The reason for the experiment is not, however, obvious. Replacing speech with sounds, experimenting in touching each other without inhibitions, they are looking for the moment of ʻspassingʼ, the moment when mimicry has transposed into a genuine state of regression beyond normative limits of behaviour. In acting out the idiot, they regress both in public and with each other. In The Idiots, furthermore, the semiotic language of the film is impossible to detach from its theme: a group of people deciding to live together and to act out ʻthe idiotʼ within, both in the bourgeois neighbourhood in which they live and with each other. It creates an uncertainness of viewpoint which makes perceptual space uncertain and fleeting, and the borders between perceived object and point of view become compromised and ambiguous. The graininess and shakiness of the image are features that could perhaps be called a cinematic language dominated by the semiotic. The result is a cinematic language in which the technical devices are no longer made invisible, but rather allowed to dominate the screen. The rules of ʻdogmeʼ filmmaking require technical minimalism: no artificial lights, no make-up, hand-held camera, among other strictures. Kristevaʼs thought on the political dimensions of expression become relevant too, in relation to the language of von Trierʼs film. In doing so, Kristeva is not just endorsing a politics of pleasure but also bringing it to its impossible endpoint.
Whereas the politicization of another scene has been a concern for most of the radical philosophers coming out of the Parisian context, few have emphasized, as Kristeva has, the neurotic and perverted pleasures of that revolt and the ambivalences that are already inherent in it. Julia Kristevaʼs idea of revolt as return offers a certain commutability with the regression staged in the film, and allows us also to consider the highly ambiguous effects of that return. Von Trier has himself described the film as an expression of his own hatred of the living experiments of that epoch: alternative communities and families only cover the pathetic side of dogmatism in suburbia. But the staged revolt is very much a return to the gestures of a pleasurable transgression that was integral to the alternative ways of thinking the political in the 1960s and 1970s.
Rather than being situated in the feverish excitement of the Paris of 1968 it is set in the sleepy Danish suburbia of the 1990s. (Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault and others have all evoked a politics of transformative practices, challenging and transgressive perhaps in relation to a normative order of discourse.) In fact, the case of The Idiots is interesting not least because it stages a return to the ideas of the revolt of the 1960s, and in a way that becomes a sort of travesty.
So where should it lie? Perhaps in its politicization of an ʻelsewhereʼ in relation to political discourse, an ʻelsewhereʼ which has also been the focal point of French philosophy since the 1960s. Engagement, maybe but even then there is little reason to pretend that the interest of his films should lie in a conscious enactment of a political standpoint. But one wonders if the term ʻmaturityʼ ought ever to have a place in the writing that continues to emerge around the films of von Trier.
It has been said by various film critics that the issues raised in his latest movie Dogville could be read as a continuation of questions evoked in and by The Idiots, a film from 1997, and that it shows a new maturity in terms of political and social engagement. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering the violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it abreacts.The thematic obsessions of filmmaker Lars von Trier are as dubious as they are relevant to contemporary thought: unconditional love, feminine sacrifice, childish gestural provocations and victimization are contrasted with the neurotic fears of normality and authoritarian abuses of power.
That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling it is thus that they see the "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course I'm which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it. “Along with the sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and the father who proffer it.