Lars Von Trier, a lyon out of the zoo

This post is motivated by the recent declarations of Lars Von Trier, in the presentation of his film Melancholia.

I decided to write this post as a way to address the issues of political correctness and the ethical challenges of the artist. Despite these general motivations I find the declaration of Lars Von Trier not the declaration of any person or any artist; his filmography shows a meticulous exploration of the moral dimensions of humanity through a variety of micro-political scenarios. His doses of irony are high enough as to separate them from the neurotic but low enough as not to fall in the bed of nihilism. I find improbable that a person responding to the latter description would give a declaration of such caliber in a simply reactionary not to mention neurotic way.

I refuse the society which allows the artist to say whatever he wants. That is a society where artists are meaningless together with everything they represent. If we allow the artist to cause any impact, we should request from him an ethical responsibility. Wondering what that responsibility may be is the subject of this post.

Is it fortuitous that the freedom of the artist is still confined to the golden frame? An armed soldier out of duty is an armed civilian. The frame matters, it is the difference between imagination and reality. One of the applications of imagination is to understand the evil. But hermeneutics is the art of understanding the other without becoming the other. The former reflections are motivated by Von Trier issue, but the judgment of his act is an adjacent matter. Should the declaration of Von Trier be taken as evil? his films are certainly evil. But they are framed and that makes them good evil, they allow us to identify and necessarily to understand the many forms of evil. His declaration, though, was under a different frame. The press conference is where the people expects to see the person behind the artist, the mask of a person the least.

Despite my outsider condition, being a colombian, I try to understand some of the attitudes of postwar germans towards WWII. I wonder if they see it as a burden similar to that of colombians with regard to drug cartels. If the holocaust is a possibility of humanity, why should they be more responsible than any other postwar generation? If the french youth is allowed to be anti-Zionist, why can't they be so? Many of them see that burden as a taboo and the first enemy of taboo is the artist. It is worthless to say that modernity is an enemy of taboo. It just rather to hide in the light than in the darkness. It does so by depuration of meaning or by its commodification. The notable think about commodification is that it looses touch with history, a especially sensible matter when it comes to the holocaust. Perhaps that is what Von Trier was looking for. I don't know, but I suspect that what is important, rather than the motivation for his utterance is the way society responds to it.