Melancholia

What are we to make of impending doom? The same answer also asks the more philosophically vexing question of the day: in response to a meaningless world, what are we to make of it?

Justine seems unable to “fake it” in such a world. She tries smiling and acting happy, but it just doesn’t work with her. Even the center of every woman’s memory-bank, the wedding, is a disastrous ensemble. Trying to engage the truth of her existence with the world only ends up alienating her even more.

And yet the film portrays her as heroic. As the inauthentic world melts around her, in her melancholy are we supposed to see strength? Courage? Perseverance “through it all”? And that most especially entails persevering through life, which she denounces as “evil” on Earth.

What a startling declaration into a meaningless world. The intelligibility of the world thrusts itself into her life, and the lives of everyone. The causation of annihilation has sufficient reason. Is this, then, the reason for her tormented soul, embracing nihil?

Make no mistake, her manic depressiveness does not appear to be something which coddles nothingness. But contrasted to her sister’s overwhelming anxiety, we are supposed to find something commendable in her attempt at equilibrium with emptiness. A futile proposition to be sure.

The aforementioned sister vehemently denies the truth about life. This creates the main tension in the film. Von Trier, however, is not suggesting a Justine triumph in their contest, but the absurdity of a Godless world. His reduction to this endpoint cannot be looked at conversely, as if ultimate reality is death for the very reason there exists value in doom-itself.

Thus the world he paints is untenable. It is a fantasy land for the wretched and depressed, who want reality, which gives them pain, to go away. It won’t. How marvelously solipsistic the female psyche is to dream of Melancholia.

Grade: A-