I Hope to Understand in a Few Days
A belated essay on Lars von Trier's 2003 film The Five Obstructions
[I’ve been kicking around a version of this essay since 2018. Enjoy.]
Sunlight bathes windows white with Danish light. A cropped and ugly little man squints across a coffee table at the taller, older, elegantly tousled blond man who is his opponent.
“The very feigned distance you have, I would like to challenge that,” the ugly man says.
The elegant man cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“I’d like to create that feeling,” says the ugly man to the handsome one, “of a tortoise on its back.”
“Yeah? ‘Tortoise.’ I’ll write it down.”
He does, in one of the endless succession of small black notebooks in which we will see him writing, testimony to an ineluctable bond between writing and the image. A notebook is an improvement of the art of living. “Tortoise.”
This is Lars von Trier’s 2003 film The Five Obstructions: a journey, the director tells us, from the perfect to the human.
I have always needed to be perfect.
*
In Blade Runner, the eponymous antihero administers the Voigt-Kampff test to distinguish between human beings and replicants—physically indistinguishable from humans, but stronger, smarter, more beautiful, if shorter lived, for each replicant has only a four-year lifespan. More human than human is the motto of their manufacturer. Planned obsolescence: commerce is our goal. Death is the horizon of perfection.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
What do you mean I’m not helping?
It’s an empathy test, designed to produce an emotional response. It is a test of sadism, for the one tested and the tester alike.
A few moments after the tester asks the one tested a question about something he doesn’t have—a mother—the one tested shoots the tester in the back.
*
In 1967 Jørgen Leth made a thirteen-minute film titled The Perfect Human. It depicts a man and woman marooned in the white, empty, clinical space of pure cinema, shot separately and together in lustrous black and white, accompanied by a disembodied voice—the director’s—asking unanswerable questions that they cannot hear: “Why does he move like that? How does he move like that?” Humans are perfectly mysterious. Lars von Trier believed that in making The Perfect Human, Jørgen Leth had made the perfect film.
Over the course of The Five Obstructions, he will challenge Jørgen to remake his film five times, each time enforcing increasingly difficult and byzantine constraints, with the single object of turning perfection into shit. Each time, Jørgen will have eluded his tormentor, will bend but not break with the imposed constraints, producing five more films, each perfect in its own way.
The first remake of the film must be filmed in a place that Jørgen has never been—Cuba. That’s fine, Jørgen replies, I can build a set anywhere. Von Trier smiles faintly: Ah too bad, in that case, no set. He demands that the questions posed in the original film’s voice-over must be answered. The last obstruction is the most devastating: no shot can be more than twelve frames long. When shooting on celluloid, one second of action takes twenty-four frames; the half-second obstruction would seem to doom the film to incoherence. He’s ruining it from the start! The stress of it hurts Jørgen’s sleep; he stares out the window of his Havana hotel room like the hero of a noir waiting for his executioner to appear.
Quite an experience, living in fear.
Back in Denmark, Jørgen and Lars sit down to watch The Perfect Human: Cuba. Layered jump cuts, folded into each other, with non-diegetic sound and Jørgen’s voice-over smoothing the edges, saturated with warm colors—yellows, oranges, reds. Faded photos of Fidel flit past. We are invited into a Danish dream of Cuba—dilapidated interiors penetrated by wistful golden light as the humans are put through their perfect paces. Music plays, the Perfect Woman lies down on a bed, opens and closes her eyes in stuttering shots. The Perfect Man muses in voice-over as he shaves: Also today I experienced something that I hope to understand in a few days. The film shimmers with color, heat, life.
Lars sits back and rubs his eyes. “Yes, I made a mess of those obstructions,” he admits. Jørgen smiles.
A replicant cannot be killed; it is only retired.
*
What is perfection? Is it a mask, as Lars believes, covering up the raw, awkward, vulnerable, ugly, human? Is it style, a graceul way of moving through the hideous world?
Grammatically speaking, the perfect is the complete, an action fulfilled, whether in the past (he had made the perfect film) or in the future (he will have eluded his tormentor).
“Know that the desire to be perfect,” writes the poet Ron Padgett, “is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.” He wrote this in a poem called “How To Be Perfect.” It’s full of advice. Some of it is even good advice.
“Do not practice cannibalism,” Ron Padgett writes.
*
Jørgen Leth’s rigorous and uncompromising approach to filmmaking was one of the inspirations for the Dogme95 movement that called for a “vow of chastity”; a series of constraints or “rules of the game.” The rules: all shooting must be done on location, no non-diegetic sound, handheld cameras only, color film only, no special effects or filters, no genre films (i.e. science fiction, noir, romance, etc.). The subject that has been lost, wrote Lars von Trier in a 2000 manifesto for the movement, is “the real treasure of life”; it can be recaptured only if we are willing “to see without looking: to defocus.”
Twenty-four years later, chastity is as archaic as authenticity, as misplaced as the fear of selling out that was last a live issue for the members of my crabbed and nostalgia-ridden generation: X marks the spot. The treasure of life no longer exists, or if it does, it exists as an endlessly modified and reproducible image. Never to be possessed, only to be seen, glimmering in every social media corner, funhouse of the only perfect life, the essence of FOMO, of your life, unlived.
Only one of Lars von Trier’s own films fully adheres to this extravagant vow. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that The Idiots features a group of young people behaving as imperfectly and transgressively as possible, acting in public as if they were developmentally disabled. The thing is damn near unwatchable. The initial reactions were harsh: one critic, according to the film’s Wikipedia page, offered this shouted three-word review during the film’s screening at Cannes: Il est merde! One can picture Lars’s amused, self-hating shrug in response. “I’d like to banalize you,” he tells Jørgen. He has already banalized himself.
“There are only a few things in life in which I’d consider myself an expert,” Lars von Trier tells the camera, his camera. “One of them is Jørgen Leth. I know considerably more about him than he does.”
It is Jørgen Leth who must adhere to Lars von Trier’s vow of chastity, imposed with increasing wit and desperation. And yet as Lars admits, “It is always the attacker who exposes himself.” Ultimately it is not the Perfect Human who ends up wriggling like an insect impaled on a slide.
*
“The room is boundless and radiant with light,” says the narrator of The Perfect Human. “Here are no boundaries. Here is nothing.”
Within this boundless room the Perfect Man and the Perfect Woman perform simple actions, mostly in isolation from one another: removing clothes, applying makeup, clipping their nails, jumping up and down, smoking, eating, shaving, falling. “We wish to understand,” says the narrator—Jørgen himself—"what the human is and what it can do. How does such a number function? We will see the perfect human functioning. What kind of thing is it? We will investigate that.”
It is as if Jørgen Leth had been reading the poet John Berryman, who denied, with earnest unconvincingness, that the protagonist of his Dream Songs was “not the poet, not me” but rather “Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second.” “God bless Henry,” begins “Dream Song 13,” in a foreshortened and priestly gesture of absolution. The second stanza:
So may be Henry was a human being.
Let’s investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That’s true. My lass is braking.
My brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way.
The map, the schematic, the plans for human ache, scarred in Berryman’s case by the questionable if virtuosic deployment of minstrel-show speech and the usual dreary reduction of women to objects and tormentors. Jørgen is no different: in his films the Perfect Woman is always an erotic object, sometimes to the point of self-conscious parody: in one shot she poses as though for an advertisement with a cigar in her mouth and a flower in her navel.
The Perfect Woman, like Darryl Hannah’s Pris in Blade Runner, is “a basic pleasure model”; but it is Joanna Cassidy as Zhora who strips down for the male gaze: “trained for an off-world kick-murder squad,” drools the blade runner’s boss (played indelibly by the late M. Emmet Walsh). “Talk about beauty and the beast: she’s both!” Harrison Ford as Deckard, the film’s world-weary protagonist, shoots Zhora from behind as she’s fleeing through a shopping plaza and she bursts like a bloody butterfly through broken glass, tumbling and dying in slow motion, fulfilling the misogynist prophecy of Edgar Allan Poe: “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Here’s a piece of trivia for you: Cassidy was hired to play Zhora in part because she already had her own pet snake, a Burmese python named Darling.
Lars von Trier is frequently accused of misogyny. His cruelty toward the radiant Icelandic singer Björk, both on and off the screen, led her to foreswear screen acting after starring in his 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, in which she plays an immigrant factory worker who is victimized by a cop, kills him, and is arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed for the crime, all while in the process of going irrevocably blind. In a 2017 statement on her Facebook page, Björk accused a certain “Danish film director” of sexual harassment, commenting:
it was extremely clear to me when i walked into the actresses profession that my humiliation and role as a lesser sexually harassed being was the norm and set in stone with the director and a staff of dozens who enabled it and encouraged it. i became aware of that it is a universal thing that a director can touch and harass his actresses at will and the institution of film allows it. When i turned the director down repeatedly he sulked and punished me and created for his team an impressive net of illusion where i was framed as the difficult one.
With remarkable generosity, Björk goes on to say that “in my opinion he had a more fair and meaningful relationship with his actresses after my confrontation so there is hope.”
Lars von Trier rejected her accusations, though all of his best-known films feature the rape and/or sexual degradation of female characters played by famous actresses: Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves (1996), Nicole Kidman in Dogville (2003), Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2013). The Five Obstructions, too, is built around challenging and abusing the director’s collaborator. It’s just that in this case, the collaborator is also a director, and a man. In a 2008 interview about his relationship with Lars, Jørgen joked: “He’s looking for a victim. Nicole Kidman and me, right?”
Deckard, the world-weary detective protagonist of Blade Runner, runs Rachael, a replicant, through the Voigt-Kampff test. She is, he is told by her creator, “special”; it takes more than a hundred questions, as opposed to the usual twenty, for her identity to be confirmed by the machine. “How can it not know what it is?” Deckard wonders. In Rachael’s case the trauma of non-identity has been cushioned with implanted memories, the way that photographs of an event eventually supplant our memory of what it was like to actually be there.
Lars turns Jørgen into an actor, a face and a body for the screen. He opens him to the camera’s gaze and in so doing, feminizes him. But of course, Lars’s film also does this to himself.
*
Why does Leon shoot Holden? Because he can no longer conceal what he is.
In Robert Heinlein’s 1982 novel Friday—published the same year that Blade Runner was released—the female protagonist is a genetically engineered “artificial person.” These beings identify themselves to each other with a ritual phrase: My mother was a test tube, my father was a knife. Any replicant might say the same.
The first shot spins Holden around in his chair. The second blows through its back, propelling chair and occupant out of the frame. Leon stands with his arm extended, a snub-nosed pistol in his hand.
Padgett: “When there’s shooting in the street, don’t go near the window.”
“He can breathe okay,” Lieutenant Bryant tells Deckard, “as long as nobody unplugs him.”
Leon’s motherlessness is his curse and his weapon. It flies from him in the form of bullets and returns in the form of photographs, images crudely framed that Deckard must learn to see through and around. He must bend the light in the photos, see round corners, travel in time. Enhance. Stop. Enhance. What does he see emerging from the grain of Leon’s photo, from the grain of time? A woman’s—Zhora’s—face. Lover and replicant, the mother that Leon—and Deckard—never had.
*
Claus Nissen as the Perfect Man is lanky and long-faced, slightly goofy in his movements, a Scandinavian everyman. The Perfect Humans do not speak to each other, though we do see them lying on a bed that magically appears, undressed amid carefully tousled sheets. The Woman never speaks. The Man, while eating a formal supper of salmon, boiled potatoes, and Hollandaise sauce, hums while reciting the words to a poem or song:
Why is fortune so capricious?
Why is joy so quickly done?
Why did you leave me?
Why are you gone?
The Perfect Man wears a tuxedo and dances in sunglasses. He is as timeless as the empty white space in which he exists. The Perfect Woman’s appearance is marked more decidedly by the period. Her above-the-knee white dress has a mod Sixties cut. Her eyeshadow is pronounced. She lies down on a mattress wearing a feathery black coat and silver go-go boots. “This is how she lies down.” Her movements are languid and sensual. She is a product in a way that he—dancing in empty space without music—is not.
“And a voice saying a few words. This voice, saying these words.”
What does it feel like to touch a human’s skin? They touch themselves, on the leg, on the face. They lie on the bed gazing at each other. The Perfect Man climbs onto the Perfect Woman as if to make love to her, only to subside, burying his head in her side, hiding his face, while she gently strokes his shoulder and back. The sentimentality of this is dispelled by the next cut to a close-up of the Perfect Man cutting his fingernails.
“What is he thinking about? Happiness? The food he eats? Love? Death? Look at him. What is he thinking?”
The Perfect Man is gawky, awkward, handsome, a bit lost. The Perfect Woman is cool, present mostly to herself and to her own melancholy, following the secret kinema of inner motion. She is there to be looked at, and to look at us looking at her.
The voice-over insinuates its questions. Is he perfect enough? Or not entirely?
*
Lars and Jørgen munch caviar. “We really ought to eat it with bone spoons,” Lars observes. With his shaved head and habitual squint and the pouches of flesh under his eyes and chin, he looks like a shell-less tortoise, or a colicky baby that has never actually gotten around to being born. He is boundaryless, a shit-stirrer, endlessly making trouble for himself and others. In 2011 Lars was banned from the Cannes film festival for joking, in an uneasy unfunny way, about being a Nazi. “How can I get out of this sentence?” he wondered.
In the first of his films I ever saw, Zentropa, von Trier gives himself a cameo as a Jewish Holocaust survivor who makes a precarious postwar living offering false exonerations to Nazi businessmen. Lars says he grew up believing that his father had been Jewish but his mother lied to him about who his father really was. Here is a quote from an interview he gave on the subject, from his Wikipedia page:
Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background. But I'm really more of a Nazi. I believe that my biological father's German family went back two further generations. Before she died, my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man. She said my foster father had had no goals and no strength. But he was a loving man. And I was very sad about this revelation. And you then feel manipulated when you really do turn out to be creative. If I'd known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!
Jørgen turns out to be another one of Lars’s foster fathers, a good-looking Aryan with a penchant for Armani suits and women from the Third World as his lovers; screenings of his 2010 film about his sexual obsessions, Erotic Man, received nearly as many boos as The Idiots. He has no compunction about using a metal spoon to ladle more caviar onto his bit of toast. Jørgen loves sports like soccer and cycling; he used to wrok regularly as an announcer during the Tour de France and is probably better known for his 1976 documentary A Season in Hell, about a bicycle race from Paris to Roubaix, than he is for any of his arty, itchy, glassy little films.
“Obstruction,” incidentally, is a soccer term: it means to impede another player without touching him. Sometimes this is legal. Sometimes it results in a foul, a penalty, a free kick.
For the second remake, Lars instructs Jørgen to shoot “in the worst place on earth,” to find a hell of abject human misery to film in—but not to show it. Jørgen is to be his own actor. “It doesn’t bother me,” he rejoins, “to play the perfect human.” On a filthy street in Mumbai, in the red-light district on Falkland Road, the tuxedo-clad actor-director sits down to a feast of curried fish, rice, vegetables, and a bottle of Chablis. Visible behind him through a semi-transparent screen are the thronged faces and bodies of people, many of them hungry-looking, mostly women and children. Jørgen serves himself some fish, pours a glass of wine, and sips it: “Very, very tasty.” He jumps up and down. He does a tiny dance with his hands. He shaves himself while remarking to the camera, “Also today I experienced something which I hope to understand in a few days.”
*
“Hope for everything, expect nothing,” says Ron Padgett.
*
“Keeping distance is a technique,” Jørgen notes in an interview, “and I’m aware of its emotional costs. I’m very well aware of that. But I think it’s an illusion to think that there’s a deeper and more true source beneath the way I work—a source that can only be reached by breaking down the technique. It’s romantic, and I don’t believe in it.”
“I must admit,” Veronica Scott Esposito writes in an essay on The Five Obstructions, “Talking to Himself,” “my own innate sympathies will always be with dead-end truth-tellers like Lars, because I’ve lived my life with that ache for self-knowledge. I have no idea what I’m here for if not to feel this ache, as fatuous a life as that may seem.”
Jørgen lives depthlessly, Lars lives for and in the depths. But depth is precisely the dimension that film as an art form doesn’t have.
When Lars sees the new film he is enraged. He has not gotten anywhere close to breaking Jørgen’s will—to forcing him into some kind of error that will reveal his imperfections. As punishment he requires Jørgen to remake the film a third time, but this time without offering him any obstructions. Jørgen is shocked. The absence of any obstructions is the toughest obstruction yet.
People like Lars von Trier, an interviewer tells Jørgen, “are almost aroused by innocence and naivete. He’ll try to get power over and manipulate it to see what happens when you befoul and besmirch innocence.” Jørgen responds that naivete “is one of my weapons, which allows me to resist and respond to his attack and actually make a good film.”
Good versus evil is as fundamental to the film’s dynamics as the comparison Jørgen makes to a tennis match. “He serves hard and we return hard as nails.”
*
In classic noir, the detective discovers that the darkness runs deeper than he could have imagined; he discovers his naivete; he discovers, like Oedipus, that he is the criminal he seeks. Self-obstruction as noir.
*
We see a well-dressed older man in split-screen, walking down the street, emerging from an elevator, striding toward the hotel desk. “Any messages for me?” “Non, monsieur,” the clerk replies, shrugging thin shoulders. We like watching this handsome older man with long hair like that of a nineteenth-century composer. “We like,” the narrator remarks, “that he is special.”
The Perfect Man is played by Patrick Bauchau as a kind of superannuated James Bond who has mysterious, charged, yet glancing interactions with a cigarette-smoking femme fatale, Alexandra Vandermoot’s Perfect Woman. The filters are blue and moody, the voice-over a rueful parody of hardboiled narration that is also a comment on filmmaking itself: “I have seen him smoke a cigarette. I haven’t seen him write. Does he think about fucking?” Flashes of a rote surrealism: chairs on a night rooftop moving about by themselves. From the back of a limousine we glimpse the Perfect Woman smoking a cigarette and describing herself in French, a human casting call: Je suis une femme, l’une des meilleures. Celui qui est très amoureux. The Perfect Man fiddles with a radio in his hotel room, a gun lying disregarded on a table in the center of the frame. It could be the same gun Leon used to shoot Holden; it could be the gun that that Roy Batty pries out of Deckard’s hand, only to restore to him after having broken two of Deckard’s fingers. “I’m right here, but you have to shoot straight!” The radio plays snatches of the same music we heard in The Perfect Human: Cuba. The Man takes a Polaroid of himself in his 2002 hotel room, a selfie avant la lettre. Close-up of a plane ticket, destination Colombia, and then we are in Colombia, a point-of-view shot of someone in a boat cruising down a river, perhaps the Amazon, in steady rain. “Okay,” says the narrator. “We can start here.” The film ends.
A solitary man, struggling to penetrate the gleaming surfaces and hallucinatory depths of the modern: city as cinema, landscape as cinema. Behind him swirls a backdrop of dark-skinned others, Asians and Haitians, blurred by the sun or blinded in the rain or simply, as in Jørgen’s Indian remake, screened out. We are dazzled by rogue signifiers, by neon and face-obscuring screens, by words intoned on the soundtrack by no visible speaker. I relish the Perfect Man’s aura of loneliness and professionalism. I like that he is special, singled out by the camera’s gaze. “I’m very pleased with him,” Jørgen says of then sixty-five-year-old Patrick Bauchau. “He is well bruised as a person. He has experience of life. He has lived a life. His story is incredible.” But it is a story, other than a brief reference to Éric Rohmer’s 1967 film La Collectionneuse, that Jørgen declines to tell, or that Lars has edited out. Wandering an anonymous Brussels hotel, Jørgen remains the coolly impersonal, ironically naïve observer, a man seen through glass, a tourist seeking protection from experience in a country not his own.
“It has been his gift,” Jørgen writes of himself in the description of his much-maligned film Erotic Man, “to master a double grasp of the erotic situation: To live it fully and to observe it at the same time. He studied eroticism framing desire and has caught its circling draumaturgy. He has experimented with watching a burning hot material with the coolness of distance.” At one moment in the making of the Brussels film we watch as he pauses to listen to the sounds of a couple having sex somewhere in the anonymous recesses of the hotel. Near the end of the film we see a couple having sex on one side of the split screen, a black woman and a white man, the woman on top, her back to us, the man’s face out of frame. In the other frame the Perfect Man bends to his suitcase and plane ticket, off to the next thing. We haven’t seen him fucking. We haven’t seen him write.
*
“Mothers of America,” writes Ron Padgett’s predecessor Frank O’Hara, “let your kids go to the movies!” Don’t let them “grow old and blind in front of a TV set / seeing / movies you wouldn’t let them see when you were young.” It’s a poem about the movies, it’s a poem about sex. It’s a poem about the pleasures of imperfection—“the darker joys” from which a mother is supposed to protect her children. Hail Mary, full of grace.
*
Ugly Lars is a filmmaker; elegant people are his toys that like every boy with a toy he takes pleasure in breaking. He has not been, will never be, elegant himself. He is terrified of air travel; he is palpably imprisoned in his own restless, paranoid, alcoholic, crypto-Nazi skin. He is an enemy of women and of the terror and longing they so palpably make him feel. He sets the elegant Viking Jørgen back on his heels by demanding that the fourth remake be a cartoon. The Danish word for cartoon, tegnesfilm, sounds amusingly to my ear like tinyfilm. “I hate tinyfilms,” Jørgen says incredulously. “I hate tinyfilms,” Lars agrees. They both hate them. There’s a beat and then Jørgen breaks out a grin. Lars returns it. “I can’t imagine it will be anything but crap,” Lars says, practically rubbing his hands together. “I’d be thrilled if it were crap.”
You might think that a pair of control freaks like Lars and Jørgen would relish the opportunity to make a tinyfilm, but it isn’t so. As the two men admit to each other, it’s the mistakes—when an actor screws up, for example—that prove to be the greatest gifts that a filmmaker can receive. To turn on a camera, to flash on reality, requires accepting that no matter how carefully composed the shot, how closed and meticulous the set, how well-rehearsed the actors, that the imp of unpredictability has been invited into the film. Images will separate from their particulars no more willingly than words. Animation is antithetical to the spirit of cinema, which, as Gilles Deleuze has remarked, captures the motion in and of looking. Animation gives motion to that which has no life of its own. The filmmakers, with their difficult and differing relations to chastity, perfection, are repelled.
Jørgen’s solution is to turn over the animation process to Bob Sabiston from Austin, Texas, the inventor of the Rotoshop process of animation behind Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Working with footage that Jørgen has already shot, some of it from older films as well as the original Perfect Human itself, Sabiston helps the director construct the most self-referential remake yet out of previously shot movement-images that are now, in a very literal sense, images of themselves.
“You should have had sushi in Bombay,” drawls the narrator of The Perfect Human: Cartoon. “It would have been better.” A man is writing, while a voice, the same voice from Brussels, talks about it: “The fan is turning, shoveling the heavy air. I write this down, getting it right.” A different man smokes a cigarette and tells us, belt and suspenders: “I am smoking a cigarette.” Yet another man moves, as if dancing, in a single plane, in delimited space. One shot presents and isolates a series of noir icons in a composition evocative of René Magritte’s painting The Menaced Assassin: a naked, dead-looking woman on a couch, a sinister smiling gangster, a briefcase, a gun. Again that puerile, boys-adventure style of noir storytelling is invoked, indulged, and critiqued, as when we see a man wearing what could as easily be a bathrobe as a trenchcoat practicing his quick-draw technique, Travis Bickle style. Is he perfect enough? The man tries to replace the gun in his pocket and misses, nearly dropping it. Or not entirely? Words write themselves across the screen: “The perfect human. That’s just something we say.” Every version of The Perfect Human includes words, music, clothing, and the presence and absence of these things: someone dancing to nothing at all. We are watching the cinematic equivalent of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. “No music any more.”
“It’s more tiring,” muses a character in La Collectionneuse, “to follow one’s nature than to fight it.”
*
The Perfect Man is shaving. Carefully applying the foam from the razor to a scrap of paper in his hand, he tells us:
Today, too, I experienced something
I hope to understand in a few days.
Around my left hand was shining
a ring of hazy white flames.
I considered carefully
the left side of my own dark coat.
In the middle of my heart
there was a small white point.
I don’t know what it means.
There is something very nearly autistic about The Perfect Human: its coldness, its clarity, its refusal to select some details as significant and discard the others. Lars is deeply moved by the spectacle of this autism, which reminds him of himself. The humans are perfect. The artist is not.
There are those who believe that autistic people do not suffer from a lack of empathy, but rather the opposite: an excess of empathy, a flood of identification with other people and animals and objects, so painful and overwhelming it must be shut down at the source. The can of paint is surrounded by razorblades.
Lars wants to break Jørgen open, to confront the cool observer with his warming effect on others.
*
We itch to complete the gestures we have seen.
*
The Perfect Human: Denmark is shot entirely by Lars, with a voice-over narration written by Lars but performed by Jørgen, who has also agreed, sight unseen, to be credited as the film’s director. The barrier crossed here is not so much between life and art or the perfect and the human as that between two different lives led in art. “Dear, silly Lars,” Lars addresses himself, through the medium of Jørgen’s voice. The voice of one who longs to be touched.
Leon’s face is raw as he hunts his hunter, the blade runner Deckard, who is being held at Leon’s mercy. How long do I live?
Four years, a desperate Deckard replies.
Longer than you!
Leon’s fingers fly for Deckard’s eyes, to extinguish the question of who sees and who is seen.
*
In his romantic struggle to break Jørgen’s aura of control, Lars reveals his most desperate need. It’s no surprise that he’s been charged with acts of misogyny and brutality, no surprise that in an awkward moment he’d identify as a Nazi, or succumb to alcoholism. “I have a penchant for alcohol as you know,” he says to Leth after screening the first remake, while serving up a “snack” of caviar and vodka. When Jørgen returns to Haiti, we see Lars alone: “I’ll eat the caviar myself.” Hunched, solitary, a munching Quasimodo of loneliness. Lars’s fear of flying is well known; he puts his words into Jørgen’s mouth: Jørgen gets the rush of Hemingway’s and Sartre’s historical wings to wave away the discomfort and that damned insecurity, because he hasn’t the guts to take wing for himself. Lars hunkers down alone in dirty rotten Denmark. He sends the older man, and his camera, out into the world.
*
Pierre Bonnard, as quoted by the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: “The practice of cropping of the visual field almost always gives something which doesn’t seem true. Composition at the second degree consists of bringing back certain elements which lie outside the rectangle.”
*
Lars and Jørgen are observers in the post-quantum sense: observers of their own observing selves, changing what they observe, maybe ruining it, all in the name of measuring perfection. They have nothing to rely on but the rules of the game—rules they follow religiously, rules that cannot be questioned, that only be modified by the imposition of a new rule. The shots of Jørgen being filmed while filming—the reduction, reuse, and recycling of footage from his long career—all serve to reiterate the same question: How does the perfect human fall?
My students, children of TikTok and Instagram, get it instinctively: they are always already performer-observers of themselves, living as they do in the era after objectivity. Truth is guaranteed by what it excludes. The whole of The Five Obstructions is a kind of selfie in which two artist-models compete for the blessings of the frame. Only one can win.
“It is crucial,” Jørgen says in an interview, “that something alien come into the work, and you can get that through these rules or obstructions. They may be disgusting or pleasant, any sort of substance. But they have to be there.”
It has been a long slow lesson, lived by years. I resort to the language of older forms, dead forms—“poetry,” “cinema,” “art.” I stand apart from these things, apart from the era when people had real hopes of either making meaning or putting it behind them, when exploitation of one’s own image seemed the least bad option.
I wish it was the Sixties, says Radiohead, the 90s band that has become the imprimatur, a metonym, for art. I derive a description, particle and wave. Obstructing myself:
I couldn’t feel more like it. —Mr. Bones,
as I look on the saffron sky,
you strikes me as ornery.
*
“The difficulties must be absorbed into the work as a part of the structure and the dregs that remain and make it into a grubby work,” Jørgen explains. “A wonderfully grubby work that contains all the odds and ends, the emptiness and the fragments. All the dregs from the everyday.” Esposito argues that this is the beating heart of the Dogme95 sensibility. “He doesn’t try to hide the shit. You know the shit exists, I know the shit exists, Lars certainly knows the shit exists. So okay. Let’s stop trying to pretend it’s not there, and let’s talk about it.”
*
It has become a critical commonplace to say that Deckard, the replicant-hunting protagonist of Blade Runner, is in spite of his manifest imperfections, one of the creatures he hunts. Deckard is a replicant, played by a hangdog movie star with a talent for being bruised. He falls in love with another replicant more perfect than himself, and they flee from the film that made them toward a sequel that cannot contain what they’ve made.
In the version I saw as a kid, they fly through a lush green landscape raided from another film—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
In the director’s cut they flee into an elevator, kicking over a paper unicorn as they run, into a black screen.
How does the perfect human fall? He falls like this.
“One always feels furious,” remarks Lars, “when it turns out there are solutions.”