What do you do when you’re miserable? Watch a movie about the
end of the world, of course.
Tonight I watched Melancholia
directed by Lars von Trier.
This film is about a very unhappy family; at first I thought
it was another proof of Tolstoy’s remark that each unhappy family is alike in its own way. This film, however, makes a different point: all families are
unhappy and they are unhappy in exactly the same way. All families, all members
of all families are ultimately doomed. There is nothing more certain than this
– nothing is certain except this.
This may be a particularly useless piece of knowledge but I
think that’s the point. There is very little consolation in this film –
everyone dies in the end and this is obvious from the beginning – love does not
conquer all, no one gets rescued…God? Von Trier has no use for that
proposition. This film never becomes didactic. There is no moral, there are no
instructions with this story. And yet at the end of this film the audience,
unlike the protagonists, are still alive. Paradoxically, the most valuable
knowledge may very well be the most useless, the knowledge that demands a
response. This demand can only be made of people, like those in this film, who've had all their illusions stripped away.
In this way I think, really, this film is a very late work of the Northern Renaissance! The Renaissance was when science was new, it was when humanism was fearless. It was a pre lapsarian moment where science, art and literature revealed sometimes terrifying truths and had not yet been used to obscure those truths. In science, truth preceded the myth of techno-scientific progress and in art and literature, insight preceded propaganda.
Melancholia belongs to the Renaissance because it uncovers rather than obscures truth; it shows but does not assuage.
The story of the film takes place on two weekends separated
by a few months. The first part of the film is about the very unhappy wedding
of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård).
Justine is deeply melancholic, and though she tries to hide it, she suffers a
number of breakdowns as the wedding goes on and eventually, she rejects her husband,
walks into the garden and has sex with a complete stranger.
The next day her
husband leaves.
While her marriage disintegrates before it ever really
begins, her back story – as revealed through the brilliantly portrayed inadequacies
and insanities of her parents (played by John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling) is
one of familial disintegration too. It seems,
at the level of intimate relationships at least, all Justine has known, all she
will ever know, is hopelessness and
failure.
And yet, hopelessness and failure is all that awaits everyone in this film. At the end a huge planet, 'Melancholia', collides with the Earth and wipes everyone out!
The doom that surrounds these characters is amplified cleverly by the constant repetition through the film of the opening notes of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde:
The theme of the inevitability of death is announced early in the film: it begins with a choral
prologue of the star crossed fate awaiting the characters. The planet is shown
colliding with the earth and a Renaissance masterpiece Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow is shown
disintegrating.
The death-drive energies released by the secular impulses of
the Renaissance which were later tamed by the optimism of the enlightenment and
the naiveté of belief in the progress of science are revived – or really, exhumed - in this film.
What is more terrifying than the reminder that planets are
not fixed? Perhaps it is only the sight
of a rapidly and lethally approaching planet that could remind us of the
enormity of what Copernicus or Galileo had to say in the Renaissance.
Theirs
was a message that was terrified rather than reassured.
Renaissance Science was not religion, which is more than you can say for science over the last couple of centuries! A lot of people have a lot of faith in science. Certainly, the latter half of the film gives
the lie to any remaining shred of belief in a notion that science can save us
all.
Suffice it to say that the conclusion of this film doesn’t
involve Bruce Willis, a space shuttle, nuclear bombs or any hope that
technology get us out of this fix.
A really obvious palimpsest of this film is Dürer’s
engraving Melancholia. The disenchanting
effects of science that feature in the second half of the film – it has terrified
us and in the end, just bloody well let us down – are identical to those recorded by Dürer.
Von Trier alludes to the Renaissance again in his
characterisation of Justine. She has a suicidal trajectory that is visually linked
to Ophelia at various points. Justine
knows she’s going to die and she knows it from the very start.
What else then is she to do with her husband and his plans
to have children and live in a tomato grove but reject them all. There is no
future, so what’s the point?
Justine has many faults but she is not dishonest. In a key
scene she goes into a room and takes down a number of abstract, modernist
prints and replaces them with other, Renaissance, and Romantic works.
She chooses Brueghel’s The
Hunters in the Snow and The Land of
Cockaigne , Millais’ Ophelia and The Woodman’s Daughter, Blake’s A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallow,
Caravaggio’s David with the Head of
Goliath and Hill’s Crying Deer.
What is she doing here? As a character, Justine is careless if
not contemptuous of other people. And yet, in this scene, the only one in the
whole film where she seems to care about anything, she flies into a near rage
in the effort to put art depicting other people on display! Of course,
attempting to unify Justine by any analysis that seeks to make her a coherent
person misses the point. She isn’t a coherent person.
She is a prophetess of doom, an articulation of the
inescapable truth of death symbolised by the approaching, and appropriately
named, planet, Melancholia. As I wrote at the beginning, she is a vehicle for a
useless, terrifying, yet infinitely valuable truth.
The paintings she chooses are not abstractions; they directly
engage with the disturbing inevitability of death and disintegration.
Bruegel’s The Hunters
in the Snow shows a bird’s eye (disturbingly inhuman) view of all human
life. The pathetic houses and fruitless hunt (the men are empty handed) show
the radical vulnerability of human beings to the whims of nature.
The Land of Cockaigne is
a surrealistic representation of the disintegration of human beings from within;
unlike Justine who’s imploding due to celestially driven depression, the men in
Bruegel’s painting are gluttons and drunkards.
Millais’ Ophelia
has an erotic charge as powerful as that forcing all the characters in the film
to watch in awe as the Melancholia hurtles towards the earth.
The paintings by Blake and Caravaggio that Justine finds are
both obscenely violent and gory.
These paintings represent precisely Justine’s assessment of
what is going on: “The earth is evil,
there’s no need to grieve for it, no one will miss it”
In the second half of the film Justine returns to her sister,
Claire’s house in a state of catatonia. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who
seems far more ‘normal’ than her sister, is torn by anxieties about the
approaching planet. She doubts the consolations of science, though, unlike her
sister, she still retains the vestiges of hope. When her husband, John (Kiefer
Sutherland) tells her that Melancholia won’t hit earth she partly – the wishfully thinking part – believes him.
It is only at the end of the film that she finds out the
truth. As it turns out she doesn’t need complicated scientific instruments. She
learns what the angel of Genius learns in Dürer’s Melancholia by using a tool for measuring the movement of the
approaching planet made by her seven year old son with a coat hanger.
I guess this means of confirming the truth relies on the crudest of technologies in order that Von Trier can indict
scientific pretension and naiveté without at the same time dismissing
scientific method.
What is Claire’s son’s coat hanger if it is not an organic
extension of the will to know and the impulse to observe? What is Claire’s
husband’s telescope and his blind faith in science if it is not – respectively -
an over sophistication of inquiry and a betrayal of scientific method?
Perhaps all that science in the Renaissance gave us was a
world where there were no illusions. Renaissance science had come with a sword
and had not yet learned to patch up the wounds it inflicted.
Justine is melancholic because she cannot but see what
Copernicus and Galileo, Bruegel, Caravaggio and Shakespeare saw: a world where (if you observed it) the truth was as
follows: planets do not stand still, the material world may very well be all
that there is, death is probably the only absolute truth and human beings are
deeply troubled and stumbling beings.
