Breaking the Waves

Gnosticism divides the world into the dead law of the archons and the living spark of the pneumatic soul that knows God directly, without intermediary. The church elders in Breaking the Waves are the archons made flesh. They control the bell tower, they refuse women a voice, they bury the wicked in unconsecrated ground while pronouncing the dead damned over the grave. Their religion is administration. It has offices and verdicts and no contact whatsoever with the God it claims to serve.

Bess has the contact. Her dialogues with God are the pneumatic's unmediated gnosis, the direct knowing that the institution cannot permit because it makes the institution unnecessary. When she chooses to keep her promise to Jan even as it destroys her body and her standing, she is following an inner authority the archons cannot recognize as anything but sin. The final image confirms which side the film is on: the mourners on the boat hear bells where there is no tower, a sound the material world cannot produce. The living spark is vindicated over the dead law, and the men who condemned her never hear the proof.

In Sufi teaching fana is the dissolving of the ego into the Beloved so complete that the lover ceases to exist as a separate thing. Von Trier tells this story with the metaphor stripped off, made physically literal and unbearable. Bess loves Jan past the point where any self-protecting boundary remains. She does not calibrate. She does not preserve a portion of herself against the demand. When Jan asks her to give her body to strangers so that he might live, she treats his request as the voice of the Beloved and annihilates every last defense of the ordinary self in answering it.

The Sufi poets sang of the moth flying into the flame, and the film gives you the flame in full. Bess returns to the ship of men she knows will kill her, and does it deliberately, because she has calculated that her death will heal Jan, and love has left her no self with which to refuse. When Jan walks again at the film's end, restored past all medical explanation, von Trier suggests the calculation was correct. The moth reached the flame. What burned away was Bess, and what she loved is walking.