Time of the Season for Loving
Dear Wendy, written by the infamous Dutch Americanophile Lars von Trier and directed by his longtime collaborator Thomas Vinterberg, is the heartwarming tale of a boy and his gun, although in this case the heart is warmed not so much by sentiment but by hot lead.
The story revolves around a group of young outcasts, (mid to late teens seemingly, but this is a little vague, in some ways they seem very adult, in other ways, particularly their enthusiasm for escapist fantasy, quite childlike). In their podunk American mining town of Estherslope, they form a secret gun club in an abandoned mine works, lead by Dick, a strict philosophical pacifist who discovers that carrying a small pearl-handled pistol greatly improves his self-confidence. Sharing his newfound source of confidence and power with the other downtrodden and abused residents of their backwater berg, their guns become mystical fetish objects imbued with personality and will, and around which they devise elaborate cult rituals. Calling themselves ‘The Dandies’, they dress in Wildean vintage costumes and speak with an affected literary erudition, study ballistics and gunshot wound pathology and practice marksmanship. Their guns are given names (Dick’s pistol is the titular Wendy), and new members take part in a wedding ceremony to their chosen weapon. The link between guns and sexual power and knowledge is made explicit throughout the film. Susan, picked on at school for her small boobs, finds that as her skill with her akimbo pistols grows, so also do her breasts.
Dick deals with his moral conflict about his pacifism and his gun cult by developing a strict moral code that the guns are never to be drawn. So repelled by violence are they that they cannot even utter the word “killing,” using instead the word “loving.” Loving, says their code, must never ever happen; that would be the worst thing of all. None of the real, human relationships in the movie have any substantial sexual element, which is part of what makes the characters seem extremely child-like. The confusion of loving vs. killing is pretty much the central conceit of the movie. Written by Lars von Trier, it retains the sort of theatrical-realism as in Dogville or Manderlay, the same heavily allegorical “village square” setting, although in this case the third-person omniscient narration is replaced by Dick’s voice-over reading a love-letter to Wendy. Borrowing from Manderlay in particular is the interest in confronting the audience with racial tabu, especially with respect to the fear of black sexual potency, a theme completely hammered home in Manderlay and introduced again here.
I wasn’t really watching the film, as a lot of other reviewers did, as a satire/criticism of American gun-fetish culture. von Trier is often dismissed by silly idiots because his movies are only about shitting on America. I didn’t really see this film as dealing particularly with American society, the guns here being, I though, metaphors for sexual power. Structurally, the film has a lot in common with the coming-of-age genre, with the major exceptions that the obligatory romantic interest between Dick and Susan is here completely sublimated into Dick’s passion for his pistol, and that everyone dies at the end.
Dear Wendy is definitely more lighthearted than either Dogville or Manderlay, maybe thanks to the contribution of Vinterberg, but if you weren’t impressed by either of those, Dear Wendy is unlikely to change your opinion of von Trier.