Here, though, the polarities have been reversed, so that instead of crime sans punishment in the film's Year Zeroville there is crime without boundaries. In other words, totalitarian order has been superseded by a theology of annihilation. The atmosphere of burnished fatalism in The Element of Crime's sepia-toned noir composition is a bit too polished, too facile. But the same could be said of Blade Runner, which it resembles after a deromanticized fashion. And certainly Alphaville and The Trial are both facile, if in different ways.
Crime operates on a similar principle of poetic effrontery.
The Trial giving its voices the same quality of forlorn cries in a deserted building, it's a tone poem to crumbling Europe. Von Trier's intertextuality turns cultural artifacts into alien runes. One thing von Trier isn't, for all the severity of his images, is an ascetic. It seems quaint in the wake of The X-Files, which as a symptom rather than a diagnosis goes deeper into political economy of the occult. You are alone, at the mercy of forces you don't understand.