home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
|
Dear Wendy may be
audacious, even stylish, but it hardly an "exploration of guns and violence in
America." Developed from an original story written by Lars von Trier (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark), and shot on
locations in Denmark and Germany, Dear Wendy embodies a European obsession with
the myth of the American frontier. In the lead roles are Jamie Bell as Dick, and Wendy, a
small but dangerous ladies’ hand gun, as herself. Dear Wendy, it eventually
becomes clear, is a love letter to a lethally dangerous mistress.
In fact, Dear Wendy is a pastiche of Hollywood western themes
and characters woven into a modern-day morality play about the mystique of handguns in
America, at least as seen from a distant European mirror. In true western tradition,
setting is a major character, and Vinterberg and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle make
fascinating use of an abandoned US military base in Denmark, a northern European stand-in
for mythic "Anywhere, USA." The script calls for a hard-scrabble, working-class
coal-mining town somewhere in "the southeast"—and delivers an oddly hybrid
locale which blends Appalachia with the old Southwest, curiously reminiscent of
Brecht’s Teutonic Alabama (The Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Telling too, the mythic temporal frame
corresponds broadly to the American occupation of Cold-War Europe, setting the film
vaguely in "the present time," somewhere between 1965 and 2005.
Dick is an outsider, a sensitive boy in a rough-and-tumble place. His
childhood loneliness gives way to friendship with the other young local loners, Freddie
(Michael Angarano), Huey (Chris Owen), Stevie (Mark Webber) and Susan (Alison Pill), who
eventually grows tits. They bond under Dick’s leadership into a group of clandestine
gun lovers, calling themselves the Dandies. As each one becomes an expert in gun lore and
marksmanship, each bonds with his or her "partner." The highly emotional, even
eroticized relationships they develop with their handguns is both very creepy and,
perhaps, the most true-to-life dimension of this film’s vision.
A key factor in the film’s architecture arises from Lars von
Trier’s long-standing interest in the mid-60s rock group The
Zombies. Much of the film’s subtext is embedded in the lyrics of several of their
songs (such as "Time of the Season"). These love songs to or about particular
women typically stand in for the particular handguns featured in the film and define a
character’s relationship with his or her "partner." The Dandies also have a
predilection for anachronistic dress-up and, as a group, resemble a sixties British pop
band, or possibly ABBA. Even the most grandiosely self-loathing American teen-age
iconoclast would not identify as a gun-loving "pacifist" or dress up like one of
Herman’s Hermits, but it’s a pretty nifty literary device to translate American
wild west outlaws into a band of sophisticated art-film dandies. (Director Thomas
Vinterberg (The Celebration)
and von Trier seem not to know that in America the dandy has historically been viewed as
an effetely homosexualizing, and purely European creature.)
Dear Wendy picks up where Pat
Garrett and Billy The Kid (with soundtrack
by Bob Dylan, notably "Knocking On Heaven’s Door") left off. While Sam
Peckinpah’s film reflected on the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam at the time, Vinterberg
and von Trier foreground their European obsession with social outsiders making Faustian
pacts with their guns and their outlaw status. Inclusion of The Zombies serves as a
nostalgic salute to when rock music was the iconoclast’s red badge of courage.
Indeed, the nascent popularity of American rock music among European youth in the 1960s
and 1970s has come to be seen as a European Faustian pact with American culture.
- Les Wright
