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Lars von Trier’s Sex Therapy: “Nymph( )maniac Vol. 2”



This is just the sort of movie that you wander into fully expecting to find Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame as a whip-wielding S&M master. Welcome to Vol. 2.

After the sex-o-rama of Vol. 1, what other nasty surprises can there be, you ask? You get 40 lashes (or 39, according to Seligman) in perverted Roman fashion for asking such a dumb question. This is Uncle Lars’ house of fun we’re talking about.

To start with, there’s the Catholic church parallelism. In the chapter “The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)”, we’re asked to examine the (Western) Catholic penchant for sadomasochism (what do you know, Christ’s martyrdom is mentioned), and in the meantime, Joe gets herself strung up like a Christmas turkey when she hooks up with K (Bell), an exclusive S&M expert with a fetish for authentic leather horse whips, rope knots, face-slapping, and an eyebrow-raising manoeuvre he dubs the “Silent Duck” (I’ll leave this one up to your imagination). We’re told that Joe, like Pavlov’s dog, gets sexually stimulated in anticipation of the pain. This is likened to the Catholic love of suffering – which I’m pretty sure your local pastor will expound on during the upcoming Sunday mass.

Personally, I’ll never be able to watch Billy Elliot ever again. No joke.

Why does daddy’s girl put herself through the humiliation? To counter her loss of sexual sensitivity due to her marriage to Jerome (LaBeouf) and motherhood. Here Uncle Lars pulls no punches. Family life kills the sexual impulse, no two ways about it. May I refer you to Melancholia and Anti-Christ for proof?

As we move into the penultimate chapter “The Mirror,” still reeling from the graphic violence, we find Joe attempting to come to terms with her “illness.” She opts to join a sex addiction therapy group. In the hands of a Hollywood director, Joe would of course be cured by new-age positive energy and embraced by all of womankind for learning to love herself. But this is a Von Trier movie, and Joe, as we’ve known all along, doesn’t see her condition as an “illness.” It’s her identity, her whole being. In a brilliant gesture we’ve come to expect from Uncle Lars, bourgeois, middle-class morality is laid to waste.

However, the masterstroke comes in the final chapter “The Gun” – when Seligman (Skarsgard) attempts to interpret Joe’s behaviour for us, labelling it the ultimate feminist move, the single most powerful statement any individual could make about his/her sexuality. The viewer’s inclination is to buy this wholesale. We’ve been conditioned by the 21st-century global village to put on those politically correct goggles at all times. (The discussion of the use of the word “Negro” between Joe and Seligman is also hilarious.) If the viewer takes Seligman’s words at face value, he’s instantly done for. This is exactly what Von Trier aims to do: to hold up the mirror of hypocrisy so that you can take a good look at yourself.   


The state of the world as it is, flagrant intolerance and hatred stretching from Africa to Russia, shows that a film such as this is needed now more than ever. But guess what? Those are the last places on Earth you’ll come across a Von Trier movie. How’s that for irony?
Director: Lars von Trier
Writer: Lars von Trier
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Uma Thurman, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, William Dafoe
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