WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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In 1936, the German director Fritz Lang, then working in Hollywood, made what is one of the best American films ever—Fury. In Fury, Spencer Tracy plays a gas station owner accused of a kidnapping, who is hunted down by an angry mob out to lynch him. In 1969, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was invited to Hollywood to make Zabriskie Point—still one of the most beautiful, moving statements about America in the Vietnam era. The film cost the then preposterous sum of ten million dollars to make, opened to almost universal bad reviews and box office, and Antonioni went back to Italy never to return here to make films again. American moviegoers don’t respond well to outsiders looking in: we tend not to like what they see.

Now, Lars von Trier, who is afraid to travel and has never been to the U.S., has solved the problem by making films about America with European money, and on European soil. First there was Dogville, out soon will be his newest feature, Manderlay. A Lars von Trier script is the basis of Dear Wendy, the new film by Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier’s Dogme co-conspirator. Vinterberg is, in my view, the most genuinely talented of the young Danish filmmakers, especially in his film, The Celebration, which delivers both shock and substance.

In contrast to Celebration, Dear Wendy is kind of a cinematic comic strip. It features highly stylized acting, sets, and action. It’s set in an American town, but that town is about as real as the American West of the Karl May Winnetou westerns. Karl May, who also never came to America, wrote his westerns while he was in jail and the films were shot on the plains of Germany.

In this imaginary mining town, a character named Dick, played by Jamie Bell, writes a love letter to Wendy. Dick is a pacifist. Wendy is no ordinary beauty: she is a double-action, pearl-handled revolver with an internal hammer. Dick, who was refused a job at the local mine for being “too sensitive,” stands and feels taller, more confident, with Wendy in his pocket. He forms a secret club of gun-fanatics called the Dandies. Most of the members are the town’s losers.

Dear Wendy is filled with metaphors. The Dandies represent those silent millions of gun-toting Americans who are “peace-loving” but own guns only for “protection.” Who do they need to be protected from? Well, from other Americans with guns, of course. Race turns out to be the wild card which unleashes the torrent of violence in the idyllic mining town. As the Dandies go down to their deaths in the final shootout, the naive divisions between those who represent good and evil in this Euro-pudding American western seem to blur and not to matter anymore. But that is the point: Vinterberg is less interested in the motivations of his characters than he is in making us face the blunt truth about the violence which infuses American life.

Are we a violent nation? Well, yes, we are. If we resist Thomas Vinterberg’s vision, we can check out the statistics.

I predict that Dear Wendy will get scandalously bad reviews and die at the box office. Some of the criticism, already out there, attacks Vinterberg for his lack of understanding about America. “He’s not one of us, so how can he know how we are?”

Well, by looking at us from the outside. It may not be a pretty picture, but this is still the one country in the world which clings to the belief that gun ownership actually solves something. Thomas Vinterberg, looking at us from his gun-safe Denmark, believes violence only breeds more violence and death. Who do you think is right?

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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