ABSTRACT
In Chapters 3 and 4, I organize von Trier's films under similar themes, forms, or style, instead of in order of his filmography to better clarify the analogical relationship between the films and Ezekiel's prophecy. For analysis purposes in Chapters 3 and 4, I separate the films’ narrative themes from their style/form, bringing them back together for the final chapter's close reading of Antichrist, creating the following binary conjunction: The first part of the binary conjunction, Prophecy: Narrative, is the subject of Chapter 3, “The Aesthetics of Prophecy: Narrative Structure and Prophetic Themes of Ezekiel in the Film Narratives of Lars von Trier.” I compare and contrast narrative structures and themes of Ezekiel's prophecy with von Trier's film narratives. The films are framed by Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the symbols of evil that give our experience of evil a language: first of all defilement, or evil that befalls us, then sin, as internal evil, which may be equivalent to breaking laws (God's laws or otherwise); and third, “guilt,” the internal evil that we feel. Von Trier's trilogies fit neatly into this schema. In both Chapters 3 and 4, von Trier's films are deployed as examples of the surface myth's meaning and the deeper myth's meaning through style.
