This is a fascinating movie, despite any flaws, but I found myself more partial to Volume I than Volume II, which became largely frustrating for me.
MAJOR SPOILERS
Most of Lars' films are kinds of fables, sometimes beginning with dubious psychological foundations, but what makes them work is the consistency by which they play by their own rules. In Breaking the Waves, after Jan's accident on the oil rig that leaves him paralyzed, Jan tells Bess that she must go sleep with other men and then recount her experiences to him, that it's the only way to keep himself alive, if he loses that part of himself he's done for. Does this make complete sense? Not really. Do we buy it as a foundation for the remaining story? Yes, but only because this sort of bent truth that Lars puts forth is held steadfast and is utilized with consistency.
In Nymphomaniac's last support group scene, Joe stands up and declares herself different than all the others, a societal outcast, embracing the word 'Nymphomaniac' instead of ‘Sex Addict’. Here we feel that Joe is not just avoiding categorization, but is accepting, in the face of total opposition, that she is a creature of a fundamentally different kind - not one with rote psychological traumas she's compensating for that can be corrected with therapy, but a person who was born with essentially different needs, good or bad, that are unmodifiable. This is LVT proposing an expansion of what we consider the human experience, widening the definition, giving Joe's needs validity in the same way any other sexual orientation may be allowed as natural despite societal projections.
The later scene with the two African men is problematic. It works as another checkmark on Joe's list of what she considers exotic experiences, but really what I thought the point of this scene was (until later), was the resulting conversation with Seligman about the word "negro". Joe claims, despite Seligman's protests, that by using the word she is calling "a spade a spade" instead of pandering to political correctness. As the conversation evolves, Seligman, established as very well-read and something approaching an intellectual, very nearly has his opinion turned about the use of the word. What underpins this scene is an embracement of uncomfortable truths, in the same way that Joe accepts the word 'Nymphomaniac', which implies impossibility of change, instead of sex addict as a personal label. Seligman's turning is a bit of confirmation that Joe isn't in typical denial about her possibility of change that plagues most addicts, but is in fact something else, something rarer, and that by hearing Joe's story recounted we are stepping into a less explored but completely valid zone of human discovery (at least in Lars' universe).
The hiccup happens later (one of many) when, as the sun is rising, Joe claims she wants to be that one-in-million sex addict who can be cured, an idea that was offered to her by her earlier support group leader. This comes almost out of nowhere, apparently prompted by Joe’s finding the solitary tree at the top of the mountain, and completely negates everything we've seen up until this point. Joe's nonsensical turn here, in which she essentially denounces all we were led to believe prior (concerning Nymphomania vs. sex addiction as completely different conditions) strips that extra meaning from the earlier discussion of the word negro in regards to the African men scene and reduces it to something flirting with exploitation. The scene with Joe recounting her discovery of the tree at the top of the mountain all by its lonesome worked as a payoff for her childhood discussions with her dad (Christian Slater) in the forest, harking back to her father's descriptions of trees as souls. The final shot in that sequence was poetic — Joe standing amongst the indifferent vastness with only the sideways-growing branches dwarfing her in the frame. It worked as a visual metaphor for her plight the entire movie, however, by using it as a trigger for hope, Joe perceiving the tree as fighting against the odds of its existence, as a sign of her own possibility of being “cured”, it diminishes the image’s original meaning and changes it to be a launching pad for her late transformation that is a lot less affecting. It changes the meaning of the entire movie to the far less interesting notion that 'Joe is just a sex addict in denial’, a betrayal of the rules the movie purported to be playing by.
By canceling out the curse of Joe, Nymphomaniac ceases to be a story of martyrdom, of carrying the burden of a permanent cross, and becomes something more murky. Whatever Lars was trying to say, the story becomes corrupted by the events that transpire in the second half of Volume II, once Willem Defoe enters the picture. While the scenes that resulted from Joe's employment by Defoe weren't necessarily bad in isolation, that entire story thread wasn't informed by anything we'd seen up until that point, aside from Joe's apparent qualifications for debt collection in terms of her nymphomania, which is a contrivance that doesn’t evolve our understanding of her. The connection between Joe's condition and the later scenes where she uses her sexual knowledge to extort money from clients is slim and a strange direction for the movie to go. What ultimately results from Joe's involvement in this area are threads of jealousy, lesbian experimentation, and questions of murder in regards to good or evil. The narrative, by this point, has become confused.
Apart from working in an illegal realm outside of the normal confines of society, which Joe’s nymphomania has pushed her to do, we are no longer following the foreground affects of Joe's condition on her life. Joe sets up the telling of her story, the entire excuse for the film in the first place, as a way to prove to Seligman that she is an “evil person”. We are then led to believe that Joe’s cross to bear, her nymphomania, will be the ultimate cause of this conclusion, directly. When Joe succumbs to her wants so impulsively that she risks the welfare of her child, Marcel, we are seeing the lengths to which Joe cannot help going to satiate her desires. If Marcel had actually fallen from the apartment’s balcony and died, if that was Joe’s reasoning for her essential “evil” nature — that her nymphomania trumped her regard for another human life, I would have bought her perspective completely. Instead, the later extortion thread leads Joe to kill out of jealousy, a completely unrelated moral question. Questions of jealousy can exist totally apart from nymphomaniac tendencies, making it an arbitrary evolution in Joe’s development.
Going back a bit, P’s coming into Joe’s life also seemed somewhat ineffective. This part of the movie seems to hold three main functions: It provides an opportunity for Joe to explore lesbian attraction, one of the only sexual areas we haven’t seen her venture into by this point, it sets up the jealousy angle in regards to Jerome later on, and it creates the possibility for the scene, however, contrived, with Joe encountering the pedophile. The problem is that P’s lesbian attraction to Joe is completely coincidental, and that she (P) initiates it. It’s way too convenient that out of all the boxes Joe has yet to check (of which there are very few), P just happens to fit into the lesbian experimentation category, and is also the one to make the advances. Taking the agency out of Joe’s hands makes the bedroom scene with P somewhat meaningless, as Joe acting on an attraction to P of her own volition would have implied a truly irrepressible desperation on her part. Joe is said to be somewhat celibate by this point, apart from her interactions with men within her job, so P acting to reignite Joe’s sexual desires instead of Joe herself says nothing about the permanent “curse” of nymphomania as it should. If P hadn’t done this, it is possible that Joe would have found her peace, which, again, is an idea in conflict with what the film sets up in the first place.
Joe’s empathy for the pedophile’s circumstance, having not acted on his impulses and harmed another human being, is interpreted by her as honorable. She states explicitly that for this she thinks he deserves “a thousand medals”. As Joe is relating her own incurable condition, her own curse, to his, we can only conclude that in the event that Joe was not harming anyone in following her natural instincts, Joe believes nymphomania is fine — which is why her son Marcel should have died, it would have been a direct consequence of her pursuing her compulsions. I thought that what we glean as an audience from this extortion scene with the pedophile was good, but that the means by which it was arrived at was unnecessarily complicated. Why couldn’t Joe encounter a secret pedophile in another setting? It seemed like the only successful development of the whole debt collection bit was our increased understanding of Joe taken from this scene, but it could have occurred more simply elsewhere.
Also, given that Seligman has this role of offering counterpoint, not merely foil, to Joe’s beliefs, I found it odd that in the final minutes of the movie, when Joe muses on the idea that if a man had lived the life she had he wouldn’t be judged so unfairly, he didn’t digress into a discussion about the biological investment women have in sex vs men. It seemed to me that this discussion was glaringly avoided, and I'm unsure of why.
Though the end with Joe shooting Seligman felt wrong, Seligman's advances in the final minutes of the movie didn't come off as completely unwarranted to me. Here is a man who, despite claiming empathy, ultimately perpetuates Joe's suffering. It's a bit wonky, and I don't know what else LVT could have done with it, but Seligman basically attempting to rape Joe after positioning himself as her first real friend felt like an appropriate conclusion to this extremely dark story.
Despite Volume II’s inconsistencies, the film as a whole has too many good things about it to be dismissed. Any film that inspires this much contemplation for me is worth seeing (repeatedly).
