Какъв му е на Адорно Фон Триер
What’s Von Trier to Adorno or Adorno to Him

Summary/Abstract: In a recent Von Trier’s fi lm, a toddler falls out of a window while his parents are busy having sex; She is deeply depressed, He, a psychotherapist, subjects her to treatment in a solitary house amidst Nature, where things get worse as she castrates him both symbolically and literally before she clips her clitoris, while remembering observing impassively their child’s death. Everything ends up with his strangling her, and the spectator feels relieved and requited. The fi lm is designed as a lucid allegory of female evil in the genre of dreamlike horror. The text attempts to defend the movie by claiming it does use the culture industry weapons only to urge the beholder to go beyond the unequivocal nausea of the fi rst reading. It does so by provoking dissatisfaction and implying a more complex mystery – criminal, psychological, philosophical, cinematic. From this perspective, the fi lm proves to be a cunning masterpiece that sends a different, more nuanced message if the viewer takes into consideration who sees what within the movie. The most important meaning at the end of the day appears to be the act – or rather the process – through which the beholder develops a critical refl exive attitude with regard to his or her own bias: his or her perspective is identifi ed as overlapping with the viewpoint of the male character, taken as both general and genuine. Thus the viewer acquires an understanding that deconstructs, or rather defamiliarises, the entire cognitive and ethical machine producing the initial effect of repulsion and revengeful relief. The latter is exposed as a forged provocation of culture industry automatisms. The fi lm suggests that the only way to fi ght the culture industry is by conquering it through the backdoor.

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