Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark (2000) develops a provocative aesthetic of attention to affliction. The significance of this aesthetic is developed with reference to Simone Weil's understanding of affliction as deep psychic, social and physical suffering. She finds that humans habitually avoid affliction with consolations of optimistic political or religious meaning, and that deep suffering is thus rarely engaged with empathic "living attention." Through his characterization of Selma, and in his manipulations of the conventions of the musical, von Trier elicits this kind of attention, creating an important ethical opportunity for viewers to enlarge their capacity for responsiveness to deep suffering. However, von Trier's film also demonstrates Weil's point that attention to affliction is a miracle like walking on water: a near impossibility. In von Trier's otherwise mobile aesthetic, that impossibility is betrayed in his use of existing patriarchal conventions of affliction, habitually feminized as hysteria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".