The Concept of Good in Lars Von Trier's Films
This paper examines how Lars Von Trier constructs and interrogates the concept of moral goodness through the female protagonists of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. Using the epilogue of Breaking the Waves as a critical entry point — in which a doctor diagnoses the deceased Bess as simply "good" — the paper explores how Bess's religious upbringing, social conditioning, and desire to prove herself virtuous drive her toward self-destruction. The paper draws on feminist theory, including Louise Kaplan's work on female perversion and social constraint, to argue that both Bess and Selma from Dancer in the Dark are sacrificial figures trapped between personal freedom and cultural expectations of womanhood.
- Introduction: The Challenge of Trier's Films: Trier's eccentric style and disturbing subject matter
- The Epilogue and the Question of Goodness: Doctor's diagnosis of Bess as simply 'good'
- Bess, Social Conditioning, and the Price of Freedom: Religious upbringing and guilt driving Bess's choices
- Prostitution as Moral Sacrifice: Bess prostituttes herself to prove love and virtue
- Dancer in the Dark: Selma and the Good Mother: Selma's sacrifice mirroring Bess's doomed goodness
- Conclusion: Cultural constraints trap women between freedom and conditioning
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses a pivotal scene — the coroner's epilogue — as a sustained interpretive lens, grounding the entire argument in a specific textual moment rather than abstract assertion.
- It draws productive parallels between two Trier films, strengthening the claim that "goodness as self-destruction" is a deliberate directorial theme rather than an isolated narrative choice.
- Integration of feminist critical sources (Kaplan, Zerilli, Jackson) provides theoretical scaffolding without overwhelming the close reading of the films.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading combined with thematic comparison: it anchors its argument in specific dialogue from Breaking the Waves, then uses that anchor to illuminate a parallel structure in Dancer in the Dark. This method — establish a pattern, then test it across a second text — is a reliable technique for film and literary analysis essays at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by contextualizing Trier's filmmaking style and the interpretive difficulty his work poses. It then introduces the central thesis through the epilogue's medical diagnosis. Subsequent sections trace Bess's psychological and religious backstory, interpret her acts of prostitution as expressions of a warped but sincere moral drive, and extend the argument to Selma in Dancer in the Dark. The paper closes by linking both characters to feminist theories of cultural constraint and female self-sacrifice.
Introduction: The Challenge of Trier's Films
If you have never watched a Lars Von Trier film, you are likely to find yourself extremely confused by the subject matter or purpose of a film like Breaking the Waves. The film is deceptively simple where story is concerned, yet it explores so many contentious issues and highlights such deeply buried controversies that one wonders why it was made at all. What exactly was the purpose of making such a movie? If you are familiar with Trier's past work, however, you are in a better position to answer that question, because you may already be aware that Lars Von Trier simply loves making films that are different to the point of becoming eccentric.
Most of his work is deliberately unconventional, and since the Nouvelle Vague techniques of filmmaking are employed, not everyone is likely to fall in love with it. One thing is certain, however: you cannot easily forget his films — not because of the story itself, but mostly because of their disturbing content and the issues they compel you to think about. How many times would a viewer leave the cinema with a million questions in mind, each of which appears to have no obvious answer? That is what happens with Trier's films, and with Breaking the Waves you can simply double the number of questions you will be left with. Why did Bess do what she did? Was she really a good woman? Was she truly in love with her husband? Did her husband respect her, or did he simply use her for his own pleasure? The list goes on.
In this paper, we shall address only one of those questions — an answer that may help resolve the others as well. We shall discuss the concept of "good" as presented by the director and examine whether Bess was indeed a good person in a religious, moral, and social sense.
The Epilogue and the Question of Goodness
In the epilogue of the movie, the director makes it easier for us to study the film from this angle. The coroner asks Dr. Richardson to cite one cause of Bess's death. First the coroner studies the body and relays the diagnosis details that had been given to him: "You have described the deceased as 'an immature, unstable person — a person who, due to the trauma of her husband's illness, gave way in obsessive fashion to an exaggerated, perverse form of sexuality.'" This is an important statement that must be kept in mind for the discussion that follows. To this diagnosis, Dr. Richardson replies: "If you asked me now, instead of 'neurotic' or 'psychotic,' my diagnosis might quite simply be… 'good.'" This exchange helps clarify the film's central idea. The coroner then asks: "You wish the records to state that, from the medical point of view, the deceased was suffering from being 'good'? Perhaps this is the psychological defect that led to her death? Is that what we shall write?"
These dialogues illuminate a great deal. For one, they show that an average viewer might be tempted to dismiss Bess as a neurotic, sex-starved psychopath. However, it would be absolutely reductive — to the character, the film, and the filmmaker — to discard this important figure so easily. The director instead wants us to go a little deeper and study her from the viewpoint of "good." What exactly constitutes goodness in society and religion? Can there be more than one definition of a good person? How do we categorize someone who does something horrible purely to please a dying person? These are the questions the director poses through this film.
It is because of this epilogue that we are prompted to re-examine Bess's character — to see whether she was truly a good person or simply a social misfit. The argument here is that the real cause of her death was indeed her desperate desire to be good, and the sections below will explore why this claim holds weight.
Bess, Social Conditioning, and the Price of Freedom
Bess grew up in a society that frowned upon women who dared to be different. In this strictly devout Christian community, every woman is expected to be demure and respectful. Women are not allowed to compete with men and are absolutely not regarded as equals. They are far more acceptable in the roles of wives and daughters than as mistresses or free agents. Bess is expected to become a good wife and a virtuous person altogether. Her decision to marry an oil-rig worker, Jan, is staunchly opposed by her family. Though on the surface Bess fights for her rights and marries Jan against her family's wishes, her guilt-ridden conscience must internally have been telling her that she did something wrong by disobeying her parents.
Growing up in a family as strict as hers, it is only natural that religion was deeply engraved on her mind. She wanted more freedom, and the only way she could obtain it was by violating certain fixed rules of the community — a violation she knew would come at a heavy price. Bess's social conditioning made her believe she could not get away with this easily. As Kaplan notes in Female Perversions, "For a woman… to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her" (528). She had to pay a heavy price for her expression of freedom, a price that manifested as guilt and later drove her toward increasingly disturbing behavior.
Conclusion
These cultural constraints create problems for women who dream of more freedom and then end up as failures because they cannot reconcile their dreams with their social conditioning. Both Bess and Selma embody Trier's recurring argument: that the societal definition of a "good" woman is itself a form of violence, one that demands total self-abnegation and ultimately destroys the very people who strive hardest to meet it. The real cause of Bess's death, as Dr. Richardson implies, is not neurosis or perversion — it is goodness, as her community and conscience defined it.
References
Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptation of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).
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