{"id":347,"date":"2004-03-26T23:52:49","date_gmt":"2004-03-27T06:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=347"},"modified":"2004-03-26T23:52:49","modified_gmt":"2004-03-27T06:52:49","slug":"dogs-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/03\/dogs-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Dogs of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

To paraphrase<\/a> David Denby, David Denby has lost it. The New Yorker’s movie critic now notorious for doing really idiotic things<\/a> and then writing about them in excruciating detail<\/a> didn’t like<\/a> Lars von Trier’s Dogville<\/em><\/a>, calling it, without irony, “avant-gardism for idiots”Slate reviews the reviews<\/a> of Dogville.<\/span>. But the movie isn’t just bad, according to Denby, it’s immoral:<\/p>\n

The movie is, of course, an attack on America\u2014its innocence, its conformity, its savagery\u2014though von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he’s never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “of course” in the above sentence settles it, then. I was going to argue for raising the bar a bit before calling something an attack on America, maybe even as high as, I don’t know, a medium sized office tower and a commuter turboprop, but “of course,” all you need these days is a social critique denuded of any possible specificity (just look at the set), minimalist to the point of being illustrated literature, making claims about the nature of free will and moral responsibility that apply universally, including the US. The fact that American society can suffer from innocence, conformity and savagery like the rest of us is clearly<\/em> an attack on American exceptionalism, unless, “of course,” it’s David Denby berating Americans<\/a> for taking their children to see Mel Gibson’s savage The Passion of the Christ<\/em><\/a> a few weeks earlier. Because, you see, David Denby is an American, and obviously Lars von Trier is not. Want to see something scary? Take a look at the demographic divergences<\/a> in IMDB voting patterns for Passion<\/em>. Check out that under-18 female vote (8.8!), but especially the discrepancy between US and non-US voters (8.0 vs. 6.7) — it must be one of the widest ever. (I certainly didn’t find a movie that generated a more disparate reaction.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Dogville<\/em>, in the end, is an abstract, aesthetic indictment of old-testament justice, while The Passion<\/em> gut-wrenchingly preaches the new testament’s “turning the other torso.” When Denby’s done with them, however, it’s “attack on America” versus “tacky America,” and choosing the lesser of those two evils is child’s play. Of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To paraphrase David Denby, David Denby has lost it. The New Yorker’s movie critic now notorious for doing really idiotic things and then writing about them in excruciating detail didn’t like Lars von Trier’s Dogville, calling it, without irony, “avant-gardism … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-5B","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}