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Lars von Trier has never made a secret of the fact that his films are intended to provoke and has succeeded to the degree that he has become the enfant terrible of contemporary cinema. Indeed, his films have evoked strong ambivalent feelings in most spectators, not least Antichrist, the most reviewed and discussed film in the year it appeared. Critics and commentators alike have wondered how to evaluate the purpose, ethics and aesthetic quality of this movie; one critic called it “a masterpiece disguised as junk” (Skotte, 2009).
Masterpiece or junk? The extremity of these designations ought to make us wonder why von Trier's films tend to receive such contradictory responses. Precisely what is it that inspires the conflicting reception and judgements?
The title of this paper is taken from von Trier (Drouzy, 1991) whose films provoke the incessant and uncomfortable feeling of having a pebble in one's shoe. His films provoke us to ask us whether we like or dislike them, or whether we like some of them while at the same time are left confused, bewildered, or even offended. The irritation caused by a pebble, however, is a somewhat inadequate image to describe the audiences' immediate reactions to the cruelty, corporal mutilation and depression featured in von Trier's films.
Commentators and critics have pointed to trauma as the central theme in von Trier films, played out at the narrative as well as at the formal and effective level (Bainbridge, 2004a, b, 2007; Badley, 2010). While this term - so familiar to psychoanalysts - does indeed capture the essence of von Trier's cinematic universe, what we meet with cannot be understood within the framework of the trauma models we know from classical psychoanalytic theory, that is, the model of traumatic neuroses or Nachträglichkeit. The traumatic effect seems rather to stem from images devoid of meaning and which reach the spectator as an excess of unbound perception.
The aim of this paper is to explore how we may under