Nymphomania : How long before it stops being an addiction and starts being a necessity
Lars Von Trier never really liked the idea of making something that can easily be digested by the audiences and especially not by the religious communities. His five-decade long career shows only one thing and that is : I am here to disturb you. Mentally!
Nymphomaniac is the third and last part created in ‘The Depression Trilogy’ by the director. It has two volumes that add up to five and a half hour long duration. The Trilogy is said to be inspired from the director’s own experiences of depression. Nymphomaniac starts with a 50-year-old man finding a 30-year-old woman, beaten up in the back of a dark alley. He takes her to his home and gives her shelter and tea for the night. The old man, out of curiosity, wants to know how she ended up like that. So the woman starts telling her story all the way from the beginning. Her childhood.
Joe, the lead character, is a self-diagnosed Nymphomaniac who believes that everything she did throughout her life to satisfy her never-ending desire for sex has destroyed lives of countless innocent people. She looks at herself as a selfish, malicious and a vicious person who did whatever it took to satisfy her sexual desires. She takes Seligman, the old guy, through her sexual rendezvous in detail and lets him be the judge of her character. There is constantly an interesting dialogue going on between the two, where Seligman tries to justify her actions through various analogies and examples from ancient history while Joe countering him with her own beliefs. At one point, Seligman compares her to the wife of an Roman Emperor in 38 AD. The wife’s name was Valeria Messalina, who was notoriously famous for her active sexual life. Many writers have described her as the most famous Nymphomaniac in history. Once you are done with the movie, you will realize that the director has taken a lot of inspiration from the life of Messalina and used them as subplots. Maybe the director feels for the poor Messalina who was wedded at a young age to a man who was 35-years older than her. Maybe this movie is like a homage to her rebellious and adventurous nature.
Throughout the movie, Joe constantly makes the argument that love and sex cannot go hand-in-hand. It is often said that the secret ingredient to sex is love. But what if sex only dulls the emotion of love between two people? You chase someone and you love them but as soon as you get physically involved, the tender feeling of love seems to fade away. Now sex becomes synonymous to love. The act of having sex is seen as the act of loving. So you stop altogether expressing your love other than in bed. You stop doing the little things you did before to make each other happy. So the dilemma stays : Is sex really necessary for love to prevail?
Joe describes one episode from her life which she believes will definitely make Seligman uneasy and make her judge negatively. She did an abortion herself at home as no docotor was allowing it to be done because they believed she was psychologically unsound. Joe says this act makes her a murderer and it’s a sin that can never be forgiven. But Seligman justifies it by saying that it was merely a way of inflicting pain upon herself for all the guilt she had been carrying and moreover what she did was an act of kindness as the child would have probably died of hunger or would have led a very sad and traumatic life. This brings us to the question whether abortion should be seen as a sin or an act of kindness? What good does it do to bring a child into this world if they can’t have a good life? If they can't get a proper education? If they can’t be fed properly? If they can’t be given the simple joys of life? What kind of a life would this be? And if they are ultimately going to die then why not die without any pain and suffering?
The second volume begins with Joe having lost all the abilities to feel even the slightest feeling of sexual arousing. This makes her life even worse. The only thing that ever gave her something resembling to joy was sex and now she had lost that too. Seligman explains the reason to her. It’s like an overdose of alcohol or drugs. In the beginning you try everything and you feel all kinds of emotion there is to feel. You are excited every time you do it. You look forward to it. But there comes a point when the feeling is no longer new and the effect begins to fade away. And suddenly it's gone altogether. So Joe starts exploring different ways to regain her sexuality. But nothing seems to work. Finally, in a desperate attempt, she tries torture. And soon she regains her sexuality by enjoying the pain inflicted upon herself.
Nymphomania or sex addiction is seen as a mental problem in the society. People who have excessive desire for sexual acts are seen as a stain on the societys’ high morals. Society does not appreciate people who embrace their nudity and make the optimum utilisation of their pleasure parts. But how did society ever reach the conclusion that the candid disclosure of nudity in public by an adult is blasphemous and unacceptable? So, if it’s a small kid running around naked with his genitals completely visible, it’s alright because it’s just a kid right? Who is even gonna get turned on by looking at a naked kid? But if it’s an adult running around naked, it’s wrong because they know how to use it? Actually, Nymphomaniac is like a futuristic version of homophobia. Just like our ancestors used to oppose homosexuality and look at it as a mental disease, we are doing the same thing with Nymphomania. We just can’t accept it as of now. We are too afraid that if we accept it, we might start doing the right thing. And we are always afraid of doing the right thing. It’s not just Nymphomania but Paedophilia, Incest, Cannibalism and Oedipus complex who are facing the same kind of treatment right now. The mere thought of these seems very wrong to us. Who knows if after 70 or 80 years, these things become normal or people start fighting to make it legal? Maybe then those people will look back on us and say the same things we say about our narrow-minded ancestors. How foolish they were!