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“In a musical, nothing dreadful ever happens.”
— Selma, to her prison guard, in Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Negotiations between the Icelandic musician Björk and the Danish director Lars von Trier, who was planning the production of his musical film Dancer in the Dark (2000), began in 1997. After securing her as the composer of the film's music and collaborator in musical direction, von Trier solicited Björk to also play the lead role of Selma, who is the film's protagonist as well as the lead vocalist in each of the songs. Von Trier began courting Björk after seeing her music video for It's Oh So Quiet (dir. Spike Jonze, 1995), a four-minute nugget of vibrant, Busby Berkeley-influenced musical escapism. Björk only agreed to play Selma in Dancer after three approaches from von Trier in which he ultimately threatened to abandon the project — and thus, two years of Björk's songwriting — if she did not accept the role. Björk finally agreed, specifically, she explained, “for Selma's sake” .
This gesture to enter the world of Dancer for the “sake” of a fictional character was fleshed out in the film's production. Björk's word choice intimates that Selma had begun to take on a kind of self-state identification within Björk herself, a life outside the boundaries of the film's narrative. In Dancer, von Trier provokes in his viewer an empathic, protective impulse as Selma is tormented in a punishing, male-dominated, litigious nightmare. She is framed, tried, and executed for a crime she did not commit, losing everything (her arduous job in a factory, the money she had saved for her son's surgery) on the way to the gallows. Her only respite from the onslaught of suffering comes in the musical numbers, which take