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This chapter argues that the structures of spectatorial complicity offered in von Trier’s films illustrate how entwined cinema, sexuality, and the political can be. It examines how Antichrist and Nymphomaniac (2014) are especially apt films through which to explore the question of spectatorial complicity because both incite strong feelings through scenarios of sex and sexualized violence. The politics of these films depends upon the generation of an intense and perversely destabilizing affective relationship with the spectator. Both films assail the viewer with scenes that might be difficult or pleasurable to watch. Both also possess an uncertain relationship to these apparently socially engaged themes.

This chapter focuses on the gendered structure of Nymphomaniac’s passionate ambivalence and agonistic dénouement. It begins with Nymphomaniac’s dialogic narrative frame as a sexually differentiated story within a story, before placing the film in the context of the classic, Enlightenment-era Pygmalion story about artistic creation. Within that context, von Trier takes his place in a long tradition of masculine creators dependent on the nymph as the cipher or screen for their passionate ambivalence: their erotic and intellectual projections. This tradition is followed through in Giorgio Agamben’s description of image making as an “amorous experience” between an artist and an imago: “an object in some sense unreal.” A critique of Agamben as an enlightened Pygmalion then serves as a background for an analysis of von Trier’s critical remake of the Pygmalion story. In the end, Nymphomaniac is read as much more than the display of its own ambivalence about itself.

This chapter examines The Human Centipede, Nymphomaniac, and Videodrome; films that push the boundaries of human objectification. The chapter draws on the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre, highlighting an ontological distinction between being “in-itself” and being “for-itself.” It is argued that though the objectification of key characters in these films, on the one hand, promotes a sort of nihilistic reduction of humans to meaningless bodies in motion, on the other hand, this same reduction potentially provokes a sense of sympathy in viewers who are also embodied, and thus can see their own condition reflected in the experiences of the characters who suffer on screen. Depictions of others as meaningless matter remind audiences of their own corporeal nature (being in-itself), disgusting, titillating, and amusing them, but also potentially moving them to empathize with the consciousnesses presumed by analogy with themselves to exist within the bodies depicted on screen (being for-itself).