Henry O'Brien
In 2024, the movie musical remained stronger than ever. Two of the 10 Best Picture nominees were musicals — the box office smash Wicked and the Best Picture favorite-turned-pariah, Emilia Perez. But it didn’t stop there, as there were plenty of original movie musicals as well. Look no further than renowned documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer making The End, an apocalyptic drama about survivors who use musical numbers to ignore their complicity in the global and environmental collapse. There was also Better Man, the Robbie Williams film that featured your standard musician biopic beats but took some incredible creative swings, like in this wondrous number that goes to the tune of “Rock DJ.”
While material such as The End and Better Man feels far more refreshing than Wicked or Emilia Perez (adapted from director Jacques Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name), The End and Better Man both fall short in capturing the wonder, storytelling potential and sometimes downright horror that comes with the world of song. Indeed, The End does feel limited in its scope as an apocalypse bunker drama, even as it tackles humanity’s complicity in the ongoing climate crisis, and Better Man does rely too heavily on tropes from time to time.
But if there is any original movie music that threaded this needle perfectly, it undoubtedly has to be Lars von Trier’s 2000 film, Dancer in the Dark. Starring Icelandic pop star Björk in her second film appearance of all time, the movie follows the star in the role of Czech immigrant and factory worker Selma, who struggles with a degenerative eye condition. She attempts to save money for her son (Vladica Kostic) so he doesn’t also suffer from the same fate. In typical von Trier fashion, fortune doesn’t smile upon Selma as she faces advances from multiple men — Jeff (Peter Stormare) and police officer Bill (David Morse) — and eventually murder charges against the latter suitor. The film serves as the perfect example of how a movie musical can push the bounds of artifice and spectacle, all the while giving a specific and distinct reason why one turns to the world of song and dance.
Dancer in the Dark also feels like a perfect thread of the needle from von Trier, one of the most transgressive and provocative filmmakers of the 21st century. Not only does he get to relish in the nihilism that branded his classics like Melancholia, but he also has the chance to experiment with the thematic and stylistic trappings of the movie musical, pushing the boundaries of the genre and Dogme 95, the Danish avant-garde filmmaking movement that von Trier helped create.
This is readily apparent in the fact that Dancer in the Dark isn’t even a musical for its first 38 minutes in a 140-minute runtime. For the opening of the movie, we begin to understand the progression (or rather, digression) of Selma’s vision and her desperate need to provide for her son. She also starts to show off her passion for musical theater, taking part in rehearsals for a production of The Sound of Music. The extent of her passion reveals itself in the film’s opening musical number, “Cvalda.” The movie goes from Selma working in a factory to her own imagination of being in a movie musical. As her eyesight deteriorates, she leans into a wonderful fantasy world.
Lars von Trier emphasizes the fantasy world through saturated colors and static shots. In various sequences, including the “Cvalda” number, there are nearly 100 shots littered around the factory. As Selma sings and her co-workers dance around, von Trier cuts between all these digital cameras to create a hyper-fast montage to match the excitement and passion that is in the protagonist’s mind. So many movie musicals make the assumption that camera movement inherently means there will be kineticism (i.e., Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and La La Land).
But Lars von Trier deftly displays how the human mind and body can create their own magic, which stands in a sharp contrast to the desaturated reality Selma finds herself in. With the musical being a mishmash of reality and fantasy, von Trier makes this connection literal as all the songs come from noises that Selma hears. For example, in “Cvalda,” the noises of the machinery are what initially cue the music and serve as the beat for the rest of the song, even as the tune sounds as if it were from an old Hollywood musical.
This sense of personal rebellion is not only the case for Selma, but also for von Trier himself. While Dancer in the Dark does follow plenty of the Dogme 95 rules that he created — low-end, handheld digital cameras, cinema verité — the musical sequences stand in stark opposition to one of the movement’s key rules, non-diegetic music. The Danish director blends the rules by using noises Selma hears into the music, but also plenty of orchestral sounds to highlight the wonder. von Trier shows how he’s willing to mess and tinker with his own cinematic style to find a greater purpose in the story.
He ups the ante with the film’s second song, “I’ve Seen It All,” which was the one number to be nominated for Best Original Song at the 73rd Academy Awards. The song, a duet between Selma and Jeff, details how the former rejects the latter’s advances of getting in a car, instead walking home via the railroad bridge. The noises of the train serve as the initial cues for the music.
Jeff keeps insisting that Selma hasn’t seen everything, particularly the wonders of the world, even as Selma continually rebuffs him. When Jeff mentions that Selma had never been to Niagara Falls, Selma retorts, “I have seen water, it’s water, that’s all.” You can mistake Selma’s responses for nihilistic provocations. In other words, von Trier could be mistaken for an edgelord. But “I’ve Seen It All” and the remaining songs throughout Dancer in the Dark tows a fine line between making Selma seem foolish for going to these dream musical numbers and having a deep empathy for her struggle in America.
The song itself is about her coming to terms with her blindness, all the while implying her purpose for enduring this suffering is so her son can have a better life. The static shots that happen on the train, where we see workers dance and leap in unison, show moments where Selma gets to walk into a fantasy. The restrained dances, where performers mainly stay planted in one spot, point to Selma’s own restraints and how she gets to see what she wants to see, even as her actual sight goes away. Additionally, there’s a couple far away from the train yard who dance together in a field, evoking some of the iconic images from The Sound of Music, showing a clear connection between the two musicals. The whole number gives Selma a chance to escape, but it is also a chance for her to advocate for herself and show there’s far more to her life than just suffering.
Rarely do musicals have such a distinct reason for why there needs to be music. That’s not to say musicals don’t need a reason to exist. But von Trier and Sjón’s lyrics are embedded with a passion and fury that add more to the fantasy, rather than plenty of other musicals that pretend to create fantasy just because it says so. There’s a clear intention that von Trier makes from the jump as to why this film needs to have musical numbers.
The rest of the songs in Dancer in the Dark display a tragic and ironic tone that touches on Selma’s downward spiral. After she murders Bill for framing her, Selma escapes to song and dance once again. The song “Smith & Wesson” depicts Bill’s corpse coming back to life and slow dancing with Selma, allowing her to eventually escape. The movie again uses static cameras, this time finding Dutch angles to point to the unsettling feeling the viewer now feels. The more lo-fi nature of the music points to a clear change in the mood for Selma. At the end of the day, Dancer in the Dark is a punishing kitchen sink tragedy, and von Trier plays with that by showing literal angles that we would never otherwise see in a work in that genre.
The downright depressing ending leans into further tragedy, as Selma is found guilty of Bill’s murder. Even as she has a way out through using money to pay for a trial lawyer instead of her son’s medical bills, Selma decides to face the hangman’s noose. She clearly feels distraught, and von Trier never lets us forget that in a brutal sequence where we see her get hanged.
But in her final moments on this earth, she still pushes for herself and pushes for her magical world. In both “107 Steps” and “Next to Last Song,” Selma dances and sings with grace and beauty like Maria von Trapp. It’s a truly stunning performance from Björk herself, who uses this moment of plight and soon-to-be-death as a moment where a dancer seems like they are dancing in front of the gods. Even in Selma’s final verse, which cruelly gets cut off because of her hanging, the movie reads out the lyrics of it, stating, “They say it’s the last song, They don’t know us, you see, It’s only the last song, If we let it be.”
This final text that gets displayed as the proceedings conclude in the execution chamber emphasizes Selma’s insistence on remaining who she is: a musical lover who will do anything for a child that barely gets shown on screen. Dancer in the Dark remains a masterful genre work for this very reason; Lars von Trier pushes the genre into a bold new direction, while Björk, who horrifically seemed to be at the mercy of the director, redefined what type of protagonist can lead a movie musical like this. The world will give any reason to want to stop the music, so why not show them how it’s necessary to have music in a time like this. It’s something many modern musicals should think about doing.
