Art: Tarot embroidery (artist unknown)
“The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.”
In Lars von Trier’s Dogville, the stark mise-en-scène strips away the refuge of physical settings, leaving only the raw skeleton of a town marked by mere chalk outlines on the ground. Buildings without walls and trees drawn in chalk create a ghostly openness, where the secret lives of characters are laid bare, an audacious theatrical gimmick that magnifies the moral emptiness they embody. The film pivots on Grace's struggle, played with poignant fragility by Nicole Kidman, who confronts a town cloaked in pretense and illuminated intermittently by the metaphorical light of truth and deception.
Grace's arrival in Dogville sets a stage of mutual need and seeming innocence, but the village's initial embrace warps into exploitation and moral decay, a transformation starkly depicted through lighting: from soft luminescence to harsh, exposing floodlights. This visual metaphor underscores the central ethical quandary Grace faces—whether to forgive those who see her as nothing more than an object to be used and discarded. Her decision, stark and final, brings into focus the contemplation of judgment and responsibility, echoing Hannah Arendt’s observation on the paralysis in moral judgment. Arendt writes, “There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging... For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.”
Grace's initial reception in Dogville is one of cautious welcome. The townspeople, led by Tom Edison Jr., agree to hide her from the mob searching for her, initially demanding nothing in return. As time passes, however, their demands on Grace increase insidiously. She begins with small tasks, but these quickly escalate. The supposedly kind-hearted townsfolk exploit her vulnerability, subjecting her to increasingly dehumanizing labor and eventually, physical and sexual abuse. What started as a community willing to help a stranger morphs into a collective force of oppression.
The deceit of Dogville’s residents is gradual but relentless. Each character, under the guise of kindness, reveals their true, selfish nature. The Hanson family exploits her labor; Chuck sexually assaults her; and even the children partake in her degradation, reflecting the complete moral collapse of the community. This degradation happens under the guise of necessity and fairness, as the town convinces itself that Grace’s suffering is a reasonable price for their protection.
Grace, a fugitive running from a dangerous past, initially presents as being at fate's mercy. She is escaping from her father, a powerful gangster, embodying the harsh justice and merciless control she fled from. Her father’s influence looms over her, and she believes Dogville to be her sanctuary. Yet, it is not fate’s mercy she encounters, but the mercilessness of Dogville’s residents. They hold her life in their hands and show no compassion, gradually revealing the darkness hidden behind their facade of niceness.
In a pivotal conversation with her father, Grace’s moral struggle is laid bare. “So I’m arrogant if I forgive people?” she asks, to which her father retorts, “Can’t you hear how arrogant that sounds? You have this preconceived notion that no one–no one–can possibly live up to your moral standards. So you exonerate. …Doesn’t every human being deserve to be accountable for their actions? But you wouldn’t even give them that chance! I love you, I love you to death, but you’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever met!” This exchange crystallizes the film’s core dilemma: the balance between mercy and justice, and the arrogance that can accompany unconditional forgiveness.
As the townsfolk hide behind their collective guilt, Grace wrestles with a solitary truth: if she cannot forgive herself for the consequences of her choices, how can she absolve those who exploited her trust and vulnerability? Wouldn’t she act like them if she were in their place? The light, previously merciful, suddenly became the glint of a blade exposing every evil in the buildings and the people. And all of a sudden, she knew the answer to her question all too well: if she had acted like them, she couldn’t be able to defend any of her actions. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. The light is, remarkably, a silent protagonist, playing the role of the mediator between the viewer and the play-like film, subtly reminiscent of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. It also marks the beginning of Grace's mental clarity. The most terrible thing in the world can be a lucid moment.
Grace's decision to reject forgiveness echoes the disconsoling reflections of Jean Améry on resentment and the refusal to forgive. Améry, a Holocaust survivor, grapples with the persistent and agonizing resentments that arise from his experiences. He argues that forgiving the atrocities committed against him would be a betrayal of his moral integrity. Améry writes,
"I am not at all concerned with a justice that in this particular historical instance could only be hypothetical anyway. What matters to me is the description of the subjective state of the victim. What I can contribute is the analysis of the resentments, gained from introspection. My personal task is to justify a psychic condition that has been condemned by moralists and psychologists alike. The former regard it as a taint, the latter as a kind of sickness. I must acknowledge it, bear the social taint, and first accept the sickness as an integrating part of my personality and then legitimize it". (Jean Améry, “Resentments”)
Améry's stance against forgiveness is a powerful testament to the enduring pain of the victim, a refusal to allow the passage of time to dilute the moral significance of past atrocities. Similarly, Grace's ultimate rejection of Dogville's inhabitants is a repudiation of their deeds and a refusal to give her suffering meaning, to weave it into the greater order of things, by an unearned absolution.
Grace chooses to be her father’s daughter and massacres the town. The moral depth and truth of Grace’s choice cannot be overstated. The culturally ingrained Biblical imperative to forgive fails to ask the single most important question: Would we forgive ourselves for the actions we wish to forgive others for? If the answer is no, are we not then positing that we are morally superior to those we claim we forgive?
As someone severely disabled, I have endured every form of ostracism and neglect. But what makes it worse is the constant sermons from my family to be grateful even for the crumbs of attention that I happen to get. I am forever expected to forgive and forget, to wear my scars as badges of undeserved grace. The commonplace, ordinary nature of ableism makes it even more insidious. Because the disabled are often already invisible, it becomes easy to mistreat them even further when it happens outside the societal gaze. This mistreatment is cloaked in the guise of normalcy, making the wounds it inflicts all the more profound and haunting. I choose not to forgive, much like Grace. I would not forgive myself for neglecting the suffering other, the weaker one. The world demands gratitude for the bare minimum, yet denies us the acknowledgment of our pain and the injustices we endure. In this invisible space, cruelty festers and grows, unchallenged and unremarked upon. Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil comes to mind, where evil and cruelty become normalized due to indifference and a desire for conformity. This insidious nature of evil, masked by the ordinariness of daily life, echoes in the treatment of the disabled, who dwell, ever so acutely, unnoticed in the shadows, tending to the words in the fire till they turn blood-red, and they burn, and they brand.
Surely, the intellectual and personal trajectories of Amery, Arendt, and Grace, are undeniably different, yet all can be traced back to the irrevocable source of all judgment, i.e., the wound. All these figures, however, display what Theodor W. Adorno calls “thought’s resistance to what merely exists [the “surplus of thought” over brute facticity], the violent freedom of the human subject.”
Through Trier’s lens, Dogville is not merely a town but a study of cruelty born from fear and smallness or thoughtlessness. It asks of us, starkly, to consider the weight of judgment, the scales of justice, and the cost or necessity of mercy and condemnation. Grace’s final act, far from an act of mere retribution, attests to the impossibility and, in fact, the insult of genuine forgiveness in the face of irrevocable betrayal and an array of evils inflicted upon her.
Yet, the film resists such simple half-truths that everyone, deep down, is capable of something terrible. Everyone is. Crafting an idea like that would be nothing short of banal and a woeful waste of creative energy. Kicking and kicking and kicking the one who’s already down, however, is a category of evil, while standing up to one’s oppressors and refusing to explain away their actions in terms of circumstance and heredity is a category of morality. Therein lies its brilliance.
Perhaps the wish-for answer to the violence against the weaker one could be, and this is closer to Amery's disconsoling vision, is to transform the actions of the perpetrator into moral events, as opposed to natural, physical occurrences, to get them to experience their actions from the standpoint of morality. At some point, however, even if this were possible, it is simply too late. The condition of the victim and the condition of the torturer are radically different and never the twain shall meet.
The fact that Grace saves the life of the dog Moses indicates to me that her choice was never about blind violence in and of itself. It was about making sure that the betrayal of the suffering other by the residents of Dogville was going to be the last betrayal. She is not guided by anger or wrath, even of the Biblical kind, but rather by contempt, going hand in hand with the realization that the evils committed by the people of Dogville will continue to happen. There are no moral lessons for them, no hope that they would glimpse the truth of the victim's condition and genuinely desire to undo what had happened. Except it did not simply happen, did it? They chose it.
We do not say an indiscriminate Yes to life in and of itself, the way Nietzsche would have it, regrettably. To turn suffering into an unavoidable part of the human condition is to commit a crime of thought or worse. Forgiving and forgetting neither add nor subtract from an act of evil. To echo Adorno in Lectures on Negative Dialectics, we have to be critical of what we choose to affirm. Blind affirmation of what is and the fatalism that goes with it serves only to maintain the existing order of evil where suffering is both naturalized and normalized. Hobbes was certainly on his game when he asserted that men heap together the mistakes of their lives and call the resulting monster destiny.
After all, some monsters are necessary to keep worse monsters in check.
Each day is a falling tower (XVI), as Grace now knows only too well.
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