Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy: Straight to the Bottom of the River

The director himself cameos as a skinhead cultist, listed in the credits as “Schmuck of Ages.” That’s about it for characters—the actors hit their dour marks with the determination of contestants in a pageant for mugs, fools, and clichés. You can barely tell them from the surrounding detritus without a scorecard. Yet between the stylized sepia look (courtesy of sodium lamps) and all the funereal-Dada non sequiturs and allusions woven into the fabric (how many films can you think of that not only quote Finnegans Wake but earn it?), The Element of Crime is just as arresting as it is off-putting. It anticipates the claustrophobic mental landscape of the pulp-art graphic novel and ridicules the tendentious epidemic of fictional serial killers, and of the cops who try to get inside their heads, in advance of that deluge.

Building out the documentary-style cringe comedy with surreal dramatization as von Trier and Vørsel sketch the scenes of their film aloud (these shot by Henning Bendtsen, who worked with Carl Theodor Dreyer and would also be the cinematographer on Europa), Epidemic blossoms into a delirious, Wagner-scored satire, with a road-picture detour that will get the pair to a stunning meeting with the cult actor Udo Kier, here also playing a version of himself. (His recounting of his mother’s deathbed story about surviving the Allied firebombing of a maternity hospital is the skeleton key to the trilogy’s sense of history—real, not reel, history—as a nightmare that movies gloss over and repurpose as pseudo-edifying spectacle.) Finally, Epidemic (its red title and copyright mark emblazoned on the screen throughout the film like a proprietary logo) arrives at a multilayered eruption that obliterates the line between The Passion of Joan of Arc and Night of the Living Dead. This is as devastating an ending as horror has produced and an existential joke for eternity.

And then, Europa (or, as it was known in its U.S. release, Zentropa, so as not to be confused with Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa): another hyperderivative movie fusing the postmodern with the old-fashioned in such a way that the incongruous and satirical elements don’t cancel out the suspense mechanisms, but also a strikingly transnational production that earned von Trier new levels of worldwide recognition. Ingeniously reversing Franz Kafka’s Amerika in postwar Germany, the film concerns an idealistic young American émigré, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr, the open-faced image of noxious innocence), who has come to work for the Zentropa railway line, in the process of being rebuilt, as an apprentice sleeping-car conductor. In no time, he gets mixed up with a severe femme fatale (Barbara Sukowa, channeling Hanna Schygulla channeling Marlene Dietrich) and the Werewolves—dead-end Nazi partisans who refuse to concede defeat, conducting a campaign of terror, sabotage, and graffiti against the Allied occupation. The term sleeping-car conductor might as well be a synonym for sucker, patsy, audience/critic surrogate. Just as Sukowa’s Kat gets her hooks into Kessler, she gets her hooks into us. With her velvet claws, capped teeth, and lupine hairdo, she’s a walking séance, one whose spirit the true von Trier fanatic will recall was previously conjured by “The Last Tourist in Europe,” the pseudo-Dietrich cabaret song that closes The Element of Crime.

Europa’s back-projected German wasteland evokes Notorious and The Third Man—corruption filtered through the lens of entertainment. It is the same type of completely self-contained universe of seamlessly gratifying myth—eternity at twenty-four frames per second—where beauty infantilizes rationality, dissolving reality the way a smokestack melts snow. Rainy, bombed-out black-and-white images suddenly hemorrhage color in Europa, filling the screen or maybe leaking just enough inky tint to draw our eyes to some small, strategic part of the frame—a bullet on the floor, a train’s emergency brake. The widescreen image has seldom seemed more claustrophobic and imprisoning than it is here: a cluttered death row of unsuspecting offenders where orderly rituals, bureaucratic niceties, and institutional rule books have been thrown out the window yet the stay of mass execution never arrives.

Von Trier turns suspension of disbelief into a struggle between the two sides of the equation, with the suspension (of judgment, of animation—as in a reverie) and the disbelief (as the film’s narrator-analyst-hypnotist insolently leads the credulous hero like a sacrificial lamb to the abyss) wrestling in the pristine studio rain. Europa opens up the more elaborately storyboarded, obsessive-compulsive framing of Crime. “Of course, I borrow, for a moment, Hitchcock’s camera and place it in a landscape by Tarkovsky,” von Trier has conceded, “but something happens in that process.” The filmmaker hired collaborators not only to execute what he has called Europa’s “cartoonlike aesthetic” but to actively resist it as well: “Henning really works against my ideas. It’s the same with some of the actors: I like to have them work against my films, because that’s when some interesting things start to happen.” Bendtsen’s cinematography lends the film a gravitas that counterbalances von Trier’s zippier pop conceptions (Barr’s naïf racing against the backdrop of a clock; a billboard-sized projection of Sukowa’s face looming over him like a Roy Lichtenstein painting; the tiny boy assassin who shoots a newly appointed Jewish mayor and faces off against the grainy, back-projected image of outsize soldiers). The cinematography refuses to make everything too shiny, new, and hard, forging a tension that gives this dizzying, sometimes maddening film the peculiar equilibrium of a recurring nightmare.

Approximating and even improving on the omniscient tone of latter-day Orson Welles, guiding us through the convoluted action and plucking the psyche’s strings, there is the hypnotic voice of Ingmar Bergman’s old knight-errant/magician/alter ego Max von Sydow. His presence—an aural representation of von Trier’s trainload of front and back projections and hyperchoreographed camera movements—is the most potent element of the film. The characters and plot are merely the moving parts of a metaphysical engine chugging toward another watery fate.

There is a ruthless functionality to the momentum of Europa and the way it establishes its narrative system only to pointedly undermine it. What’s unique about the film and the trilogy as a (fractured) whole is that they leapfrog over the traditional figure of the unreliable narrator. They jump into a series of unreliable master narratives: systems of credulity, high or low, that von Trier infiltrates and reconstructs as an interconnected house of games. They expose theory, abstraction, rationalization, and spectacle in all their facets; laid bare like the organs of a cadaver on a table, illusion and denial, the heart of artifice, are splayed open through scenes and images that serve as incisions.

Maybe The Element of Crime was an exorcism that backfired. Instead of awakening from the trance of images and meaninglessness, we drown in substitution, fantasy, addiction—a limbo state we’re cast into for the duration of the trilogy. What is the psychic equivalent of foot-and-mouth disease, eye-and-brain fever? Cinephilia? In Epidemic, von Trier plays both himself and the doomed Dr. Mesmer, who sets out to cure the plague and turns out to be the carrier. Cinema as mesmerism, a kind of infectious unease that goes viral—it opens the floodgates of the unconscious. In the film, as himself, von Trier diagrams the narrative arc for his writing partner by painting the timeline on a bare wall. An extraordinary scene. “Here we need some drama,” he says. “Please write ‘Drama’ over there.” He scribbles “WAG Tann,” to indicate how in the film the bacteria will spread to strains of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Death would be the very air European civilization breathes. Epidemic’s maddest Dr. Strangelove–ian joke is delivered by a Black man in a lake, screaming a racist joke up at the camera as a way of deriding the entire corpus of ennobled pretension signified by that swelling Wagner overture.

To say this scene, and these movies in toto, are “haunted” by the specter of the Second World War is a colossal understatement at best. Von Trier assumes a sardonic awareness of the unimaginable extent of that human catastrophe in, as they say, the “European theater”—making these films a sort of public service reminder for today’s myopic media age, a little night context. Rounding off to the nearest million or so, there were fifteen million people murdered in the Holocaust (six million of them Jewish). Overall, the total number of combatants and civilians dead likely exceeded one hundred million. So this is the background to the punch lines of the Europe Trilogy.

A common refrain is that von Trier—with his wizardly trick shots and corkscrew dollies and willingness to play the Euro-anguish, last-train-from-Auschwitz blues for black-hole laughs—somehow violates the sanctity of the film medium itself. J. Hoberman approvingly ascribed the director’s brazen effort to revive “the primitive magic of popular cinema” to an aspiration to the “flashy hubris” of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Von Trier is not laughing at the victims of history but instead at the marks, the suckers, the idealists, the lofty Wagnerians, the sectarian rationalists, the idiot ideologues. The folks who want to believe in some Supreme Abstraction at any cost and are willing to sacrifice their fellow humans in the purification process. Which makes the Europe Trilogy a gloss, inadvertent or not, on gnarled, epochal, transcendentalist, multihour mausoleums (crematoria?) such as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma: von Trier renders the subconscious mind, anticonsciousness, and the death instinct that permeates cinema not as altars but as shtick. All that philosophy and poetry and romantic violin music in the Europe Trilogy’s mini-Götterdämmerungs is treated as slapstick.

No wonder David Thomson writes in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that von Trier is “brilliant in a way that gives the term a bad name. He knows no reality—only film. His movies refer only to the accumulated culture of all those split seconds.” Couldn’t you say as much about Godard and Sergei Eisenstein and most of the great movie-mad directors? (Ideology isn’t a higher form of the real, it’s the opiate of the intellectuals.) Thomson claimed von Trier’s hollow-point aesthetic “may have more to do with personal and private dysfunction” than anything else, but look around. If it wasn’t already crystal clear in 1984, ’87, and ’91, it is now: dysfunction is everywhere in the public domain. All the carefully curated illusions that were built up after the war are crumbling in a wave of unsustainability. Everything seems to be under siege from all directions: democracy, art, the economy (after all these decades, late capitalism is a term that’s actually in danger of meaning something).

Cinema is a system of interlocking illusions, self-referential congratulations. The Europe Trilogy deploys the trappings of grandiosity and genius in order to trap us—to make us surrender our better judgment and give in to the cheapest dream ploys in the book. These films are morosely exuberant thrill rides straight to the bottom of the river: a spin that Dr. Mesmer might call reclaiming the tradition of the sublime while perversely demystifying it. Doesn’t that sound nice? Nihilism but, you know, constructive. Absurdism with a purpose; a pebble (in your shoe) with a cause. A stare into the abyss of meaning—the abyss, period—as a form of memory therapy. Dystopia as not a trope but a repressed presence, a promise—a consummation devoutly wished.

Contemplating these movies, this lovely box set, today—I am writing in the fall of 2022—it feels as much like 1940 (or 1470) as like what one would have imagined 2022 to be. So many diseases, so little time. I stumbled on a passage in George Orwell’s 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” that feels apropos of von Trier’s worldview, the (wait for it) Europa-verse: writing of his own wartime, Orwell refers to “the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies . . . Not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.”

So, begging your question and your pardon: Cinema—cure or disease? Is it even an either-or proposition? None of the above or below? Is there such a thing as a safe negative space? The magic of film vs. the never-ending train wreck of history—who likes those odds? What leap of faith will keep you/me/us/them from plunging into nothingness? Don’t ask moi. I’m just the janitor here. Sweeping up at closing time. One word to the wise, though, to paraphrase the late Satchel Paige: Keep an eye on the past. It might be gaining on you.