Lars Von Trier: Nymphomaniac. Should our dark side be explored?

Fishing for men: Nymphomaniac, Lars Von Trier

Usually we are so ashamed of our dark side, we put it away and leave it to fester in some dark cupboard under our consciousness.  Unconsciously it rots away like an untreated wound that we ignore, never brought to the light of day.  

Notorious for bringing out the unexamined in our society, Lars Von Trier has created the film ‘Nymphomaniac’, the story of a woman who is obsessed with having serial sex.

In the story, a man called Seligman discovers a woman lying on the pavement, seemingly beaten to a pulp.  Her nose is bleeding, she has a black eye, her legs are covered in sores.  Though the man tries to call an ambulance, the woman begs him not to.  She asks instead for a cup of tea.  

So Seligman takes her into his house and snug in clean sheets and warmed by hot tea, he coaxes her into telling him how she got her wounds.

At first the woman sees herself as ‘bad’ and is afraid to reveal her dark side, but Seligman encourages her to continue her tale, saying that “no human being is bad”

So the woman, whose name is Joe, launches into her story, from her early erotic experiences, the loss of her virginity and the growth of her obsession with sex.  The audience is voyeuristically led to view her early experiences and feel alarmed at the mass pick-ups in train toilets, the tallies she kept of her conquests and the droves of lovers who came to her apartment each night.

Seligman remains calm as a listener, encouraging her that her behaviour resembles that of ‘fly fishing’ He compares her catching of men in the train corridors as the use of ‘nymphs’ to fish for trout. The upstream presentation is often the easiest and most effective for nymphs because you are downstream or directly behind the fish. While you are in the trout’s “blind spot” (directly behind it) you can often get close to the fish—regularly within 30 feet or less.

The girl, Joe, then describes her experience of seeing her dying father. Joe admits to having multiple sex in the hospital basements while her father is dying.

“It’s only natural that you would want something to help you with the pain of such an experience” suggests Seligman.  

He parallels the manner of Joe’s father’s death to Edgar Allen Poe’s own death, from suggested alcohol and drug abuse where he was found trauma, vascular disorders in the brain, neurological problems such as epilepsy, and infections. Alcohol withdrawal is also a potential cause of tremors and delirium, and Poe was known to have abused alcohol and opiate drugs.

Then, when Joe tells about a love story with Jerome, where she is forced to feel sensation and is alarmed at being unable to control its sensation, realizing that ‘making love’ leaves her unable to feel anything.  In wrought panic she cries “I can’t feel anything”  The de-numbing process, though begun, is too much of a feat and too frightening a venture for her…

Nymphomaniac explores the beauty of illness, and embraces our dark side with empathy, forcing us the audience to also have empathy.  It explores the reasons a person resorts to addiction and shows the journey of an addiction, and the ‘numbing of all feeling and empathy’ leaving the addict in the full sway of danger without realizing it, where, at one stage Joe even uses a strategy for throwing dice in thinking of replies to her men.  Number ‘one’ means “I never want to see you again” and number ‘six’ means “I’d like to see you tonight” This gives a sense of ‘russian roulette’ to her meetings shows the madness of her addiction.

However Seligman compares her behaviour to that of Bach, pointing out that he used a number of formal mathematical patterns when he composed his majestic organ fugues. Bach used, for example, the "golden section" as well as the Fibonacci succession (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc., in which each number in the succession is the sum of the two previous ones). In many ways he worked like an architect, joining the two different parts of a musical piece into one harmonious whole before the actual process of composition started.

The film Nyphomaniac (part one) explores the complexity of humanity and that it is only embracing and bringing to light the complexity that we can really love and understand it.

Deepak Choprah said:

“The shadow self seems to be the opposite of love.  Actually it is the way to love”

For me, the alarming gratuity but enlightening examination of humanity and nymphomania in Lars Von Trier’s film is a very real route to love.