Came here to specifically mention Von Trier and that movie. With my short ass attention span, I'm surprised that I managed to sit through those two movies.
You're last point is interesting because I thought the fact that the audience was supposed to sympathize with her abandoning her toddler son was a load of bullshit.
I cannot be entirely sure that von Trier deliberately sets up the protagonist Joe as sympathatic
. Some audience may take Seligman's concluding remark, that Joe has suffered so much simply because she is a woman (which is bullshit), at face value, but then Seligman is nothing but a more well-read loveshy, and he might said so in order to get in Joe's good graces and then her pants. Still I think there is something very manipulative about
Part II of
Nymphomaniac: the film deliberately sets up a whole series of gauntlets for Joe: the child negligence and the subsequent divorce, the trouble at work, the self-induced abortion (which is the height of absurdity), and the "sex triangle" at the end of the film, that the audience may be tempted to feel sorry for Joe, and, because the
Part II focuses almost entirely on sex (unlike
Part I, which has Joe's relationship with her father as counterpoint), come home thinking that her suffering is due entirely to her free pursuit of female sexuality -- and this is in complete accord with the politically-correct mainstream thinking that sexually liberated women are unjustly punished in a men's world.
