Dating Lars Von Trier

Allie Avital on seeing your heroes on their knees.

I’ve been worshiping male artists since I was a kid. First my father: a Soviet immigrant who was born in a shack in Kazakhstan and ended up designing theater sets on Broadway. Then came Allen Ginsberg, a man after my depressive, oozing, Jewish teenage heart. Then contemporary artist Matthew Barney as I scaled the spiral of the Guggenheim, floating wide-eyed past his vats of Vaseline and phallocentric mythologies. And then there was the man that made me want to become a director: Lars von Trier.  

Lars is a polarizing figure to say the least, deemed by some a genius and by others a misogynist troll, but I’m not here to investigate his many shortcomings (even if I have been known to defend him against any and all haters after a few drinks). All I know is that his films make me feel a spectrum of sensations in my body: catharsis, disgust, and everything in between. They are brutal, unforgiving operas of sorts, hitting me in a place beyond intellect, somewhere vaguely below the belly button. Some of them (i.e. Dancer in the Dark) I refuse to watch again, while others (Melancholia, Antichrist) remain on frequent replay. There's a sick masochism, a thrill in tolerating the discomfort.

But in August 2023, Lars released what is arguably his most brilliant film yet: a one minute “dating ad” in which Lars himself appears facing the camera, shakily announcing his search for a “female girlfriend slash muse.” Muse sounds like moose in Danish and his lips curl as he drags out the word like a frail Scandinavian grandpa. He looks old, thin, his body gripped by tremor, as he humbly declares: “I am 67 years old. I have Parkinson’s, OCD and at the moment, controlled alcoholism. In short, with any luck, I should still have a few decent movies left in me.” 

Lars’ films are rife with merciless injustice and terror, but nothing could have prepared me for this masterclass in simple, direct filmmaking. Like a tragic TikTok video: first-person, bite-sized, no makeup, no editing, a raw display of human vulnerability. Lars’ dating ad has it all, the most potent themes across his oeuvre: desire, loneliness, and above all, the inherently precarious and fragile nature of masculinity. 

Many an essay (and even a book) have been published on Lars von Trier and women. His self-sacrificing heroines, possessed by one type of sexual hysteria or another, and his alleged harassment of the actresses leaves nearly every Lars scholar speculating about his respect, disgust or worship of the female sex. But I’ve always been much more fascinated with Lars’ men: the rational, “scientific”, yet ultimately feeble characters whose spirit, self-awareness and inner strength pale in comparison to their “hysterical” female counterparts. Lars’ men are emotionally unintelligent, pathetic, obsessive, their rigidity and weak constitution ultimately leading to their own tragic demise.

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From Melancholia’s John (portrayed by a stoic and patronizing Kiefer Sutherland), who attempts to implement logic and science to shield his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister Justine (Kirsten Dunst) from the impending apocalypse, only to take his own life––abandoning them and his young child to face it alone. To the unnamed psychiatrist “He” (Willem Dafoe) in Antichrist, who is convinced he can “cure” his depressed wife “She” (also Charlotte Gainsbourg), but instead burns her on a pyre. Or perhaps most relevant is the generous “savior,” Seligman of Nymphomaniac (Stellan Skaarsgard) who patiently listens to Joe (Gainsbourg again) as she recounts every violent sexual encounter of her life while he remains a picture of kind grandfatherly wisdom, a shoulder to cry on, until the final moments where he too tries to rape her. There’s an admission of weakness, an apology in his eyes, a vulnerability, an inevitability, as if he just can’t help but surrender to his basest instincts, as if all male virility must rest its head in this ugly, old, pathetic finale.  

And so, with his dating ad, is Lars surrendering to his own inner Seligman? Is this his self-aware final work of genius? Is he simply trolling us once again? Or after years of writing characters as his mouthpieces, is he intentionally positing himself the symbol of constitutional male fragility? Is his loneliness so great, so complete, that it overpowers his astute cleverness, his sense of irony, into this puddle of earnestness? Is this the death rattle of masculinity? And more personally, is this the death rattle of my own relationship to the male artistic hero? 

As all children learn through mimesis, I learned how to direct by watching my father. Working in his set design studio after college, I watched the patience and kindness with which he spoke to his assistants. I threw my feet up on my desk just like he did (probably more a function of our genetically weak lower backs than hubris), and loudly slurped up Chinese tea just like him. And when I finally began experiencing success in music videos and commercials, and people asked me what kind of movies I wanted to make, I said I wanted to be a “female Lars von Trier.” 

While devouring the aforementioned Allen Ginsberg in high school, I remember having the distinct feeling that I could never truly be an artist because I couldn’t write about “my beard” and “my cock” like Ginsberg did. Matthew Barney made an entire magnum opus based on a male genital muscle. I felt that there was something anatomical in art-making, something I lacked.

THERE GOES MY HERO