Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac is a confessional story told by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character
"Joe"
about her life as, well, a nymphomaniac. A stranger ("Seligman") finds her beaten
and bruised in an alley (all to the soundtrack of Rammstein, may I add)
and brings her to his apartment to listen to her tale. Her narration
opens into a visual recount of the stories, which are occasionally
interupted by the man's owns assertions and parallels of her sexual
escapades to the act of fishing.
One of my favorite characteristics of Nymphomaniac is
Trier's comedic sensibilities. Trier has an extremely interesting and
sometimes offensively unique sense of humor that has never projected
itself through his films until now. Trier employs the tactics of comedy
to demystify the excessively unsettling sexual experiences that Joe goes through. Her sexual experiences are not unsettling or disturbing in that the nature or actual physical practice, but in how normative and impersonal they are. Rather than sex being a sacred declaration of love (or at least affection) it is presented as being meaningless, emotionless and banal. The comedic element to this otherwise depressing and unorthodox treatment of on-screen sex is the constant comparison between fishing and hunting down a sex partner. The man to which Joe confesses the beginning of her experiences constantly interrupts her in the most degrading of moments to mention the uncanny resemblance of her sexual struggle to catching fish. This weighs down the intensity of the scenes of recollection by breaking away from her memories back to reality, where Joe is not only safe without the possibility of pitfalling back into another empty sexual experience but where traditional hobbies like fishing command observance.
Trier uses comedy rather than drama to ground the voyeurism of the audience by breaking away from the scenes of intense sexual nature. However, it is still not comedic relief because rather than alleviating the audience from being exposed to scenes of deviancy it alerts us to our voyeurism. Seligman, to whom Joe is telling her story, is not a actual part of her narrative: he can only bear witness to her rendering of the past. He is able to eject himself from the story but we find that we can't. When Joe begins to narrate her story, the experiences are on screen. When the man interrupts and talks about fishing, dreamy and hallucinatory visuals of a man fishing in a stream serve to visualize his descriptions. It's interesting that while Seligman describes systematic practice, the mise-en-scene is almost hypnotically abstract but when Joe explains her story the visuals are as matter-of-fact as her words. The clarity of rules and stakes are distorted in Joes life, but evident in Seligmans' explanation of fishing.
Trier extracts the erotic from the sexual. Joe is so inherently attached to constantly having sex that it becomes a burden to organize and orchestrate her sexual encounters. The banality of sex diminishes her hope for compassion and love, feelings in her that die with her father. Joe perhaps performs as a embodiment of the jaded spectator. Film and media parades sexuality so intensely that it sex is as banal of an act for us to watch as it is for Joe to perform. He also turns it on it's head in terms of it's conventional purpose and connotation. From what we see in most films, we learn to associate sex with passion and inter-personal connection, but Joes' sexual experiences are so purely physical, monotonous and inherently lacking any emotional engagement that they only serve to maintain a physical fulfillment, much like watching popular films. However, Trier seems to embody in Seligman the "intellectualization" of sex. Just as the initial comparison of Joes story is to fishing, the comparisons develop into even more obscure knowledge and theory that serves t o add intellectual parallel and psychologically meaning to Joes otherwise purely physical obsession. A comparison that, by the end of part 1 to Nymphomaniac, appears to have proven quite useless.
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