Has anyone watched the director's cut for Nymphomaniac on Netflix? (Spoilers)

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So I finally got around to watching Nymphomaniac, and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the movie until the last ten seconds. Now before discussing it, let me state I get what it was supposed to mean. Seligman is supposed to represent the intelligentsia, and his digressions are supposed to poke fun at the connections film critics make in search of a deeper meaning. Sometimes they are spot on, and sometimes in the words of Joe they "are the weakest digressions yet". By having him attempt to rape her at the end it is supposed to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the intelligentsia, which is not a bad thing in of itself, it was just executed with the subtlety of a monkey with in a sledgehammer in a china shop. Not only that it ruins the character arcs and plot arcs.

To begin with it is clear that Joe is on a descent, and her time with K definitely represents the nadir of her experience. After K she tries to find redemption in P, by being the mother she never was to Marcel, and the lover she never was to Jerome. However, P isn't perfect. Several remarks and actions show she's rash, emotional, and spoiled (in that she gets what she wants when she wants it). In a way it was perfectly set up, as Joe had often acted similarly with men through her own impulsive nature, and it was a bit of comeuppance that P leave Joe for Jerome.

So what do we have? A failed redemption story. But that's the point of Seligman's character, by passing judgement on her as a good human being who just has a socially frowned upon interest, he's vouching that she does not need to redeem herself for anything, and validates her life thus achieving a redemption arc. It was a perfect ending, ends the character arcs and plot arcs well and most importantly with cohesion.

Now all of the sudden he tries to rape her, what the frick? This makes no sense based on all of the screen time they shared. I'm sure if someone compiled all the scenes he was in throughout the entire movie and rewatched it focusing on the scenes they would find no allusions or hints to his hypocrisy. There was no build up like there was with P of hints to their true nature that made the betrayal inevitable, there wasn't even an arc that implied it. This was the equivalent of a character just waking up one day and for no reason deciding to walk off a bridge. Not only that, it ruined the rest of the movie for me. By placing this jab at intelligentsia above the rest of the film, Trier demonstrated that was really the only purpose of this film, to mock the people that wounded his feelings at Cannes. If you want to make a movie about that, go right ahead, but he did not make that movie. Instead, it makes me think about all the times she criticized his digressions as the true point of the movie, which makes this an ego project for the director. Honestly, it ruined what was otherwise a good movie for me.

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