The term 'grace' designates a key-notion of Christian theology. 'Grace' derives from the Latin 'gratia', which is the translation of the Greek term 'charis' as used in the New Testament. In the Bible of the Seventy, ‘charis’ renders in its turn a similar notion which is already present in the Old Testament in the guise of the Biblical term 'hén' / 'chén'. In his philological review of Lars von Trier's film Dogville, Charles Baladier (2003) reminds us that this Hebrew term has three different intertwined meanings: it refers to the abstract favour that is awarded by a high rank personality to one of his subjects, the concrete witnessing of this benevolence on the part of the benefactor who thus fait grâce, as well as the charm that the beneficiary receives from the fact of being in the benefactor's good graces. Grace can never be attributed to just one person. The dialectical character of this notion is even more evident in the Latin term 'gratia', which can signify both generosity in giving and gratitude for having received. To put it simply, both the Biblical and the Roman pagan grace are ultimately based on a continuous exchange of favours, or gifts, in which what Marcel Mauss named the gift-exchange of primitive societies still resonates.
More precisely, Mauss describes the gift-exchange as the 'exchanges and contracts [that] take place in the form of presents [...] given and reciprocated obligatorily [...] a "total" social phenomen[on] [that gives expression to] all kinds of institutions at one and the same time – religious, juridical, moral, [...] economic' (1990, 3). From this standpoint, the whole social fabric, the symbolic order as such, however complex, is born out of and constantly relies on the gift. Jacques Lacan fully endorses this, as is shown in Seminar IV, when he relates the mythical emergence of primitive symbolisation in the child to the transformation of the virtual object into a gift. After the mother has neglected the child's appeal, objects – first of all the breast – that up to this point were, for the child, virtual objects that satisfied a biological need, are transformed into gifts that may or may not be donated by the real mother as a power. What is more, the real object of need can be perceived as such only after the child has confronted himself with a lack of object, after having realised that the object may not be donated: the relation subject-object is clearly based on the productive nature of the lack. The virtual Real precedes the Symbolic but it can be 'given' as actual only by the symbolic dimension of the gift.

In Dogville, something definitely goes wrong at the level of the gift-exchange. And this for two main reasons: first, the gift of the charming fugitive named Grace (Nicole Kidman), the gift of Grace – who gives herself away to the townspeople, as Lars von Trier remarked in an interview – is not reciprocated, or better, stops being reciprocated. As we have just seen, following Mauss, the gift, and the symbolic order it sustains, is nothing but reciprocation. Second, the unconditional way in which Grace offers herself to Dogville is as such dangerous: the pure gift soon turns into a poison (Mauss 1990, 62-63), a dis-grace. On this point, von Trier states the following: 'The idea behind Grace's treatment at the hands of the townspeople was that if you present yourself to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them'.

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