WEll, Oscar, as usual you're so tightlipped that there's not much to reply to. My view is that von Trier is not a humane filmmaker in any way shape or form, so comparing him to Kurosawa, even in a narrow way, seems outrageous. Apples and oranges--you said that of one of my comparisons. The comparison to contrast makes sense, which is what I am doing with Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The comparison (to contrast) is very relevant: Dogville very much resembles Our Town in its theatrical accoutrements and also invites comparison with Brecht, as quite a few writers have pointed out.

We're not previewing the movie now but discussing it, so we can talk about the ending, eh? You can't have a real discussion of a movie if you're afraid of dropping "spoilers."

Perhaps Sola was just exhausted from being too long in the airless and artificial world of the movie. "I felt so and so" is not really a way of convincing anybody else of the emotional impact of a movie. It's like saying "You hated it and I loved it." The question is, Why?

I don't know what you're saying about the photos and Bowie song's import at the end. Why don't you spell out what you think it implies? Something to do with Grace? What? That isn't what most people think. They think, I guess, that it's saying America is a lie. Sure, there are various possible interpretations, but an anti-American one strikes me as the most likely, in the whole context of von Trier's work and of Dogville.

"An austere Brechtian critique of an unjust society" is how one critic (Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine) describes Dogville. If it is that -- and the concluding credits underline that -- then you ought to walk out not overwhelmed with emotion, but THINKING. The heart of the Brechtian approach is that it shakes you up, yeah, but instead of awakening Aristotle's pity and terror, the purging effect (catharsis) of classical tragedy, it withholds that, and instead makes you sit up and THINK. And Dogville does that to me: but I don't buy the ideas it dishes out. I don't think it's supposed to induce profound sorrow or any strong emotion, but shock and then thought.

Let me quote the conclusion of Gonzalez's review, because it provides the kind of interpretation I was hoping for from you:

Though Grace’s final conquest can be read as a campaign for cultural euthanasia, the film’s devastating final credits—which juxtapose David Bowie’s “Young American” with photojournalistic memories of American underdevelopment—are unmistakably sympathetic. Von Trier understands that the root of American aggression may very well be our arrogant elite’s oppression of the culturally underprivileged, which has bred ignorant and isolationist attitudes throughout the ages. Contempt breeds more contempt, so to speak. “It’s got to be universal,” says a confused Tom at one point, widening the director’s political perspective. In the end, Dogville is less anti-American than it is, quite simply, anti-oppression.


I don't quite agree, but I think this is an example of the way you have to approach the movie. Lots of good interpretation offered by Gonzalez in his review.(http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/fi...iew.asp?ID=830).