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.