The Danger of the Naive Religious Woman of Breaking the Waves

Abstract

Chapter 2 discusses Breaking the Waves as von Trier’s early attempt to put the figure of woman at a crossroads with the idea of culture and religion. The film features a woman whose morality is based on her own sense of righteousness, which is determined by an imagined private connection to God. As freeing as it is from the idea of institutionalized religion, the idea of a personal relationship with God cannot be trouble-free since it implies replacing the mediation of culture (in Bess’s case the culture of her Calvinist church and highly conservative community) with pure linguistic correspondence with the master signifier ‘God’. That such an idea is related to the psychotic phenomenon is an established discourse in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is not to suggest, however, that Bess is psychotic. In fact, the main purpose of writing this chapter is to argue for precisely the opposite; that since Bess’s form of belief seems to stress that a personal relationship with God can only be established through a human being, and since she does not cancel out the human dimension in religion, she remains a neurotic subject who identifies herself in language and maintains erotic relations with the other. The aim of Chapter 2 is to argue that the naive Bess, who truly loves God, is indeed innocent of all sins but one, and it is the ultimate sin a human being can fall into; Bess is nothing but the very representation of that which marks the fall of God himself into sin, which is no less than his very existence in language.