One thing I like about Lars in this film is how he plays with our conditioned moral responses. Like we expect (why not?) the gangsters in their big black cars are bad. But we’re less obviously inclined to dislike police however we are suspicious of them that they are not taking into consideration the “humanity” of our on-the-lam protagonist Grace.

And of course the town being poor and humble we expect goodness to ooze from some if not all of them. Eventually and somewhat inevitably we see where this is going. Even her wannabe boyfriend Tom is manipulating her selfishly. She is a cipher, a ghost, we know little really about her. We know she has a past association with criminals but was she an innocent? Set up? We don’t know. But we are on her side and want to “give her a second chance” with the kind poor folks.

We see foreshadowed darkness though right away with the mean orchard farmer Chuck. Though he is the first to rape her, the child in her care was the first to betray her. So much for innocent children. Still we have hope they all can’t be bad, but the Grimm’s Fairy Tale aspect of the voice-over narrator reminds us that this is going in a pre-ordained and mythical direction that makes our liking (or disliking) the central character is some irrelevant.

Once the town turns her into a chattel slave it’s hard to see any redemption in store for them. And we agree with Grace that Tom’s last ditch effort to show the people their sins via confrontation with the slave-whore is not going to go well.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that when the gangsters return she is not the gangster’s moll but an errant daughter of a somewhat sympathetic Big Man who acts mostly like a concerned parent, upset his child has called him arrogant. Surely a gangster has been called worse. The father-daughter discussion is perhaps the most “normal” conversation by modern standards in the whole film. The “fun part” if you will is how the father explains the metaphor of the dog (Dogville) that such (lowly) people need to be trained just like dogs need to be trained.

So in a sense the massacre and burning of the town is a moral act in the father’s world, like a feudal landowner who “has to” wipe out a rebellious village to show the rest of his vassals the proper way to act. Which would be what? We aren’t sure. It seems the town is in a lose-lose situation. Perhaps if they had turned her in immediately (but not to the cops) they would have been spared his wrath. Maybe. But then we’d have no story. Girl good, town bad, gangster bad.

The way it endows have an “upper class” (albeit gangster) gal joining the “family business” which is modeled after a feudal kingdom where the peasants have no rights (and no weapons).

Ah, the Young Americans Bowie song ending with a montage of classic poverty (mainly white at least at first) intermixed with contemporary homeless (mostly but not exclusively black) throws out many confusing signals. It seems like it might be about race but then race didn’t feature in the film, so why bring up a new “topic” in the closing credits? Usually we see the famous Walker Evans Depression photographs as evidence of the horror of the Great Depression. And often there is a moralizing about how “the system” (capitalism, the government, etc.) failed the common man.

But here we have to associate the fact of the poor with the negative experience of the nasty folks from Dogville. Would these poor people obviously quite desperate react to Grace like the “good people of Dogville”? Is so, we are invited to see them not as good people victims but (like the gangster’s dog analogy) “desperate people who would do desperate things.” It is a rebuke of the common theme that poverty is ennobling (or at least neutral) and the real villains are the rich.

Not many rich show up in the montage with the exception of President Nixon. I checked Bowie’s lyrics, which are unusually mild about this easy villain. All he’s asking is if we (the young Americans) remember “your President Nixon.” And do we remember the “bills you have to pay”? Throw in do we even remember yesterday?

There is another shocking line in the song (more shocking today perhaps than the 80s): “Ain’t there a woman I can sock on the jaw?” Though it may not be Bowie talking but a fictional brute persona it’s a similar question to the one asked by Lars in the film. What is kindness really? Is self interest wrong? Is anything ennobling (certainly not town meetings in churches)?

In the end we have to admire the power of the gangsters, their hierarchical order, their gorgeous cars, clothes and guns. They are the Mongols, the Huns, the robber barons, but the play a role in preventing everything from being Dogville. They have accumulated wealth and power. They know something Dogvillians don’t. Is there another pun: it’s a dog-eat-dog world? No one is good, everyone just plays our their roles? We are uncomfortably forced to admire their Germanic efficiency in wiping out the town and even using it as a way to teach the young warlord, the next Commandate — Grace— how to “do what you need to do yourself.” That is shoot the lousy wannabe boyfriend wannabe intellectual in the head.