jdeureka Review of The Boss of It All

The Boss of It All (2006)

Von Trier's "The Boss of It All": the Perverse Pleasures of Nihilism.

[6/10 · 7 January 2010]

With Lars Von Trier's "The Boss of It All" (2006) welcome to an odd dozen characters in search of meaning. Here is Kafka Land, Luigi Pirandello Place. "The Boss of It All" puts the audience in a modern cube of a building that could be in New Jersey or Denmark in any modern, widget-selling company. "The Boss of It All" is comic desert not office comedy. Here are the delights of the absurd without its fun, its articulate melancholy, or the slapstick darkness of "Waiting for Godot". In "The Boss of It All" business is sheer busyness. One critic @: "http://www.filmcritic.com/" put the film's core issue very well: "careerism and the business world have surpassed brutality and arrived in the realm of hostile idiocy." Yes. But is this not dishonest on Von Trier's part? Isn't he in the movie industry? This film aches with nihilism. "The Boss of It All" confirms Camus's remark: "The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact...we are suffering from nihilism."