Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The House That Jack Built
2018 · Lars von Trier · The House That Jack Built on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch what Jack does after a killing, not during. (performance)
He cleans the floor. He leaves. He comes back and cleans it again. Matt Dillon narrates all of it in the flat, self-regarding calm of a man delivering a lecture on his own work.
Payoff: The voice says composition. The rag says compulsion. The distance between those two claims is the film. In the reading: symptom. The reading calls the cleaning a symptom: behavior that gives away a drive the man speaking never names.
Notice the ordinary setting each incident starts in. (staging)
A roadside breakdown, a dinner at home, a picnic, a hunting trip with children. Von Trier uses the plainest containers domestic life offers and then drills through the bottom of each one.
Payoff: The ordinary scene is not a stage for action here. It works as a lid over something else. In the reading: derived-milieu. The reading calls this a derived milieu: a furnished social surface sitting on top of a world made only of drives.
Notice how jittery and close the handheld camera stays. (camera)
Manuel Alberto Claro keeps reframing, pressing nearer the violence than is comfortable and refusing the composed distance a classical thriller would keep. The color stays desaturated, gray and muddy green.
Payoff: You are never given a safe seat. The style denies you the distance that would let this play as genre.
Listen for Bowie and Bach with no score in between. (sound)
There is no composer on this film. Von Trier uses records: Fame across the montages, Glenn Gould's Bach under the murders, Ray Charles for a joke. The talk between Jack and the unseen Verge carries the rest.
Payoff: Nothing in the soundtrack tells you how to feel. Music and image keep giving separate accounts of the same minute. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: sound and picture running different stories, with the argument living in the gap.
Watch the film interrupt itself with photographs and diagrams. (cutting)
Molly Malene Stensgaard cuts in Blake engravings, cathedrals, taxidermy, Nazi architecture, the noble rot of wine. Each break is illustrated argument rather than story, and then the incidents resume.
Payoff: The image arrives as a citation you are asked to check. You end up reading the film as much as watching it.
Once you have seen it
Track how Verge answers each of Jack's analogies. (structure)
Bruno Ganz stays patient, skeptical and finally mournful. The five incidents amount to a case being argued, and Verge's questions slowly reveal what kind of guide he actually is.
Payoff: This is a dialogue rather than a thriller. The suspense is whether Jack's argument survives contact with anyone else.
Watch the images start composing themselves in the epilogue. (light)
For two hours the camera is handheld and cold. Then come vaults, chasms and infernal light, and the picture turns painterly. The chapter is titled Katabasis, Greek for a descent into the underworld.
Payoff: The style itself moves out of grubby true crime and into myth. The downhill slope becomes geological.
Watch for clips from von Trier's own earlier films. (structure)
Antichrist, Melancholia, Dogville, Breaking the Waves and others get spliced into the reckoning, so that the body of work Jack is defending is literally the director's own.
Payoff: After that you cannot settle who is confessing. The film builds that undecidability deliberately and leaves it standing.
Watch what Jack keeps inside the storage freezer. (setting)
Bodies arranged and kept under fluorescent pallor. He calls the collection his work. He is also a failed architect who has demolished every house he ever began.
Payoff: He calls it an oeuvre. It is a hoard, and the difference is the one thing he will not say.
Carry this in: Do not watch the murders. Watch what Jack does afterward, and listen to how calmly he explains it.