The iconic film Quentin Tarantino said should have “won a Pulitzer Prize”
In the world of journalism, the Pulitzer Prize is considered to be the apotheosis of a reporter’s career. It’s a symbol of excellence, awarded to the best in the field whose works create unignorable waves that end up changing the world. While it’s not awarded to movies (despite many prominent figures, including Roger Ebert, calling for it), Quentin Tarantino once declared that one particular film deserved the Pulitzer Prize more than any other.
During a video feature in which he named his favourite films from 1992 to 2009, Tarantino singled out Lars von Trier’s 2003 masterpiece Dogville as one of his favourites. The enigmatic work is one of the greatest cinematic experiments of the 21st century, starring Nicole Kidman as a troubled young woman who takes refuge in the titular fictional, seemingly idyllic, small American town. However, beneath the picturesque beauty, ugliness inevitably lurks.
While describing the brilliance of Dogville, Tarantino claimed that the script was simply sublime. He called it “maybe one of the greatest scripts ever written for film”. According to Tarantino, von Trier deserved a Pulitzer Prize for his philosophical investigation, and he would have gotten it if he had gone the theatrical route with Dogville. “Had [he] done it on the stage, he would have won a Pulitzer Prize,” Tarantino declared.
Dogville is a visceral deconstruction of the myth of small-town America, digging deeper into the façade of politeness and morality to uncover the inherent violence that forms the foundation for the entire country. It’s a remarkably nuanced film that has been interpreted as an allegory on immigration by some and a Biblical story by others. Thoroughly Brechtian in its aesthetic principles, Dogville is a curious oddity that shouldn’t work, but it does.
In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, von Trier was asked about his stance on American geopolitics and its critique present in Dogville. He responded: “Of course, I am not anti-American in that sense. How could you be ‘anti’ a country? But the politics that I see — and I was against the war — yes, very much so. This whole Western world against the Muslim thing — that’s not a war that can be fought with guns, even if you are a superpower.”
The filmmaker insisted that while Dogville was undeniably political in nature, it wasn’t an attack on the entire country. Instead, it only poses questions to a very specific vein of American thought. Von Trier added: “I think there’s 10 per cent of the American population that have more or less the same political views as I have, but then again, the same goes for Denmark. So you know, there are probably more people that I agree with in America than in Denmark because Denmark is much smaller!”
Check out Tarantino’s segment below.
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