Recontextualizing Inferno: The Hell of "The House That Jack Built" Sara Benesova College

The House That Jack Built (2018) is the latest thriller piece by Danish director Lars Von Trier, notorious for his never-ending greed for controversy and shocked audience. Eric Kohn describes the film as “often-horrifying, sadistic dive into a psychotic internal monologue, with intellectual detours about the nature of art in the world today.” (Kohn, 2018) The way Von Trier achieves such effect is through combination of complex and not so complex allusions to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and by identifying the main character, Jack, with philosophy of William Blake. This essay will look at the way the film recontextualizes Inferno into a modern day narrative and transforms Jack into Dante-esque antihero. It the result of shift in time of the plot, the language and how the literary form of hell gets translated into a film medium. I will start by looking at the way in which Von Trier creates his antagonist by identifying him with Blakean philosophy, the portrayal of his art and philosophy in the film, and how that later influences Jack’s final fate in hell.

The connection between Dante and William Blake already evidently existed. Blake’s intricate 102 illustrations of the Divine Comedy created in the last years of his life...