe explains to Seligman, I would say it's more difficult not to. For a human being, killing is the most natural thing in the We're created for it. Joe's essentialist evocations of nature--regarding both the soul tree and, what she calls, a natural, or intrinsic, impulse to kill--are anachronistic in the context of contemporary film theory, which, under the sway of poststructuralism and continental philosophy, has tended toward constructivist accounts of subject formation, and it is undoubtedly von Trier's reversion to anachronistic, even biblical notions of human nature and female depravity that have earned the Danish filmmaker his misogynist reputation. According to Tricia Olszewski, Nymph()maniac is just the latest example of von Trier's empty pretension and unmistakable misogyny. (2) Stephen Whitty similarly states that, so many of von Trier's films, 'Nymphomaniac,' when reduced to a single theme, is about a woman's suffering --but it's the director who engineers that suffering, and solely because the character is a woman. Her gender is both her crime and her punishment. Identifying, resolutely, as a nymphomaniac--which, readers should note, is a specifically female term--Joe is widely condemned as social pariah, determined to stand up against all odds, just like a deformed tree on a hill. Not surprisingly, Joe's deformity--presented in Nymph()maniac as an intrinsic, female trait--has compounded von Trier's reputation as a misogynist, but the notion of human nature, or of an essential female identity, that resists the normalizing forces of discursive power is also central, I will argue, to Toni Morrison's Sula, a coming-of-age novel widely celebrated for its feminist underpinnings. As Amanda Putman recently stated, Morrison's female characters are powerful, dominant, and intriguing.... They choose their own destinies, even if those futures are often lonely or tragic. (4) This article compares Nymph()maniac with Morrison's novel not to suggest that von Trier was influenced by Morrison but, simply, to highlight the striking similarities between these two stories, demonstrating why the latest installment of von Trier's oeuvre may, like Morrison's novel, be interpreted as feminist. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Like Joe, Sula assigns herself a counterpart in nature, a soul tree, which, she explains on her death bed, represents her unique ability to live according to nature, outside of the normalizing strictures of conventional society. [E]very colored woman is dying, she explains, Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world. (5) Like Joe, Sula embraces her identity as an outcast and she compares herself with a redwood not simply to contrast her life well-lived with the majority of stump-like women who stay within the confined spaces allotted to them by conventional society but because the redwood, like the drunken tree Joe discovers on the mountain top, signifies nature, which, in her mind, substantiates the essence, or physical reality, of her own body. …
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