Maggie McMuffin takes on Lars von Trier’s two-part epic of provocative nonsense and discovers the widest chasm possible between Volumes 1 and 2…but also grace toward a past version of herself.
All I remember about Nymphomaniac was that when I watched it ten years ago, both pieces in one go, I was wildly uncomfortable. I do not remember what caused the discomfort, only that it caused me to curl up in the corner of the couch in a tight ball. Even so, I volunteered for this re-view of Volume 1 and was pleasantly shocked when I not only didn’t shield my body from emotional shrapnel but actively enjoyed it. Maybe it was from my thirtysomething self-extending grace towards the me of ten years ago. Maybe it was my perception of living in a post-Lars von Trier world* diluting any critique of his work. Maybe it was that the movie is actually good.
Ten years ago, it was still a bit of a novelty to see such a messy woman narrate her own story. We’re now in the age where messy queer women get to star in films. Even films made by other queer women. Many of those recent films are comedies, whereas the story Joe tells is a self-flagellating tragedy that features a number of graphic sex scenes. LVT doesn’t shy away from showing the naked body of his lithe star (Stacy Martin) as she fucks her way through trains, cities, and job sites. Nor does it shy away from showing many of the penises she engages with. Sex is how Joe engages with the world. It is the basis for most of her relationships (including platonic ones) and tells us a lot about how she moves through society. By seeing her boldly ask a man to take her virginity, we see she is determined. By seeing her shamelessly seduce (or assault depending on how you view the scene) a married man during a teenage game, we see that she is self-serving and competitive. By seeing her montage of “big black dicks and small yellow dicks” we see that she is racist. But von Trier has a lot of racist ideas about dick size**, so I’m not surprised his heroine does, too.
Even non-sexual events are marked by sexuality. Joe’s father (a stunningly understated Christian Slater) is her one real friend. He teaches her about trees. He instills within her a curiosity of the world. He is poetic in his scientific leanings. When he winds up in the hospital for an unnamed illness that leaves him breaking with reality, Joe fucks her doctors. When he finally, quietly dies, she “lubricates.” In place of a single tear, we see vaginal fluid slide down Joe’s inner thighs, which frame her father’s corpse. Much as I don’t want to give a man as famously misogynist as von Trier points, I do think other men would have given Joe a sign above her head that said DADDY ISSUES. Instead, Joe feels a touch of shame at this physiological reaction but ultimately fucks the pain away in the past while Older Joe moves onto the next chapter of her story in the present.
Older Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) does show up in Volume 2, but here she is just a narrator. We meet her right before Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who takes her into his home and listens with rapt, platonic attention to her saga. He adds in commentary, relating details of her life to literary references and Fibonacci numbers. He points out that her story contains many coincidences, but Joe maintains that they are true and that it is her story. It is not until a great coincidence, where Young Joe follows the same forest path her father favored and runs into Jerome (actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf), the boy she lost her virginity to and the first man she falls in love with, that Seligman balks at her. She asks him if he gains more from the story by believing her or not believing her.
This moment is crucial for me. The movie itself relies on coincidences. The opening shots take us through rain-soaked alleys until we, like Seligman, find Joe beaten and bloody on the concrete. He takes her home, feeds her, and keeps her for at least a full day. He respects her refusal to see an ambulance or the police, and immediately engages her in conversation about her life. Her whole life. He is the one to connect it to Fibonacci numbers and poetry. He himself is a narrative coincidence that feels unbelievable but which we the audience suspend our disbelief to follow. It raises questions of how Joe views the world and events. Seligman immediately disbelieves that she is as awful a person as she says she is, arguing that if she’s not religious she shouldn’t be using words like sinful to describe herself. So to have him so actively question her version of events makes me wonder: how much of Joe’s story is to be believed? How much is skewed by memory? How much is self-mythology?
Many of us wish to be the hero of our story, but there are times when we feel the opposite. When we imagine ourselves the ultimate villain. Joe insists this is what she is, despite only detailing consensual sex. There are moments where she realizes she has hurt someone or rather that someone feels hurt. The best example of this is a sequence where she tells one of her many lovers that she loves him too much to be with him, knowing he would never leave his wife and children, which he immediately does to prove he loves her back. This leads to his wife going to Joe’s apartment with three small children in tow to say goodbyes in a scene that is truly hilarious and features Uma Thurman brilliantly monologuing from room to room.
But relevant to the conversation is Joe’s reaction: stoicism. This didn’t go as she expected, and she isn’t thrilled to face consequences, but Young Joe doesn’t seem to feel much beyond annoyance. It is only Older Joe that adds this to the list of reasons she sucks. As I said earlier, I’ve softened towards my younger self and her various follies. Here, me and Joe diverge.
Young Joe is rewarded even. Though Jerome initially fucks off before she can confess her feelings (having previously turned him down her first day at a job where he would be her boss), she does find him in the forest at the end of a trail of torn photographs. It’s a fucking fairy tale re-reunion. They go home and fuck madly until Joe realizes she “can’t feel anything” and sobs at the loss of herself.
Folks, I was hooked. Here we had a woman living life on her terms, taking control of her own narrative, in a film that was touching and funny and not afraid of sex. I loved it! I wrote an initial re-view and then decided fuck it I’m going for the double whammy. I waited three days to get Volume 2 from my local library and popped it in ready to see where Joe’s story went.
Friends, I hated it.
Whereas Volume 1 is all I said, flaws and all, Volume 2 is filled with misogyny, more racism, slut-shaming, a fully clothed Willem Dafoe***, and more.
Young Joe, having lost all sensation in her lower half, becomes pregnant without knowing it. She gets a C-Section for vanity. She is a poor mother, leaving Jerome to do the bulk of the work. She is depressed but her sexual feelings have come back…too bad Jerome likens her appetite to that of a tiger needing so much raw meat and suggests he “get help with the feeding.” Joe sets out to hook as many men as she can, first through a delightful callback to the train game she and her bestie played as teens, fully morphing into Charlotte Gainsbourg, and then through fetishes and addict behavior. There is a sequence, which she refers to as “the dangerous men,” where she pays an interpreter to set her up with an African man for the sake of having an experience where linguistic communication is impossible. This man shows up with a surprise other friend (who Joe assumes is his brother) and they try to fuck her but wind up arguing over who gets which hole (another assumption). Joe sits on the bed, a large erect penis on either side of her, angry voices rising, before grabbing her coat and slipping out unnoticed.
She then loses herself in a sadomasochistic relationship with K (Jamie Bell) and, okay, this section is mostly fine. Also pretty hot. Joe proves herself worthy of submission, he beats her in various ways and refuses to fuck her, and she becomes obsessed with following his rules and schedule. LVT gives a cheeky callback to the opening of Antichrist when Joe leaves her toddler son alone to keep a date and the kid wanders out onto the balcony to play in the snow. Luckily Jerome (always traveling for work at this point) gets home just in time. He even gives Joe one last chance to stay in the next night instead of seeking pleasure and Joe says NAH. She gets herself off while being whipped (and whipped HARD****) and returns home to an empty apartment.
After that, she tries her hand at recovery but leaves her sexual addiction support group by demeaning the other women and saying she’s not like them, she likes sex, she’s not gonna be ashamed and, yeah, there’s a difference, but also, girl, your child could have died. Glad you’re not sorry for yourself but admit you fucked up, girl. Older Joe (the one narrating) resolving this quickly and moving on feels less like denial or controlling her own story (like in Volume 1) than it does LVT just not being bothered. Joe is now edgier than ever and solidly Not Like The Other Nymphomaniacs (“We say sex addict here”).
I won’t give a play by play for the rest, but we’re gonna play the greatest hits.
Joe becomes a debt collector, and this leads to her sexually torturing a non-active pedophile. She gives him a pity blowjob for “ruining his life” and tells Seligman that she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that, with the guy getting off thinking about kids, and besides, isn’t her condition basically the same thing as being a pedophile?
At this point, I’ve hit pause and rewound to make sure I heard that right. Okay. Okay that’s where we are. Great. Onward we go.
Now we learn that Joe’s vulva is basically just a constant weeping scab due to years of masturbation and fucking around. Very painful. No more sex.
Joe goes back into mother mode, becoming close to a 15-year-old called P (Mia Goth) for the purposes of training her to take over the debt collection business. When P turns 18, Joe begins that training, which P takes to very excitedly albeit recklessly. P is quiet and gentle, as demonstrated in a scene where she decides she really needs to see Joe’s scabs and they wind up engaging in some softcore bonding, complete with P sucking on Joe’s nipples at length while Joe cries. It’s unclear if a sexual relationship continues beyond this, but they are closer and act more like girlfriends and this is literally grooming. Sure, Joe was grooming P for crime and not sex, but COME ON.
Work leads them to Jerome’s, Joe refuses to see him and is like “hey P you’re ready to do this on your own” and sends her in. P starts acting weird and, shocker of shockers, her and Jerome wind up sleeping together. Joe tracks them on a date, attempts to shoot Jerome, gets a jammed gun, and we find out that:
A) Jerome is the one who beat Joe up so badly
2) P didn’t do any beating but she does piss on Joe’s face after getting fucked (very poorly!) exactly like how Jerome first fucked Joe (not the Fibonacci numbers!)
4) This is the Big Bad Thing that Joe has been leading up to. She wanted to kill someone. Doesn’t this make her a monster?
Seligman, well, he’s invested in Joe now as a person. They’ve been talking for hours if not days. Seligman has even confessed he’s an asexual virgin. It’s why he hasn’t been turned on by Joe’s stories at all, a fact which had previously confused her. By this point they’re bonded, maybe even friends. Of course Seligman absolves her, explains why she’s not a monster, and says goodnight.
Only to come back in, attempt to rape her in her sleep, and offer up “What? You’ve slept with thousands of men” before Joe shoots him and the credits roll.
I just do not understand how the first part was pretty progressive, especially for a man to have written, especially the man who wrote Antichrist, only for Volume 2 to be this bad. What is the point? Joe hasn’t learned anything. We’ve seen her say no to sex before, so this doesn’t feel like Joe learning she can say no or that she can refuse sex, especially since it’s not sex at all; it’s flat-out rape. Is the follow up to Antichrist’s message that women are the root of all sin that men are inherently bad and will mistreat honest sluts? Since Seligman is the only man other than her father, she forms a platonic, intellectual bond with does this mean it was daddy issues the whole time?
Maybe it’s because I’m older and no longer into movies being shocking for shock’s sake. Maybe it’s that I’m rarely enraged by various -isms in art these days and merely exhausted by them. Maybe it’s because this movie just isn’t good.
Early in life, her father introduces her to the concept of a “soul tree.” All trees are souls and all humans, no matter who they are, have one. Joe finds hers in Volume 2 and it’s sat atop a rocky hill, twisted by the wind, reaching across the divide towards emptiness. Joe reaches back, however futile the gesture is, before leaving and attempting to live her life again. At another point in Volume 1, she explains her theory of giving people a memorable experience. She proclaims unfelt love, lies about guys giving her her first orgasm, and gives out sex like candy at a parade.
I keep thinking of that tree scene, the one scene I remembered from my first watch ten years ago. I was so sure that it would mean something, be the image that cracked open the whole story for me. But sometimes a story is full of metaphors and coincidences. Sometimes it has no meaning except for in the telling.
I don’t know what Lars von Trier gained from telling this story, but I hope it’s more than I gained from watching it.
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*I have vivid memories of him dying but they’re wrong? I only learned this because I texted our editor during my watch and he corrected me. We briefly considered trying to spread the rumor that LVT is deceased to see if LVT would question his own mortal state.
**One of my current missions in life is to explain that Willem Dafoe did not need a cock double in Antichrist because his dick was so big. He needed one because LVT thought his dick was too big to be believable specifically because Dafoe is white and LVT thought only black guys had bigger than average dicks. I have seen an old gif of a young Dafoe and as a professional dick handler I say it’s a fine-sized penis but hardly worth the hubbub. I will keep correcting people until Willem Dafoe corrects me. Respectfully, I would love for Willem Dafoe to prove me wrong. Please free me from this self-inflicted torment.
*** I will die on this hill. This Hillem Dafoe
**** The sex in this movie is clearly not always meant to be arousing but I’m pretty sure this kink scene is. After all, we need to understand why Joe would throw her life away over it when she’s not even into BDSM when she starts seeing K. Anyway, people into hardcore impact play and creative bondage should make a point to watch.
— Maggie McMuffin
10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective 