Narrative Structure Analysis of "The House That Jack Built": The Fusion of Dante's Divine Comedy and Nursery Rhyme

Lars von Trier is a frequent guest at film festivals and is considered an eccentric figure in the eyes of movie enthusiasts. Each time he makes an appearance, it almost always comes with major news.

Sometimes, this big news is not just about his films but may also involve his unconventional actions. In 2011, Lars von Trier faced long-term "blacklisting" at the Cannes Film Festival due to inappropriate comments he made about the Nazis and Jewish people.

However, seven years later, he returned to Cannes with his new work, "The House That Jack Built." Whether it was his return to Cannes itself or this highly anticipated new film, it created a whirlwind in the film industry. What does it mean to "live up to expectations"? This, of course, refers to "The House That Jack Built," which still carries von Trier's signature extreme taste, perhaps even more so.

But if it were just about extremity, it would be no more than a B-grade movie. The reason Lars von Trier is counted among the masters of art cinema is that he places these "anti-human" elements within a complex and intricate structure and uses such works to reflect on the deepest sins on this planet.

This article will analyze the unique narrative structure of this film. In fact, the form of "The House That Jack Built" is inseparable from its content. To some extent, the film's form even determines its significance.

In this film, Lars von Trier employs a complex narrative structure. Moreover, its two components are almost self-evident.

First, we can find the first component of this structure in the title of "The House That Jack Built." The English title of the film means "The House That Jack Built," derived from a British nursery rhyme, "This Is the House That Jack Built."

The first three lines of this nursery rhyme go as follows: "This is the house that Jack built; This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built; This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built..." and so on.

Through its nested structure of clauses, this nursery rhyme combines different pieces of information. In reality, it doesn't tell the story of Jack's house but rather the relationships between these different elements.

However, by the third line, the connection between the "rat" element and the "Jack" element becomes quite tenuous. As the clauses continue to stack, the connections between the new elements and the old elements become increasingly fragile.

Lars von Trier had already used this nursery rhyme in his feature debut, "Forbrydelsens element." In his film titled "The House That Jack Built," he directly employs the narrative method of this nursery rhyme.

Jack has a goal that haunts him throughout - building a house. He connects architecture and murder in a way that might seem far-fetched to us, using materials associated with church construction and art. Then, he uses excuses like "poetry" and "politics" to carry out his brutal killings.

These excuses and the connections between different elements, as the film progresses, become as fragile and meaningless as the conjunction "that" in the nursery rhyme. We know Jack wants to build a house, but we don't understand the origins of this goal. We see him continuously committing murders, but we also don't know how he encounters and selects his victims.

To some extent, "The House That Jack Built" follows the techniques of this traditional nursery rhyme, but the film doesn't appear as simplistic and disjointed as the rhyme. This is because it borrows from another source without a doubt, and that is Dante's "Divine Comedy."

Whether it's "Virgil" who converses with Jack throughout the film (in Dante's "Divine Comedy," Virgil is Dante's guide), or the painterly scenes that pay homage to Eugène Delacroix's masterpiece "The Barque of Dante," there are clear references to this classic work.

"Dante's Divine Comedy" has two prominent narrative features. One of them is metanarrative. Besides the main story of "Divine Comedy," there are numerous smaller stories interwoven, each with its specific textual system.

In "The House That Jack Built," we also see a significant amount of metanarrative and metaimages. We can observe the return of elements from Lars von Trier's other films, footage of renowned Bach performer Glenn Gould playing the piano, and a reinterpretation of William Blake's poems "The Tyger" and "The Lamb."

The second characteristic of "Dante's Divine Comedy" is the intertwining of time and space structures. We witness Dante's journey through the three realms being distinctly divided by spatial scenes. These different spaces are self-contained, and we can even see juxtapositions of different timelines within a single space.

While film and literature naturally carry this narrative effect, in the hell section at the end of "The House That Jack Built," we see Jack gazing at a wheat field scene from his childhood within the same screen space, directly echoing the temporal and spatial effects in "Dante's Divine Comedy."

These features of the narrative structure in "Dante's Divine Comedy" assimilate the fleeting with the eternal, allowing different histories and cultures of humanity to coexist in the original work. However, in "The House That Jack Built," due to the presence of the nursery rhyme structure, they deepen our sense of despair instead.

If we say that Lars von Trier embeds substantive elements within the nursery rhyme structure, then he uses elements in the style of conjunctions and subordinating clauses, like "that," within the structure of "Dante's Divine Comedy."

To put it more concretely, let's go back to the examples we discussed when explaining the nursery rhyme format. As the film unfolds, the connection between art and murder becomes increasingly weak, but he still employs a "Dante's Divine Comedy" style of metanarrative, inserting external elements into it en masse.

So, what were once thin and meaningless connections suddenly appear absurd and comical. Lars von Trier, in his characteristic black humor, merges the seemingly mundane British nursery rhyme with the contributions of a literary classic.

The most astonishing aspect of this is that if we were to describe one of these as "absurd and comical," most people would undoubtedly choose the former. Yet in "The House That Jack Built," it's the structural features of "Dante's Divine Comedy" that create the absurd effect.

In his heavily symbolic and extreme segments, "building a house" might have become a metaphor for religious, political, warfare, artistic, and even humanitarian goals.

However, what makes "The House That Jack Built" most "extreme" might be his subversion of the classic narrative structure. It implies that humanity will forever meander, forever digress; it will always remain behind a layer of glass, unable to reach the shore in front of it; it will always fall off the steep cliffs on the path to hope, descending into the deepest hell.