Abstract

The House that Jack Built (2018), a film about how the protagonist Jack is reborn as a "mad artist" with psychotic symptoms during a 12-year killing spree, provides an interesting opportunity to analyze the film in terms of psychoanalysis and religion. Jack, an engineer who suffers from OCD, finds pleasure in the accidental murder of a character and considers killing people as an art form, overcoming his OCD in the process. The question we are interested in is whether the symptoms of OCD are truly overcome by the act of repeated killing. The idea is that Jack's OCD is not overcome by killing, but rather that the symptoms disappear as he moves from neurosis to a stabilized psychotic state. According to the theory of the famous French psychoanalyst Lacan, the hallucinations or delusions that human subjects experience when they lose their realistic stability are a phenomenon that occurs when they are confronted with The Real, which penetrates through the cracks of the symbolic system. Phenomena such as Jack's illusory reality and delusions in the movie are pathological symptoms of the absence of a paternal figure in his life, causing the Name-of-the-Father to fail to take hold. This paper deciphers the psychotic structure of Jack, the protagonist of Lars von Trier's House of Jack, through Lacanian psychoanalysis.