[Essay] The consolation of tragedy in Lars von Trier's Melancholia

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Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) is essentially an apocalyptic movie which exemplifies the tragedy of love, marriage, and death. It opens with a wedding party of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), the heroine, and her fiancé Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) at a golf resort and brings on with the ruin of the wedding due to her depression whereas a mysterious planet called Melancholia is about to collide with the Earth. Thematically, the movie makes constant reference to human melancholy, and this in turn brings the solitude theme on a broader, more universal significance, showing a collective, physical disconsolation state within the family. Stylistically, the film has a “hauntingly beautiful overture” with sixteen stunning shots as identified by Dargis (2011) which conveys an apocalyptic narrative in a circular notion of time, as opposite with the traditional linear flow.

Integrating these themes and style, Melancholia is a perplexing movie about the tragedy of existence, particularly the solitude and the prophetic death, and how tragedy allows people to solve the problem of the value of existence. Is pessimism the key to this puzzle, as Nietzsche suggested in his book The Birth of Tragedy (1956)? What prevalently happen in this film’s tragedy are the universal depression and the destruction of individuals. Is Justine’s delight welcoming the collision as a necessary end to an isolated, unnecessary world what he called ‘joyous affirmation in the face of terror’ (Melchert 2011, p. 539), or to put it in a simpler explanation, a ‘metaphysical delight in tragedy’ (Nietzsche & Golffing 1956, p. 102). The film ends with the scene of Justine telling her nephew Leo to close his eyes and holding Claire's and his hand, and them all waiting for the catastrophe. This existential ending connotes the consolation of the existence’s tragedy on Earth.


The first eight minutes of Melancholia is “a masterpiece in miniature” (Dargis 2011) which contains literary, artistic and cinematic allusions. Lacey (2009, p. 18) states that every elements in a mise en scène has been put there for a reason. One prominent theme in this overture is apocalypse - the final destruction of the world as described in the Bible. In the last shot of the prologue, a small planet moves toward a bigger blue planet, which “seems to pull the small globe closer with translucent rays as if in an apocalyptic embrace” (Dargis 2011).  Scriptural relevance is also implied later in the movie in the stallion’s name, Abraham, of same name as Abraham from Genesis. Meanwhile, the arising soundtrack of Wagner's Tristan und Isoldeon as a catastrophic metaphor in the overture leads the views to thoughts of the dreamscape of the end of the world.

The film’s apocalypse opening traces an unusual flow of narrative with a circular notion of time instead of a linear. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode discusses apocalyptic narrative according to the Judeo-Christian view of history as linear, which consists of “a beginning, a middle in which narrator and reader exist, and a necessarily different ending” (1967, p. 41). Time does not move linearly inMelancholia as is suggested by a flash-forward in the opening scenes when a mysterious planet is hurtling towards the Earth and finally they collide. The prolepsis, in Genette’s narratology terms, arises where "an occurrence in the future... happens earlier than it would in chronological order" (Stadler & McWilliam 2009, p. 161). It undermines the viewer’s expectations about the way the plot will unfold and provides a foreknowledge that can "deepen the significance of a scene" (Daniel & Chandler 2011, p. 152). The collision reduces the Earth to the nothingness from which it began, and the outer space scene ends.

Another tragic theme in Melancholia, which does not only appear in the opening frames but is developed throughout the film, is solitude. Solitude is presented not as a psychological state but as a physical condition. There are some scenes in the wedding party where Justine voluntarily isolates herself. What causes Justine to seek a solitary existence is not her personality trait but an external factor which is the unknown planet. When Katherine, a guest of the party, comes to the stage to play a song with the guitar, Justine suddenly disappears and goes outside. She steals a golf cart and urinates on the golf course. Then she looks at the sky as if her eccentric behavior is urged by the mysterious planet and she is expecting it to come. The solitude is most prevalent within the heroine character, but is paradoxically also a collective state. This state exists among other members of the family, such as Gaby, Justine’s mother. After saying harsh things about marriage in the wedding party, Gaby locks herself in a guest room.  Justine catches up with her mother; she says, "I’m freezing… I have trouble walking… I’m scared!” Then her mother says, “We all are, Sweetie. Just forget it” and asks Justine to leave her alone (Melancholia 2011).

While the first half of the film is mediation on a collective state of solitude and about how characters isolate themselves to seek a solitary existence, the second passage follows the course of the unknown planet coming to destroy the Earth and the depression spreading around the family members. It is reasonable to suggest that Lars von Trier's philosophy is influenced by Schopenhauer's view of pessimism. First of all, it is the Wagnerian music that expresses the Schopenhauerian philosophy of will (Nietzsche & Golffing 1956, p. 97). Secondly, for Schopenhauer, “this world is so bad that if it were to become even slightly worse it would collapse into chaos” (Honderich 1995, p. 656). There is no hope that it can be adjusted, since "the fault lies in the substance rather than any accident or form of the world" (Honderich 1995, p. 656). What happens in the film’s tragedy is the destruction of individuals. Justine’s long-divorced mother says to all the guests, “I wasn’t at the church. I myself hate marriages, especially pertaining to my family. I don’t believe in it” (Melancholia 2011). John, Justine’s brother-in-law, who has a grudge against her mother, will be found committed suicide by sleeping pills which her sister Claire had bought to execute herself. Justine, in the midst of her gloom, pushes over her co-worker Tim and has an intercourse with him in a golf bunker in one of her escapes from the party.

Lars von Trier uses plenty of literary and artistic allusions as a foreshadowing of the universal theme of depression. In the overture, there is a shot where Justine floats down a stream, holding in her hand a bouquet. This image refers to Ophelia, a famous painting of John Everett Millais (Zoladz 2011). In the play Hamlet (Shakespeare & Jenkins 1982), Ophelia, after being suffered by female hysteria, is drown into brook and died. The bunch of lilies in Justine's hands gives an allusion to Eve's tears after she was expelled from the Garden of Eden (Dargis 2011).

In another aspect, the way space is treated in Melancholia suggests a sense of disconsolation. While most of activities and conversations take place in the party room, the fact that Justine behaves in a diverting way, leaving and rejoining the party as she pleases, conveys the meaning of isolation, gloominess and distress. In addition, a long shot of the green lawn with a large sundial at the center-bottom evokes the famous garden in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1962). According to the novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote Marienbad, the surrealistic garden makes him realize his efforts “toward a somewhat ritual deliberation, a certain slowness, a sense of the theatrical, even that occasional rigidity of attitude” (Dargis 2011).

Justine’s role of spreading depression to other family members and providing a sense of disconsolation throughout Melancholia leads to the question of how tragedy can solve the problem of existence and the problem of overcoming pessimism. In The Birth of Tragedy (1956) Nietzsche thinks that the key is the role of the Greek tragedy’s chorus, a group of voices who sing in unison. He believes that there were no actors in Greek drama but only the chorus, and that the drama is the dream of the chorus. Given Schopenhauer’s view of reality - our lives are purely appearance and not reality, just as the chorus affirms the dream, so the spectators, who neglect “emotional and cognitive involvement” (Daniel & Chandler 2011, pp. 403-404), affirm life.  In Melancholia, Justine experiences herself as one who creates the dreamscape of the ending world.  Dargis finds that in the fourth shot of the eight-minute prelude, the Earth is shown in the same location and with the same size as Justine’s head is in the first shot, and the red point to its right represents the planet Melancholia; for that reason, there is a possibility that “the world of the movie is nothing other than a manifestation of Justine’s imagination” (2011). Another scene is where Justine replaces some modern art books in the chateau's library with ones which have Edward Burne-Jones’ and Pieter Bruegel’s reproductions, among them the Hunters in the Snow which had appeared in the prologue’s third shot. The painting depicts disconsolate hunters returning home from a fruitless hunt. On the opposite side in the lower landscape, there are people skating, a valley full of ponds, and a fire from a burning farmhouse, representing a continuous reality with all this diversity and activity. With the act of rearranging the paintings as creating her own reality, Justine is the heroine in Nietzschean tragic symbolism who speaks to us: “Be like me, the Original Mother, who, constantly creating, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flux of appearances!” (Nietzsche & Golffing 1956, p. 102)

In a more subtle extent, the symbolism of character names may be read as a satire to demonstrate Lars von Trier's “low church” filming style striving for spontaneity (Clark 2012). Justine is named after the novel of same name by Marquis de Sade, a libertine which attacks the Catholic Church and "dismiss belief in a deity altogether" (Phillips 2005, p. 91). This element of black comedy shows Lars’ similar view to Nietzsche's believing that we need to bring in another kind of god to overcome pessimism that is our aesthetic value. Only that we experience our life as an art work in which we are like actors justifies our life and makes it worth living (Melchert 2011, p. 539). The sensational conclusion is consequently appropriate in a film about tragedy of existence. Justine and Leo cut branches to make a little cave of sticks. She brings Claire inside, and takes Claire's and his hand. She looks at them calmly, and they disappear in the ending catastrophe. The consolation of tragedy is where life at bottom is “indestructibly joyful and powerful" (Nietzsche & Golffing 1956, p. 50).

The title of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia contains a thematic key to the film: a universal sense of melancholy and disconsolation shown in a collective state of solitude. The apocalypse prologue which serves as a prolepsis signals that a slightly different plot from the viewer's expectations will be unfold. The unexpected joy which the main character Justine experiences in the face of the catastrophe after her spreading the depression to the family represents that tragedy is terror and ecstasy in one. Instead of escaping from life as Gaby or John is later in the film, or choosing a suicidal rest by a bottle full of sleeping bills as Claire is, Justine shows a ‘joyous affirmation in the face of the terror’ by which she creates the landscape of her own reality. As Nietzsche's view of tragedy, affirming life passionately and joyously as the spectators is the way to overcome pessimism (Melchert 2011, p. 539). Containing many literary and artistic allusions with different purposes, from devices of apocalyptic metaphor to satire of Catholic Church, the film conveys the drama of existence through opposites, and makes one of opposites what we are going after in ourselves and what tragedy provides; that opposite is the consolation.



References

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