Murphy Shimamoto
Dogville:
Theology and Theodicy
Lars von Trier’s Dogville is a harrowing foray into the depths of human evil and sinfulness. The film accomplishes this in a parabolic manner wherein Nicole Kidman’s character Grace, the personification of divine grace, seeks refuge at a small dilapidated community in Great Depression Era America. Whereas the township initially accepts and rejoices in Grace, they come to abuse and ultimately reject her, thereby, condemning themselves to wrath and judgement. It is this downward movement from acceptance, to abuse, and finally the rejection of Grace through which von Trier allegorically attempts to reveal the sinful nature of human beings and justify their damnation.1
The film’s prologue concludes with Tom, played by Paul Bettany, saying that his country has forgotten a lot of important things and that they are in need of a gift. He says this in response to his friend Bill who asks why Tom must hold lectures arguing for a “moral rearmament” of the town questioning whether it might not be better instead to leave people alone, saying that they are fine as they are. Tom, however, an aimless young man with pretensions of being a renowned author, sees himself as “mining into the human soul, right into where it is blistered” and thus able to recognize the deep moral lethargy which depresses and ails the ordinary everyday life of Dogville’s residents. Whereas the town community believes itself to have a deep sense of camaraderie and closeness, Tom sees their self-centeredness and distance. He thus places his hopes in a gift which comes in the film’s first chapter with the arrival of Grace.
Presumably on the run from violent mobsters, Grace finds herself vulnerable and alone. Tom, fascinated by this glamorous and mysterious figure, offers her sanctuary, assuring her that the townsfolk will not object because they are “good, honest people.” The film’s narrator describes Grace in this scene by saying “She gave herself up to Tom at random, a gift.” In the Catholic tradition, “grace means a freely given gift”2 due to which, “Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption, that is in Christ Jesus”3 human beings can be liberated from sin. Thanks to the unmerited, freely given gift of God, accomplished in the passion and resurrection of his Son, human beings can persevere in holiness through freely receiving and cooperating with God’s grace. Thus the post-paschal condition of mankind is one standing in the possibility of either accepting or rejecting divine grace, thereby emancipating man from sin or condemning him to eternal death. Having been presented with the freely given, unanticipated, gift of Grace, Tom then holds a lecture outlining the human problem as one of receiving: imploring that people must be open and accepting. The townsfolk, skeptical of this enigmatic woman, decide to give her two weeks to prove herself trustworthy.
Initially, Grace’s offers of help to the township’s inhabitants are met with rejection, mirroring the obdurate unbeliever and hypocritical believer’s rejection of grace and complacency in sin. Eventually, however, they come to welcome her help and begin to depend on it. It turns out that she completes what is lacking in each individual. For the blind man she uses her sight to allow him to see, for the local idiot she thinks for Bill, helping him learn engineering, and so on. At the end of the trial period, the village decides to accept Grace into their community. According to the Council of Trent, “the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just.”4 Having each individually accepted Grace, the members of the town begin to find fulfillment in themselves and in each other. The previous moral lethargy and self-centeredness covered up by a superficial camaraderie is replaced by an authentic conviviality permeating the entire town.
At the peak of their joy and gratitude towards Grace, Dogville’s residents are confronted with the first trial which sets them down the road of damnation. When a police officer interrupts their wonderful Fourth of July celebrations to hang up a wanted poster, identifying her as dangerous and offering a substantial bounty, the residents begin to question their acceptance of Grace. Despite the fact that she has already proven her trustworthiness, when faced with the possibility that their cooperation with Grace may entail detrimental consequences, the residents re-evaluate their relationship. Instead of freely and graciously receiving Grace, they demand a quid pro quo. Rather than being grateful to Grace, they come to believe that it is Grace who should be grateful to them. The residents then decide to cut her pay, increase her responsibilities, and decrease the amount of time in which she is supposed to fulfill them. The narrator says of this state of affairs, “Irrespective of whether increasing Grace’s hours had any fairness or justification it didn’t seem to make anyone happier, on the contrary.” The townsfolk, having infringed upon fairness and undermined the original spirit of an open acceptance of Grace, have corrupted their affiliation with her into a business deal where she is permitted to stay only insofar as the incentives for her to remain outweigh the possible costs. In so doing, they reduce Grace into an instrument for their individual purposes who they become increasingly dissatisfied with the more she fails to live up to their excessive demands. It is worth noting that the villagers were only able to impose increasingly exorbitant demands on Grace because her powerlessness, as she had nowhere else to go, was exploited fully by Dogville.
According to the Council of Trent “they, who by sins were alienated from God may…convert themselves to their own justification, by freely assenting to and co-operating with that said Grace…while God touches the heart of man by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, neither is man himself utterly without doing anything while he receives that inspiration, forasmuch as he is also able to reject it.”5 Just as grace can be freely accepted and make a sinner righteous, so too can it be rejected and seal man’s damnation. We see this happen throughout the remainder of the film as the abuse of Grace intensifies. When passing through a shortcut which had just been raked, Ma Ginger scolds Grace to which she responds, “are you saying I’m less entitled to use the shortcut because I haven’t been here as long,” echoing The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. Whereas before the villagers cooperated with Grace on their daily tasks, they now demand that she do them for them. This culminates with Chuck who makes an unwelcome sexual move on Grace in the apple orchard which she rebuffs. In the sixth chapter of the film, Chuck rapes Grace by blackmailing her into having sex with him. Grace is then confronted by Chuck’s wife Vera who blames Grace for tempting her husband and decides to teach her a lesson by breaking the figurines Grace had bought with her wages. Vera says that if Grace can embody stoicism by holding back her tears upon watching the figurines shatter, she will stop. To Grace, these figurines were “proof that in spite of everything her suffering had created something of value” and upon seeing them shatter “for the first time since her childhood, she wept” alluding to John 11:35. After this, Grace attempts to flee Dogville with the help of Tom but is instead raped by her getaway driver, Ben, who returns her to the village to be bolted to a bell and wheel, reduced to a sex slave for the local men, and made to work without compensation for each resident. Grace had said to Tom at the end of the fifth chapter that “The thing I love about you is that you don’t demand anything of me” which is the proper, loving disposition with which to receive God’s gift of grace. Now, however, the townsfolk have turned Grace into an instrument endlessly subject to monstrous, exploitative demands.
Tom, in love with Grace yet paralyzed by his contemplative nature, suggests that Grace “tell the truth about each of them, show them for who they are. They’ll see that it's for their own good.” This, Tom believes, will clear the path for them to understand the injustice with which they have treated Grace and open up forgiveness. According to the Council of Trent “As regards those who, by sin, have fallen from the received grace of Justification, they may be again justified, when, God exciting them, through the sacrament of Penance they shall have attained to the recovery, by the merit of Christ, of the grace lost.”6 Therefore, in accordance with the theological understanding of grace personified in the film, by recognizing their having fallen out of grace and relapsing into sin, it is incumbent upon the sinner to turn in penance asking for forgiveness and openly receive the recovery of grace. The villagers, however, refuse to do this. When confronted with Grace’s clear and unembellished disclosure as to who they are and what they have done, Tom’s father says that this doesn’t accord with his perception of Dogville. The townspeople even turn against Tom asking him, “are you for us or against us?” appropriating Matthew 12:30 in support of evil. Tom, disheartened, goes to Grace’s cabin where he attempts to console himself by having sex with her. Grace pleads with him not to, saying that it would compromise on the love they have for each other which is supposed to be consummated in freedom. Tom agrees to this but is perturbed by what this interaction revealed about him. Upon reflection, Tom sees that he is human, in the sense that he is subject to the same temptations to which the villagers have given in. His pretensions to purity and an elevated moral state, that imbues him with the ability to recognize the evil which the townspeople exculpate themselves of, are fundamentally jeopardized when he sees that he is not immune to temptation. He then engages in a series of practical-calculative reasonings whereby he subordinates his ideals to his ambitions as a writer, fearing that this doubt about his own moral perfection and his worry that this be made public could discredit his pontificating. He thus calls the mobsters, closing the path to forgiveness and ensuring damnation.
When Grace and Tom meet in the final chapter they stand in front of a mineshaft reading Dictum ac Factum meaning “said and done”, confirming that with Tom’s final rejection of Grace the fate of the town is irreversible. On the fifth day after Tom’s phone call, the mobsters arrive, release Grace from her chains, and put her in the car with the mob boss who is revealed to be her father.7 What occurs in the car is a debate between father and daughter about human nature. This debate is kickstarted by unveiling why Grace ran away from her father. It turns out that it is because she believed that her father was arrogant for holding human beings in such low regard that the only way to corral them was through fear and violence, which he himself would righteously administer. Her father utterly affirms human depravity saying that they are dogs by nature. He accuses Grace of being the truly arrogant one who, in her inordinate sympathy and thus readiness to exonerate people from responsibility for their actions (seeing only victims of accident and circumstance never criminals and evil), condescendingly uses the horrific actions of others to elevate herself as a moral exemplar. Her father insists that human beings need punishment and when Grace says that the people who live here are doing their best under, undoubtedly, hard circumstances her father rhetorically asks whether their best is good enough. Grace leaves the car ready to forgive all that has been done to her saying that if they are merely obeying their nature, why not forgive them. However, upon exiting Grace reflects on whether she would have really done what Dogville’s residents had were she in their circumstance. She comes to believe that she could never have. The narrator then says “sorrow and pain assumed their rightful place” after which Grace gives the order to burn Dogville and murder its inhabitants for the sake of other towns, humanity, and Grace herself.
What are we to make of the relationship between father and child and their debate about human nature which occurs in the film’s final chapter? Many hints, I argue, are given so that we may see this dispute as one between the Old and New Testaments themselves with, appropriately, the father representing the former and Grace the latter. When Grace first meets Tom who enquires as to her family she says she has none, only a father possibly alluding to Matthew 12:48-50. Furthermore, when Vera and Chuck’s child Jason desires to be spanked and punished by Grace she refuses saying “I am the way I am, if people don’t like me there’s nothing I can do about that” echoing John 8:58 which itself is meant to relate back to Exodus 3:14. Thus, we see the dichotomy internal to God himself, in the persons of the Trinity, between the God of the Law and the God of Love. Whereas Grace in Dogville has a readiness to forgive and love, despite the horrors and suffering inflicted upon her, her father holds fast to righteous retribution. Lars von Trier’s parabolic film thus dramatizes the Christian God’s conflicted relationship towards humanity, love and forgiveness vs. law and punishment. Furthermore, von Trier’s film sides firmly in favor of the latter where the personification of grace itself decides to wreak horrifying justice against Dogville, even as she does so weeping.8
The most crucial punishment Grace inflicts is that on Vera wherein, paralleling the supposedly instructive punishment she inflicted on Grace, Vera’s children, including her infant, are to be shot one by one: the murder only stopping if she can stoically withhold her tears. Two aspects of this punishment are crucial. The first is that this scene verifies that Dogville is not a mere lesson in ethics, not a fable where the unjust get what they deserve: as presumably there is no ethical justification whereby Vera’s baby, along with many of her innocent children, could be conscientiously slaughtered. What it is instead is a theodicy of the horrying nature of God’s judgement. This is why the prior conversation about human nature is indispensable. Vera’s children, and for that matter the residents of Dogville at large, are not righteously murdered primarily because of their transgressions but because of their being human. Their sinfulness and guilt, i.e. their humanity, due to which they already deserve God’s punishment is merely confirmed by their transgressions. Man’s guilt is imputed and inherited, not necessarily legal. This is why the evil present in the son Jason, who blackmails Grace into performing obscene acts on him against her will, is so crucial. von Trier is depicting evil as the fundamental facet of human nature, present in children as well. By portraying humanity, per se, as evil, von Trier is able to illustrate a type of divine wrath, whose justice is beyond the boundaries of ethics, which can even sanctify the murder of innocent children, such as God’s tenth plague Exodus 12:29-30. The second aspect of this punishment which is relevant is the inadequacy of stoicism. All of Vera’s children are named after ancient greek, pagan, gods and heroes and she instructs her kids in the classics (you can see on her board early on in the film that she is instructing them with regards to eros and psyche). When sadistically punishing Grace, she tested her to see whether or not she could embody stoic virtue. However, when Grace punishes Vera in turn, she is likewise unable to control her agony. The universe von Trier creates cinematically is not one where stoic calm and composure belong, but one where only weeping and wrath can faithfully express the human condition.
This then is the tragedy of Grace. Whereas, Grace came into Dogville fulfilling its residents in what they lacked and opening them to love and gratitude, when confronted with a trial they relapsed into the harshest depravity until finally rejecting Grace all together. This is why Vera’s smashing of the figurines was essential as to Grace, these figurines were “proof that in spite of everything her suffering had created something of value.” The tragedy of Grace was that her suffering was not only in vain, but that it itself provided the occasion to confirm the wickedness of human nature.9 Furthermore, we must understand Dogville not as an exceptional place of particularly heinous human beings but one which epitomizes humanity. Before Tom is shot by Grace he says, “this specific illustration says so much about being human. It has been painful yet edifying.” Theologically, we can glean that von Trier wishes to suggest the effectivity of grace in creating love and brotherhood in certain circumstances, but that, when human beings are challenged they will fall into the most horrific iniquity. We are left to wonder whether von Trier’s vision is so misanthropic as to suggest that the citizens of Dogville, by representing humanity in microcosm, betray the irremediability of human nature, who when presented with grace are fated to abuse and reject it outright.10
It may then be permissible to wonder whether Bill was right in the prologue when he cautioned against Tom’s attempt to morally awaken the people? However, I do not think that this would be a fair reading. For von Trier makes clear, through the contrast of their vain, ordinary, and depressing everyday life before Grace and the bliss the community experienced after she arrived, that Dogville was in need of a moral reawakening. von Trier does not therefore seem to be following in the footsteps of the Grand Inquisitor. Rather, he seems to be suggesting something even more terrifying: that human beings are both in dire need of grace and yet so sinful that they cannot be redeemed through it. That concomitant with grace are the challenges and temptations to lead one astray which, because of human frailty, are almost certain to lead man towards destruction. While human beings are almost banally sinful in their everyday life, the introduction of grace, meant to liberate man from sin, only serves, by testing mankind, to take their depravity to the uppermost limit. Perhaps this is how von Trier interprets Jesus’s saying “I am come to cast fire on the earth; and what will I, but that it be kindled.”11
Notes
1 Undoubtedly, the concept of grace is itself one of the most controversial in the Christian faith, especially historically. This paper will choose to read von Trier’s understanding as Catholic, therefore relying on The Council of Trent and thinkers such as Erasmus, due to his stated connection to Catholicism in old interviews and given that in the film the narrator mentions that the local chapel is missing a priest, not a reverend, minister, or preacher.
2 Erasmus, Discourse on Free Will, p. 36.
3 Romans 3:24
4 Council of Trent, Decree on Justification, p. 34.
5 Council of Trent, Decree on Justification, p. 33.
6 Council of Trent, Decree on Justification, p. 41.
7 Here Lars von Trier may be making a conscious allusion to The Book of Revelation. As Dogville had to wait five days before its destruction, when the fifth trumpet blows the abyss opens up and begins to bring destruction onto the world. This is the first of three woes as Dogville was meant to be the first installment of a U.S.A trilogy which never made it past its second installment Manderlay.
8 Perhaps itself an allusion to Luke 19:41-44.
9 Something which from her first conversations with the disillusioned Chuck up until the end with her father she hoped to disprove.
10 Were it not for the exceptional heroines of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark this may have, inarguably, been the impression.
11 Luke 12:49.
Works Cited
Council of Trent. “Decree on Justification.” Session VI, 1547. English translation, vatican.va.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Discourse on Free Will. Edited and translated by Ernst F. Winter, Bloomsbury, 2013. Bloomsbury Revelations.
Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will. In Erasmus, Discourse on Free Will, edited and translated by Ernst F. Winter, Bloomsbury, 2013.
Trier, Lars von, director. Dogville. 2003.