Representing Evil
The films of Lars von Trier, especially Europa and Melancholia, grapple with the problem of representing evil and insist that the avoidance of evil is a failure of representation. Evil presents a peculiar problem for any theory of political representation. Is a political society the better for including the representation of evil or avoiding it? Von Trier’s films address this problem by depicting evil as something omnipresent and yet difficult for some to see or to acknowledge. To be a faithful representative in a world that contains evil is not an easy vocation. A representative may have the unpopular task of bringing to light not just what a population says or thinks, but what they are in the whole, for better or worse. A good representative, then, may not be a popular one.