Thursday, January 2, 2014

Melancholia - A reflection on the film and on living today

Melancholia (2011) - A film by Lars von Trier

Somehow this film made an impact on me and is lingering in my thoughts and feelings. 

The basic scenario is this:  A large rogue planet, maybe 5 times the earth's size, enters the solar system. There are conflicting predictions whether this planet, called Melancholia, will pass close by the earth, thus providing a spectacular event in the sky, or whether it will actually hit the earth. Melancholia ultimately does impact the earth, head on, completely destroying it.

However, this story about the rogue planet does not really emerge until late in the film.

Part 1 begins with a hugely expensive wedding held at a fabulously wealthy country estate, where the bride's sister resides with her husband and child. The film starts with the bride being extremely late to her own wedding -- a wedding meticulously arranged by her sister and professional wedding planners.  We watch the bride as she goes through a kind of gradual breakdown at the event,  while  various kinds of dysfunction are revealed among the family and guests. In sum, we watch the bride go through a deeply felt disillusionment with and rejection of everything in her culture and family.

Part 2 starts with the former bride in an almost catatonic state of deep depression. The failed wedding is long over. She is now staying at her sister's estate, starting on the road to a manner of recuperation, albeit not a return to her former self but to something very different, rooted in a different awareness and values. Little by little the story of the rogue planet emerges. The different characters respond in different ways. The sister's very wealthy husband is an excited amateur astronomer, who remains in optimistic denial about where the rogue planet is actually heading; he constantly reassures the others — until he finally realizes the truth and kills himself, alone. At the very end, as the planet Melancholia looms larger and larger in the heavens, blocking out the sky, the former bride rejects her sister's proposal of how to spend the last moments (on the patio, with wine and candles). Instead, together with the child, she fields long sticks in the woods. In the simple woods, in herself and in the child, she has found the only resources she needs to live a meaningful, authentic life. With the sticks, on the grass, she builds a spare, simple tepee-like structure. She calls it the magic cave. The characters enter it together.

I think the film affected me because I saw the whole story as figuring the state we are all in now on planet earth, or at least in the western world. A hollowness in our civilization. The west in decline. The optimists, the mainstream press and people and their leaders, in denial. The coming doom.

Yet somehow I'm comforted, because in accepting my powerlessness to avert what is coming -- be it the collapse of our world, or simply death itself -- I can perhaps better enjoy the simple beauty of the moment, and a sense of modest dignity and a happiness that comes from realizing that I am doing the work that I am earnestly doing for the sake of doing it and for the sake of the ideals, the people and the vision that it keeps me in company with, even if the outcome is not what I hope for, even if the world is doomed.  I am building a magic cave, the best that I can.

UPDATE

I thought I'd add to my above review the somewhat more detailed analysis that I posted on the Film Quarterly site, and to which commenter "pekingthom" refers (thanks pekingthom!). For the Film Quarterly site, see: http://www.filmquarterly.org/2013/11/summer-2013-volume-66-number-4/
- MT


The film first represents Justine’s experience of the hollowness of western culture, the dysfunction of family and work, the hollowness of modern cultural forms.

Melancholia the planet threatens earth, in part, as an analog for the doom facing the west which today is in steep decline.

Justine’s painful loss of the shared ideals that hold our culture together, her loss of belief in mainstream western values, leads her to a deep depression, but ultimately also to a place of renewal. Stripped of her attachments to cultural norms, refusing to participate in John or Claire’s optimistic denials, Justine gradually comes into touch once again with a natural inner strength. This is like Nietzsche’s hero who sees the emptiness of the ideal realm, and revalues again the natural strength of the “beast.” Justine’s regaining of contact with her authentic, primordial self, connected to nature and authentic desire, is symbolized in one instance by her taking jam from the jar hungrily and vigorously with her fingers without concern for “propriety” of the spoon or knife, in another instance by her lying naked on the river bank.

The deconstruction of her former identity, and the nearness to doom, enable Justine to come into contact again with an underlying vigor for life, an appreciation of what really matters “on earth,” where ultimately nothing lasts, because we are all mortal.


She rejects Claire’s suggestion that their last moments be spent “on the patio” with “a glass of wine and candles” and Beethoven’s ninth, because all of these forms and “accessories,” these “ultimate commodities” of the western world, are built on a denial of, and have been interposed between, the self and the primordial authenticity of our condition. Authenticity has been replaced with commodity.

Instead, Justine opts to go into the woods with the child, in part symbolizing her own renewed inner child, to find sticks. She builds a spare kind of teepee structure, the “magic cave.” Justine chooses this “magic cave,” constructed from plain sticks drawn straight from the simple woods, over the wealthy setting of the castle, as a more true place to be. The magic cave symbolizes a more healthy, more honest dwelling place for humanity, a dwelling place for our living, which is also the place where we die.

I think it no accident that the magic cave is like a teepee. Melancholia the planet is like the juggernaut of the west that came down upon and wiped out indigenous peoples everywhere, including the Native American indians, and replaced their way of life with something else: a materialist dream, rooted in a blind industrialism that is ultimately destroying the planet and that leads to the ugly social dysfunction manifested during the wedding party.


This film is a rejection of those materialist values and an embrace of something much more basic. Let us give up all the pretense. Let us embrace the simple, the primitive. Let us face death together authentically. Let us enjoy the gift we have been given of this earth. Death is coming, and yet we sell our souls for corporate jobs so we can buy expensive real-estate, join golf clubs, drive fancy cars and follow all the dreams that advertising can paint.

- Marc Tognotti