If modernism is underpinned by a sense of having arrived ...

If modernism is underpinned by a sense of having arrived too late, Lars and W. are seemingly too late to have even arrived - to have genuinely occurred - at all. Even their despair is disembodied and secondhand, a dim echo of someone else's hopeless struggle for authenticity. Their self-consciousness renders every gesture a cliché, every histrionic expression of despair a redundant parody of a continental tradition that remains out of reach, laughing down at them from on high. Whereas Kafka had despair and meaninglessness, W. and Lars – two Brods cut adrift without a leader – have only idiocy.

from Danny S Byrne's interesting review of Dogma at Ready, Steady, Book.