Melancholia (2011) review

The end of the world.

Assuming that every artist is compelled to his art, one must ask what this need is, this idea, opinion or feeling, which makes an artist be that artist and no one else. Lars Von Trier’s need revolves around this idea: one cannot be neutral with regard to people. The option of not caring, simply looking away, refraining or retiring from the ethico-political sphere is simply not possible for him: he forces you to look, you must look, and once you look at it, you'll feel them (i.e., humans) in your gut, and you cannot easily do away with whatever goes on in the gut-level. Once you're in, you must take sides, neutrality or withdrawal from the world is no longer an option and whichever choice you make regarding the world is bound to become a universal choice. Lars Von Trier is an universalist and his road to it is either absolute optimism or absolute pessimism: the latter in Dogville (2003), the former in Melancholia (2011). In Dogville the universalist choice is brutal and revengeful–– but only after great expectations are deposited on people, that is, only after an entirely optimistic approach does he arrive at some kind of Hobbesian pessimism. In Melancholia the universalist choice is compassionate and redeeming–– caring, or love, becomes possible as a dimension of life only after he fully embraces pessimism. 

Let us examine this in Melancholia. The film is a cultural imperative, that is, it must be watched even if to be hated. The end of the world has been a rather blithely topic of conversation in culture for the past 25 years or so; Lars Von Trier’s film is the first serious consideration of it by a master of cinema since Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Now, the first thing to be understood, and that is perhaps rather implicit in the film, is that it is profoundly Christian. This, as a matter of fact, is not a sign of finesse–– our culture, indeed, is prodigious in producing stories such as the one in Melancholia, soaking of Christian sorrows, without their authors even realizing what forces were behind them. And without this realization, which I think is the case with Lars Von Trier here, comes a certain note of affectation, the haughtiness of an artist who’s sure to have found some deep and sublime grotto––– at his own backyard!...

No, Melancholia is not some sublime grotto; nor is it a resounding ocean, or a profuse river: it is, rather, a pond, so disposed as to distort the sight–– an optical illusion. Besides the inspired images – it is a work of vision – just a few minutes of reflection suffice to exhaust the film’s possibilities. The film, then, becomes a masterpiece for two reasons: first, what it is not (namely, for its inversion of the ordinary Hollywood apocalyptical blockbuster); second, for what the film indicates it could be, without ever escaping its own limitations. A shallow pond which is magnificent precisely for not being a resounding ocean, and for tricking our eyes towards real illusions. 

Melancholia could be summarized, schematically, in the following sentence: its existential pessimism is only supplanted, inadvertently, by its ethical optimism. Thus, we have a contradiction – which would not be a problem if the author were aware of it. Lars Von Trier inverts Hollywood’s catastrophist paradigm: instead of saving the world, redeeming it in a heroic act, he destroys the world––– redeeming it in a heroic act…. As Heidegger said of Sartre’s existentialist motto (“Existence precedes essence”), the inversion of a metaphysical proposition is still a metaphysical proposition. Now, the inversion of a Hollywood motif is still a Hollywood motif. 

For how else should we interpret the moral evolution of Justine (Kirsten Dunst)? (How else? An attempt to redeem... Sade?) We have seen many stories like this before, nowhere better than in Kurosawa’s Ikiru, inspired by Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illich:  the banal clerk Watanabe finds out he has cancer and will die soon; after a few stops in the existential road for meaning, he finds it in ethical (and political) involvement. The shock, the abyss, the trauma: but an urge towards a “moment of clarity”. However, in Melancholia the initial shock is… the end of the world! If this lady requires the apocalypse in order to be moral and recognize love, then I’d say she is beyond redemption already. In a word, serenity and compassion, when facing the absolute end, is much too easy… For these to have any value they must come in media res. Without a tomorrow it is just as easy to be saint as it is to be a pervert. From this, the Christian content of Melancholia is made explicit: if intentional, too mellow; if inadvertent, as I claim, a failure. (A grand failure is still a failure). 

Why a failure? ––– It all comes down to the interpretation of the recurrent musical theme of Melancholia: the Prelude of Tristan and Isolde. Yes: the film boils down to an cinematic exegesis of the Prelude. Thus being, it is a bad interpretation of Wagner. More precisely: it is a bad interpretation of the Prelude. Even more precisely: it is a bad interpretation of Tristan’s chord. Melancholia, the planet which will destroy Earth, is just another name for Tristan’s chord. Therefore, a bad interpretation. Lars Von Trier associates it, repeatedly, with the end: the end of a marriage, end of a career, end of human bonds, end of human life, the end, ultimately, of the world. In other words: death… The whole film passes as a succession of endings, with brutal chance, Heraclitus’ child, metaphorized in the planet coming towards Earth: blind contingency and the unmaking of the cosmos’ economy. The film is a constant “It is coming! It is coming!...”, which means it is marked by a prophetic rhythm. Nevertheless, it neglects – and here it is, the ethical optimism – that an end can only fully make sense to those who are already beyond it, that is, the end is only properly said by those who have surpassed it, or: the apprehension of the end presupposes its residues. 

It’s not there, in the end, as Lars Von Trier wants it, that one finds the true abode of the terrible, the inevitable, the absurd, the true augur, the… melancholia… That’s not where it is, definitely. It is, rather, one step ahead: the recurrent after-the-end, the fallout, or: the after-wards. It’s in the constant again, the return, the fatal possibility of continuation, of the “What now?” ––– in these interstices of opening and incompleteness uncertainty lies, the angst, the true suffering. By realizing the end Lars Von Trier realizes, also, consolation: the final redemption of capitalism which seeks, above all, the end of history: the final say-so, arbitrary, violent, capable of ceasing continuation, that is, ceasing change. Kill history: even if thereby we kill the world and ourselves… Any denouement soothes, numbs; it’s the absence of its possibility that afflicts: the gaps, the breaches… 

This is what Tristan’s chord compels us to feel, with supreme irony, returning briefly after the Liebestod, that is, after the end. It’s a profound irony, indeed, even a scorn: yes, it is a scorn, Tristan’s chord. The return of the augur, return of the menace of an augur. Dreary, sullen, nocturne: never luminous as a planet (there is no light in Tristan’s chord…). It simply… looms. A danger, the smile of a Grim Reaper which does not swing his blade, but holds steady the sickle, wielding it in a grin––– an ever returning enemy, an irresolute presence. Cioé, Tristan’s chord, a triumph of tragedy. It is not, then, in the end’s realization, but in its constant and immediate reversal as unrealizable, its constant menace, followed by an equally constant continuation under menace.

This is what Lars Von Trier failed to represent (though it is indicated) since he did not go beyond a hopeful common sense view: “Death!, oh the end…”, it is usually thought. ––– “To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come” –––. Indeed, well did Shakespeare know the dread beyond death. The end is solace, the truly terrible is its unrealizable presence, the skull by a basket of fruits in a still life ( ––– dead nature shining, more alive than the real). Most would give anything for an ending, for a definite outcome, closure, even though most are not aware of it most of the time. ––– Well, then, in a word: life’s the problem, not death… 

Nietzsche, Wagner’s mutinous bastard-child, understood this. His “eternal return of the same” is the philosophical consecration of what is beyond, what’s terribly beyond, mere death, mere ending, mere absence of meaning. It’s all this – and more: it’s the constant, inevitable return of all this. The ineluctable repetition of the eternal “What now?”, of the eternal “What to do?”. His doctrine’s fatalism is always posthumous: it becomes effective only after the end. After... The after-wards, that is, tending in the direction of the after. This is what Lars Von Trier rids himself of, in psychological relief perhaps, redeeming the world in a conception which… inspires! Justine, after doing bad all day, does good all night, so to speak. She becomes the ethical refuge of whatever’s left (the child and her sister), she lives up to the ethical challenge, and we feel (or: we’re supposed to feel…) that in spite of everything, in spite of the absolute end, we can do it: after being forced to look at humanity – we can withstand it, we can even love it. (That is, Melancholia’s Justine is an answer to Dogville’s Grace). 

An optimistic film, indeed, which thinks to find its optimism at the end, after navigating extreme pessimism: but in this, as we saw, it fails, for it neglected true pessimism, since it mistook it for the absolute end, missing its beyond and its afterwards. Optimistic, then, insofar as it does not look deep enough into the abyss –– therefore, a frail optimism, yet a masterful one, since it indicates its own shortcomings (especially through the choice of Wagner for the score). True optimism would only be possible once this inevitable after-wards has been properly faced, braved, and endured, allowing, then, for a rather joyful comprehension that, though inevitable, this after-wards is ours. (As in Zorba the Greek, perhaps, or even: The Wild Bunch, another film about endings…)

“The end–– death…?”, asks Lars Von Trier. Not quite, quips back Fernando Pessoa: 

“Dead, we’re still dying.

“Lydia, we’re only ours.”