Melancholia and the Ugly Truth

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.