Manderlay: The Gift, Grace’s Desire and the Collapse of Ideology

Abstract

Chapter 6 looks at von Trier’s Manderlay as a film which deploys the black body as a cinematic gift and the figure of woman as the collapse of ideology simultaneously. Manderlay, as a film dealing primarily with American racism, takes what it perceives as America’s democratic ideal—that which is taught to the slaves of Manderlay by Grace—and reveals it as a social fantasy; a necessary counterpart to the concept of antagonism. What illuminates this social antagonism, however, is Grace’s personal experience with Timothy—her sexual fantasy fixing the racist divide in America’s social structure. The enjoyment in (watching) Manderlay is precisely the enjoyment of the black body as a (cinematic) gift, as an object for the gaze. On this particular point, von Trier’s film seems to be more or less in line with several Hollywood productions content-wise, regardless of its minimalist stylistics. What is different about Manderlay, however, is that it takes the black body on a Lacanian detour from sublime to soil, from fantasy to feces; in other words, from the Lacanian objet petit a to the gift. And, as a gift, the same black body loops back and transforms itself again into the objet petit a. It is at this point that Manderlay goes beyond its racist discourse. The chapter shows that Manderlay, over and above the history of slavery in America and the black/white division, reconsiders the concept of human freedom through disturbing the viewer’s common sense of the term in three particular scenes: the scene of Grace’s dream in which we have no access to the dream images except through the narrator’s voice; the scene in which Timothy rapes Grace; and the scene in which Grace whips Timothy near the end of the film. In analyzing these three scenes in which the figure of woman plays a major role, three notions will help to radically revise what we take as the common sense of freedom. These three notions are the gift, the object cause of desire, and fantasy.