The Idiots is a 1998 Danish black comedy/drama written and directed by Lars von Trier, shot under the rules of the Dogme 95 manifesto.
The semi-mockumentary film concerns a small group of people who pretend in public to be mentally disabled, which they call “spazzing”. They do this as an elaborate prank, as a kind of performance art, as a passive-aggressive attack on society (épater les bourgeois), and for other reasons. Rotating members of the group play “the minders”. Karen, a seemingly lost woman, is swept up in the group and stays with them.
George Costanza: [In a depression clinic] I should be in a place like this. I envy this woman. You get to wear slippers all day. Friends visit. They pity you. Pity is very underrated.
Seinfeld, S03E02 “The Truth”
I discuss this film because it brushes up against certain expressions of masochism, particularly those that involve public roleplay and abjection. We know that Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby often did public roleplay, as did Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Aurora Rumelin. This connects with the kink of disability fetishism, such as the creative works of “Paracathy“, as well as certain forms of ageplay.
Stoffer is the group’s unofficial leader, in part because he provides the house where they squat. In fact, he’s supposed to be selling it for his uncle. He also criticizes the others for perceived flaws in their performance of mental disability, that they weren’t bringing out their “inner idiot.”
Spazzing is based on the idea that to be “in touch with your inner idiot” is a privileged, even exalted state. People either leave you alone or coddle you, freeing you from all expectations and responsibilities, allowing social transgression without punishment. (See the concept of homo sacer.) Stoffer uses spazzing to eat at fancy restaurants and not pay, for example, or go into the woman’s change room in a public pool.
This idea of abjection-as-exaltation appears in the true story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Blanchard was the subject of her mother’s Munchausen-by-proxy, claiming her daughter was younger than she actually was and had a host of medical problems. Blanchard, along with her mother, had been publicly performing “the perfect victim” for nearly her entire life, and was “paid” with money and a house with a wheelchair ramp, as well as the charity and pity of others. To escape this, Blanchard had to not be the perfect victim, which eventually led to the murder of her mother. She traded a privileged form of abjection to a scorned form.
On one of the group’s “spazzing” expeditions, Stoffer, as the “minder”, leaves Jeppe, a young man, in the company of a group of tough-looking guys. Instead of abusing him, the toughs look after him, and even take him to the bathroom. Stoffer explains this as forcing Jeppe to perfect his spazzing performance. If he is totally innocent, the perfect victim, the toughs will leave him alone, or even care for him. If he shows even a hint of ability or agency, they will beat him up. Stoffer eventually returns and collects Jeppe. As soon as Jeppe’s out of sight of the toughs, he runs away from Stoffer. His “spazzing” depended on there being somebody there to protect him; in other words, Stoffer was a bad dominant.
Stoffer also demands that the members take their “inner idiot” into their regular lives, to “spazz” before people who know them. One member says he will do this in a work presentation, but doesn’t, much to Stoffer’s contempt.
Jim Goad, an American author and publisher who is described as the “godfather of the new right”, published a zine in the early 1990s called ANSWER Me! One of the issues included the following passage:
True psychos stand alone. The only pioneers are those who give voices to the ugliest corridors of their unconscious without fear of censure from any quarter. The acts that ordinary of people commit behind closed doors are beyond the ken of any performance artist. Humans’ innate weirdness is far more threating [sic] and entertaining than anything the professional shock mavens could conjure.I boggle your conception of a world split between cognoscenti and squares.I subvert the subversive and bury the underground under six feet of its own hypocritical manure. I perform unsolicited tattooing, body-piercing, and ritual scarification upon you. Give vent to your sickest fantasies, but don’t call it art. Cornhole Barbara Bush, but only if you want to. Sketch your astrological chart with your own feces,but only if it feels good. If you want to do something truly radical, kill yourself. We’ll have one less reader, but the world will be a better place.
I don’t know if Goad ever saw The Idiots, but I imagine that both the “spazzers” within the film and the film itself would be a great disappointment to him. The spazzers’ reluctance and failure to remove the separation from this mode of life and their “real”, bourgeois lives illustrate Goad’s point completely: only the truly abject are truly authentic. You can’t be abject as a weekend warrior; you have to go all the way.
The Idiots ends with Karen following Stoffer’s challenge to take her inner idiot into her regular life. She returns to her repressed middle-class family, who wonders where she has been the past two weeks. We also learn that Karen’s baby died recently. When Karen sits down to eat with her family, she “spazzes”, letting food dribble out of her mouth. Her husband brutally slaps her face.
Karen is in touch with her inner idiot, and it’s in so much pain from losing her child, she can’t express it verbally. Far from the coddling of the disabled that Stoffer both craves and disdains, this is the cruel treatment society bestows on people who won’t or can’t conform to bourgeois ideas of behavior and bodies.
In the comedy film Lady Ballers (2023), a group of cis male ex-athletes claim to be transwomen or genderqueer to succeed against women athletes. In this film’s world, to be a transwoman is to be in a privileged elite, with the entire world fawning about how “brave and beautiful” you are. “Just shave your legs, tell each other how brave you are for things that require absolutely no physical courage. And don’t be afraid to cry at work. Easy peasy.” You’d never know the amount of ostracism and violence directed at transgender people. What drives this film is a perverse form of envy, the yearning to be “special” in the eyes of others, or maybe just frustrated entitlement leading to resentment.
Resenting the world is what drives Stoffer too, leading to his passive-aggressive hostility in his “spazzing” and how he bullies the other “spazzers”. The irony is that some of his dialog and actions hint that he has some experience with mental health institutions, so his abject “inner idiot” might be closer to the surface than he wants to admit.
How sweet to be an Idiot,
As harmless as a cloud,
Too small to hide the sun
Almost poking fun,
At the warm but insecure untidy crowd.How sweet to be an idiot,
And dip my brain in joy,
Children laughing at my back,
With no fear of attack,
As much retaliation as a toy.
Neil Innes, “How Sweet to be an Idiot”, 1973
“Spazzing” only works if there’s a social taboo surrounding the mentally disabled, that they are to be cared for, instead of abandoned or punished as useless. That’s a relatively recent social development. Without that, they are intensely vulnerable.
