“Vanity and self-indulgence”: The project Björk regrets
While there’s always been a sense of childlike fantasy and magic in the work of Icelandic singer Björk, she also isn’t averse to exploring darker themes in her work, especially those that focus on the impact of humans on the world around us. With albums such as Biophilia zooming in on the relationship between mankind and nature and how our actions can often have detrimental effects on our planet, her music also has plenty of world-weary and anxious themes, yet she still finds ways to express beauty in such serious subjects.
However, it isn’t necessarily Björk’s musical career that provided her with the darkest source material to work with, as in her second feature film role in Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, the singer was thrown into a bleak environment that saw her portraying a character affected by destitution, exploitation and a degenerative eye condition that prevents her from pursuing many of her dreams. Working with such dreary themes was not unusual for Von Trier, but for Björk, this was a completely new avenue for her to explore.
With Björk having shown a keen interest in musical theatre from a young age, Von Trier used this information to structure elements of the film’s script around her early life and created an aspect of the plot that saw Björk’s character, Selma, seek to earn a role in a theatrical production of The Sound of Music. Selma regularly falls into daydreams in the film that turn into fantastical musical sequences, with her providing the musical numbers throughout that often coincide with the most tragic moments of the narrative.
While Selma is befallen by tragedy throughout the film, with her circumstances getting increasingly forbidding as the narrative develops, there is a hopefulness that remains intact in her performance that things will be able to work out for her. Her desire to ensure a positive future for her son Gene by fighting to earn enough money to pay for an operation that will prevent him from developing the same degenerative eye condition that she is suffering from is omnipresent, yet the singer has always felt differently about the character she portrayed.
Speaking to the Evening Standard about her appearance and soundtrack contribution to the film, Björk spoke about her experience of working alongside Von Trier and questioned his motives as a director for always wanting to emphasise the suffering of his subjects. “One thing I think I learnt from making Dancer In the Dark,” she confessed, “Is that suffering for an artistic cause can sometimes just be vanity and self-indulgence. I came out of this film thinking, ‘Maybe there’s enough suffering in the world as it is: why should we want to add to it?'”
Given that despair is so integral to the plot of the film, perhaps Björk’s notion that Von Trier’s insistence on putting her character through such harrowing experiences is a little misguided, and for her to have endured less suffering, the impact of the film would possibly have carried less weight. Despite this, her regrets about working on a film of this nature are equally valid, considering how much it would have drawn her into a place of negativity.
She would further elaborate on how Von Trier expressed such a fondness for bringing the mood down, saying that “the funny thing is, Lars loves suffering,” recalling a particular experience of him calling her to merrily suggest that her character should be blind.
“‘Come on, confess it, you enjoy the pain’,” Björk says Von Trier suggested to her during the making of the film, to which she would respond: “Actually I don’t: call me a pervert, but I prefer a cocktail.”
