Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
2013 · Lars von Trier · Nymphomaniac: Vol. I on Sightlines
She tells him she was sleeping with three men at once. He says: Bach.
He isn't joking. Seligman means the three-voice polyphony of a Baroque organ piece, cantus firmus in the bass, and the film obliges him: musical staves come up over the memory of Joe's lovers like a plate in a textbook. That is the machine of Nymphomaniac: Vol. I in one beat. Joe offers flesh. Seligman answers with a footnote. The film draws the footnote on the screen.
Everything about the picture follows from that exchange, including its bad reputation. People who dislike the film say the digressions are padding, a clever man's self-indulgence stapled onto a dirty movie. Turn it around and the film opens up. The digressions aren't interruptions of the drama. They are the drama.
Deleuze cut cinema in two. In one kind of film, which he called the movement-image, a person perceives a situation and acts on it, and the acting changes the situation; that circuit is what continuity editing exists to serve. In the other kind, the circuit snaps. The character can no longer do anything adequate to what they see, so they watch and endure instead. Deleuze's word for that figure is voyant, the seer. Von Trier stages the break with almost diagrammatic literalness. In the present tense of this film there are two people in one room: a woman lying on a bed with a beaten face, a man sitting near her making tea. Neither can act. Everything actable has already happened. Seligman is a seer in the most reduced form available, a listener with no power over a word of it.
And every act he hears gets converted into something else. Deleuze has a name for an image whose action has been displaced into figure and commentary — the reflection-image, and at its far edge the discourse-image, a picture that poses a problem it can't settle. Fly-fishing plates and Fibonacci numbers laid over the rooms and trains of an adolescence. The film doesn't pretend the analogies fit; it openly flags them as impositions. That's the condition it puts Joe in. To be told about, here, is to be turned into an illustration.
At first the chapters look like ordinary flashbacks, and Deleuze has a precise term for those too: the recollection-image, a dated former present you go and fetch, which classical cinema uses as evidence. But Joe's past never comes back intact. A crystalline description, in Deleuze's phrase, is one that builds its object and then stands in its place, so that no independent original survives to check it against. That's what Seligman's glosses do. The three men are gone. Three voices remain.
Two accounts of one life run the length of the film and neither is withdrawn. Joe's: I am a bad human being, this is sin. Seligman's: you are a natural phenomenon, a pattern, an angler. Deleuze calls this falsifying narration, versions that exclude each other held together as co-true, not as a riddle with a hidden answer but as the way the thing is made. Joe forges herself as sinner. Seligman forges her as innocent. Each certifies the other. Deleuze's forger never appears alone; he comes in chains.
Which brings the film to the one place in cinema where the false was supposed to be impossible. Bazin's claim for photography was that the thing was there, that the image carries a trace of the world the way a fingerprint carries a finger. Serious explicit cinema has traded on that guarantee since In the Realm of the Senses: the act was real, so the film is not lying to you, and the explicitness functions as an ethic. Von Trier's own The Idiots bought in, with Dogme's natural light and its unsimulated inserts. Nymphomaniac keeps every appearance of that contract and quietly removes the contents. The actors played their scenes clothed. Doubles and adult performers supplied the anatomy. Digital compositing married the two. The most documentary-seeming images in the film never happened to the bodies we are watching. Deleuze's powers of the false — falsity as a creative principle rather than a defect — is normally a matter of how a story is told. Here it has gone down below the story, into the photographic substance. That is von Trier's particular invention in this film, and it isn't a stunt. It is the argument. What you are shown is assembled. What she tells you is assembled.
So the image asks to be read rather than simply seen, which is Deleuze's lectosign: the numbers, the diagrams, the staves, the freeze-frames, the split-screen triptych rating the physiognomies of her partners like specimens. Sound runs across the image instead of with it. Joe's guilt-soaked voice plays over pictures Claro shoots with handheld flatness, refusing to eroticize anything; Rammstein is bolted onto both ends of a wintry, talky chamber piece. That constant commentary is precisely what stops the graphic material from functioning as pornography. It makes you read where you came to look.
The volume's set piece proves how well von Trier understands his own method. Mrs. H, betrayed, marches her children into Joe's flat to be shown "the whoring bed," conducting the tour with terrible courtesy. Nothing is resolved and no one acts on anyone. What the scene exhibits is the social arrangement itself, held up for viewing. Deleuze took the term gest from Brecht for exactly this: a posture that lays bare a relation instead of expressing a psychology. It is the most Brechtian passage in a film built like a lecture with illustrations, and it is why the scene is farcical and unbearable in the same breath.
Underneath the cleverness sits an older Deleuzian shape. The impulse-image describes a cinema where a recognizable social surface turns out to be a crust over an originary world of appetite. Von Trier's surface is a deliberately unplaceable European city, Cologne pretending to be nowhere, with its trains and hospitals and gray institutional light. What's underneath is counting: hundreds of men since her teens, games with scores, the chapter itself as a unit of accounting. The essay frame keeps that from curdling into squalor, and the squalor keeps the essay honest.
The lineage is unusually legible, because von Trier makes no secret of it. Breillat's Romance set explicit intercourse against a woman's philosophical voiceover so that sex arrived pre-annotated; Anatomy of Hell gave the annotation a second body, a detached man listening across a series of nights. Salò supplied the architecture, chaptered sexual episodes glossed by narrators quoting their reading. Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her supplied the register: whispered analytic voice, intertitles, on-screen text converting a woman's life into material for an illustrated lecture. Von Trier makes one change, and it changes everything. He makes the annotator kind. Pasolini's libertines relish their citations; Seligman offers his as rescue. A gentle man who will not permit a woman to call herself guilty, because he has a better theory, is a more disturbing figure than any libertine.
What it leaves behind is a technique and a problem. The technique is the digital double, visual effects marshaled not for spectacle but for carnality, a way to put unfilmable acts on screen without a named actor performing them; that quietly severs the old equation between explicitness and authenticity, and it isn't going back. The problem is Seligman. Once a film gives interpretation a chair, a voice and a personality, criticism is inside the story and can be judged like any other character.
So watch the interruptions, and watch which direction they run. He breaks in on her constantly. She almost never breaks in on him. The volume stops mid-argument, which is what a first volume is for, and the question it hands you isn't whether Joe is guilty. It's whether being explained is a form of being heard. Carry that back into the chapters and every fly-fishing plate looks different.
Concepts in play
- discourse-image — Every recounted act is transposed into figure and commentary rather than acted: fly-fishing plates, Fibonacci numbers and musical staves superimposed on Joe's chapters, with the film openly flagging its analogies as impositions it cannot resolve.
- voyant (the seer) — The present-tense frame gives Seligman nothing to do but listen: a monastic room with a single bed, a table and tea, a beaten woman on the bed, and no action available to either of them.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The five titled chapters present themselves as dated, retrievable episodes of Joe's past — the classical evidentiary flashback the film sets up and then refuses to leave intact.
- crystalline-description — In 'The Little Organ School' Seligman likens Joe's three simultaneous lovers to the three voices of a Bach polyphony and the film illustrates the analogy directly, laying staves over the memory so the description replaces its object.
- falsifying-narration — Joe's guilt-laden self-account (she insists on her sinfulness) and Seligman's benevolent rationalizing glosses run the whole length of the film with neither refuted; the friction between the two is the film's actual drama.
- puissances du faux — The explicit imagery is digitally composited — clothed dramatic performances by the stars, anatomy and penetration supplied by doubles and adult performers, grafted in post — so the film's most documentary-seeming carnality never happened to the bodies on screen.
- le faussaire — Joe forges herself as sinner while Seligman forges her as natural phenomenon, each account authenticated only by reference to the other in the framed-confession structure.
- the readable image — Superimposed text and diagrams (Fibonacci numbers, fly-fishing plates, musical staves), freeze-frames, and the split-screen triptych rating the physiognomies of Joe's partners — an image made to be deciphered rather than simply seen.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Joe's guilt-driven narration and Seligman's counter-commentary play against Claro's handheld, desaturated images that refuse to eroticize, with Rammstein's industrial metal bookending an otherwise talky contemplative film.
- the-gest — The 'Mrs. H' chapter: Uma Thurman marches her children into Joe's flat to be shown 'the whoring bed,' staged with excruciating, near-farcical social precision in a film built as a Brechtian lecture-with-illustrations.
- impulse-image — The chaptered accounting of appetite — hundreds of men since her teens, adolescent games scored and tallied — running beneath the film's discursive surface as compulsion rather than choice.
- originary-world — Cologne standing in for an unnamed, deliberately deracinated European city, its trains, hospitals and flats shot in flat institutional light as the social crust over a world of pure drive.