{the black box}
Gruppeknald: an Analysis of Lars Von Trier's The Idiots Ranger Kasdorf
The Black Box is a new column intended to serve as a home for polity submissions that engage with television, movies, and cinema. In this inaugural column, Mr. Kasdorf gives a compelling account of the film The Idiots and the themes of community and cruelty within.
I
t is rare– more now than ever– that a person belongs to just one community at a time. Beyond being part of the loose community of St. John’s College Annapolis, we, the Annapolis Johnnies, have also cleaved to one another independently, forming our own bands, groups, troupes, clubs, and cliques– not to mention any non-Johnny communities which students occupy on their own time. One would have to be the most reclusive Room Johnny imaginable and lack an internet connection to be solely a part of the St. John’s student body. These various communities tend to be both wholly compatible and wholly separate. A student who goes to church on Sunday, attends seminar on Monday, and watches a movie with their Discord server on Tuesday acts as a member of three separate communities, and not one of them is ever in conflict with either of the other two. What’s more, each community’s activities are self-contained: nobody in your seminar needs to hear about your priest’s latest sermon, nobody in your Discord server needs to hear about the Unmoved Mover, and nobody in your church needs to hear about last night’s heated debate over whether or not Robert Pattinson was a good choice to play Bruce Wayne. But, as many readers of this newspaper are likely aware, this is not an absolute rule. Anyone who spends a lot of time in many different communities– especially since the advent of the internet and forum culture– will, at one point, encounter a disagreement between two communities more significant than a scheduling conflict, a cross-pollination of two incompatible groups, and be forced to choose one over the other. A particularly gut-wrenching example of this is the climax of the 1998 Danish film Idioterne, or The Idiots, directed by Lars Von Trier,1 of which I recently held a latenight, post-seminar screening with a group of friends.2 The central character of The Idiots is Stoffer, a young, mop-haired aspiring socialist with a taste for the profane, the obscene, and the pseudo-intellectual. He is the patriarch of the titular Idiots, a commune of middle-class Danes who all live together in a suburban home owned by
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the Gadfly / πόλις / May 13, 2022
Stoffer’s uncle. He is also the visionary who came up with the idea for the commune’s primary activity, which they call spassing3 and which I will euphemistically call performing for the remainder of this article. When they’re not sleeping on the floor4 or throwing parties for themselves, they go out to public places– including a public pool, a bar, and a restaurant– and pose as a group of developmentally disabled people, with one Idiot filling in as their “handler”. This is as upsetting to watch as it is to imagine, but the Idiots themselves, with rare exception, find it hilarious. Over the course of several sequences, which are both so offensive and so absurd that they provoked a curious kind of riotous, disdainful laughter among my friends during our screening, the Idiots use their perceived disabilities as license to do whatever obnoxious thing they please. Stoffer in particular views this act not just as idle recreation, but as a bold, revolutionary statement, like a combination of performance art and civil disobedience– a way of striking back at a conformist society, man. Or at least that’s the justification he gives. In one pivotal scene, the commune is visited by a smartly-dressed member of the local housing council, whom (after asking him to use the battery of his car to provide one Idiot with impromptu
notes
(1) Due to The Idiots being part of the “Dogme 95” film movement (which I don’t intend to discuss here), crediting Von Trier as the director is discouraged, but the film’s Dogme-ness is virtually irrelevant to this article, and frankly I don’t like the idea of letting Von Trier evade responsibility for the creation of this film. (2) Let it be known that neither I nor The Gadfly condone the practice of screening The Idiots for your friends, coworkers, prayer group, or any other community to which you may belong, unless you’re no longer interested in being a part of that community. (3) The Danish equivalent of the ableist English term “spazzing”. The fact that this is the word these characters use to describe their favorite hobby should be all the characterization they need. (4) Bewilderingly, the Idiots sleep in sleeping bags in spite of the house having several perfectly good beds, which are only ever used for tying Stoffer down during a fit of hysteria and during the film’s climactic gruppeknald sequence– more on that later.
