Melancholia: A Tone Poem of Depression

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Melancholia is actually not the kind of violently anti-human cinematic war crime that I've grown to expect from Lars von Trier, the enfant terrible of world cinema, a brilliant stylist, artist, and craftsman, who I would usually want to run over with a bus, after I'd run it back and forth over the Cohen Brothers.  (You can see this revulsion in my review of Trier's Dogville, here).

Unlike his other films, which purport to eviscerate human kind in order to read the truth in the entrails, Melancholia is essentially a tone poem to depression.  Depression is something I know something about, so I can say that Trier gets it right, technically, relationally, emotionally, and symbolically.  The feeling of the movie is the felt-sense of depression:  bleak, crushing, violent, helpless and hopeless.  The conceit of the film, that a rogue planet is inexorably coming for the earth, crushing it, extinguishing life completely and irreversibly, is the interior experience of major depression.  And the saving grace of the film is that there is no claim to any final ontological conclusions.  Trier does not say that this bleak and hopeless state is the final one for humanity, nor that Justine is the model of the seer among poseurs.  Her claim to authority about the position of life on Earth is not otherwise supported or upheld by the film;  it is answered by her sister's, "Sometimes I hate you so much."

Melancholia begins with an absurdly comic scene of two newlyweds, Justine and Michael, in the back of their limo, whose driver is trying to negotiate the narrow and windy entrance way to Justine's brother-in-law's estate.  John, an absurdly rich man who is footing the bill for Justine's wedding and party, is played by Keifer Sutherland, and whose house (it's always his property, with Justine's sister Claire attached) provides the backdrop for the entire film.  Joking and embracing, the two arrive, walking, at the estate building, late for their reception.  The initial impressions of the two and their relationship quickly devolves, or rather, clarifies.  We see Justine's parents, a roustabout and neglectful, if warm-hearted, father (played by John Hurt), and a bitter, toxic harpy of a mother (Charlotte Rampling), who both take the opportunity of their daughter's big day to take swipes at each other and, for mom, at the basis of her daughter's happiness, attacking marriage as an institution.  We see Justine's blushing bride persona slip, and then crumble, first freezing, then cracking, then shattering as that single night goes on.

She tries to hide in solitude, but is dragged back into the ritual of the evening, and into what is apparently a house-of-glass relationship to Michael, who is portrayed as basically a loving, caring, and "young soul" of a man.  He tries to cheer Justine up after she retreats from the wasteland of her parental war, announcing to her in a back room that he has bought an orchard, planting young trees which he hopes she will sit under if she is feeling sad so that they may lift her mood.  He gives her a photo of the trees, explaining the type of apples.  She tries to play along, saying she'll always keep the picture with her, and then a minute later leaves the room and leaves the photo laying on the floor, forgotten or punished.  Michael looks both devastated and resigned:  we get that he's been here before, has tried to kill her demons with kindness, and lost over and over (before he leaves the estate, and the marriage, that evening, she says, "What did you expect?" and he nods).  It expresses something tragic about depression, both the demonic anti-social (anti-relationship) actions that the depressed person takes to defend themselves against contact with a corrupt and voided world, as well as the naive ministrations, and therefore painful confirmations of futility, that the caregiver tries to offer the afflicted.  Michael is a decent man, but for a depressive, he's poison.

Justine keeps trying to rejoin the community, the social web, but finds only the toxic strands.  She destroys her job and career, after her advertising executive boss (an ugly portrayal of self-servingness by Stellan Skarsgard) has his nephew dog her for a tag line to what appears to be some trivial ad image.  She destroys her marriage (or gives it the coup de grace) by fucking the nephew in a sand trap on John's 18 hole golf course.  She tries to hang on by keeping her father nearby, but he slips out to tryst with one or both of the Bettys he brought to the party, which he tells her in a note.  Mother at least abandoned her years ago.  We see why her inner life, when it spills over paste-and-glue retaining walls, spills such devastation and bile throughout her life and relationships.

Therefore it's no wonder that the second act starts with her coming back to John's estate in a major clinical depression, and being nursed by her sister in one of the endless rooms of the manor.  She has sprayed all the props of her life with gasoline and tossed the match, but nonetheless her sister pulls her out and tries to put her back together.  Meanwhile, John is reassuring Claire that the planet, entitled Melancholia, is going to fly by and miss the earth, although we've been prepped by the initial montage of near-stills (Trier uses the phantom cam for hyper slow motion) to know that Melancholia does consume the earth.  The physics of the event are absurd, but since that's not the point, it doesn't matter.  We're in the last days of life and watching it through a tiny patch of humanity, whose drama is all in the interior and in the relationships.  Until the last, obliterating contact, virtually nothing in the external world of the estate changes.

Now, Trier could have ended Melancholia with something akin to the bitter, poisonous statements of Justine's mother, and does have the following exchange that made me cringe, as I was expecting a existential sucker punch at the end.  Justine and Claire are sitting together as the inevitability of the Earth's destruction is made obvious.  It goes like this:

Justine:  The earth is evil.  We don't need to grieve for it.
Claire:  What?
Justine:  Nobody will miss it.
Claire:  But where would Leo [her son] grow?
Justine:  All I know is, life on Earth is evil.
Claire:  Then maybe life somewhere else.
Justine:  But there isn't.
Claire:  How do you know?
Justine:  Because I know things.
Claire:  Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
Justine:  I know we're alone.
Claire:  I don't think you know that at all.
Justine:  678.  The Bean lottery.  Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
Claire:  No, that's right.
Justine:  But I know.  678.
Claire:  Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
Justine:  That I know things.  And when I say we're alone, we're alone.  Life is only on Earth, and not for long.

This is a transcript of a classic dialogue between depression and "conventional mind."  It is a hate filled statement by Justine, and attacks hope and connection not because its true (it claims an authority it can't prove) but because it's functionally useful. The raison d'etre of depression is disconnection, and it achieves that by propagating and supporting futility and unexamined conviction through the system, mind, body, and heart.  Justine, the voice of conventionality, is not then the heroic antidote to the depressive bile, but represents that consciousness which is about survival and the staving off of despair. Grasping for some solace amidst the crushing of her world, having just discovered that John suicided in the horse barn, she asks Justine to drink wine with her and her son, on the terrace, waiting for their deaths.  "You know what I think of your plan," she asks, "I think it's a pile of shit."  She walks out as the camera stays with Claire, who says through her hands, quietly, "Sometimes I hate you so much."

That exchange is why Trier gets a day pass from the gallows on this one.  That, and the final sequence of Justine helping Leo, her nephew, get ready for the end.  Leo expresses his fear, saying that his father had said there's nowhere to hide or escape.  Justine says that she knows of a magic cave, and sets out with him to cut sticks, that they assemble into the barest structure of a cone, and then they enter it, and Justine takes Claire by the hand and guides her in.  They sit together, holding hands, Claire grieving, Justine accepting in the as-if acceptance of depression, and die in wind and flame as Melancholia hit the Earth.

In Dogville, the protagonist enacts revenge on humanity for its evils and weakness.  In Melancholia, there is neither accusation nor punishment, at the level of Trier's engagement with his characters, nor at an existential or ontological level.  Perhaps despite himself, somehow he let this film be merely a beautiful and scary depiction of an interior state, outpicturing that utter wasteland of the soul that is depression when it has infected the whole person and possessed them with it's anti-social heart.  There is much that Trier misses about the greater phenomenon of depression and its treatment, but with the essential felt quality of this particular human misery, he gets it dead on.

NCIS, My Love

It started while I was looking around for distraction.  I didn't mean to fall in love.  Just a little fling, a little dalliance to pass the time after work, after my neurons were stretched out like dry rubber bands, having seen clients all day.  Just poking around the recent postings on On Demand, not even the casual encounters, just the television series.  It was all innocuous. I'd gotten tired with my off and on affair with CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York;  it had gone on for years, and I'm not happy to admit it.  But I just couldn't do it anymore, with the same old crimes, the same old cities, night after night.  I just couldn't take it anymore, all right?  Alright!?

It was probably the international flavor, the tres exotique quality that finally drew me away from CSI.  It felt like a bigger world with NCIS, and then her friend, NCIS: LA, was like a Moroccan fashion model.  It just kind of happened, and now six seasons later...well, we haven't made it official, but it's definitely not a one-nighter.

I'm not feeling like I have to defend myself, but I do want to explain.  I need to explain.  I need you to understand me.  And not judge.

I love the international thriller.  It's one of my favorite categories.  I love the Bourne movies, the James Bond movies.  I even liked "The International," although surely Clive Owen is the J. Edgar Hoover of Hollywood.  How else do you explain his success except for having bugged many producer's bedrooms?

And I also love stories of functional ad hoc families.  I watched all of "Buffy the Vampire Story," and all of Joss Whedon is pretty much centered on these kind of groupings, which is more or less the story of my generation.  Adrift from conventional moorings, coming together in alleys and desert towns, forming societies out of the wreckage of the old, not yet coalescing into a new, integrated structure.  That's me and mine.

So!  NCIS, with less fan boy vibe, revolves around similar families but in particular work settings.  But the tension and rough love is still there, the backing-each-other-when-the-chips-are-down, the humor and the functional dysfunction.  Then add the involvement-with-world-affairs-and-important-stuff, and how could I refuse that third drink?

The attraction of these shows, maybe all procedural shows, is a ritualistic one.  A procedure is followed in each episode;  the same arc with inflections, riffs, and different textures...but always the same arc.  Sometimes there's a larger arc that helps hold the smaller stories, and those, like the meta arc of the X Files, are really what I love.  They are like the huge science fiction novels I used to get as a kid, thick like a massive sandwich, taking forever to get through, holding one's mind in a warm, directional embrace that bridges the childhood cultural ice fields of crevices and brittle surfaces.  With the broken suburban narrative of youth, these big, multi-faceted, and ultimately integrated stories, that moved from chaos to order, from confusion and disorientation to resolution and transformation (or at least clarification), can't you see why I was primed for this affair?

My life has a lot of inelegant and geometrically lumpy arcs, clients moving forward generally, but with many curly cues and wavy lines.  Not to mention my own, more faith-based arc.  So exposing myself to these matmatically luscious designs, episode after episode, and then savoring the different paint schemes while my social network of add ons and ad hocs is reflected without ridicule--it has a saluatory effect on the general background anxiety of modern life.  You know?

We have to surrender to our loves.  To try to stuff our love into prescribed forms, only cavorting with Masterpiece Theater, or on the other end, teenage slasher films, it distorts you, it twists you like a metal bar propping up a tank.  So I declare it:  I'm in love with NCIS (and her slutty NCIS: LA friend--don't tell her).  It's a modern love.  It's maybe a post-modern love.  It cuts against across my idealized identity.  It exposes shame, blame, rage...well, not rage, actually, a slight blush maybe.  Ok, that came from my dream last night.  Sorry.

So don't judge me.  Love me.  And my darling NCIS(s).

"The Cabin in the Woods": Negotiations with the Old Gods

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

We just set off, after a lazy Sunday morning, to see Joss Whedon's new film (as writer and producer), "The Cabin in the Woods," a film that gets odder in the aftertaste than in the viewing. Something like "Blue Velvet" is odd all the way through, both self-consciously and at the level of primary process. I often refer to that opening scene of the father's heart attack and the suburban lawn filled with savagely waring ants--that's so rich and apparent. But "Cabin" inserts or layers on the oddness at different points, and then in reflection; as I think more about it, its multiple and conflicting levels stand out more and more. It's an odd film.

At one level, it's a very clever wink-wink, nudge-nudge, postmodern deconstruction of teenager horror films (are there adult horror films? Heather says there's some: "They are much more psychological--that piece is a big part." So.). Its topic, at the apparent level, is the meta level of how these films are constructed and executed. The puppeteers who are usually behind the screen--the film makers--are put in the film, as an organization tasked with constructing these rituals of the punishment of youth, in order to keep the "Old Gods" from rising. It's a yearly thing that, in the modern context, is run by high tech, but serves the same purpose as tossing a virgin in a volcano. It doesn't then blow and ruin everything.

The ritual itself has become technological, and therefore bloodless, as the ritual priests (here, dressed in white like doctors) flick switches and watch on multiple screens, able to manipulate the characters to satisfy the rather rigid requirements of the Old Gods: one whore, one jock, one mental type, one joker, and one virgin (the virgin must be left for last, and her death is optional, not required). And they must be "punished for transgression," which seems to be a necessary form, though more honored here in inadvertent action than in intention of the characters. As the control room guard says (to paraphrase), "Isn't this a setup?" It is, and is supposed to proceed according to ritual form.

It doesn't. Surprised? It also doesn't come off at any of the other ritual sites in the different nations (though it seems it's more cultural groupings than nations per se), which puts pressure on the American team to pull through and finish the ritual. It is more or less on track until the three remaining kids--the virgin, the jock, and the brain--are driving out the entry tunnel, and it has not been, as is proscribed, collapsed. Some message never came through, and for some reason, "power was rerouted from upstairs," (as the explosives techs say later). Their escape is not sealed until the last minute.

So things are not going to plan, all over the world, with this ritual negotiation with the Old Gods. Then it gets worse as, at the celebration party at the ritual control room, they learn that the joker (a smart stoner kid named Marty) is not dead, and shows up to save the Virgin from the head Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie Family leader. They find a way into the complex of the ritual engineers, evade the guards, and when cornered in a control room, hit the Big Red Button and open up all the (clean, modern, stainless steel) containment cases, letting out humanities collected nightmares loose into the (clean, modern, stainless steel) innards of the facility. Blood and guts and horrors tear the place and its working stiff staff to pieces.

The dénouement has the Joker and Virgin in the bottom level of the facility, the stone room with the carvings of each member of the sacrificial band, that fills up with blood as they die. They are met by The Director, played by Sigorney Weaver. I don't know why, really. It works. But maybe just because she's in every other movie these days. But there she is, explaining the function of the place and their sacrifice, and why Virgin must shoot the Joker. The Virgin does seem about to do so, following the injunction of the maternal authority figure, but is attacked by a werewolf (shadow masculine?), allowing the Joker to attack the Director, who is then axed in the head by the one armed Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie daughter (her arm was eaten off by her family, if I remember right), and Joker tumbles them both into the void where the Old Gods are getting pissed. The two then sit back and smoke a spliff, deciding to let the whole thing go to hell (literally), and the last scened has a giant God Hand erupt through the cabin, fade to black, and end of human world.

Ok. Breath. Pause. One more breath. Ok, so, what was all this about, anyway?

What it was not was an exercise in postmodern meta-commentary, in the way that "Rubber," the film about a homicidal desert tire, was. It's not that clean. None of Whedon's productions are that clean or focused. "Cabin" seems to have levels of meaning and levels of the artists' understanding of those levels of meaning.

At the top is the exercise in deconstruction, the wry and ironic commentary-in-motion on the structure and function of modern teenage horror films. The archetypal characters are all presented, and put in the standard encounter with "objects from the past." I think the best reading of these genre films (and actually, much of genre film in general) is as the experience of modern minds and identity looking back at previous developmental levels and, not having yet stabilized the integrity of the modern mind (think here of WWII), looks on the last developmental level as a consuming, rapacious, heartless and cruel entity. How do you deal with the anxiety of this transition in the modern mind? In horror films, it's through and as these ritual sacrifices, tossing the young and weak to the monster, and leaving the modern aspects of mind to survive and conquer the evil. The Jock (life as physicality), the Whore (life as sexuality), the Joker (life as hedonism), and the Scholar (life as abstracted mind) are consumed, and the Virgin (who is often also sexy, physically competent, smart, and most important, heartful) survives.

That's the pattern. We are moving, culturally, and developmentally, towards more and more expression of what Ken Wilber calls the Integral stage of development, in which all these archetypal forces represented by the different kids are brought together and integrated in individuals. So the most integrated one, we want her to win and mark the way out of these negotiations with the old gods.

But that's the enactment. In "The Cabin in the Woods," the meta level is played out by literalizing this enactment. We see it as a conscious, and consciously presented, act, that has become so conscious that, within the film, it is seen as prosaic and an act of art, divorced from its bloody roots, and outside the film, is known so thoroughly that it can be represented (rather than simply enacted unselfconsciously) and its elements commented on, riffed on, and mocked.

But Joss Whedon can't seem to produce happiness. Every film of his I can think of requires a sacrifice. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series), love, relationship, and some major characters, are regularly sacrificed. In "Serenity," the ship pilot is crucified on a huge stake. "Dr. Horrible" has the sweet, wounded super villain killing his love object and actually becoming an embodiment of Evil. There's really no transformation or triumph in his work, or at least none that's not tempered by a blood sacrifice.

Down a level from the postmodern critique and fun is a kind of despair at the possibility of escaping and transforming the past. In "Cabin," the horrific past has been mollified through negotiations that ritually destroy life each year rather than literally destroy life (again, think of WWII). The Old Gods have not been understood and integrated, and thereby transformed and detoxified. Rather, they have been paused, and it's only time till they emerge and consume.

That's a bleak psychological model of human life. There has been development, of course, but only in the technological realm. From virgins being pitched into the volcano, there are now high tech rituals, sanitized and tightly controlled. There's something to be said for that, and for, given the alternative, keeping the catastrophic forces of destruction sedated. But it's not stable, and that's what the Virgin and Joker respond to ultimately in allowing the culture that's based on the consumption of its young to be consumed. Within the film, it makes its own sense.

But the meta to this meta film is this bleak picture of the heart of humans. Negotiation with evil, rather than its transformation; codification and sanitization of one's relationship to that evil, rather than integration and transcendence. Fuck it, the film says in the end, this is the system and it's all that's available, so let it burn.

At the end of the day, it's an adolescent's world view, which makes the Nine Inch Nails singing the endcap ("Last") particularly apropos. But there is an interesting strain running through the last part of the film, which adds to the oddness, because it seems to be an enactment, rather than a comment, meaning that Whedon and his director don't seem fully aware of it. Or maybe one is and one isn't and you're seeing the tension. "The world is shit!" "There is hope!" and they never worked out a resolution.

Because one wonders, why now, why are all the world's rituals failing during the same year? Why are the Japanese children able to, collectively, sing the evil spirit into a bowl of flowers and safely contain it in a cute frog? What did they do right? Did they find out, genuinely, how to transform evil in a way the ritual engineers can't conceive (there's a great image of Richard Jenkins telling the little girls on his monitor, "Fuck you, and you and you!"). These girls are not negotiating with the Old Gods, but rather, besting them. And then there's the oddly explained and not-explained failure to collapse the exit tunnel (until Jenkins manages it at the last moment). The implication is that someone or something prevented it. Why?

In other words, it's not as simple as, say, "Natural Born Killers," which Oliver Stone described as his "fuck shit up" movie. It's not simply glee in tearing down the parent's institutions and status quo, or a triumphant return of the body to what has become a bloodless (clean, modern, stainless steel) exercise that itself simply hides the awfulness of "the before." There's an odd, seemingly un-self aware, strain going through "Cabin" that reminds me a bit of the early Disney films, in which one group of artists tried to present life in the raw, and another life as we'd like to see it (watch Bambi and you'll hear Bambi's mother get murdered by men, and then it cuts to butterflies and lurid colors of Spring).

I have little tolerance for tragedy as a life view; as the astrologer Caroline Casey has pointed out, there's always a 4th act. After King Lear dies, life continues. Some peasant off over that hill has a great crop of lettuce come in, and celebrates with life-affirming orgasms with his wife. "Cabin" would be an adolescent throw away if it were only that, or if it were as left-brained in its deconstruction of the genre as "Rubber." Thankfully, it itself is not bloodless, and exhibits a rich confusion and dis-orientation in its own right that belies the preciousness of the conceit. There's something disturbing in the guts of this film, which mirrors the disturbance in the age we're traversing, and that's what makes it keep echoing out long after the popcorn is gone.