Strange Pleasures: The Idiots
Column
Strange Pleasures: The Idiots
The Idiots (1998)
Column
BY
Beatrice Loayza
Strange Pleasures is a regular Metrograph column in which writer Beatrice Loayza shares unconventional desires found across underground and mainstream cinema alike.
A new 4K restoration of The Idiots, created on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, begins a run at 7 Ludlow on Friday, June 16.
Of all the provocations conceived by the Danish iconoclast Lars von Trier, The Idiots (1998) stands apart. Shot on location in the suburbs of Copenhagen with handheld cameras and a cursory script that von Trier claimed to have written in four days, the film—peppered with visible boom mics and continuity errors—is one of the few truly faithful expressions of Dogme 95, the anti-artifice filmmaking movement spearheaded by von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Paradoxically liberated by Dogme’s formal restraints, which somewhat relieved him of the burden of creative decision-making, Trier here looked to the “lightness” of the French New Wave and its emphasis on improvisation—he, too, would unleash his performers and capture them in a genuine state of play. Von Trier was at this point already known for his technical prowess and compulsively controlling methods; The Idiots, as much as it represented Dogme’s rejection of modern cinema’s illusionist tendencies, was also the director’s attempt at letting go.
The Idiots is about a radical commune of able-bodied adults who challenge bourgeois society by spontaneously pretending to be mentally disabled, or as they call it “spassing.” We see their hijinks through the eyes of Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), the group’s newest member, a fragile naïf recruited by idiot-in-chief Stoffer (Jens Albinus) in the film’s opening sequence, in which he and his underlings crash lunchtime at a ritzy restaurant—essentially killing the vibe with their unsightly chewing and listless plate-smashing. “You were poking fun,” whispers Karen, unamused when she realizes the whole thing is an act. Throughout the film, mockery and disruption is given special leeway dressed in the sheep’s clothing of mental disability, which bars polite society from expressing its true feelings about the crew and its various grotesqueries. Stoffer fends off a prospective buyer by brandishing his idiots, and later, a community spokesperson wanting to bribe them with the funds to relocate; caviar is swiped from the grocery store like an honest mistake.
For Stoffer and company, idiocy isn’t a physiological condition, it’s more like a cathartic form of performance art, one geared toward contesting the strictures of bourgeois decorum and capitalistic productivity. During the stone age, Stoffer declares, the mentally disabled were considered dead weight, but in the modern world, to be an idiot is a “luxury.” It has no meaning, no purpose; spassing unearths a buried inner self, an alternative to reality-as-we-know-it with its social codes and haughty pretenses.
The Idiots (1998)
In the 25 years since its original release, the film has generally been regarded as a tasteless failure, a work aimed to shock and nothing more—snickering shots of full-frontal nudity, and a notorious orgy scene, staged in broad daylight in the middle of an empty room, would seem to confirm these suspicions. By today’s standards of political correctness—in which the cheap humor of comedies like The Waterboy (1998) or Tropic Thunder (2008), and the condescending sentimentality of inspirational dramas like Radio (2003), have been written off as relics of a more culturally primitive time—The Idiots would seem especially egregious, even relative to von Trier’s other works often deemed sensationally misogynistic.
Yet spassing isn’t played for laughs, nor are the mentally disabled the subjects here, either. Structured loosely by documentary-style interviews of the group’s members as they recall the final days of the commune’s existence as well as Karen’s involvement, the film is also a reflection on the reasons for such behavior. Is spassing just a cruel joke? A sick means of manipulation? The participants—an art teacher, a doctor, a corporate stooge, among other socially respectable fronts—seem to find in the commune a safe space for acting out in ways their real lives disallow them. For some, it’s a vacation; for others, like Josephine, whose stern father sweeps in to take her home like a runaway teenager, it’s a break from a seemingly repressive existence.
Throughout his work, von Trier has consistently put forth psychological aberrance, be it disability or illness, as a marker of inconvenience, a scarlet letter, an indicator of so-called “evil” at odds with everything around it. Björk in Dancer in the Dark (2000) is visually impaired, her innate goodness and great love for her son likewise allowing her to find joy, music, in the drudgery of everyday life—a gift that ultimately leads to her false incrimination and death at the hands of an executioner. Stuck in the murk of clinical depression, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia (2011) is incapable of enjoying her own wedding, can’t grasp the tragedy of the world coming to an end. Matt Dillon’s serial killer in The House That Jack Built (2018) is a slave to his own murderous desires, his dreams of artistic transcendence premised on the gravest of sins. The Idiots’ meta-conceit, its film-within-the-film, calls attention to the relative fangless-ness of the group’s subversions, confined to a realm that doesn’t meaningfully affect their (or anybody else’s) lives. Watching the film today, it can be seen as a comment on the inherently bourgeois nature of modern protest, the kind of disruption that doesn’t actually inconvenience, but is in fact performed in a space of comfort and ease. That’s why Karen, in the end, proves to be the only one bold enough to spass in a context that matters; impoverished, trapped in a loveless marriage, and catatonic after the death of her infant son, she has nothing to lose. For her, to play the idiot is to embrace an alternative, to imagine herself otherwise—ugly, simple, brutish, and tragically defiant.
The Idiots (1998)
