Dancer in the Dark : Affliction and the aesthetic of attention

Abstract

This article argues that Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark (2000) develops a provocative aesthetic of attention to affliction. The significance of this aesthetic is developed with reference to Simone Weil's understanding of affliction as deep psychic, social and physical suffering. She finds that humans habitually avoid affliction with consolations of optimistic political or religious meaning, and that deep suffering is thus rarely engaged with empathic "living attention." Through his characterization of Selma, and in his manipulations of the conventions of the musical, von Trier elicits this kind of attention, creating an important ethical opportunity for viewers to enlarge their capacity for responsiveness to deep suffering. However, von Trier's film also demonstrates Weil's point that attention to affliction is a miracle like walking on water: a near impossibility. In von Trier's otherwise mobile aesthetic, that impossibility is betrayed in his use of existing patriarchal conventions of affliction, habitually feminized as hysteria.