A Reading of "The House That Jack Built" As A Scathing Condemnation of Misogynistic Directors and the Complacent History of Hollywood
This contains spoilers for every bit of the film.
Lars von Trier's latest, "The House That Jack Built," features an architect-turned-serial killer named Jack traveling down the River Styx at the end of his life and telling anecdotes about the gruesome murders he has committed. He explains that he began taking post-mortem photos of his victims and dubbed his serial killer persona "Mr. Sophistication." His once-overwhelming OCD waned, and he became better at faking emotions, confidence, and charisma.
My reading of the film was that it was one huge takedown of directors who frequently employ cheap or gratuitous violence, especially against women. It highlights their resistance to criticisms and uses symbolism to call out the stagnation and complacency of the industry.
Jack drives a big obvious red van, leaves a trail, is clumsy, and is a terrible liar, yet he gets away with everything for over a decade because of everyone's willingness to look the other way, and also likely because it was “a different time” - the 1970s and 80s. The complacency of men and the law is underlined here. Cops in this film are ignorant as hell and never catch Jack even when he's daring them to or admitting his crimes to their faces. Al, the clerk at the end of the film, has known something has been fishy about this customer for years but he doesn't call the police until the very end, when Jack finally yells at him for once.
Jack stuffs dozens of women he's randomly killed into a walk-in freezer, literally "fridging" them and acting out a bad entertainment trope. The street sign here - Prospect - is broken off and only reads "Pros." It is featured every time he adds a body. The freezer is also filled with hundreds of cheese pizzas, representing the need for instant gratification and the homogeneity of the industry. "Fame" by David Bowie blares several times during the film until it nearly becomes a gag.
Like every insecure film school grad, Jack over-explains and over-justifies everything on his ride down the River Styx, going so far as to give little meta PowerPoint presentations about William Blake, the protocol of wild game hunters, how cool Albert Speer was, and how everyone who doesn't agree with him is a sheep who will never become a beautiful tiger embracing savagery as he does. He thinks he is explaining and justifying his choices, his influences, and his pursuit of artistic perfection. This is all utter bullshit and good ol' Virgil calls him out on it at every turn. When Jack says that we should look at the works of a person, not at their actions - an all-too-common comment on abusive but revered directors like Polanski, Kubrick, Allen, and von Trier himself - Virgil basically replies "you lost me when you started abusing children."
Uma Thurman plays the first victim. It seems significant that she would be involved in this project, given how vocal she has been this year about her experiences with Weinstein and Tarantino. In fact, her scene here seems like meta commentary on her own conflict with Tarantino during Kill Bill: They drove up and down a road a few times in preparation for a stunt. She felt unsafe and wanted a stunt driver. He kept pressuring her to do it herself. She did, and she was seriously injured. So when her character here insults Jack repeatedly and calls him a wimp, he snaps, killing her in his passenger seat after she's made him drive the same road three times. Both people in the car represent Thurman in real life. She "snaps" and finally does the stunt scene after being taunted, but she's the one who pays dearly.
Jacqueline Simple is the only character/victim we actually witness screaming for help, leaning out her window at night. Her name is a clue - she is a mirror to Jack, a representation of his fear of being unintelligent and his fear that he is merely screaming into the void with his art and will never be listened to. He cuts her phone line earlier that night while on a date at her apartment and enters into a feedback loop with her/himself, reassuring her and lulling her into a false state of security before he attacks. Jacqueline's scene could also represent the relationship between actress and director - her line to the outside world is severed and she now derives all validation from her abuser. He holds the keys to her freedom, literally.
Jack represents problematic creators, specifically directors, throughout the film. Chief among these parallels is his proclivity for post-mortem photography of his victims - posing their bodies to suit his whims. Jack finds the negatives of his photos more interesting than the originals - having an obsession with violence and drama. We see him shooting people often, either with a gun or a camera. He tries to rewrite the experiences of some of his victims by means of grim taxidermy, putting smiles on their faces before they freeze in storage.
If something is methodical and informed by theory and research, it HAS to be good, right? Boring directors probably think so. That's all the effort and thought that they care to put in. Jack explains the ethical pattern in which to shoot a family of deer: fawns first. If you miss the doe, she can survive without the fawns, whereas inverse is not true - and that would just be cruel! Jack even says he considers himself a gentleman for following this pattern as he shoots down a human mother and her two sons. (There's another layer of symbolism here, hinted at by the sign-off of von Trier's video that prefaced the screening of the film I saw in theaters: "Remember: Never another Trump." The clueless family had all donned red baseball caps at the start of this scene as visibility/safety gear at the shooting range, yet the caps make them into targets once Jack begins his spree. The caps represent MAGA caps, and the family's refusal to remove them even when in danger shows how reluctant Republicans are to admit that they were wrong. The apple pie at the picnic and the act of feeding it to the dead child further comments on von Trier's view of America.)
"Why are all the stories you've told about dumb women?" Virgil asks him. "I killed men, too." Jack answers. "But you're only telling me about the dumb women because you need to feel superior," notes Virgil.
When Jack starts killing men in the last fifteen minutes of the film, it's all intricately planned: he monologues, gives a bunch of backstory, brings up the military, and reminisces about hunting trips with his best friend, the elderly S.P. (Standards and Practices? ...Am I reaching now?) before shooting him to death. This stands in contrast with the earlier, fumbling murders of numerous unnamed women throughout the rest of the movie, which were sometimes even played for laughs. Jack finally gets caught, right after he murders his first man onscreen but before he can pull the trigger on another seven he had prepared.
There is no way in hell that we are supposed to sympathize with Jack or think he is a cool, slick killer. There is no way the director sympathizes with him. Jack is a massive joke who keeps getting away with things due to dumb luck and the utter complacency of the world around him, yet he gives more than one "you're all sheeple who can't understand my art!" lamentation. He even goes on a "men have it so hard, men are always assumed guilty" rant as he's skinning a woman alive. Hi, irony, nice to meet you.
Jack has absolutely no hope of redemption at the end. Virgil knows his narcissism will compel him to try to cross the broken bridge that no one has ever conquered, which results in him falling and burning in the very deepest pit of hell. Turning the screen to a negative exposure at the moment of the fall is the film's final taunt to Jack's character, as in "now let's see him try to find the beauty in that, in his own suffering."
We never see Jack at work at his day job as an architect/engineer. He buys a picturesque lakeside plot of land. The house that he demolishes and restarts multiple times at that location was supposed to be his real masterpiece, but instead he became fixated on his identity of "Mr. Sophistication” and the accompanying photography. He confuses this compulsion for his true calling, all while Bowie's "Fame" plays on loop. The house is never completed.
It is easier to destroy than to create, and it is easier to talk yourself into thinking destruction is some grotesquely beautiful esoteric art than to actually challenge yourself and endeavour to create anything original.
The character Virgil repeatedly reminds Jack that the greatest works of art have been borne of love. True art needs love, humanity, and feelings, which Jack will never understand because he is a stubborn psychopath.
This film is an overt callout of creators who think that stylized violence is a substitute for substance and that anything that is informed by theory is inherently good. Those who refuse to admit they're wrong or may have taken an unfulfilling life path, leaving a cheap and hollow legacy with no new message to impart. Those who think it is easier to paint someone's suffering as artistic than it is to unpack their own suffering and the root causes of it.