oh so habituous

Some thoughts on Lars and the Real Girl

A couple weeks ago now I saw Lars and the Real Girl, a film by Nancy Oliver (who wrote for the HBO series Six Feet Under), and thoughts have been coming to me about it ever since.

One stream of the thoughts involve its very peculiar and subtle playing with notions of reality. On the surface it appears to be a very realistic movie; at least, it takes place in what appears to be the real world. It is easy to identify all the people and places being used. And yet there is something deeply fantastic about the world we are made to step into. At every point we cannot help but feel like something very bad or tragic is about to happen -- some violence will be done, or some hidden conflict will rear its head in an awful way, BUT...
(The film, for those of you who do not know, is about a guy, Dagmar, who lives in his brother and sister-in-law's garage, and who does not speak to anyone if he can help it, and certainly does not touch anyone. It comes about, after he orders a very "realistic" looking sex-doll in a crate and dresses it up and treats it like his new, and very chaste girlfriend whom he "met on the internet" that he is delusional. His brother, of course, is slightly distressed about it, but his sister-in-law, and indeed the rest of the northern-Midwest town --Wisconsin, maybe?-- are perfectly able and willing, with some direction and input from the town doctor/psychologist, to play along with his delusion and let it work itself out. Yes, this is all pretty much parenthetical to what I want to say. But now let me get back to it.)

... instead of witnessing an all-too predictable xenophobic tragedy, we are given a glimpse of something of a parallel universe, a truly fantastic and utopian vision of how to live with others' psychological ailments. We are not shown what is realistic (Dagmar being quarantined in the secluded care of professionals, being subjected to mockery and even suffering physical attack whenever he steps out of doors), but instead, the one who reacts most "realistically" or normally to the situation (Dagmar's brother) is shown (in a similarly gentle fashion, by the way) that it is his own "realistic" understanding that if anything helps to produce, or at least prolong, Dagmar's delusional behavior. (This he does by rejecting Dagmar's "fantasy" and trying to show him that the girl is, after all, plastic.) If everyone in the film had reacted in this way it is clear that Dagmar would have been left with the satisfaction of his delusion alone, and probably would have suffered for it. That the town plays along with Dagmar (and plays seriously, not in a mocking way), suggests to me that this movie is more in fact about saying something to those of us who are like Dagmar's brother.
And it is definitely "saying something" -- though again the subtlety of the movie carries over into its morality as well: it simply presents this world, and we are left to imagine our way into it and its way of understanding and relating. There is no pressure, and there is no damning judgment. We are brought into a world that simply suggests that certain possibilities, certain parallel universes, are only a loving condescension away.