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Video by Jaime Frederick The last couple of films from Danish director Lars von Trier confirm that his stock in trade as an artist hinges in part on the manipulation of his audience’s comfort level – some viewers of his most recent film, Dancer in the Dark, have even suggested that his approach to audience expectations verges on sadistic as he balances desperation with hope until, finally, the floor drops out on any prospects of a happy ending. It is interesting, then, that the tragic melodrama of Dancer in the Dark follows his aggressively extreme experiment to shock his audience out of its complacent desire to be passively entertained, or just passive, period. It is no idle coincidence that von Trier made Idioterne (The Idiots, Denmark, 1998) in compliance with the Dogma 95 manifesto that he co-wrote, but the relevance of that fact is not merely that he shot the film with "shaky" hand-held cameras. Dogma, at its most sincere, is genuinely concerned with changing the face of modern cinema, and poses hard questions about the nature of escapist entertainment. That the manifesto demands the camera be held in the hand is motivated by a belief that freedom of mobility on the part of the camera operator contributes to improvisation, spontaneity and the veracity of the final product. In a sly mirroring of form and content, The Idiots is also about living life spontaneously, or free from the strictures of bourgeois society, although it also suggests that this idea can itself be taken too far. The story concerns a group of young to middle-age adults living together in a large vacant house in a wealthy suburban neighbourhood. In an effort to get in touch with their "inner idiots" they masquerade as people with mental disabilities and take trips to restaurants, the swimming pool or the local factory, where they confront the patronizing attitudes of the people they come in contact with. At the same time, von Trier takes advantage of the fact that the group’s antics are played for comedy, so he’s setting up a double standard for his audience. Funny as it is at times, this is dark, disturbing material that gleefully exposes the elitist values of anyone who has ever called someone a "retard" or laughed at someone for being different. The Idiots is an unsettling film that has polarized opinions about its attack on political correctness, but many people seem to have missed the film’s greater point. Von Trier is not merely saying that political correctness is bad – we can get small-minded statements like that from mainstream pundits anywhere. More importantly, he’s suggesting that it is but one form of bourgeois hypocrisy that people hide behind in their efforts to shield themselves from the unpleasant aspects of everyday life. Liberalism is rarely critiqued in such a clever way, but because The Idiots has the capacity to offend so many people, its subtleties might be easily missed. The controversy stems from the fact that the film can be seen to indulge the very stereotypes it sets out to expose. Then again, von Trier’s willingness to leave so much unarticulated allows every viewer to consider their own limits before deciding just how much they can take. It’s a potent movie that seems to be designed to make you turn away in revulsion – if you don’t, you just might need to see it more than you could have imagined.

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