In the early spring of 2022, I talked with the lecturer, podcaster, and Freudian cinephile Mary Wild about Joachim Trier’s film The Worst Person in the World (2021), the transition from analog to digital, early internet memories, (im)materiality, Burnout Society, the problem with trigger warnings, art as collective therapy space, and more. In some ways, it’s a continuation of a dialogue we had about Dario Argento and philosophy on Mary’s Patreon, and a slice of our ongoing conversations about provacateurs, cinema, and the risk of art. What follows is a transcribed version of our lively conversation, which constellates around The Worst Person in the World and goes many places. — Emmalea Russo

EMMALEA RUSSO: What are you watching lately?

MARY WILD: I saw Fresh which I don’t recommend. Although, maybe I do recommend it. You know, as something to take the cultural temperature. A reminder of how dire things really are.

(laughter)

ER: Okay, we’ll take the cultural temperature later.

MW: Always happy to report.

(laughter)

ER: I was at the movies recently and I was reflecting on the trailers. It seems like the new films want to teach us lessons. These tend not to give the viewer much credit.

MW: I prefer to be given the benefit of the doubt. Tangentially and poetically. I know what you mean. It’s like those movies were made by bots.

(laugher)

ER: Last time we talked, we discussed Dario Argento’s films. He’s plenty ambiguous. The music and the events onscreen don't always match up. The viewer is forced to think about this disjunction. He doesn’t name evil for us nor does he moralize.

MW: Absolutely. In The Worst Person in the World, there was some wrestling with the culture but I thought for the most part it was done thoughtfully.

ER: What did you think of The Worst Person in the World?

MW: I’ve seen Joachim Trier’s other films. I was immediately intrigued by the image that was being used in the advertisements. I missed it at the London Film Festival and I couldn’t even get into the press screening. But then I got the screener for it, which I shared with you, and I loved it as a cinematic experience mainly because of the actress who plays Julie, Renate Reinsve. She has an interesting presence. Also, the film treats cheating with a lot of complexity. It hones in on this idea of a potentially magical experience with someone else while you’re committed to your partner. Suddenly, out of nowhere, one is met with this bolt of lightning, coup de foudre!

ER: The encounter!

MW: Exactly. And the film depicts it as not completely mired in evil.

ER: The film begins with a prologue. Julie is studying medicine and quickly decides she has other passions. The first ten minutes of the film show her endless process of self-discovery and transformation. Her hair changes in tandem with her jobs. She becomes a psychology student, then a photographer, on and on. She’s a millennial and begins dating Aksel, whose gen X. In some ways, the film is commenting on generational differences. Julie’s engine was self-discovery. Aksel’s was something else. The film shows the hollow underbelly of this urge towards self-invention. The narcissism and rootlessness of it. To me, the film captures how consumer capitalism with its myriad choices and nimbleness alters the structure of love.

MW: It does depict that restlessness that’s so associated with millennials. Even at the very end, Aksel is speaking about how he grew up in a world where culture is predicated on physical objects. He talks about the comic book store and the video store. There was a materiality to his processing of the world. Whereas now, there’s a transientness. The director himself is generation X. So it does seem like a lamentation.

ER: Aksel is literally dying at the end of the film. He’s mourning the past and the cultural transmission via material and stable objects. He seems to be able to commit not only to the relationship with Julie – which he holds onto long after she’s gone – but also to his point of view. When he’s interviewed on TV about his work, even though the press disagrees with his stance, he sticks to it relentlessly. This is a kind of character. But this stage of capitalism doesn't reward stability or character. It rewards and engenders flexibility, nimbleness, and constant change or what Walter Benjamin called the storm of progress. I was annoyed at the beginning of the film, but then there was a tonal shift.

MW: There was definitely a tonal shift. I enjoyed the magical realism in the beginning. At one point, with the flick of a switch, everyone stops moving. Time stops. She runs through the streets of Oslo and finds the guy she was flirting with at the party. They spend the whole day and night together. Then she returns home to Aksel. This reminded me of an old episode of The Twilight Zone where someone gets their wish – that they could stop everyone from being animated and be the sole person wandering in space. So I appreciated these touches. Suddenly, the film becomes darker. Aksel, by now her ex-boyfriend, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And they spend time together during his final days. He confesses that he wishes he was still with her. I reacted strongly. You really illuminated something about the film. I think it’s more interesting to read it allegorically, as a comment on how gen X’s way of processing the world is dissolving. It’s about Aksel but also the culture.

ER: Yes. It illuminates how these immaterial shifts impact the ways in which we interact with one another. I kept thinking about something Byung-Chul Han says in The Burnout Society: “The late modern achievement subject, with a surplus of options at its disposal, proves incapable of intensive bonding.” Julie seems to be emblematic of this “late modern achievement subject” – moving forward, energetically restless, and incapable of intensive bonding. Love, commitment, and rootedness become more and more difficult in an economy that tells us to keep moving and to avoid pain, silence, resistance.

MW: Love (and the erotic in general) is such an unpredictable force. The notion that you could be animated by something that is not externally governable flies in the face of a culture that seeks to have us believe that we must monetize everything about ourselves. Play along, be on message, have good optics, etc.

ER: To know the right line and keep repeating it.

MW: Exactly. To market ourselves in such a way that plays into a script that’s already mapped out for us. On the TV show, Aksel says that art has to be free and messy. This applies to love, as well. It must hold space for chaos and contradiction. This is simply incompatible with our current economic model. There was also the dilemma of having children in the film – various characters who did or did not want children and what those decisions were based upon.

ER: I like this parallel you’re drawing with art and love. And there seems to be a conversation happening about desire vs. duty/obligation, as well. Julie seemed to be confronted with the burden of options. Her character felt like a particle blowing in the wind. There was the feeling of being seduced in many directions or being on the internet, clicking and clicking. Her character carried a certain kind of energy or force and was also carried by that force. So things like commitment and children become points of contention or resistance that stop up the force.

MW: I couldn’t help thinking that her ambivalence about having children was rooted in a desire to avoid having her freedom taken away or to not confront certain things about herself. And I’m not one of these people who thinks everyone should be reproducing. I don’t have kids myself and this is by choice. But it’s hard to ever be sure about why I’ve made these decisions.

ER: With increased access to information comes a new set of problems. Increased freedom can become a kind of crypt. The film shows this very clearly. Julie has so many options – the world at her fingertips so to speak. Still, she’s spinning in circles. I’m a kind of elder millennial. And you’re gen X. Aksel tells Julie that the world he grew up in – without internet and smartphones – has disappeared, but he can’t stop looking back. I remember getting the internet in middle school.

MW: What are your earliest memories of using the internet?

ER: AIM chatting with friends. I was also very interested in attempting to decode my crush’s away messages. Remember away messages? This was a total change in social interaction. I remember my first quote unquote boyfriend and I would chat endlessly online but we’d be utterly scared to speak in person. We could barely make eye contact. What are your earliest memories?

(laughter)

MW: I must have been 17. I remember seeking out chat rooms. Right after we had our modem installed and I could hear that little connection noise, I went into a chatroom and started chatting with guys.

ER: Early online dating! A pioneer.

MW: Exactly! In those days, we didn’t have emojis. There were no avatars.

ER: It was typing. And clipart.

MW: I felt such exhilaration because I grew up in a very sheltered and strict household. I had absolutely no freedom. So the internet felt like a godsend, as I was able to interact with other people without needing to leave my house. In The Worst Person in the World, Julie meets Eivind at a wedding reception, not online. They were very playful and animalistic in their initial meeting.

ER: And in her relationship with Aksel, who is gen X and has a career as a writer, Julie feels like she’s playing a “supporting role in her own life.” After she dates Eivind for a while, who is her age and works as a barista, she eventually gets pissed that he doesn’t have more ambition. Is it harder than ever to just stay put? To accept someone or something as-is? Because of the immaterial, information-based feel of cultural transmission now? There’s this rhizomatic chaos. Julie’s character is endlessly reaching. Like, should one even feel like the main character in their own life?

MW: I got a huge kick out of Aksel’s television interview.

ER: Yes! Julie’s on a treadmill at the gym and suddenly she sees Aksel being interviewed on TV. And the women interviewing him were being very moralizing.

MW: Those two are like my sleep paralysis demons! They were telling him that his comic book characters are potentially harmful to certain people. He rejected this. He said that they were making a choice to be offended and that as an artist, he cannot be concerned with who he will offend. He needs to make his art and express himself freely. And he said “after this, if I decided to make a cartoon out of this interview, I might be compelled to call you a whore, hypothetically.” That was amazing.

ER: Everything he said got immediately corrected and censored before it was even registered. It’s seemed like instead of listening to what he was saying, they were waiting for opportunities to be offended. This felt like a comment on the role of the artist in society and the censorship on art and life by the “left.”

MW: Absolutely, these people are not left wing. This change in the left is one of the biggest cognitive dissonances out there. And when Julie was on the treadmill, the interview stopped her dead in her tracks. She may have been on that cultural hamster wheel that compels you to just keep moving and not question anything – this automation of the culture – keep your head down and do what you’re told. Seeing him was such a striking thing.

ER: An encounter! An exit from the loop.

MW: Yes!

ER: The women interviewing him were weaponizing sensitivity by claiming to protect certain groups. However, it seemed like she was using the same logic that she was purporting to be against. I was reading an essay by Simone Weil recently that was written in 1940 and feels very relevant to this scene in the film. She writes: “To be sure, there is something even more foreign to good and evil than amorality, and that is a certain kind of morality. Those who are currently putting the blame on famous writers are worth infinitely less than they, and the ‘moral reorientation’ that certain people would like to impose would be much worse than the state of things that they are pretending to remedy. If our present suffering ever does lead to a moral reorientation, it will not be accomplished by slogans, but in silence and moral solitude, through pain, misery, terror, in the deepest part of each spirit.” Aksel’s take on art and freedom was not extreme at all, though it was treated as such.

MW: His was the only normal response! It’s the kind of thing that makes you think there are still sane people in the world.

(laughter)

ER: I know. And then he died. That scene enacted what we started talking about at the beginning – that films (and art in general) are often thought of now in terms of a series of boxes that must be checked instead of a form to be engaged with, challenged by, approached as an encounter. Why do you think this is?

MW: I’ve just carried on watching “problematic” stuff.

(laughter)

ER: Isn’t all art “problematic?”

MW: Yeah! That’s the whole thing. One should require from art what you’d want to excavate from a good psychoanalytic session. To get your hands dirty. I think we should look at art as a kind of collective therapy space.

ER: Aksel actually says that in the film.

MW: Yes, that’s right, he does.

ER: There are no guarantees when we’re reading or watching a film or having an encounter. No matter how many trigger warnings. There’s a way in which we have to be open to contagion in art or we become weird bubble people. Is it me or do people seem very suspicious of fun? In the TV interview, Aksel was joking. But the women took him very seriously.

(laughter)

MW: Exactly. When these things happen, they’re like glitches in the matrix.

ER: Treadmill stoppers. Do you think it’s harder to think freely now?

MW: There’s a lot of pressure to join in, to join the crowd. This has always been the case but social media makes the process more rapid. I always rely on Freud’s text Civilization and Its Discontents. It was written in 1930 but it’s maybe more applicable now than ever. He talks about how the desire for group membership is a paradox. We want civilization and society because we don’t want people to feel alone or isolated. We want to bring everyone into the fold. And yet, we often end up compromising our instincts and values, things that we hold dearly, because we’re told that those things don’t measure up to the standards of the group – so and so will get offended, for example. So you end up in a group setting with compromised values. And perhaps you’re not lonely but now you’re neurotic because you're worrying about measuring up to various standards. Ultimately, the cure for this is to fall in love with your own company so that loneliness can’t be used as a manipulation tactic. The people that I know who have remained sovereign and are not robots repeating certain lines have been able to find kindred spirits. Lately, being a member of a group is so fetishized that people end up selling themselves out.

ER: Exactly. This pressure to state which side you’re on. It's mimetic violence, where one is inclined to jump on board with something or to come out against someone or something even if they don't necessarily know why they’re doing it. There seems to be a general movement online – like if you read x y or z or if you’re friends with or follow person A then you must have the same opinions or beliefs as person A. This has the effect of deleting otherness and difference. It makes bonding, love, and friendship difficult, too.

MW: I actually saw one particular tweet about The Worst Person in the World by a person who was offended by the TV interview that Aksel did in the film. They thought it was depicting toxic masculinity. They lost me at toxic masculinity.

(laughter)

ER: Again, the notion that the film needs to be on one particular side and teaching a particular lesson.

MW: There is this strange assumption that masculine subjectivity is inherently harmful and that men have to do The Work™ in order to salvage themselves from the wreckage of their gender. In reality, everyone has to contend with their own issues and sets of problems.

ER: The notion that there has to be a scan of something to decide how and who it’s harming.

MW: I can’t get my head around this. If we’re talking about movies, as we are right now, then why would we not want to risk being harmed by something that isn’t happening to us. The funny thing is, this isn’t even how PTSD works. The engine of PTSD is the compulsion to avoid a direct confrontation with the trauma. I find it so strange that people run around issuing trigger warnings when this is the opposite of what PTSD requires. Trigger warnings are actually an invitation to dissociate.

ER: This clenched state also prevents us from having other kinds of experiences. Think about the beautiful encounters in the movie. If one is not open to the unknown, meaningful and surprising relations are also foreclosed.

MW: Exactly. It’s a neurotic dance or a lingering in purgatory. It’s this narrow path of avoidance between two pains.

ER: We touched on this in our last conversation, too. A kind of undeadness permeates. The horror films we talked about reveal how desire and horror are not opposed. Rather, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities. This is why I love what Georges Bataille said: A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

MW: Yes, we talked about the smoothness of aesthetics now.

ER: The smartphone being one example.

MW: Impenetrable. And I think this style of relating to each other in the culture via identity politics is attractive because it’s very hard to tolerate the uncertainty of identity. Certain labels are modeled to us as solid and unshakeable. However, identity is a hazy concept because of the unconscious. This is scary. When we’re handed certain labels, this can be very reassuring and pacifying. Ultimately, I believe this is the reason for an overidentification with this style of relating culturally. The solution is really to learn to live with the void of one’s identity. As Freud said, the ego is not master in its own house. 

ER: That makes sense. And of course these ways of relating often delete complicated and nuanced readings of films, texts, each other, whatever.

MW: The Worst Person in the World is navigating the culture without being prescriptive. It’s painting a topographical landscape and in that way, it’s refreshing.

ER: I appreciated certain formal choices, too. The time stoppage that you mentioned. And there’s the psychedelic scene when they all take shrooms and the floor swirls. Then, towards the end when Aksel is speaking about death, we see his view from the window in every primary color, as though we’re wearing hued glasses.

MW: About the mushroom-taking scene: during her trip, she imagines flicking her tampon at her dad and then wiping the menstrual blood on her face like war paint. But then she wakes up with the blood on her face which suggests that she did actually flick the tampon.

ER: I liked that because it suggested a supernatural porousness between the trip and the not-trip.

MW: It remained unresolved, so it hinted at a kind of paranormal connection.

ER: What are your predictions for the future?

MW: I think the new Ari Aster movie looks good. It’s described as a “surrealist horror set in an alternative present.” I’m also excited about the new Aronofky movie The Whale. Brendan Fraser’s in it.

ER: Remember when Brendan Fraser played a prison guard in The Affair?

MW: I loved it. The Whale is based on a play about a guy who is estranged from his family. It looks like the photographic negative of Black Swan. The third one that I have high hopes for is David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future.

ER: I’m also excited about Gaspar Noe’s Vortex.

MW: Oh god, yeah. He’s one of the greats. And Lars von Trier.

ER: I read an interview with Ana Lily Amirpour (I loved A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) where she calls Lars von Trier “the biggest feminist.” I thought that was great.

MW: That’s a great answer. He’s making complex portrayals of women and gets called a misogynist. Is it tin foil hat of me to think that’s the real misogyny?

(laughter)

ER: I had that tin foil hat moment with Promising Young Woman. I watched it in a hotel room in Florida. It was unbearable!

MW: Exactly! It was so bad. And infantilizing.

ER: We actually turned off Promising Young Woman and watched a bizarre reality TV show called Insane Pools about people who design and build pools for people in Florida.

(laughter)

MW: I love the title of that show! Time flies when we talk.

ER: I know. We could just keep going.