Page - 58 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

58 | Gerwin van der Pol www.jrfm.eu 2018 4/1 kindness, Grace offers to help the villagers in all possible ways. Later, when a price is put on her head, the villagers take their moral-balance metaphor very literally. They reason that as she could be turned over for money, they are losing that same amount of money as long as they keep protecting her and not turn her over. In this logic, the “cost” of protecting her has grown, so Grace must increase her duties in compensation. Her situation goes from bad to worse. She flees the village but is returned by the villagers, after which everyone takes even greater and more gruesome advantage of her, raping her and chaining her like a dog. In the end her father, a gangster boss, finds her. He had been searching for her only in order to have a conversation with her in which he could defend his morals against hers. She had believed in the goodness of people, that people do their best in life, whatever the circumstances. In such circumstances she would have acted similarly, she would have done her best like the villagers. Her father asks a rhetorical question: “But was it good enough?” The narrator recounts what Grace thinks: If she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. No, what they had done was not good enough. And if one had the power to put it to rights it was one’s duty to do so for the sake of other towns. For the sake of humanity and not least for the sake of the human being that was Grace herself. … If there is any town the world is better without, this is it. (02:35:44–02:38:10) The spectator who at first strongly sympathised with Tom Edison, who is friend- ly and a moral compass, slowly comes to understand that he is conformist and dangerous. Throughout the film we prefer to engage with Grace, a refugee who has been treated unfairly. Our engagement is strong but troubling, for we have to witness and suffer all the atrocities the villagers inflict upon her. And we strongly hope that she will survive, and that justice will be done. Grace’s rescue does not bring the spectator relief. In the end, she has all the villagers murdered, which is not the poetic justice that the spectator had wanted. Fig. 2: A still representing the “objective” view on the world of Dogville (Lars von Trier, NL/DK/ GB//FR/FI/SE/DE/ IT/NO 2003), 00:23:35.