Two minutes of black, silence, water, cramped places. To the rhythm of Rammstein's music with Fuhre Mich the scene opens. Seligman finds Joe on the floor, evidently unconscious after being savagely beaten.

He welcomes her into the house and she begins to tell her story:

she is a nymphomaniac and claims to be a bad human being .

(Nymphomania: an archaic term for hypereroticism in women. What makes her particularly desirable seems to be the active role she plays in sexual intercourse. Faced with her resourceful lust, the man places himself in the passive role. The psychological roles are reversed, the bodily exchanges remaining essentially unchanged. Knowing no catharsis, nymphomanic desire perpetually recurs in the form of the compulsion to repeat, in a repeated search for the object that crosses the boundaries of need and demand).

Divided into chapters as in Dogville begins an erudite mathematical-metaphorical disquisition, made of numbers and combinations , of definitions and quotations, of more or less weak intellectual digressions.

All accompanied by insolent and transgressive images under the motto of "mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima vulva"

Love is lust combined with jealousy, and power is marked by gender difference....

Men are listed with initial letters and chosen at dice to make them excited by unpredictability as Mrs. H takes her children to visit the bed in which her husband/father cheats on her with a young girl.

The nymphomaniac experiences the polyphonic combination of bodies and J.S. Bach's Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ plays the funeral march to the feeling of love as she expects permission to die.

Joe departs from when she was 12 years old, and between Zeno's paradox and the turtle/orgasm Seligman's metaphorical/psychoanalytic interpretations seem not to convince her.

As Jan had done in the Waves of Destiny, here Jerome asks her to go with other men. Li had acted Bess's devotion to the Western church of suffering here Joe though far from the Eastern church of joy has the obsessive task of REHABILITATING sexuality.

Then again, Christ also had a sadistic and cynical experience, and Joe's end justifies any means.

Seligman reminds her that Freud spoke of the polymorphous perversion of the child, as Joe's son approaches the window taking us back to the dramatic images of Antichrist, accompanied by Georg Friedrich Handel's Let Me Weep.

Sentimentality is a lie and therapy a useless remedy for those who have no place in society unless they become a debt-collection counselor expert in the broad knowledge of men.

The success produced by the profession will also determine the need to find an heir, and if killing is the natural thing the gun can betray you.

The only sin was to have asked too much at sunset, especially as a woman.... If she had been a man everything would have been different.

Living guilt and resentment against oneself and against the oppressed gender triggers the resistance of the subconscious, and although now the addiction becomes clearer one has to wonder if it is a life worth living.

Seligman's chastity has Schopeuerianly enabled her to understand.

The nymphomaniac is the slave who unconsciously claims the freedom to be a woman.

From Medea to the Waves of Fate, sadism/masochism will bring death.

The philosopher of Dogville turns into the psychoanalyst of Antichrist to become the intellectual of Nimphomaniac.

A self-quoting summation that of Lars von Trier; the fulfillment of the trilogy disguised by the depression of the sublime tale of atavistic male misogyny and self-defeating female misogyny.

There is no sexual liberation without cultural conquest. The apparent hypereroticization hides and enslaves the feminine by making it unconsciously justicialist but concretely the result of oppression.

The hypocrisy of a false and lying liberation masquerades as justificationist and cultured intellectualism; a monologue the male one self-referential and sadistic though naively explanatory and concretely autistic.

In many other, seemingly scattered and fragmented ways von Trier always tells the same story, that of the woman circumscribed in her mad and pathological attempt to colonize a territory that has no boundaries: her body.

"Woman on a par with man is her own body but her body is a different thing from her," Simone De Beauvoir had said.

Contrary to those who see in Lars von Trier a representative of misogyny, Nimphomaniac reveals itself, even to the most stubborn dullness, as an explicit and didactic condemnation of the stereotypical masks of women and especially men affected by ideological illiteracy called nature. Manufactured social mutilation tolerated and framed in a system that deforms expression and humiliates liberation through its artificial fabrication.

A lesson Lars' is one from which it is impossible to escape but bad faith is always lurking and so the consequences are unpredictable.

CORROSIVE, WEARISOME, UNIQUE.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice