Von Trier's apocalypse is hyper real. The Earth is eulogized with images that seem torn from high class fashion advertising. It fits nicely then that Dundst's character, protagonist Justine, is a depressive fatalist who works in advertising. When Wagner fades out the film follows Justine on her wedding day at an opulent manor house in an undisclosed location. Despite the elegant attendants and sumptuous surrounds, Justine is unable to engage in the ceremony or find an appropriate emotion for the occasion. Instead she behaves badly. She avoids her groom, skives off to take baths and fuck an interloper. She insults her boss and generally gets down to the serious business of destroying her life.
In showing all the painful details of Justine's wedding, Von Trier portrays life in the shadow of the death planet, Melancholia as nothing more than a series of empty rituals and beautiful images. For the audience, it's easy to move past the well lit chaos of the overture and be lulled into a familiar mode of reception for 'family drama', quietly moralising and sympathising with Justine and her guests. But when we glance at the night sky and see the faint red star of Melancholia approaching, our engagement is disrupted. At the point of imminent collision with Melancholia, how can we put stock in the importance of this messy family affair? Further to this, how can the melancholiac, whose past is lost and whose future always appears catastrophic, create meaning?The thinning of excess meaning is a narrative function of apocalypse. Apocalypse is a definitive ending in light of which all preceding events are interpreted. In the bible, apocalypse reveals the truth of history according to God's judgement, before a completely new world descends, 'prepared as a bride adorned for her husband'. However with Melancholia, Von Trier withholds revelation, the bride does not behave as expected and apocalypse is presented as pure spectacle without revelation.
The second part of the film follows Justine's sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Unlike Justine, Claire won't embrace the nihilism of end times and wants things to be 'nice' until the last possible second. While her husband (Kieffer Sutherland) urges her not to worry, and to 'trust the scientists', there is no doubt that the sisters' emotional connection with the apocalyptic exceeds any rational, scientific description of Melancholia. While Justine claims to have always known it would end this way, Claire anxiously measures the planet's distance with a bent coat hanger loop, which when shaped around the perimeter of its silhouette and pointed out from the chest, shows the planet decreasing or increasing in size. This device is a perfect illustration of the way we all measure the significance of the universe in relation to our own bodies. We construct events, our lives and rituals with an apocalyptic significance - revealing new ages, truths and worlds.
The apocalypse is a representational event, that is to say, it hasn't happened yet. When, in 1994 Jean Baudrillard joined with Francis Fukayama in declaring that the world had already ended, he was appealing to the post modern perception that order, both temporal and spatial has become impossible due to the proliferation of real-time media, surveillance and simulation. The collapsing of symbolic space makes us anxious about our endings, which are described as both impossible and paradoxically having already occurred when linear, universally narrated history lost plausibility and signs detached from their referents in the service of consumer capitalism. The psychological implications of living in this endless, post history waste land is, according to Baudrillard in his book The Illusion of The End, characterised by melancholia
"We are, then, unable to dream of a past or future state of things. Things are in a state which is literally definitive - neither finished, nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is, deprived of its end. Now, the feeling which goes with a definitive state, even a paradisiac one - is melancholic. Whereas with mourning, things come to an end and therefore enjoy a possibility of returning, with melancholia we are not even left with the presentiment of an end or of a return, but only with ressentiment at their disappearance".
Lars would agree with Jean. Melancholia is natural, an appropriate psychological stance given our extraneous position in relation to history and nature. The pace of modern life is accelerating toward a horizon of smoke and rubble. How can we ignore the sense of heading at breakneck speed into catastrophes which we can neither prevent nor understand? Planetary collisions, nuclear annihilation, terrorism, starvation, climate change: it takes more will to ignore apocalyptic threat than to be devoured by its melancholic shadow, or indeed to follow Baudrillard in concluding that we reached crisis point long ago and are now continuing in ruins like victims of trauma.
Von Trier has admitted that the world would benefit from an ending (if no-one had to suffer) and that his inspiration for creating Justine was his own 'experience with depression and doomsday prophecy.'
Biblical narrative has provided a blueprint for Von Trier's film making before and he has continually explored themes such as the essence of evil and man's alienation from nature. His two most recent films (Melancholia and Antichrist) are linked aesthetically, through their visual style, the deployment of overture and art images, and thematically in their reworking of bible stories. If 2010's Melancholia is Lars' version of Revelations, (though he fears it is an exploitative romance, 'a woman's film') then 2009's Antichrist is his take on Genesis (he claims that it is simply, 'his version of a classic pork roast'.). Von Trier is known for toying with audience expectation. In Dogville and Mandalay he used theatrical staging to interrupt audience immersion and create critical distance. In 1987's Epidemic, the story of the film's composition collides with the dark SF narrative which is its subject. In Europa, he uses the conceit of a hypnotist to imply the complicity of audience and protagonist in a depiction of historical genocide (Nazis, of course!). In his Golden Heart Trilogy, he explores the ideal of 'female goodness' based on the notion that enduring wickedness is high virtue and in 2009's Antichrist, he exploits the horror genre to explore conceptions of the abject, the inerrant 'evil' in nature and the basis of misogyny. In all Von Trier's films the audience experience is destabilised. Strange allusions interrupt the completion of meaning. Philosophical rouses are staged in which the viewer's morality becomes the object of deconstruction.
In 1995 in Copenhagen, Von Trier, along with Thomas Vinterberg founded The Dogme Collective. Their manifesto called for discipline as an antidote to the decadence of cinema. In the market boom of affordable cameras and film stock the dogme movement saw potential for the democratization of cinema. The dogme manifesto called on directors to take a 'vow of chastity' and practice a bear bones, restricted method of film making. The rules of dogme film preclude the use of props, soundtracks, fancy camera tricks, lighting, temporal dislocation, video cameras or arty film stock. Genre films are strictly forbidden. Lars attributes part of the appeal of this obstructive discipline in his work to the psychological effects of an over liberal childhood where everything was permitted.
Melancholia's plasticized, luminous aesthetic is a far cry from Lars' dogme days when he railed against a culture of film making which was "cosmeticized to death". Considering his new film Von Trier wonders if it turned out "too nice" and reflects, ruefully that, "it's hard to inject a little bit of ugliness". But he still managed to do so, if not straight into the main vein of the film, then certainly the fatty excess of it's publicity.
Responding to a question about the film's use of Wagner at a press conference in Cannes, Von Trier muses, "I always wanted to be a Jew, but it turns out I am a Nazi."
In the Youtube footage, Dundst looks on, blank faced as Von Trier continues over the stark soundtrack of digital shutters and journalists licking their lips.
"What can I say? I understand Hitler... I think he did some wrong things yes absolutely..." Dunst's facade cracks, she whispers something like, "Oh my god, this is terrible," over her shoulder. Von Trier breaks pace to justify himself to her, "No but there will come a point at the end this when..."
Unfortunately for Lars, The End and the revelation it affords is not in sight. While his 'nazi gaff' rendered him officially persona non grata from Cannes in 2011, it's likely he'll be back soon with The Nymphomaniac and it's equally likely that there will be controversy surrounding that film too. There is controversy surrounding all of Von Trier's films. Exploitative treatment at the hands of the Danish director is rumoured to be the reason Bjork will never act again. Nicole Kidman firmly stated that she wouldn't do a sequel to Dogville. Von Trier holds a longstanding reputation as a deranged agitator, a sadist and perhaps most famously, a misogynist.
"I think he hates women and he wants to punish them," a friend recently told me at a BBQ.
But I always thought that the men came off much worse in his films. The men in his films are exploiters, rapists, control freaks, sycophants, saps and hypocrites. That the women, generally smarter and more interesting characters, tend to bare the brunt of these men's tactless cruelty seems like a fairly accurate, if over dramatised, version of what happens in real life. In breaking the waves, Emily Watson plays a 'good' woman who finds herself manipulated into prostituting herself for her paraplegic husband's vicarious thrill. In Dancer in the Dark, Bjork plays an immigrant who retreats from the injustice of her life into a hysterical passion for musicals, but is still driven to despair by the monotony of factory work and the racism of the community she has moved to. In Antichrist, Charllotte Gainsborg is a grieving mother and PhD student who becomes convinced by her own academic research into the routes of misogyny that women are in fact evil. Her husband meanwhile, holds the historically misogynist rhetoric of psychological therapeutics against her and tries to 'cure' her of her melancholy.
Lars von Trier, in his work and his life, appears to remain skeptical that melancholia is something that can be cured. In his famous essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freud differentiated one process from the other as a dichotomy of the 'natural' and the 'pathological'. Some time after the loss of the object, Freud claims, the mourner will 'return to reality' where as the melancholic remains caught in the experience of loss eventually turning the sorrow against themselves. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
For a melancholiac then, the end of the world might seem like a relief; a vindication of the emotional certainty that folks like Justine (and I'd guess Von Trier too) experience.
Von Trier's pathological fear is a part of his film making. He is unable to get on planes and so filmed the two first parts of his America Trilogy in Europe. His phobias sometimes necessitate directing remotely, via monitor, to avoid entering anxiety inducing locations like aircraft or oilrigs. Documentaries and interviews suggest that Von Trier operates from a creative but insulated space. His ideas develop there, sheltered from reality - an opposing place where sensitivity is often more important than provocation. When he is forced to 'return to reality', he flails around in the schism. "I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive," he babbles, stepping backwards into a pre-dug hole, "I found out I'm a Nazi!" he calls out on the way down.
At the risk becoming a Von Trier apologist, I am sure he's not really a Nazi. By declaring that he 'understands Hitler', Von Trier is making the mistake of reducing history to mise scene, ignoring the reality of history and its legacy and rendering the Second World War as an allegory in which one finds oneself, suddenly under lights, in a Europa style narrative game: Close your eyes, when you wake up you find yourself in Europa, are you a Nazi or a Jew? Only your creator knows.
"I'm the best director in the world!" says Lars, over and over, to anyone who'll listen.
Experimenting with ideas and images is how Von Trier untangles his chaotic and frightening world. His respect for art as a system of interpretation is everywhere in his film making. Melancholia is full of quotation marks. Several shots of Bruegel's The Hunter align the film with a tradition of 'art of ages' as well as with the aesthetic mysteries of Tarkovsky's Solaris. At one point Justine, in a fit of rage, goes into the library and replaces all the displayed prints of abstract art with allegorical paintings. Justine, like Lars, rejects studied, rational abstraction in favour of a melodramatic excess of story where genre and metaphor collide and obliterate each other. But is art enough? For the barren ego, can art fill the void? For want of a definitive answer, Von Trier the melancholiac continues to make movies. For Justine though, art is just another corrupted commodity. Though as a shelter from the final, definitive loss, it turns out a representation is as good as anything 'real'. In her final moments Justine cobbles together a 'magic cave', constructed from kindling to comfort a fearful child. It is here, in their own feeble representation that Justine, Claire and Claire's son seek shelter. At the end of the film, which is also the terminus of the world, they sit together in this primitive structure, powerlessly awaiting doom.
Meanwhile, back in the cinema, we too sit out another apocalypse in a magic cave. We are all swamped by meaning, all living lives that are both apocalyptic and hollow. We gaze upon a flaming horizon, waiting to be obliterated by Melancholia, unwilling to return to any 'reality', without the will to see how fragile, how un-cave like our accomplishment, this fragile lean-to of sticks.
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