ugh.

I love Björk. I wouldn’t consider myself a die-hard superfan, but she’s an artist whose music I’ve deep dived and many of her songs have made it to my Spotify playlists (Joga is one of my all time favourite songs, Hyperballad is an honourable mention).

This isn’t novel information, but Björk is a once-in-a-lifetime artist. Her music has a complexity, resourcefulness, and experimentation that you don’t hear from the average musician. It is incomparable, and many (if not all) of the leading ladies in today’s art-pop circle cite her as an inspiration. Heck, she may even be your favourite artist’s favourite artist. I’ve even seen her as people's profile pictures here on Peliplat (you know who you are 🫶🏻).

When you grow to immensely admire an artist in one medium, you become curious to see how they show up in other artforms. So, when I learned that in 2000, she dipped her toe in the pool of acting, I needed to see Björk: the actress.

As I instinctively do, I looked up the title in Letterboxd and saw the 4.2 average rating. Then, I went to Wikipedia and discovered something:

At the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, musical drama Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, was the recipient of that year's Palme D’Or, and Björk herself won for Best Actress.

Dancer in the Dark immediately climbed to the top of my watchlist. That night, I grabbed my brother (a way bigger Björk fan than I), we HDMI cable’d my laptop to our TV, pulled up Criterion, and threw ourselves into the two-hour-twenty-minute magnum opus. I was ready to be blown away…

Except… two hours and twenty minutes later, I got up, ripped out the HDMI cable, slammed my laptop shut and yelled: “FUCK THAT. That was just trauma porn!”

My brother hit back with a puzzled “are you serious?”

To my surprise, he loved it. He was utterly moved by it, and now he considers it one of his favourite movies.

But… I just… I just hated it.

A Palme D’Or win, a Letterboxd 4.2… the masses seem to adore this movie and find the emotional tragedy very moving. For my brother, that was the case, and as I combed through endless Reddit threads discussing it, many people seemed to express the same sentiment. For what it’s worth, Björk does give an incredible performance. The musical numbers are great, and it’s not like I hated it from the start, but it’s the way it unfolded that made me hate it.

I can handle depressing movies. I can be compelled by brutally violent scenes. I can appreciate a provocative tragedy. But, to me, Dancer in the Dark is one of the most pointlessly depressing films I’ve ever seen. It is relentlessly cruel without any rhyme or reason. To put it bluntly, it felt like two hours and twenty minutes of an innocent woman being purely taken advantage of, abused, betrayed, and fucked over non-stop, and it just gets increasingly more cruel. I was stumped trying to wrap my head around why this was a story worth telling, and how it’s retained its reputation as a modern classic even 25 years later.

I don’t mind the way the film opens. There’s a home-movie-like feel to the camerawork and you are getting a slice of Selma (Björk)’s simple, blue collar life. It may not be glamorous, but with the quaint neighbourhood she lives in, her close relationship with her son, and kind, supportive neighbours and coworkers, there’s nothing to complain about. You want to know more about this world. Her home, her workplace, her backstory.

Selma is an immigrant to the United States. In an early scene, she and her neighbour (who is also a local police officer and her landlord) have a heart-to-heart. She tells him about her degenerative eye condition and that it’s slowly making her blind. Sadly, her son has inherited it, but by being in the United States, she can get her son an operation to prevent the condition from turning him blind. In this sweet, vulnerable moment, her neighbour Bill (David Morse) confesses to her about his wife’s excessive spending and it has put their house at risk of foreclosure. He has experienced suicidal ideation because of this but can’t bring himself to follow through. They promise to keep both problems a secret.

At this point, we understand Selma’s clear objective: make enough money to prevent her son from suffering the same loss she is bound to suffer from her eye condition. The only antagonistic force at this moment is her deteriorating vision. She saves up for her son’s surgery by stashing money in a jar in her kitchen. Bill catches notice of this.

Here is where the tables turn and I begin to get upset with the film.

Selma notices her jar is empty and realizes that Bill robbed her. She goes to his house to confront him. Bill lies to his wife that Selma wanted him for his money, which causes his wife to give her grief, and in her confrontation with Bill, he draws a gun and she accidentally shoots him in self-defense. Bill yells for his wife and frames the situation as Selma trying to rob him, and then he begs Selma to kill him, which she follows through with.

This scene is super well acted, but watching a very unjust and manipulative situation escalate to Bill coercing Selma into shooting him is disturbing. His betrayal is cold. I had to catch my breath when this scene ended, but naturally, the plot is just thickening. There may be some misunderstandings, but Selma can explain the situation, prove that it was self–defense, and she will live happily ever after… right?

She gets sent to court and gets accused of being a Communist and faking her blindness to exploit the American healthcare system. When given the chance to explain why she shot Bill, she refuses to say anything because she promised not to share his secret.

Damn… unconditional loyalty, even in the court of law? Gosh, it’s not productive to her, but it makes you care more about Selma since she’s so committed to honouring Bill’s trust… even after the things he’s done. Bill’s dead, this is her moment to fight for her innocence, but she still doesn’t do it. Instead, she says she sent all of her money to her father, and once that’s proven false, she’s convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Then, in prison, her friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) recovers Selma’s money but uses it to pay for a trial lawyer instead of her son’s operation. And then, because there’s no way of saving herself, a long-drawn out scene of Selma being brought to the gallows, having a noose tied to her neck, and then being hung closes out the film.

Initially, I was angry at the Dancer in the Dark for simply existing. I felt like all I was watching was an innocent, lovable character who had a clear objective - and a disability - who was then taken advantage of by people she trusted, and then eventually killed. Yes, her failure to disclose Bob’s financial issues was what got in her way. She got in her own way. But the unfolding of these events and telling them through long, raw, and emotionally volatile scenes creates a painful and traumatizing watch. All I’m left with is feeling like I just watched trauma porn.

This is probably the moment you’re thinking ‘but, Aidan, that’s the point!’

And, in a way, that’s probably all it is. Maybe it’s the fact the film has the audacity to tell a story so tragic. Maybe it’s the fact the film is purposefully abandoning the ‘happily-ever-after’ for its protagonist. Maybe it’s the fact the film has the audacity to tell a story of a character enduring things she doesn’t deserve in the slightest. Maybe it’s just a blunt way of telling us that bad things happen to good people… and packaging that message into a story like this is what makes it so remarkable. And maybe… because I still can’t decide whether to hate this, respect this, or just write it off as something that’s “not for me”, Dancer in the Dark just so happens to be a festival film that has left a significant mark on me.