Think of a kiss, maybe the first kiss you ever had, or the first kiss with your loved one: what was the most thrilling thing about it?
The same can be true of sex, which has become tangled up with so many complex emotions, excitement not always being one of them. In the most explicit ways and on the grandest scale possible, it uses sex only as a lens through which to understand broader ideas about the world, spirituality and humanity. Volume 1 examines the mechanics of sex while contrasting it with the philosophy and beauty of the more mundane things in the world. Joe Charlotte Gainsbourg is passed out and beaten badly and remains there until Seligman Stellan Skarsgard finds her and brings her to his apartment so she can rest.
In explaining her story of how she got there, she begins at her childhood and suspects what led her to this point is that she may be an evil human being. She and Seligman talk about the world and nature in cynical, clinical terms, but their intelligence and provocative ideas are nonetheless an intriguing lens through which to reimagine what we know. In removing the romanticism from the sunset or the calming joys of fly-fishing, it allows von Trier to talk about sex.
Everything about sex as it is seen here is just an analogy. But von Trier shows us the mechanics in sex and removes all that makes it beautiful or even erotic. A young Joe joins a cult of sex in which honest and romantic pillow talk is repeated over and over again to different male partners. Her sexual encounters are dangerously determined by chance. And masturbation is discussed so casually it turns sex and love into a social construct.
Von Trier finds more eroticism in three ropes dangling from a gym ceiling, in the precise nature of music or in discussing Edgar Allen Poe. And in a weird way, he makes us respect Joe rather than vilify her perversion. The second film opens with Seligman wondering aloud if Joe is making fun of him. She flashes back again to her first sexual experience, in which while resting in a field she glimpses a vision of Goddesses of Sex levitating her and providing her first orgasm.
