The Worst Person in the World is about dissociation

Spoilers for The Worst Person in the World follow, but I'm gonna try to keep them vague, because I want you to see this movie!

The most common criticism I've seen of Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World, which is (it must be said) one of my favorite movies ever made and a film I could watch once every day quite happily, is that the movie eventually ceases to be about its protagonist, Julie, and becomes about her ex-boyfriend, Aksel. As the film enters its final third and Julie gets some bad news, she is drawn back into Aksel's orbit, and he pontificates about the meaning of life and how it feels to watch himself become obsolescent as he ages and grapples with his own mortality. Julie mostly sits and nods and listens.

The thing about this criticism is that it's not wrong. The movie does kind of cease to be about Julie at a certain point. When she is in a relationship with the older Aksel, his desires for what their relationship should look like take precedence, and the one major decision she makes in the midst of the film is to leave Aksel for another guy named Eivind, a choice she makes at what is very nearly the film's exact midpoint.

Yet both men haunt nearly every moment of the film. Worst Person very cannily employs a mirroring structure that means the film's 12 chapters (plus its prologue and epilogue) reflect each other. So, for example, the second chapter, when Julie is in a relationship with Aksel, is perhaps the most tender chapter in regards to her newfound attraction to Eivind, and the 11th chapter, when Julie is in a relationship with Eivind, is perhaps the most tender chapter in regards to her regrets about what happened with Aksel. It is really easy to walk away from Worst Person believing that Trier and his cowriter Eskil Vogt have made a movie ostensibly about a millennial woman grappling with life in 2020s Oslo and instead turned it into a film about how melancholy and cool the Gen-X guy she dated for a while was.

Maybe the most vicious American review of the film came from The New Yorker's Richard Brody, who more or less argued that Worst Person doesn't allow viewers to understand Julie's character or perspective at all. Brody writes:

The odd, dismissive emphasis away from the professional and the intellectual toward the sexual and the personal is the dominant note of the film, which isolates Julie’s personality from any public or professional activity, any intellectual pursuit, any point of view on anything happening in the wider world, any politics (whether international or local), any cultural interest, any awareness or curiosity about anything beside her romantic life. Julie has blown up her life path for an artistic pursuit that remains almost entirely offscreen and silent. Why photography matters to her, when and how she does it, what her ambitions are, whom she knows in the field, who her mentors and role models are, whether or how she discusses her interest and knowledge with Aksel or anyone else—these questions remain entirely suppressed, a matter of total indifference to Trier.

Brody is one of our great film writers, and I think I see what he means here. (I do feel like his seeming negativity toward the film's emphasis on the personal comes slightly too close to a criticism frequently leveled against stories about women — they don't "matter" on some level — but I have read enough Brody to feel safe in suggesting he doesn't mean that.) If you're watching the movie looking for great insights into why Julie does what she does, makes the choices she does, sleeps with the men she does, they're not really in there. At one point, Julie herself says she feels like a supporting role in her own life, which suggests she's just going where the main characters need her to go.

‎That single line explains perfectly what the film is up to and why its detractors are mostly describing the same movie I watched but seem to have been completely immune to the emotional effects of the film, which I found devastating. But, then again, I found the film so devastating because it beautifully portrayed what is a near constant fact of my own life. The Worst Person in the World, see, is a movie about dissociation.

The "supporting role" line is by far the most frequently screenshotted one on Tumblr, which tends to be a useful indicator of what fans of the film have glommed onto the most. This post, in particular, underlines for me why this moment seems to have resonated so much, comparing Julie's line to a section from Sally Rooney's novel Normal People and dialogue from the 2016 teen comedy Edge of Seventeen. In all three, the idea of one's real life happening somewhere else recurs.

And it's not as though this idea is only in those three works. Scratch the surface of almost any movie, TV show, or novel about "being a millennial," and you'll find a similar expression of a similar idea. Back when I used to be in writers groups and judging the fiction and teleplays of my fellow would-be writers, the same idea cropped up all the time, too. For whatever reason, I belong to a generation full of people who are fixated on the idea that they might be completely out of control, their lives dicated to them by some unseen force that exists outside of them.

When this quality of art either by or about millennials (for Trier and Vogt are squarely Gen-X, though their lead, Renate Reinsve, is millennial through and through) is written about, it's usually filtered through the idea that millennial art is somehow "about" technology. For as long as my generation has been written about as a thing, it's been written about as a generation with a symbiotic, sometimes sinister relationship with technology. Indeed, the reason the millennial generation birth year cutoff generally comes in the mid-90s is because if you were born in the '90s or later, you grew up "on the internet" as opposed to "with" it, as Bo Burnham's useful delineation between the kids of his day and the kids of today would have it.

And the use of this idea to talk about millennials isn't wrong, either. We do have a complicated relationship to the technology that subsumed our lives. Even the opening lines of The Worst Person in the World nod toward this idea, as the film's unseen narrator says, "Julie disappointed herself. This used to be easy. She was still among the top students, but there were too many interruptions, updates, feeds, unsolvable global problems. She sensed a gnawing unease she had tried to suppress by cramming by drowning it in digital interference. This was wrong. This wasn’t her."

Yet despite the extremely perfunctory nods toward technology here, the storytelling device that carries through the rest of the film isn't this notion of Julie feeling overwhelmed at the weight of modern life. No, it's the narrator, who constantly seems as if she's privy to inner thoughts of Julie's that even she doesn't know about or guessing at what those inner thoughts must be. The more you watch the film, the more you start to realize that the narrator really only pops up at times when Julie is taking some sort of decisive action. The sequence outside of the prologue with the most narration is when Julie dumps Aksel, which amounts to the most active choice she makes in the entire film.

At first, the narrator could seem a bit like an affectation, a nod toward the film's loose replication of a novel, with its chapters and the like. But the narrator seems to function almost as a second Julie, albeit one who knows why the woman does what she does and doesn't regard her nearly every choice as a mystery. When the narrator falls away from the film, Julie has more or less taken control of her destiny without thinking she's taken control of anything. She's made no definitive choices, which add up to choices all the same. She is absent an animating principle, except she is also starting to figure out where her life might lead her, even if she never chooses a single other thing. She will bob along in the current for a while, then be lost. So it goes.

I think that a lot of millennial art is about dissociation, because I think that telling stories about the ways tech has reshaped our feelings about being alive on this planet necessarily ends up having a lot of overlap with how it feels to dissociate from the self. You start to look at yourself from outside, and you start to wonder what story you are telling about yourself. The experience of being online often feels as if it comes with an intermediary of one form or another, perhaps a narrator or two.

‎But being alive right now also offers copious opportunities to dissociate because we are so aware of how much of modern life all but begs us to completely forget about it even as it's happening. Dissociation is often a trauma response, and what are our modern systems but immense machines that force us into distasteful and even dangerous situations? For an article I worked on last year, a man who studies the effects of trauma called modern capitalism "a trauma factory," and he's not wrong. What's changed for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s is that we grew up constantly seeing the effects of that, instead of having them filtered out by mechanisms designed to preserve some sort of status quo. It's telling that the only time in the film when Julie seems truly unencumbered is when time literally stops in a lengthy fantasy sequence. For a while, the world metaphorically ends, so she can just be alone with a guy she likes.

Throughout Worst Person, we get indications that Julie's childhood was less than ideal, especially since her father is a confirmed piece of shit. The film never argues that Julie was abused (though it tiptoes up to the line of suggesting she was neglected), but the single scene we spend with her dad underlines so many of the choices she doesn't make. She can't escape the specter of the idea that nothing she does will be good enough to fix anything. And yet she needs to keep going.

In interviews, Reinsve has alluded to having PTSD stemming from terrible things that happened to her as a child. (She has not elaborated on what those things were.) And her portrayal of Julie, who is often aloof and detached and seemingly unable to say what she needs or wants, feels heavily informed by her own experiences with PTSD (or at least I resonated with them considerably). People who were repeatedly subjected to traumatic experiences as children often find ways to obscure from themselves the reasons they're doing anything. Seen in that lens, essentially every choice Julie makes is not understood by herself, even as we in the audience understand that she makes choices that seem designed to avoid having to make further choices.

Seen in this light, so many of the movie's narrative devices feel like a nod toward the powerlessness of someone who is dissociating from themselves. The enormous terror that comes with being alive on this planet that seems to be utterly falling apart makes it all too easy to completely detach from reality and compartmentalize. It's one way to stay alive. But too much dissociation ends up feeling rootless, unmoored. The World Person in the World is one of the few movies I've ever seen to completely capture that sense of being lost in the woods of your own mind after dark.

In one sequence of the film, the narrator carries us through the past several generations of women in Julie's family, eventually carrying us all the way back to women whose lives largely consisted of bearing children and dying. Julie has so many more options than them, but in having all of those options, she becomes paralyzed by choice. She doesn't know how to be a human, because there are too many humans she could be. So she tries being all of them, and then she tries being none of them, and then she just stops and picks one seemingly at random.

The Worst Person in the World isn't a character study in the way we're accustomed to. It is, instead, a story about what happens when you give in and let the current take you where it will. We're all headed to the same place anyway.

What I've been up to: Over at Vox, I talked about the ways in which Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is using his skills as a comedian and performer to win hearts and minds in the midst of a war.

The act of leadership is always bound up in performance, at least to some degree. Seeming like a leader is almost as important as actually being a good leader. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shirtless photo ops, for instance, are aimed to make him seem both physically and psychically powerful, not just a leader but an icon of masculinity. But even just in the US, every president of the mass media era has had to reckon with the fact that they are not only the president but also play him on TV.

What you missed if you're not a paid subscriber to Episodes: Freelance pieces will start up again this week! Thank you for your patience. We have some really great stuff coming up. In the meantime, if you're not reading my Cowboy Bebop recaps, I think you're missing out. I'm having a ton of fun with that show.

In the meantime, here's VT, a character so obviously trans that the first recommended Google search is "VT Cowboy Bebop Gender." Within the show, VT uses exclusively she/her pronouns, so I will do that as well, but I found readings from trans people who dig the show that suggested she was everything from a cis, butch bisexual woman to a trans man to an early-transition trans woman. Obviously, there's no need for the show to have VT earnestly talk about her gender or sexuality. She's simply a rad space trucker who hates bounty hunters and loves her cat. Do you need more than that?

Read me: You should always read Julia Serano when she has a new piece, and this one on why trans women are so often denied the closet is a scorcher! God, I sound like a boring mom!

So why does this discrepancy between gay and trans coming outs exist? Well, some of it likely has to do with gender essentialism, which I discuss a bit more in that link. But another way to frame what’s happening is via what I call (in my forthcoming book) delusional fakeness: when perceivers who are ignorant of, or in denial about, a particular LGBTQIA+ identity conceptualize such individuals as otherwise “normal” people (typically straight, although sometimes gay) who are pretending to be something they are not. Delusional fakeness is the mindset that leads people to mischaracterize trans women like myself as “really men” who are “pretending to be women.” It’s also what leads people to mischaracterize bisexual individuals as “really gay men” who are in denial, or as “really heterosexual women” who are merely experimenting or seeking attention. And so on.

Also, if you are at all following the terrifying situation in Texas right now, then you should read this piece by friend of the newsletter Lily Osler (who wrote that amazing Celeste piece last year) and her dad, Mark, about Lily's Texas childhood and how threatening these laws would have been to her.

Imagine a teenage girl who is taken away from her supportive family and, as her parents are put on trial for child abuse, is sent to an unaccepting foster home. Her foster parents take away her blockers, forcing her to grow an Adam’s apple and facial hair and outing her against her will to everyone she knows. Between the family separation, her forced outing and subsequent ostracization, and the onset of a dysphoric, unwanted puberty, she is at an extremely high risk for suicide. This is an outcome Gov. Abbott’s order is very likely, if not explicitly designed, to achieve for thousands of Texas kids.

Watch me: "Watch" is kind of a weird way to refer to this video by YouTuber Shaun that's mostly him speaking over a series of still images, but it's a useful look back at the Harry Potter series from someone who came to them only after J.K. Rowling decided to turn her entire online persona into attacking trans people for a weekend.

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And another thing... They gave me a new beat at work! I'm very excited about it, and you can read more about it here.

Opening credits sequence of the week: You remember the show Brooklyn Bridge? No? Well, I used to sing this Art Garfunkel theme song to girls as an attempt to woo them. Didn't really work, but you can't say I didn't try.

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A thing I had to look up: I am so thankful that the transcriptionists of the internet have already transcribed Worst Person, because that made checking my memories of the film so much easier!

This week's reading music: "Ride Like the Wind" by Christopher Cross

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.