The Annihilation of Hegel in Dogville
The Hegelian dialectic is inherently problematic in its construction and subsequent erasure of an ‘other’ through a process that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) termed synthesis. His triadic thesis-antithesis-synthesis model posited an eternal ‘ontological state of becoming’ characteristic of enlightment thinking’s attempts to locate a rational and cohesive identity within the politicized body of the individual.
Hegel’s is at best an idealistic philosophy that rests upon that flawed hallmark of enlightenment thinking, dualism. That is, a tendancy to structure thought through dichotomy and hierarchy, which is an ‘identification’ of difference to create meaning. In our late-capitalist/post-modern Western context, a Hegelian dialectic is no longer credible, or even ideal, given the fractured, multiple identities experienced by peoples saturated by local and international media, and inhabiting diasporic, exilic and multicultural spaces.
However to write off the relevance of Hegel in a contemporary context is to blindside the legacy of enlightenment and idealist (Hegel’s work is considered to be a part of the idealism rather than enlightenment school of thought) thinking on both a political and an aesthetic level. Liberal notions of ‘double occupancy’ and hyphenated identities are extant with the contemporary political imperatives of nation-states, cultural and ethnic groups, religious institutions, etc, to preserve (and impose) their collective identities and protect (and expand) their borders. Imperatives that explicitly rely upon the same notions of difference and antagonism as the Hegelian dialectic; imperatives that also look a lot like the Hobbesian ’state of nature’ that underwrites much contemporary international relations. Seen this way, the idealism of Hegel and the realism of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) are two sides of the same coin.
Hegelian idealism as Dystopia
Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville enacts a Hegelian dialectic in its depiction of a community striving to incorporate an outsider, Grace (Nicole Kidman) into their town, Dogville. The dialectic is portrayed through the visualisation of border spaces. Specifically, how border spaces are performed in ways that simultaneously seek to reinforce and to erase (Grace’s) difference.
Geographically speaking Dogville exists as little more than chalk outlines demarcating a black studio floor into areas representing the homes, the store, the garden, streets, etc of a small village said to be located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the US. There is very little that is physical/tangible to reinforce the delineation of community space, which enables von Trier to draw attention to the ways in which space is politicised. That is to say, how space is carved up, who is allowed where and for what reasons, and how it is performed in ways that reify collective and individual identities.
As Thomas Elsaesser poignantly states in his essay Double Occupancy: Space Place and Identity in the European Cinema of the 1990s, Dogville’s boundaries, being marked mostly by chalk ‘are at once imaginary and real, invisible and brutally enforced’ (2006, 655). It is a point that draws attention to the fact that border spaces, such as those that mark out Dogville, contain no inherent meaning but, rather, are assigned meanings that are subject to shifts of perception.
Beyond the physical dynamization of space, for example characters/actors opening and closing imaginary doors, border spaces and access points are reified through looking relations. The most poignant example is perhaps the first instance of Grace’s rape by Ben (Zeljko Ivanek) in the later’s home. At one stage this scene is framed so that Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) sitting in her store, occupies the foreground whilst the violence perpetrated against Grace is clearly visible in the background. That Ma Ginger is, diagetically speaking, ‘unable’ to see what is clearly visible to the spectator draws attention to and undermines the ways in which border spaces are naturalised through (violent) performance and complicity. And it is worth noting that sound operates in a similar manner. Grace’s exclusion from the various town meetings conducted to decide her fate, aurally render her outside of the community. On opposite sides of the chapel wall, her ‘inability’ to hear the concerns of Dogville’s residents enable them to speak openly and unhampered by her potential response.
However, it is the changing ways in which these fixed borders are enacted that the Hegelian dialectic is envisaged as a dystopian nightmare by von Trier.
Upon the arrival of Grace in Dogville from ‘the outside’ Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), an idealist not unlike Hegel himself, attempts to synthesise the disruptive and fragmentary force of her presence with the day-to-day functioning of the community. With the first of the afore mentioned town meetings, provisional acceptance of Grace is achieved. Tom subsequently architects her perminent acceptance by encouraging Grace to servile and gracious temperament - thus achieving the desired synthesis…for a while.
The dialectic at work here is not a static process, it is after all an ‘ontological state of becoming‘. The intermittent visits that Dogville receives from gangsters and police officers looking for Grace serve remind the town’s residents that their newest member is in fact different from them – her primary allegiance belonging to another alien community - thus her presence unremittingly reverts to being perceived as antagonistic. The towns folk ultimately attempt to overcome the seeming impossibility of synthesis (couched in a rhetoric of increased risk attendant to her continued residency) by claiming an increased compensation of Grace’s body.
This requires a shift in how borders and spaces are performed. For example, Grace is no longer welcome to access the shortcut that is Ma Ginger’s garden path. And where Grace was originally required to offer her services to each of the eight homes of Dogville once per day, she is expected to attend to the services of each home for half an hour twice per day which results in an increased survelliance of her activities and whereabouts. And as a final example, the mill renovated as a home and personal space for Grace evolves into a den of forced prositution, no longer insulated from the demands of public life.
Grace Annihilates Hegel
When Grace accepts an opportunity to annihilate her abusers at the close of the film, her visage as the ‘model of an ideal immigrant’, accepting of her exploitation and construction as a scapegoat in order to fit in (Elsaesser 2006, 654), is supplanted by a Foucaultian image of power relations that belies the idealism intended by Hegel. It is a moment that refuses spectator identification with Grace and instead re-contextualises the community of Dogville as a rather insignificant participant in the dog-eat-dog ’state of nature’ expounded by Hobbes.
I believe that it is important to understand that although the film can be and is read as allegorical of America’s war in Iraq, the exclusion of former Eastern block countries from the EU, the various immigration policies in place the world over, or more abstractly the neo-libralism versus neo-realism debate, the film’s minimal scenography offers a rather more universalising affect. As a result the film exceeds specific contexts to paint a nihlistic view of humanity and its persistant politics of fear and violence, us and them, that is historically and spacially unmoored.
Far from synthesising spectator thought perceptions with the reason that structures Hegelian or Hobbesian philosophies, von Trier ultimately refocuses upon the sensory, the visceral affects of such political reason.
If this aesthetic aspect seemed absent from the film as result of Grace’s body not bearing the marks of oppression and abuse (or perhaps as a result of Kidman’s wooden performance), the credit sequence shifts register to illicit a visceral, haptic spectator reaction through a montage of depression era and Iraqi wartime photo’s. If nothing else this montage paints a picture of ‘us’ and ‘them’ undistinguishable in the face of human suffering.
David Bowie’s accompanying song ‘Young Americans’ highlights the irony inherent in believing that our much more ‘enlightened’ liberal and contemporary Western ideals are insulated from the historical legacies that bore them.
