ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship of the related figures of social contract and dysfunctional town, and how they explicate law’s role in historical violence. It also argues that Dogville essentially concerned with the relationship between representation and contract – both the social contract and the individual contractual arrangements that are key to contemporary legal and social life. Dogville tells the story of Grace Margaret Mulligan, a young woman on the run, who flees a corrupt, mafia-run city and comes upon an isolated town. At first glance, the town seems wholesome and kindly. The year is 1933: the mines have closed and there is no money. There is nothing innovative about a community dehumanizing an outsider. But Dogville is innovative in the way it stages the framing of this dehumanization: rather than a naturalistic slide into violence, the film frames Grace’s treatment by the town as an effect of moral and legal technique.
