Metatextual References in The House That Jack Built
The most famous work of the Italian poet Dante, the Divine Comedy, has been repeatedly employed as inspiration by visual artists since its creation. The 2018 Lars von Trier film, The House That Jack Built, employs both the Divine Comedy and various other works of art as metatexts and incorporates themes and moments from them throughout its narrative structure. This essay explores how various aspects of the film reference or allude to these works to demonstrate just how von Trier has repurposed images and themes from the canon of Western art to provide a critique of the notion of glorifying fame or celebrity in the modern day. This repurposing and reinterpretation are essential to understanding von Trier’s filmic language, as the film effectively shifts the focus of the viewer from the serial killer to a critical examination of fascism, celebrity worship, and the glorification of violence within Western culture and art.
The film, The House That Jack Built, follows the story of a psychopathic serial killer named Jack who, for his repeated and enthusiastic violations of the Sixth Commandment, is ultimately damned to eternity in Hell. As the film begins, we are in complete darkness, an empty void, and we can hear the faint noise of water trickling while the disembodied voices of Jack and his guide Verge—based on the poet Virgil—speak with each other. Verge claims that most of the people he has guided have a need to confess along their journey, and Jack goes on to do just that by recounting a series of five “incidents,” which are just a few of his many, many murders. After listening to these stories, Verge states that he does not remember ever escorting anyone as depraved as Jack, which is no minor assertion, as he has also escorted numerous notorious humans like Adolf Hitler and Fritz Haarmann to their eternal locations as well. Jack is truly evil.
Towards the end of their journey, Verge and Jack find themselves on a precipice where a bridge has collapsed, and stone stairs on the other side lead up a path to Paradise, repurposing a scene from the beginning of Purgatorio where the character of Dante completes his descent and begins to ascend a great mountain. Below is a drop to the lowest level of Hell, a lake of molten lava. Surprisingly, this is not where Verge is guiding Jack: his eternal place is a few circles higher. Jack ponders attempting a perilous climb on the rocks around the abyss to reach the path on the other side and ascend instead of going to where he belongs. Verge warns him that no one has ever made it successfully to the other side that way but leaves the choice to Jack; Free will is the standard option here in Hell. Ultimately, Jack doesn’t heed Verge’s advice, attempts the climb, slips, and falls to the lowest level, where he will spend the rest of eternity engulfed in flames, unduly suffering because he cannot accept his fate, desiring the eternal glory of residing in Paradise.
Nazism and the Holocaust
Jack has an ongoing obsession with the Holocaust and, more generally, the aesthetics of fascism. He also self-identifies with the Nazi aesthetic just before recounting his final “incident” to Verge. In this episode, he stages an elaborate homage to the German Einsatzgruppen, who—when short on ammunition to facilitate their mass murders—experimented with killing several people with just a single bullet on the Eastern Front, mainly in the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania. As the industrialized mechanisms of the Holocaust were not yet in place in those eastern locations in the way they were within the borders of the Third Reich and other occupied nations like Poland, the Nazis resorted to employing local paramilitary groups to perform the “Shoah by bullet” (Shrayer). These local militias carried out the mass murders of Jews, Roma, and members of the LGBTQ community, as well as those associated with left-wing political organizations like communists, labor activists, and socialists. These activities were often carried out free of actual Nazi supervision—neighbors murdering neighbors in small villages.
Jack’s aesthetic ambition is expressed through his repeated attempts at perfecting the architecture of his perfect house, an ongoing image in the film. This footage is interspliced with archival video of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer examining architectural models of their planned future Berlin, as a fascist monumental world capital. These images further align Jack’s character with the iconography of the Third Reich. Jack ultimately fails to build this house, just as Hitler’s vision for Berlin was never completed.
Jack maintains that the most beautiful images, the true masterpieces, tend to explode from fear or as a response to destruction. To illustrate this point, he engages in a monologue regarding his admiration for the German Stuka bomber, claiming that its effectiveness was primarily due to the fear it inspired in its targets through a screeching whistle. Nazi engineers explicitly designed these whistles to terrorize people on the ground when the aircraft dove towards its target (Badley 176). Jack views violence as an art form, and he justifies his murders with this rationale.
The final parallel of Jack’s aesthetics with those of the Third Reich is the sole architectural construction that he completes in the film: a grotesquely monumental sculpture that represents his entire oeuvre, using the bodies of his victims as the building materials (Badley 184-86). This is reminiscent of the way the Third Reich itself was built upon the corpses of those who were deemed its enemies, as it cannot be separated from the murders committed in order to gain power and those perpetrated under Hitler’s command. In the same way, Jack’s murders cannot be separated from his ambition to build a grand structure; instead, his architectural achievement is grotesquely built from the dead bodies of his victims.
The casting of Bruno Gantz as Verge also bears some metatextual weight here. His most famous roles are Hitler in Downfall and as the observing angel Damiel in Wings of Desire; Both roles are firmly rooted in the German artistic tradition. His noticeable German accent and intermittent use of the German language reinforce the connection between Jack and the aesthetics of Nazism. He also provokes Jack’s lengthy digression about the inherent contradiction of the large oak tree that Johann von Goethe famously sat under while writing his poetry, being located in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
All of these references to Nazism take on another layer of meaning if you consider von Trier’s controversial statements on the topic. At the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, while sitting on a panel, he claimed that he both understood and empathized with Hitler as a human being due to his own German heritage (Nayeri). Following these comments, he was banned from attending the festival for the next seven years, before he finally returned with the film that is the subject of this paper (Nayeri). In a manner of speaking, this film is his response to that incident and makes his actual view on fascism clear; he rejects it in its entirety, as the film plainly depicts the horrors and crimes against nature that are unable to separate from Nazism.
Fame
Throughout Inferno, the concept of fame and celebrity is a repeated theme. Dante appears to have been obsessed with it, and he desperately wanted to be crowned with the ceremonial laurel wreath of the Florentine poets, something he did not receive prior to his death in exile. Jack also has a strong desire for fame. We can see this in his behavior following his murders; he begins to write letters to newspapers, signed as Mr. Sophistication, reminiscent of the Zodiac killer, looking for recognition. After these news stories appear in the newspaper, Jack collects the articles and posts them on his wall as trophies, documenting the trajectory of his growing fame. This false identity exposes the gap between Jack's self-image and reality; he views himself as a “gentleman,” but the film disavows this idea by repeatedly portraying Jack as a ridiculous, bumbling murderer who justifies his evil by claiming it to be an art form (Badley 169). His murders rarely go smoothly; it usually takes him several attempts to kill each of his victims.
The romanticization of serial killing in true crime literature, fiction, and film—coupled together with celebrity culture and a fascination with psychological trauma and physical wounds—has resulted in the archetype of the serial killer to be viewed as a charismatic person and, for some, a role model. Assuming the American liberal capitalist myth in which anyone can succeed and, correspondingly, that anyone who does not is a failure, Jack turns to serial killing for self-expression, rejuvenation, and a form of success that he has not been able to achieve in his career or love life. As his skill in covering up his murders and confidence increases throughout the film, the refrain from David Bowie's Fame blasts from the soundtrack (Badley 167) and becomes a recurring motif of the soundtrack, further associating the quest for fame with Jack. It is clear from these actions and the inclusion of that specific song that Jack craves both celebrity and adulation for his crimes.
Romantic Art
The film combines the traditionally lowbrow genre of horror with the sensibilities of an art film, an effort to raise a form generally not respected in high culture (Badley 153). References to romantic art are abundant in this film; one of the most striking images appears immediately after Jack and Verge begin their descent into the underworld: the recreation of Eugène Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante, which depicts a scene from the 8th canto of Inferno, where Dante and Virgil are ferried across the River Styx by Charon. During this scene, Jack is wearing a red, hooded robe, something frequently depicted in art as being worn by Dante in Inferno, as he crosses the perilous river into Hell, making Jack his stand-in in the world of the film.
There are also multiple references to the work of William Blake, mainly three poems that are repeated several times—the companion pieces of The Tyger, The Lamb, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In one scene, Jack asserts that Blake's predator, the tiger, is simply acting within its nature and maintaining an ecological balance by preying on life forms lower on the food chain. He then likens this equilibrium to an artist's creative energy: a necessary counterpoint to reason and order (Badley 175). This alleged balance is, of course, simply how Jack rationalizes his horrific crimes: as him culling the herd—merely natural selection at work. Jack claims to be the tiger, while his victims are the sheep.
The House That Jack Built heavily mines both the text of Dante's Divine Comedy and other famous works of literature and art. By employing these artworks as metatexts, the film critiques the presence of fascist aesthetics and the cult of celebrity, two topics that have a strong history of representation in Western culture and art.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Aspray, Benjamin. “On Trolling as Comedic Method.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3, Spring 2019, pp. 154-160.
Badley, Linda. Lars von Trier Beyond Depression: Contexts and Collaborations. “The House That Jack Built: Murder as Art/Art as Murder.” Columbia University Press, Wallflower Press, 2022.
Meis, Moran, and J.M. Tyree. Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieslowski. “Horror On Lars von Trier.” Punctum Books, 2021.
Shrayer, Maxim D., and Ilʹi︠a︡ Lʹvovich Selʹvinskiĭ. I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah. 1st ed., Academic Studies Press, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618111913.
The House That Jack Built. Directed by Lars von Trier, performances by Matt Dillon, and Bruno Gantz, Zentropa Entertainments, 2018.
Nayeri, Farah. “Cannes Brings Back Lars von Trier after 2011 Ban for Hitler Comments.” The
New York Times, 19 Apr. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/movies/cannes-festival-lars-von-trier-hitler-ban.html