Lars von Trier’s searing portrait of a serial killer The House That Jack Built arrived to instant controversy. Graphic scenes showing the murder of women and children, their bodies mutilated, prompted over a hundred walkouts at its Cannes premiere. As it goes on theatrical release, it is agood moment to reflect on the worth and appeal of serial killer movies. Serial killing is one of the most disturbing and brutal of real-world crimes, so what is the value of audiences putting themselves through witnessing it at the cinema?
On one level, the extreme violence of The House That Jack Built – in which Matt Dillon’s Jack murders and mutilates his victims – is near identical to that of slasher cinema, where serial murderers remain staple characters with little furore. Here, such killers straightforwardly personify bloodlust and cruelty. More narrative tools than human beings, they hunt down the innocent and not so innocent. The unknowability of the serial killer – how could anyone actually do such things? – is used in these genre movies to construct an unreasonable killing machine for the sake of horror entertainment, creating a kind of pleasure removed from any sort of reality.
But more respectable Hollywood thrillers have also been guilty of playing with the figure of the serial killer and of more problematic pathologising. In the 90s and early noughties, following the success of The Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer suddenly became Hollywood’s favourite movie villain. In a series of films – Seven, The Bone Collector, Copycat, Fallen – an intricate and sophisticated motive filled the void of the serial killer’s inexplicable cruelty, transforming the criminal into a mastermind always one step ahead of the police. At a loss for clues or any reasonable motive, the detectives in these movies have no choice but to follow the killer’s warped logic. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter literally teaches FBI agent Clarice Starling how to think like a serial killer. In Seven, John Doe forces the police to follow his labyrinthine plan. Similarly, The House That Jack Built gives Jack the stage as he himself tells his life story.
Other, more socially conscious films have aimed for a sobering portrayal of the serial killer: not as a man with a plan, but simply as a man who kills. In Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler, the camera stays close to the murderer throughout, following him both as he commits his crimes and as he leads the rest of his otherwise mundane life. These films tease us proximity to the killer, only to show that closeness reveals nothing. No matter how well we might know the character, we will never see anything in his life that explains or justifies murderous tendencies.
At the same time, those films’ matter-of-fact aesthetic returns serial murder to the realms of everyday life, restating the horror of murder and demythologising the killer. In this context, even the most intricate masterplan cannot legitimise a killing. These films make us question the nature of empathy and humanity, as well as the fragility of the human mind – but, crucially, the best of them steer away from pop psychology and do not attempt to give answers they do not have.
Like such sobering portraits, The House That Jack Built gives us access. Even more access, in fact, because Jack relates his most intimate thoughts to an old man leading him on the road to hell. But the film builds on the history of the genre, and while visually referencing the grim and unflinching aesthetic of the “realist” treatments, it also deconstructs the model of the 90s pulp thriller, self-consciously alluding to the Hollywood serial killer chic. Like Lecter, the apparently smart, intellectual Jack gets to talk about himself. Like a showman, he is entertaining and even sometimes charming. But regardless of how well we get to know Jack and how much he expands on his theories about art and death, the serial killer remains completely unrelatable, his explanations and theories never adding up to the monstrous act of killing.
With The House That Jack Built, Von Trier has tapped into the fact that what makes serial murder a valid focus for a film is precisely the unsettling extremity and incomprehensible character of it. We may experience a perverse thrill in learning about these monstrous figures, but brushing up against the limits of human nature also draws our attention to its shape and to its fragility. In creating a charismatic – yet almost unwatchably disturbing and ultimately pathetic – serial killer, Von Trier builds a vicious critique of Jack’s (and Von Trier’s own) delusions of grandeur. But the film also reflects the audience’s curiosity for horror and crime, highlighting just how easily we might slip and fall into damnation.
