![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract:
This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986). All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation to Melancholia we can trace the logic of this loss, culminating in Melancholia's radical gesture of world-sacrifice; this aestheticisation of world-destruction has the paradoxical ethical meaning, I suggest, of preparing for a post-humanist beginning.
Notes
I would like to thank Alex Ling and Magdalena Zolkos for inviting me to participate in the Sydney Seminar for the Arts and Philosophy, Seminar 20: “Melancholia non Grata: Lars von Trier and the Infinite Sadness” (2012), where I first presented some of the ideas developed in this article. I gave another version of this paper at the Film-Philosophy Conference 2013 (Amsterdam), and am grateful for the excellent questions and insightful comments I received there. I would also like to thank Louise D'Arcens and Magdalena Zolkos for their stimulating discussions of von Trier's work, and Costica Bradatan for his excellent editorial suggestions.
1 Von Trier's video version of Medea (1988) shows, in graphic detail, Medea's sacrifice of her own children in order to punish her husband, Jason, for accepting as an award the hand of Glauce, King Creon's daughter, in marriage. In Breaking the Waves (1996), Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) sacrifices herself, becoming a sexual martyr, in order to save and heal her crippled husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgaard), a sacrifice “confirmed” by the infamous concluding shot of heavenly pealing bells. In The Idiots (1998), Susanne's (Anne Louise Hassing) grief-driven “spassing” is taken to its limits in her unbearable encounter with her family, where she simulates a humiliating condition of drooling imbecility, sacrificing her dignity and social identity. Dancer in the Dark (2000) centres on the travails of blind, battling mother Selma (Björk), who sacrifices herself in order to ensure the money stolen from her by deceitful policemen Bill (David Morse) can be used to cure her blind son's affliction, a decision that culminates in her brutal execution by hanging. Dogville's (2003) fugitive heroine and “moral example,” Grace (Nicole Kidman), destroys the town of Dogville in a sacrificial act of fiery retribution for the suffering she endures at the hands of its morally hypocritical and socially exploitative “good folk.” Antichrist's (2009) disturbing “cognitive therapy” session cum psychosexual struggle between He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) culminates in the husband's sacrificial burning of his wife's corpse on a funeral pyre, an act summoning up the female forest spirits of a misogynistic past. Even von Trier's comedy The Boss of it All (2006) is premised on the “sacrifice” of authorial creative control and decision making, which is assumed by the random computer-generated angles and shots of von Trier's “Automavision,” a sacrifice of artistic freedom that mirrors the protagonist's “outsourcing” of managerial authority to a fictitious persona (the American “boss of it all”).
2 See Bradatan; Buch-Hansen; Mandolfo; Pohl.
3 See von Trier's interview with Nils Thorsen (“Longing for the End of All”) in the Press Release for Melancholia where he mentions his research into nymphomania and the frequency of cutting and self-harm among women with hypersexuality.
4 See Matts and Tynan's ecological reading of the film, and Latour's comments on its ecological-ethical aspect. See also Žižek, “Optimism of Melancholia,” who argues that the film is not pessimistic or nihilistic but “profoundly optimistic,” even ethical.
5 “Last man” narratives have proven popular in film; Richard Matheson's novel I am Legend has inspired adaptations such as The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), Omega Man (1971) and the recent I am Legend (2007).
6 At the end of H.G. Wells' Time Machine (1895), the expansion of the Sun causes the death of all life on Earth.
7 The film is The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959).
8 Apocalyptic movies (e.g., 4:44 Last Day on Earth or Melancholia) are centred on characters' responses to the catastrophic destruction of civilisation or even the Earth itself, whether due to nuclear war, biological catastrophe, or planetary collision. Post-apocalyptic movies (e.g., Time of the Wolf, 28 Days Later, or The Road), focus on the aftermath of the apocalyptic event and how survivors struggle to keep alive in a devastated and anarchic environment. Some films (2012, for example) attempt to straddle both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios.
9 Žižek, Living in the End Times.
10 I discuss this aspect of Time of the Wolf in Sinnerbrink.
11 See Critchley; Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.
12 Rancière, Film Fables 166.
13 Rancière, Aesthetics. Schelling writes: “The work of art reflects to us the identity of the conscious and unconscious activities” (225). See Garneau and Cisneros.
14 Like many recent movies, the rest of Melancholia was shot in high definition digital video using an Arri Alexa camera.
15 See Remes for a fascinating discussion of images of stasis in experimental cinema as revealing an ontology of duration.
16 The painting also appears in Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975).
17 The golf course at which the wedding reception is to be held has only eighteen holes (as we are told twice in the film).
18 Darghis remarks that the image could be a reference to Isaiah 51.8: “For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from generation to generation.”
19 See, for example, the contrasting reviews by French and by Ebert.
20 See Freud.
21 See Kovács.
22 Žižek discusses the fantasy situation of being in a position to contemplate our own death or absence from the Earth. Žižek, Less than Nothing 273ff.
23 Benjamin 122.
24 “If you ask me, she is longing for shipwrecks and sudden death, as Tom Kristensen wrote. And she gets it, too. In a way, she succeeds in pulling this planet from behind the sun and she surrenders to it” (Melancholia Pressbook 5). For such a critique, see Brody. For a different view, see Williams.
25 Žižek, “The Optimism of Melancholia.”
26 Latour.
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112447/MPU-L1HU.png"})