A scene analysis of Lars Von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac'
Lars Von Trier’s 2013 film, Nymphomaniac, follows Joe, a nymphomaniac who renounces love and pain and for a life of sexual exploration. In this presentation I will analyze key scenes from the film. Thanks for stopping by and please leave a comment.
(3:24)
A middle aged bachelor leaves his home to go to the grocery store and on his way home he finds a beaten and bruised woman in the alley. He takes her home and she tells him the story of her life and the discovery of her sexuality. She asks Jerome to take her virginity.
Analysis
The 1st stage of Joe’s sexual awareness is pleasure which begins in her childhood. Not yet aware of her power yet, she is a nymph which, using Seligman’s fishing analogy, is the bait. All she understands is that it gives her pleasure. Her father in this scene helps her to experience herself through his love of trees, particularly, the ash tree, which serves as a metaphor for her, and its rustling leaves that represents the feelings and sensations she can experience within herself. Later, she asks a stranger to take her virginity in a scene that foreshadows the many cold impersonal encounters she will have thought the film.
(19:08)
Joe is a teenager now. She and a friend named B have a contest to see who can have sex with the most male passengers on a train. After falling behind, Joe compensates by giving a blow job to a married man saving his load to get his wife pregnant. Joe wins the candy.
Analysis
In this scene, Joe goes from discovering her bait and losing her virginity to a stranger to winning a contest by fucking the most men on a train ride. On this ride, she becomes aware of the power her sex has over men and how to use sympathy to play on men’s emotions. The key to her power is that she has no emotions invested in any of these encounters. In a world controlled by men, Joe learns that she can control men as long as she doesn’t fall in love with them.
(42:06)
Joe and her friend B start The Little Flock, a club for women who reject love and embrace sex with as many men as possible, no man more than once. Joe tries to follow in her father’s footsteps as a doctor but drops out and applies for a job at a printing company where she reunites with Jerome who took her virginity. He is sitting in for his uncle who runs the company and hires Joe as a jr. secretary. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when she rejects him. He goes out of his way to humiliate her by making her do menial tasks. However, after a while she falls in love with him. Before she can let him know her feelings he leaves the company with the secretary. She tries to remember him by selecting pieces of other men that remind her of him but she eventually forgets.
Analysis
Power is about control which is why Joe avoids relationships and love which, she tells Seligman, is humiliating because love is an emotion and emotions can’t be controlled.
Wikipedia:
In music theory, the tritone is strictly defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones.[1] For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it (in short, F–B) is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adjacent whole tones F–G, G–A, and A–B. According to this definition, within a diatonic scale there is only one tritone for each octave. For instance, the above-mentioned interval F–B is the only tritone formed from the notes of the C major scale. A tritone is also commonly defined as an interval spanning six semitones. According to this definition, a diatonic scale contains two tritones for each octave. For instance, the above-mentioned C major scale contains the tritones F–B (from F to the B above it, also called augmented fourth) and B–F (from B to the F above it, also called diminished fifth, semidiapente, or semitritonus).[2] In twelve-equal temperament, the tritone divides the octave exactly in half.
(1:07:24)
Joe has so many lovers, that she has to create a system to keep them organized. One of her lovers breaks the schedule and leaves his family to be with Joe. The man’s wife confronts Joe who admits that she does not love the woman’s husband.
Analysis
The word organization is the key to understanding this scene. In the previous scene at the printing company, she organizes Jerome’s desk like she organizes her lovers in this scene. Jerome, then, tells her not to touch his desk and messes it back up. Joe’s fixation with organization is about power. The power to control her emotions and the emotions of others; the power to keep herself from falling in love. This is why, in both instances, someone fell in love: in the previous scene, Joe falls in love after seeing order in the clutter on Jerome’s desk; and in this scene, with H leaving his wife and 3 sons to be with Joe. Both of these scenarios happen after Joe makes an attempt to organize something. And in both cases, she learns that love is not something that can be controlled which is why she distances herself emotionally from others. This is a warning for anyone thinking they are immune to falling in love; it can happen to anybody at anytime and if that person has no love invested in you and nothing to lose—or not as much to lose—as you, that person will hurt you. This is why you have to be careful with your heart:
Proverbs 4, 23: Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.
If you’re in love with someone who loves you, hurting you will hurt them as well. It’s like the Cold War’s MAD policy that insures peace because a full-scale nuclear war will destroy both sides. This is why Joe has no remorse for destroying H’s marriage when she tells Seligman: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” H was just another lover she had no emotional investment in and, therefore, nothing to lose.
(1:25:45)
Joe visits the hospital to see her father who is dying of dementia. Seligman tells her that it is common to react sexually in across and offers an analogy of polyphony.
Analysis
Joe uses sex to escape pain. In this scene, every time she is confronted with something painful or difficult, she finds someone to have sex with . The forest is a metaphor that she herself is not aware that she is using sex to address her pain. She loves her father and this is the reason she renounces love and relationships with men other than sex. Her orgasm is the death of her father’s half of her persona consisting of love and feeling. No more will she expose herself to being hurt. The ash tree’s nakedness is fear, the fear of pain that she uses and will continue to use sex to avoid at all costs.
(1:42:07)
Joe develops a ritual of walking alone. One day, she finds a torn picture of Jerome and Liz. A hand reaches down from above, she looks up, and there’s Jerome, smiling. He and Liz got into a fight and he tore up the picture. Joe recalls the time that B told her that the secret ingredient to sex is love.
Analysis
Joe reunites with Jerome. Then she has a flashback of B telling her that the secret ingredient to sex is love thinking that bringing Jerome in with her other 2 lovers will bring back the sensitivity and pleasure she once got from sex. The cantus firmus is the foundation of a polyphony; likewise, Jerome and the love she once felt for him, is supposed to bring the same enjoyment to sex that her father brought to life. But because of the pain associated with her love for her father and his death, Joe has shut off that part of herself to Jerome. This is why she feels numb. In Nymphomaniac part 2, Joe searches for the feelings she loses in this movie.
