And here’s a big, fat fuck you to Lars Von Trier.

Von Trier, whose fear of flying has prevented him from visiting the United States, won thunderous cheers at the world premiere and a news conference, where he said he enjoyed bashing America on screen because it invades his life even in Denmark.

“We are all under the influence—and it’s a very bad influence—from America,” said the 49-year-old Dane. “In my country everything has to do with America. America is kind of sitting on the world.

“America has to do with 60 percent of my brain and all things I experience in my life, and I’m not happy about that,” von Trier said. I’d say 60 percent of my life is American so I am in fact an ‘American’ too. But I can’t go there and vote or change anything there. That is why I make films about America.”

First, bashing America at Cannes is always a good way to get noticed. Von Trier may be hailed as a brave, visionary genius, but the fact is he’s just a whore of another kind. His movies are so focused on the bad in America that he never noticed that there’s good here, too. Dogville was so unrelentingly dismal, so completely free from joy or even a moment’s happiness, that it wasn’t so much painful to watch as incredibly dull. As a stylized look at crime, hypocrisy, and cruelty in America, movie geeks and critics praised it even while the public ignored it.

But hating America must be an easy task for people like Von Trier, who live in a happy utopian Europe, a socialist wonderland with nary a problem in site. No one has ever been raped, murdered, cheated, or lied to in Von Trier’s Denmark. There are no racial problems and they’ve even ended poverty. Denmark never indulged in slavery or the persecution of people with different religious or racial or sexual affiliations, nor did they partake in that dreadful colonialism bit that really set the world up for a lot of future problems.

It must be awfully nice to be able to identify the source of all the world’s ills so easily.

Maybe we should apologize for the lives we lost helping Europe in both World Wars. Or maybe for all of the money and effort we put into rebuilding nations that were ravaged by those wars. Maybe we should give out a big “sorry” for helping to bring about the end of communism--putting our soldiers at risk and using them as “tripwires” against Soviet aggression instead of leaving Western Europe to handle the problems all by themselves.

How about a big “oops” for America’s funding of a disproportionate share of the UN (the rest of the world might be okay with that one, but, boy, I’d sure like to say sorry to Americans who continue to shoulder an excess of the burden of funding a mildly anti-American, bureaucratic wasteland like the UN). Maybe a little mea culpa for standing against aggression in Korea at a staggering loss of American lives.

If Von Trier is talking about America’s cultural dominance, then I have no apologies at all. See, while I would sincerely love to apologize to the rest of the world for Titanic (just to choose an example), I can’t. No one forces people to eat at Macdonalds or to shop at Walmart, and no one straps them down to their seats to see tripe like Titanic. If other nations don’t want our cultural exports, there is a simple way to stem the tide: stop buying the stuff.

I’ll never understand how so many millions of people could ever love a movie like Titanic, but I certainly won’t apologize for the thing. Frankly, I find it just as staggering that people could find so much to like in Von Trier’s own Dogville.

Von Trier is a smug, arrogant, self-righteous little anti-American prick--and, in that way, he’s just a diminutive Michael Moore only without the sense of humor. He’s welcome to his thoughts and his beliefs and his hatred of America in the same way that I’m welcome to loathing him; luckily, his movies are generally pretty easy to ignore.