Outsourcing Authority:

Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All (2006)

and the Question of the Master

Benjamin Noys

A ‘postmodern’ boss insists that he is not a master but just a

coordinator of our joint creative efforts, the first among equals;

there should be no formalities among us, we should address him by

his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us … but during all this,

he remains our master. In such a social link, relations of

domination function through their denial: in order to operative,

they have to be ignored.

Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008a: 202)

The king or chief arouses envy on account of his privileges:

everyone, perhaps, would like to be a king.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem & Taboo’ (1913)

Introduction: ‘Mostly Harmless’

On the one hand, psychoanalysis, especially in its Lacanian form,

seems to offer one of the most radical critiques of authority and

mastery available to us, by tracking the repressed desire for

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dominance even into gestures of deference and renunciation. In

this case psychoanalysis would appear to be the best ally for a

radical politics, if by that one takes it to mean the thoroughgoing

critique of authority. The ability of psychoanalysis to detect the

ruses of authority, especially in the denial of authority, promises

the path to a true equality. On the other hand, psychoanalysis

always appears to return to authority as the crucial and necessary

guardrail against madness and social disorder, whether that is in

the Oedipal configuration of desire or in the Lacanian Symbolic.

Now, the very radicalism of psychoanalysis in questioning authority

and uncovering its ruses seems to leave authority as a necessary

and ineradicable function of the human psyche and social order. If

civilization is always discontented, then all we are left with are

better or worse ways of ameliorating these discontents. In this case

psychoanalysis runs against radical politics, by supposing there is

no way to eliminate or reduce the question of authority. When

asked, in Seminar XXIII, if he was an anarchist Lacan replied

‘Certainly not’ [Sûrement pas] (Lacan 2005: 138).

Here I do not aim to resolve this seeming antinomy or aporia

in the relationship between psychoanalysis and radical politics.

Instead, I aim to displace the question by displacing the

consideration of authority onto a new site: film, and more

particularly Lars Von Trier’s 2006 film The Boss of it All

(Direktøren for det hele). Certainly Lacanians have been attracted

to the films of Lars Von Trier like flies to the proverbial part-object.

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This attraction is perhaps partially reciprocated; as one interviewer

noted on visiting Von Trier’s writing cabin, he found that ‘[b]ooks –

a weighty tome on Ingmar Bergman, various psychoanalytic titles –

are scattered around’ (Husband 2008; my italics). The attention of

Lacanians has often fallen on Von Trier’s thematization of ethical

questions through melodramatic representations of female

sacrifice and excess: notably in Breaking the Waves (1996), The

Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000) – the ‘golden heart’

trilogy – and in Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005) – the first

two parts of the ‘USA Land of Opportunity’ trilogy, and on to

Antichrist (2009).1 I want to depart from this ‘tragic-heroic

paradigm’ (to use Simon Critchley’s (1999) phrase) because The

Boss of it All is itself a departure: a ‘comedy’ and so declared

‘harmless as such’ by Von Trier. Lacking a central feminine figure

of excess, sacrifice, or jouissance this ‘office comedy’ departs from

the grand themes of his other films – with their invocations of

Christianity and the passion – and appears as a deliberately minor

effort.

In brief, the film concerns a Danish computer company whose

owner, Ravn (Peter Gantzler), wants to sell the business to a

rebarbative Icelandic businessman Finnur (Fridrik Thor

Fridriksson). Unfortunately, to do this Ravn needs the permission

of the overall owner of the company – ‘the boss of it all’. The

reason this is unfortunate is that ‘the boss of it all’ is a fiction

created by Ravn to take responsibility for all the harsh decisions he

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has had to make over the years. In order to proceed to sell the

company Ravn lands on the ingenious solution of using an

unemployed avant-garde actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) to play ‘the

boss of it all’. The comedy that follows turns exactly on how this

role of fictional authority is to be played, but what could be more

trivial than a film about office politics? 2 And what could have less

to do with the pressing concerns of radical politics in a time of

global capialist crisis?

The turn to film, and a comedy at that, would seem to be the

usual indulgence of the cultural critic, unwilling or unable to dirty

their hands with actual politics. Obviously, I can’t simply evade

such a charge. What I do want to suggest, in line with

psychoanalysis and with a comedy concerned with deceptive

appearances, is that we pause a little over the self-evidence of

believing such a work can have nothing to do with politics. After

all, when Lars Von Trier declares the film ‘harmless as such’ he

does so in the character of the occasional, and deliberately jarring,

Brechtian narrator (à la Kingdom (1994)). As this narrator he goes

on to add that the film we are about to see is not political, not

worth a moment’s reflection, and is poking fun at ‘artsy-fartsy’

culture – while pointing out that we can see his reflection in a

crane shot of the outside of the office building.

We are entitled, as good psychoanalytic viewers, to be

suspicious of such disavowals, and in aiming not to be taken in by

appearances we can judge Lars Von Trier an unreliable narrator.

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License is then granted to ape the style of Freud’s paper ‘Negation’

(1925): ‘Or: “You ask who this person in my dream can be. It’s not

my mother.” This we amend: “So it is your mother.”’ (Freud 2005:

89). Amending Von Trier, we can say that The Boss of It All is not

harmless, but dangerous, worth much reflection, deeply political,

and highly avant-garde. But this is only a first reversal.

If we are to be truly good psychoanalytic viewers we should

also recognize the efficacy of appearances. To ‘never be deceived

by appearances’ has a double sense: to distrust appearances and

seek for some underlying truth, or to take so-called appearances as

the very site of truth. It is that second sense that I take as the true

path of psychoanalysis, one that (coincidentally – if we believe in

coincidence) corresponds exactly to that of the Hegelian dialectic

as parsed by Fredric Jameson (2006): ‘stupid stereotype, or the

“appearance”; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or

“essence”; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the

appearance, so that it was the appearance that was “true” after

all.’ It is this dialectical passage that, I will argue, is the model for

how we should analyse this film, and also the best mode in which to

pose and analyse the disavowals and forms of contemporary

authority.

If we follow the films seemingly trivial concern with the reality

and efficacy of the ‘appearance’ of authority, then we avoid the

form of ideology critique that, naïvely, believes it is enough to

expose authority as false. This is the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ model

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of the unveiling of the truth of authority, which, ironically, Derrida

took to be the allegory of the limits of the psychoanalytic

procedure (1987: 416-419). Ironic, because Lacan, and after him

Žižek, never cease to invoke the counter-model of Alphonse Allais,

who pointed at a woman and said: ‘Look at her, what a shame,

under her clothes she is totally naked’ (Žižek 1989: 29). Therefore,

the play of reality and appearance is more complex than simply

unveiling the ‘nakedness’ of authority, instead we have to consider

how appearance itself is a site of authority. For this task it turns

out that a deliberately trivial film may have something to teach us.

In particular, the lesson that concerns me is that

psychoanalysis can make us attend to the displacement of authority

– that it is never quite where we expect it to be. Writing on comedy

Alenka Zupančič reminds us that:

What Lacan and Hegel share in this respect is that they

both take this dimension of the Other extremely seriously

– not as a subjective illusion or spell that could be broken

simply by saying out loud that ‘the Other doesn’t exist’

(just consider how this common theoretical mantra

coexists perfectly well with all sorts of secret and not-so-

secret beliefs), but as something which, despite its

nonexistence, has considerable material effects in which

it does exist. (2008: 17)

I would only be tempted to add one thing: it is not despite its

nonexistence, but because of its nonexistence that the Other has

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material effects. So, pointing out the Other doesn’t exist, that the

emperor has no clothes, is to reinforce the effect of authority.

Rather, particularly in the face of ‘soft’ or ‘postmodern’ forms of

authority, we have to attend more closely to this ‘nonexistence’. In

what follows, to deploy one of the key signifiers that structure this

comedy, I will be tracing this constant outsourcing of authority. In

this way, we may be able to see that our belief there is no ‘boss of it

all’ may very well conceal our continuing to behave as if there is,

and that it will take a comedy to teach us differently.

The Dialectic of Authority

To follow the twists and turns of Von Trier’s film, which follows a

permutational logic reminiscent of Pasolini’s Theorem (Teorema)

(1968), I will use Jameson’s model of the dialectic as passing from

‘stupid stereotype’ to ‘essence’ and then finally back to the ‘reality

of the appearance’. As is often the case with comedy the film

rapidly develops into a complex and at times dizzying exchange of

roles and actions. I will do my best to trace and track these

exchanges in a game of following the outsourcing of authority that

never seems to quite find a final resting place. Again, this is not to

claim that therefore authority is merely fictional or empty but, as

with the exchanges Lacan traced in Poe’s The Purloined Letter

(1845), to trace the continuing insistence of authority in the

material effects of fiction.

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Stupid Stereotype

Zupančič notes that the comic situation – especially the comedy of

mistaken identities, of which The Boss of it All is a supreme

example – is structured by the suspension of the (Big) Other, which

permits the play of identities (2008: 90). This takes place here by

the supposedly temporary suspension of the authority of the ‘boss’

of the firm Ravn, as the actor Kristoffer enters to play ‘the boss of

it all’. Of course, Ravn has really been ‘the boss of it all’ all the

time, but he displaced his unpleasant decisions and dubious

practices onto the fiction of ‘the boss of it all’ to maintain his own

image as soft-hearted and reasonable boss. This is the perfect

structure, as we will see, of ‘postmodern’ authority. In fact, despite

the fact that Ravn seems to have suspended his own role as secret

Big Other he still believes he ‘pulls the strings’ of Kristoffer by his

expertise at writing the legal contracts that bind and limit

Kristoffer’s performance.3 Kristoffer, playing ‘the boss of it all’ is

merely the puppet to the true boss of it all, Ravn. In taking up this

position, in believing in his own displaced authority, Ravn places

himself in the position of the classic non-dupe: he errs in

underestimating the power of fiction and appearance. In believing

himself to be the supposedly consistent (big) Other, guaranteed by

law, Ravn will reveal his own true appearance of authority.

This suspension of the Big Other is also reflected in the formal

construction of the film. In filming Von Trier employed (or claimed

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to employ4) a computerized process called ‘Automavision’; as he

explains:

Basically I make the frame how I’d like it to be in the film,

and then we push this button on the computer and we get

given six or eight randomized set-ups - a little tilt, or a

movement, or if you should zoom in. It’s supposed to

make the image imprecise. (in Muss 2006)

His reason for choosing this process is that it robs the filming

process of human intention. The effect for the viewer is one of

jarring ‘jumps’ and seeming ‘mis-framings’ of the action – to quote

Von Trier as narrator again, ‘it looks a bit weird’. A self-described

‘control freak’ Von Trier claims that by using this process ‘I’m

fighting against my will to control.’ Yet beneath this seeming

abdication of authority he also suggests he had another motive: to

keep the actors from stealing scenes or being able to be sure of

camera position. We hardly need to refer to the legendary stories

of Von Trier’s cruelty to actors to sense that this formal decision

itself incarnates exactly the play of authority posed by the film’s

narrative – as with Ravn, the appearance of abdicating authority

should arouse proper suspicion.

The first appearance of authority within the film certainly

corresponds to ‘the stupid stereotype’ – this is the attempt by

Kristoffer to play ‘the boss of it all’. Initially Kristoffer is only

supposed to have a brief role: he will meet the Icelandic

businessman Finnur Sigurdsson and his translator, sign over the

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power of attorney to Ravn, and be on his way.5 The pretensions of

this self-important actor are on full display in his actorly pauses

that confuse the Icelandic translator, his anti-naturalistic style, and

his inability to master even the basics of the script. Matters go

awry when the stubborn and rude Icelandic businessman Finnur

refuses the arrangement to finish dealing with ‘the boss of it all’

and merely deal with Ravn. Finnur quotes a supposed ancient saga

to the effect that ‘He who deals with stooges deals with nobody’ (of

course thereby ensuring he deals with a stooge, a ‘nobody’).

Inadvertently then, Kristoffer has to be retained, and also he

inadvertently reveals his presence to the ‘inner six’ – the key

‘seniors’ of the business, each of which believe that he is ‘the boss

of it all’ who has taken decisions that have negatively affected

them.

Ravn is forced to confess to Kristoffer that ‘the boss of it all’

has never existed; it was a fiction invented because he didn’t have

it in him to be company president. Kristoffer now willingly takes-up

the role until the deal is completed, signing a strict contract with a

non-disclosure agreement. His performance, however, does not

improve. Lacking any knowledge of what the company does he

lurches from one highly embarrassing social gaffe to another. At his

first meeting with the six seniors he is punched by the depressive

Gorm, who prefaces his outbursts of violence with statements

concerning the muggy autumnal weather in the country. In the face

of this violence Kristoffer tries to take control he decides to play

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‘the boss of it all’ as a harsh and dictatorial figure. The results are

catastrophic. In the first technical conference he fails to grasp any

of the company terminology, humiliates the overly-sensitive senior

Nalle, and makes another senior Nelle cry by declaring her sales

figures ‘shit’. The damning verdict on his performance is delivered

by Lise, the HR representative, which he mistakes for HA – Hell’s

angels. She tells him he has a ‘credibility problem’ and that she

and the others see through his ‘lousy acting’. Unimpressed by

Kristoffer’s defence of his own anti-naturalistic avant-garde acting

style – ‘the point of comedy nowadays is to reveal the comedy’ –

she goes on to say she does not believe he is gay; completely

puzzled by the last statement Kristoffer calls an emergency

meeting with Ravn on neutral ground.

Essence

At this point, nicely after a third of the film, we (fortuitously) shift

towards second stage of the dialectic: the revelation of the

‘underlying reality’ of authority. What is revealed when Kristoffer

sees Ravn is that Ravn has created different versions of ‘the boss of

it all’ for each of the six seniors: only Lise’s, for example, is gay.

His ostensible reason for this is that it created a ‘good vibe’ in

which ‘the boss of it all’ belonged to each of the seniors. Ravn goes

on to advise Kristoffer to stop trying to subdue, control, and

dominate, and instead say ‘yes’ to the six – this being easier. In this

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scene we have the revelation of Ravn’s own management style: the

perverse ‘postmodern’ refusal to embody any authority at all as the

mode of authority. This nullified authority is nicely conveyed by

Ravn’s final piece of advice concerning the IT jargon, when he

explains that, ‘When they say “outsourcing” they mean “off-

shoring”’. The fact that the difference between these phrases is

inexplicable indicates the ‘hollow’ authority of constant agreement

and encouragement. We might say we have passed from

outsourcing authority to off-shoring authority…

Returning to the workplace Kristoffer puts Ravn’s advice into

play, and immediately regains credibility by correcting Nalle use of

‘outsourcing’ to ‘offshoring’, and then by saying ‘yes’ to everything.

This affirmative management style soon descends into farce when

he comes to deal with Lise, who still supposes he is gay. By the

simple method of saying ‘yes’ to everything Lise says Kristoffer

finds himself fulfilling her fantasy of ‘the boss of it all’ as a macho

pig who will take her over his desk, which he proceeds to do. Here

we have a rather exact probing of the relation to fantasy, which as

generated by Ravn and the projections of Lise, is fulfilled by

Kristoffer through the expedient of affirmation. The theatrical, or

filmic, scene of fantasy merely requires that we take our place in a

role and is indifferent to who is in that place.

By the method of continuing to agree with everything the

seniors say Kristoffer also finds out that ‘he’ (as ‘the boss of it all’)

has proposed marriage to another senior, Heidi A. This will be

12
revealed as another ruse of Ravn, enacted to keep Heidi at the

company. What we find in these scenes is the revelation that

internal to the ‘postmodern’ outsourcing or off-shoring of authority

is the ‘essence’ or ‘underlying reality’ of fantasy qua organization

of jouissance. To be more precise what we find revealed is the

fantasy of the primal father described by Freud in ‘Totem and

Taboo’ (1913). There Freud argues for the reality of the primal

father as the one who once possessed all the women in the horde,

which is to say all the jouissance, and whose ‘arbitrary will … was

unrestricted.’ (1985a: 289) The unlikely figure of Ravn is the

‘cuddly’ postmodern incarnation of the primal father, organising

the jouissance and possessing all the women he wants in the firm

by the manipulation of the ‘higher’ figure of ‘the boss of it all’.

Rather than the classically cold and mechanical seducer, here we

find the manipulative and pseudo-emotional ‘postmodern’ seducer.

It is exactly at this point that Von Trier makes another

narratorial intervention – ‘no comedy without breaks’ as he puts it.

His interruption is to introduce a new character, the actor

Kristoffer’s ex-wife Kisser. She is an ex-leftist who is now attorney

for the Icelandic businessman Finnur Sigurdsson, and Kristoffer is

soon forced to explain to her that he has become a ‘stand-in’ for

‘the boss of it all’. She quickly informs Kristoffer that he is wrong if

he think Ravn has been constructing this fiction innocently: ‘By

blaming all this shit on this boss you can appear likeable and

noble’. She goes on to explain that Ravn is selling the company

13
from under his co-workers, and so defrauding the six seniors of

their shares.

Troubled, Kristoffer uncovers the various manipulations of

Ravn (in the character of ‘the boss of it all’): he retained Heidi by

the promise of marriage; overruled Gorm on project development;

undermined Nalle’s confidence; stopped the Danish lessons of

Spencer to prevent him gossiping in the corridors; encouraged Lise

to have sex with him; got the six to ‘loan’ him 25,000 Krone each;

and sacked Mette’s husband, who then committed suicide by

hanging himself with a printer cable as he couldn’t stand to be

excluded. This leaves Mette a nervous wreck, who screams every

time the copier is used. Ravn’s image as the ‘postmodern’ boss of

group hugs, company songs, and his image as a ‘cuddly teddy

bear’, finds its essence, its support, in the arbitrary cruelty of an

unfettered exploitation of jouissance. In this way, he really does

instantiate the violence of the ‘primal father’, but, again, at one

remove.

True Appearance

If the film were to end on this scene of exposure, or to follow that

exposure with Ravn’s immediate confession and contrition then it

would be considerably less interesting, considerably less

psychoanalytic, and considerably less funny, than it is. Such an

ending would, of course, conform to the cliché of psychoanalysis as

the revelation of malign authority lurking in every kind-hearted

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gesture. Instead, to be truly psychoanalytic and to truly grasp the

appearance of authority, one final turn of the screw is required.

Ravn, meeting Kristoffer on a merry-go-round, is unapologetic: he

claims he is the one who ‘gives and gives’ to the seniors and

remains unappreciated by them. Ravn also gives Kristoffer power

of attorney to make the final deal.

During the ‘final’ meeting to confirm the deal Kisser, in her

role as attorney for the Icelanders, reveals that the other

employees with be sacked, with the exception of Ravn, and also

lose any compensation for the rights to the company’s mysterious

best-selling product the Brooker 5. Kristoffer now feels morally

that he should stop the deal going ahead, which he does by

inflating the selling price, and so breaking the agreement. This can

only be a temporary delay, so Kristoffer extracts the only

concession he can: getting Ravn to sign a contract that he will

confess to the six seniors his role in defrauding them. The problem

is that when Ravn does start to confess his plan he can only then

blame it on ‘the boss of it all’, i.e. Kristoffer. Ravn’s causistical

defence is that he has fulfilled the ‘contract’ to confess, because it

did not specify that he could not blame someone else – as he says

‘law is an extremely exact science’.

Without any options left, trapped by the contract he has

signed, Kristoffer takes the advice of his ex-wife: to outwit Ravn at

his own game. He realises that Ravn wants to be loved, to play the

cuddly teddy bear. Hence, Kristoffer invents ‘the boss of the boss of

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it all’ to take responsibility for ‘his’ (i.e. Ravn’s) decision to defraud

the six. Of course this is literally true: Ravn is ‘the boss of it all’

and ‘the boss of the boss of it all’. Zupančič notes that in comedy:

The path to truth leads through fiction. Or, more

precisely: we do not get to the Real by eliminating the

symbolic fiction, the mask, and looking behind it, but by

redoubling the symbolic fiction, the mask, by putting

another one on top of the already existing one. (2008:

105)

We ‘shoot too soon’ if we think matters should end with the

revelation of Ravn as fantasmatic ‘primal father’ with his obscene

monopoly on jouissance. Instead, we have to pass through the

redoubled fiction that this primary outsourcing of authority entails:

Ravn is both cuddly teddy bear and cruel ‘boss of it all’. In fact this

result is already in-place for the attentive when we note that in his

‘absence’ ‘the boss of it all’ has been played by a toy teddy bear.

Kristoffer redoubles the symbolic fiction by playing ‘the boss

of it all’ as an even more exaggerated version of Ravn: as generous

and kind, and giving the six the work outing Ravn had denied them

for years by saying ‘the boss of it all’ would not agree (although

this outing is to a particularly bleak looking seaside). The strategy

works, deprived of the role of cuddly teddy bear Ravn is forced to

express his disgust at the expense of the outing, the reason why he

had prevented it. In this way he brings together, only briefly, his

two modes of authority, but the truth of the effect cannot yet take

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place. This requires the final scene of the selling of the company.

Again to out-trump Ravn’s sentimentality Kristoffer invites all the

six seniors and plays the scene as soap-opera kitsch. Giving a

speech praising Ravn for his selflessness Kristoffer eventually

causes Ravn to breakdown in tears and really confess that he has

always been ‘the boss of it all’. It turns out that Mette had known

all along, the senior most cruelly treated due to the suicide of her

husband as a result of Ravn’s actions. Mette forgives Ravn, as do

the other seniors. Now Ravn says he will not sell the company, and

we have the typical comedy happy ending.

This is Lars Von Trier, however, and when Ravn says he will

correct the sins of the past, that he has some ‘off-shoring’ to see to,

Kristoffer corrects him: ‘outsourcing!’ Kristoffer is working to a

different logic: not the logic of authority that operates in a

sentimental dialectic of cruelty and forgiveness, but the logic of his

avant-garde acting and his ‘master’ Gambini; Alenka Zupančič

points out that comedy often operates through ‘combining, in one

scene, two different, incompatible realities’ (2008: 71). The Boss of

it All has played on this throughout by combining different

incompatible realities of identity, but now we can perceive the true

clash is between the soft and soppy ‘authority’ of the postmodern

boss and the truly and openly cruel authority of the artistic

‘master’. Kristoffer refuses to annul his power of attorney so Ravn

go retain the company. To refer to what he initially said to Ravn:

‘The character is my law. And the script is my court.’ This initially

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pretentious and self-aggrandising claim has now come true, as the

legal authority of Ravn has, finally, been suspended by the ‘higher

court’ of artistic authority. Kristoffer tries to think ‘in character’

and assess what ‘the boss of it all’ would really decide.

Initially Kristoffer initially decides not to sell. The Icelandic

businessman goes into a terrible rage and says that the whole

business is absurd as Gambini. Kristoffer’s sympathy is piqued; it

turns out Finnur is a fan of Gambini’s work and so Kristoffer signs

the contract for a fellow follower. Zupančič notes that the heroes of

comedy ‘go a step further than heroic characters who are ready to

sacrifice everything for their cause, they do not even perceive it as

a sacrifice . . .’ (2008: 68). The ‘sacrifice’ of Kristoffer for the cause,

abandoning the seniors, is not perceived by him. We might say that

‘the boss of the boss of it all’ is no longer Ravn but Gambini. Using

the terminology of Alain Badiou we could even say that here an

‘artistic truth’ clashes and overturns the soft cultural economy of

‘serving the good(s)’. The articulation of two elements – business

and acting – has ended in one final moment of comic overturning

and the re-evaluation of the symbolic Other. We end with the six

seniors packing-up and leaving, while Finnur, his translator, and a

chastened but still employed and rich Ravn sit down to watch a

performance by Kristoffer of the three hour monologue: ‘The

Chimney Sweep in the Town without Chimneys’. Lars Von Trier’s

final narratorial voice-over states: ‘Those who got what they came

for, deserve it.’

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Between Two Masters

What do we deserve? Alenka Zupančič’s argues that the suspension

and re-instantiation of the Other in comedy is not a conservative

operation of closure, but the opportunity for the reevaluation of the

Other. Again to quote and adapt Zupančič: ‘the final return of the

Other (from its suspension) is far from reaffirming the Other (the

symbolic coordinates) with which the [film] begin[s].’ (2008: 93-4)

We can certainly see that this is true of The Boss of It All. The (Big)

Other we began with was the ‘postmodern’ authority of Ravn as

split between his cuddly appearance and his cruelty through his

second appearance as ‘the boss of it all’. In Kristoffer’s signing of

the contract this mode of deflected, disavowed, outsourced, or off-

shored authority, is brought back to its originary outsourcing. In a

parody of Nietzsche we could say this is a classic case of ‘become

what you are’: Ravn has to inhabit his own fiction, his own

appearance, as ‘the boss of it all’. He is rewarded for his cruelty

and is forced to not give way on his desire.

This reevaluation of the Other in the figure of Ravn as ‘the

boss of it all’ reveals the crucial role of law in his outsourced

authority. Ravn’s mastery of contracts is what preserved his

‘hidden’ power over Kristoffer and allowed him to pull the strings.

Although this is reversed when he gives Kristoffer power of

attorney, in fact Kristoffer’s decision to sell the company benefits

Ravn and fulfils his original desire. What he ‘loses’ in this

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transaction is his appearance as the kind and cuddly teddy-bear

‘boss’. So, power lies, it seems, finally in the power of law, and

more precisely in the power of attorney. What I am tempted to call

a ‘psychopathology of everyday authority’ would then, at least for

capitalist modernity and postmodernity, be a psychopathology of

law. Lacan remarks that ‘the essence of law [is] to divide up,

distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.’

(1999: 3) While we may have been led astray by Ravn’s

management of jouissance in terms of his sexual manipulations, we

can now see these as a result of the effect of law.

To point out the fundamental and constitutive illegitimacy of

law, its relation to jouissance, may not be sufficient. After all, the

lesson of ‘Totem and Taboo’ is that the murder of the primal father

is the crime that founds the law and the guilt shared between the

brothers. This action does not abolish the law or the super-ego, but

outsources it through its internalisation and so exacerbates it.

Rather than the rebellion against the localised father, we now have

an internal law operating in each of us. The psychoanalytic refusal

of antinomianism therefore leaves it in a position that may

certainly appear to be conservative. To put matters in a

deliberately naïve fashion, The Boss of It All may demonstrate

Ravn’s cruelty but the film ends with the fulfilment of that cruelty:

there appears to be no happy ending for the six unemployed and

defrauded seniors. Ravn still benefits and still performs his original

intention. While the cruelty of his authority may have been

20
revealed, while he may have been forced to act according to his

desire, the result does not appear that ethical.

I would suggest that Ravn does lose something – his

appearance. He loses his inner distance to the role of ‘the boss of it

all’, finally collapsing together his true authority. The difficulty is

that this might still not feel very satisfactory. This ‘punishment’

appears to only restage an allegory of authority. Revealed or not,

we do not appear to be any nearer to any real alternative to

authority. I do want to suggest something important does take

place here. In the redoubling of the symbolic staged by the film we

find that the Real is not situated as an exterior or transcendent

moment, for example located in Ravn’s ‘inner core’ of cruelty.

Instead, as Zupančič notes, the redoubling produces the Real, or

reveals it, as the moment of minimal difference:

we get a reality that is slightly out of place in relation to

itself, a reality that is simultaneously ahead of itself and

behind itself, a reality that is at the same time

anticipating and lagging behind itself. The shift opens up

the space for the symbolic Other as immanent to the

given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its

framework or outer horizon.) (2008: 106)6

Where does this get us? The redoubling and the reinvention of the

Other stages the cruelty of outsourced authority as lying in its

appearance. ‘The Boss if it all’ is not brought down to earth, if by

earth we mean brute materiality, but down to the ‘earth’ of

21
appearance as the site of material effects. This gives us, I would

suggest, some traction on the sense of authority that is no longer

simply outsourced as ideal or transcendent instance.

Is there, however, any real alternative to this postmodern

‘soft’ authority? The only alternative canvassed in the film appears

to be the meta-cruelty of the artistic master Gambini. It is

Kristoffer’s fidelity to the avant-garde master that overturns,

momentarily, the logic of exchange and which strips away Ravn’s

sentimentality. The difficulty is that this ‘alternative’ is highly

problematic. The authority of this master is in rather precise

alliance with business and law: that is, with the sanction of the

Icelandic businessman and with Kristoffer’s power of attorney. It is

also a business of men. While Kisser initially stays for the

performance of the monologue, as does Heidi A., who still seems to

hope to marry Kristoffer, Kisser says ‘Forget it. It’s Gambini’, and

they both leave. Also, while Ravn is crest-fallen he remains

employed and his only ‘suffering’ is to have to watch the

performance. Therefore, while the Other may be made immanent,

brought down to earth, we are left ‘between two masters’.

Conclusion: The Cold Master

To return to my epigraph Žižek follows up his statement on the

authority of the ‘postmodern’ boss with a suggestion on how we are

supposed to deal with this deflected and outsourced authority:

22
 Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of

liberation is to demand from the master that he act like

one: one should reject false collegiality from the master

and insist that he treat us with cold distance, as a master.

(2008a: 202)

Now, this would seem the precise way in which The Boss of it All

deals with the ‘postmodern boss’ Ravn incarnates. Under the

pressure of Kristoffer’s fidelity to the ‘cold master’ Gambini, Ravn is

forced to play ‘the boss of it all’, and his sentimentality is excised.

But, as we have seen, this also reveals something problematic in

Žižek’s advice. In making the master act as a master the coldness is

revealed, we may see the minimal difference, a reality ‘out-of-joint’,

but this appears to close-up into the instantiation of a new master.

Is it really better to be made unemployed by the master acting as a

master?

I would suggest that some surreptitious work is being done

here when Žižek calls this ‘the first act of liberation’. What this

implies, but leaves hanging, is a second act that will, presumably,

make a more radical breakage. Leaving this unspecified is, for me,

the sign of a neuralgic point in the articulation of psychoanalytic

ideology-critique. After all, for ideology critique to be anything

more than an exercise in knowledge, in the construction, precisely,

of the non-dupe or the ‘subject supposed to know’, it must be able

to make possible a shift in the very terms of our symbolic

coordinates. The difficulty, in part, is that often this shifting seems

23
to be taken as a return to previous forms of authority and mastery.

This is the case of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism

(1978), with its call to return to paternal authority or, more recently,

John Milbank’s (2009) call ‘to modify paternalism’. If the

postmodern ‘master’ fails, or is only a pseudo-master, then the only

way seems to be back to a ‘proper’ master.

At times Žižek, for example, seems to flirt with this argument –

as in his invocations of the superiority of the traditional parental

injunction versus the ‘soft’ persuasive and intrusive postmodern

parent. Of course, Žižek and Badiou (2008) both talk of the need to

reinvent discipline in new forms that can take the measure of

postmodern authority, but they rarely seem to specify what form

this would take. In fact, often, they seem haunted by a certain

nostalgia, not least the one mocked in The Boss of it All – the

nostalgia for the ‘passion for the real’ incarnated in the artistic

avant-garde. In this way, we could say, this comedy is even more

unsettling. I remarked that we seem left ‘between two masters’, but

we could add between the inadequacy of both, in the space of the

morbid symptom of an old dying authority and a new authority

refusing to be born (to adapt Gramsci). The question remains, how

can we take the ‘second step’ that would to imply the reinvention or

traversal through the ‘bad new’ of the postmodern master?

In the case of psychoanalysis itself the possibility of the

reinvention of authority is given through the end of analysis, which,

in Lacanian terms, makes possible a coordination of the lack in the

24
subject with the lack in the Other as the opening of a moment of

freedom or renegotiation with our own ideologically-

overdetermined fundamental fantasy. While even here we might

query just how ‘radical’ this reinvention is – do we trade one master

for another? – we can also note the difficulty that this is an

individual solution. How is it possible to imagine such an activity as

collective, political and cultural?

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud at once

indicated the existence of a ‘cultural super-ego’ (1985b: 336) and

the possibility of ‘a pathology of cultural communities’ (1985b: 339).

The ‘special difficulty’ Freud identified for this task was a lack of a

control group for comparison: ‘[f]or a group all of whose members

are affected by one and the same disorder no such background

could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere.’ (1985b: 338) Of

course it is perfectly possible to suggest means by which we could

find standards for comparison: historically, transculturally, or

immanently, for example. What rather also appears as a ‘special

difficulty’ is the lack of agents to carry this analysis out. Freud,

after all, may be content with the ‘Münchausen effect’ by which

certain individuals can pull themselves up by their hair from a

pathological community through psychoanalysis. But, presuming

the absence of mass-psychoanalysis, if we are to make ideology

critique anything more than a variant of cultural pessimism or

cultural criticism then we have to answer the question of the

25
agency or agencies who might do something with the ‘minimal

difference’ of the immanent Other.

The difficulty is that the very skill by which psychoanalysis

probes and realises the lures and ruses of ideology seems to exactly

erase that possibility. This returns us to the aporia I noted in

opening this analysis, and which has recently been restated by

Slavoj Žižek:

Lacan unveiled the illusions on which capitalist reality as

well as its false transgressions are based, but his final

result is that we are condemned to domination – the

Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic

order, so the attempts to overcome domination only

generate new figures of the Master. (2012: 18−19)

Of course we could counter that Lacanian psychoanalysis is not

Frankfurt school-type pessimism, in that it always leaves an

irreducible discordance that can be politically activated. But I don’t

think that answer is satisfactory unless we can articulate the

potential agential dimension of change on which such Lacanian-

inspired ideology critique is premised and which might actuate such

a potential. Without this actuation we risk remaining with a

consolatory fantasy that things could always be different, that we

are never fully subsumed by power and capitalism, but with no

means to do so. If ‘the boss of it all’ proves to be pervasive then how

could we re-articulate a new relation of authority and jouissance?

26
That is the task that confronts us and, personally, I don’t know

whether to laugh or cry.

Notes

1. Two conferences – on Dogville and Manderlay respectively –

have been organised by the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian

Ideology Critique in 2006 and 2007. For Lacanian readings of Von

Trier’s films see also the papers by Lorenzo Chiesa (2006; 2007;

2012), David Denny (2007), and, of course, Žižek’s many

references to and discussions of Lars Von Trier’s films (for example,

in The Parallax View (2006), Violence (2008b), and so on).

2. One of the film’s trailers plays exactly on this perception, by

contrasting the evident controversy of Von Trier’s earlier work to

this ‘office comedy’, see http://uk.youtube.com/watch?

v=UHjVPLpAlMs

3. Like Wagner’s Wotan, Ravn could be considered to be a ‘God of

contracts’ (Žižek in Žižek & Dolar 2002: 136).

4. In his critical Guardian review Peter Bradshaw (2008) has

suggested that we take the whole ‘Automavision’ process with a

large pinch of salt.

5. Von Trier commented in an interview for Future Movies that:

27
 The fact is that we have a lot of Icelandic people who are

buying most of Copenhagen right now. For 400 years,

Iceland was under the Danish Crown. All the Icelandic

people hate the Danes in that sense. They have freaked

themselves out about the Danes. There is this scar from

these 400 years that is rightfully there.

On the recent Icelandic financial crisis see the report by Haukur

Már Helgason, ‘Iceland Sinks’ (2008).

6. This concept of the ‘minimal difference’ is discussed at length,

and with reference to Hegel, by Žižek in Organs Without Bodies

(2004: 60-74).

28
References

Anon. (2008) ‘The Boss of It All: Interview with Lars Von Trier’,

Future Movies,

http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=237

Badiou, A. (2008) ‘“We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary

Politics and the Crisis of the Negative’, Interview by Filippo Del

Lucchese and Jason Smith, Critical Inquiry 34: 645–59.

Bradshaw, P. (2008) ‘The Boss of It All’, The Guardian Friday

February 29 2008,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/feb/29/worldcinema.comedy

Chiesa, L. (2006) ‘Lacan with Lars von Trier: Tragic Transgression

and Symbolic Reinscription’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

Humanities 11.2: 49–62.

Chiesa, L. (2007) ‘What is the Gift of Grace? On Dogville’, Film-

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philosophy.com/2007v11n3/chiesa.pdf

Chiesa, L. (2012) ‘Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror

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Critchley, S. (1999) ‘Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-

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Helgason, H. M. (2008) ‘Iceland Sinks’, London Review of Books

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Husband, S. (2008) ‘Lars Von Trier: finally, The Boss of it All?, The

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Jameson, F. (2006) ‘First Impressions’, London Review of Books

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Lacan, J. (1999) Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of

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Macnab, G. (2006) ‘I’m a control freak – but I was not in control’:

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Žižek, S. (2008a) In Defense of Lost Causes. London and New York:

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Filmography

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Teorema (1968)

Trier, Lars Von, The Kingdom (TV miniseries, 1994)

___, Breaking the Waves (1996)

___, The Idiots (1998)

___, Dancer in the Dark (2000)

___, Dogville (2003)

___, Manderlay (2005)

___, The Boss of it All (2006)

___, Antichrist (2009)

33