blue bile

The child closes his eyes and the world disappears, within this is the world of his parents and their cold stories of marriage, of a 19-hole golf course; and without, this is the world of the Earth engulfed by an immense planet. And then later? A little older, if in grief he faces the ground's fall, the ``de-groundation'' [``des-solation''], he won't even know where to set foot, he will hear the words of black-bile, of melancholia, of self-destruction to the point of 'killing death' as Freud says in \emph{Mourning and Melancholia}... And if he meets History's madness where it's spread, at the movie theater, he will be LVT, with the Destruction that he wants to show us showing his fascination for it to the point of crushing his Palme d’Or in Cannes. Like Benigni, Spielberg, Tarentino, Costa Gavras does he want to give it a shot as director since the attack on humanity carried out in the Shoah, since Lanzman's Shoah? Does he conjure up the effects that he experiences as an artist? Not to prove like the philosopher, but to show images that affect the spectator so that he himself become one to the point of saying he is convinced he accepts the fascination? Fleeting symptom or creation? Desire or folly? A coalescence filmed between the creator and his creation? There, where the desire for the end of the world grips him: the end of the couple, the unattainable feminine, a planet in which nothingness must crush everything, the falling off love at the time of love, the inside of the hut made of branches that are not separated from the outside, the black bile of the world hatred where the inside is fused with the outside. Where the worst of the XX century is not far: the horror and the pleasure of the nameless crimes through the annihilation of Jews disfiguring their lives and deaths. LVT slides in the chaos where limit and support disappear in the face of the Other. Does he shocks us in the theater? ... Melancholia is the wimp of Chaplin's Dictator that gets hard and collapse on a cosmic scale ... and that falls at the end of the feature. Even though they tell him "no, despite yourself you are not a Nazi. Eh, li'l Lars Von Trier, close your eyes and write your film!"

This was J-J Moscovitz's foreword to a screening of Melancholia at the Cinéma La Pagode in Paris (my translation). Given the French elan in the ambition of this film, I thought only a non-conventional French review could do it justice.
I had seen the feature just over a week earlier, but have been hesitating ever since about its significance. Frankly, during my viewing, I was in awe of the prelude, but then slowly slipped into deadly boredom. The initial collage of cinematic metaphors was awesome, but perhaps just as Wagner's ouvertures erect monuments of expectation that later shrivel in long-drawn narrative corridors, similarly the force and novelty of these images and sound could only lead to disappointment.
Lars Von Trier is not new to awkwardness, he's a director of bold ideas, and an artist often pays with bathos when they risk so much. The result in Melancholia is artistic incoherence, unprecedented vision juxtaposed to dead-end oddities: why does John suddenly turns into a Scrooge, what's the point of having Tim chase Justine for the next big thing in marketing at her own wedding? Perhaps, these are just bizarre pieces of a puzzle that pass through my thick mind like neutrinos through Earth.
What did not leave me, and to some extent has grown in me perhaps to the poing of haunting me is Melancholia's essence. Melancholia, the black bile of ancient medicine, in this film turns into the most poignant depiction of clinical depression. The depression that paralyzes Justine before her bath, the depression that makes her flatly deny Earth has a future and assert it will all soon end in utter absurdity, the depression that yet she seems to worship as an otherworldly power, the depression that ridicules its compassionate (Claire) or rationalistic (John) deniers, the depression that inexorably engulfs Earth like the coldest Jupiter-sized planet.

Of Melanie Klein's study of early childhood psychological development I remember this: that in the beginning the distinction between the child and the rest of the world is blurry. To a newborn the Self, if "Self" is the appropriate term, is everything. The universe is a Monad. Starting with the distinction of the mother, the world grows around the child psyche as separate entities. I often see depression as a devolution towards that primordial stage of our lives.

Sweden Occupied

Last week,  Bloomberg News ran a piece singing praises of Sweden's  fiscal health  in these time of systemic financial turmoil.

I got a kick ouf reading the following paragraph:

Sweden’s success lies in part in its focus on income equality, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in an interview last month. Sweden has the world’s highest tax burden as a percentage of gross domestic product after Denmark. The two countries also boast some of the most equal income distributions in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

While the mayor of the Big Apple had been busy busting Occupy Wall Street, his company was reporting on institutionalized occupation.
And this is all the more telling since as I remarked in a past post a socio-psychological study by Norton and Ariely found that the great majority of Americans, regardless of political orientation, would move to a country with the wealth distribution of Sweden! So why so much crying "income redistribution!" whenever there is a timid attempt to raise marginal income tax and similar legislation?

At the cost of oversimplifying, I'd say it's a matter of perception. Just like the Norton-Ariely study revealed dramatic misperception in the distribution of wealth in the US, so it is reasonable most on the conservative side believe any policy aimed at fiscally increasing social justice is deleterious to the greater good. Obviously, such misperception has not spontaneously arisen, but is the result of the slogan drumbeat  that can be traced to the trickle-down economics of Reagan. Labels such as "income redistribution," or "communist," or "taxing job creators" have been slung to whoever sought to redress the trend that is starving the government of the resources it needs to maintain a modicum of a social safety net.

When confronted with actual data, such as the near stagnation of real wages since the Reagan years, none of these labels stands the test.
Take for example the "higher taxes" that would result from an expiration of G.W. Bush tax cuts. First of all higher taxes would mean a return to previous marginal tax rates especially for a family filing jointly with yearly taxable income higher than $250000. Secondly, we are talking of reinstating higher marginal rates. That means that such family would pay exactly the same tax as everybody else on all income up to $250000, and 4.9% on the income that exceeds that threshold . For every $1000 in excess of $250000 such family would pay $49 more.
Given significant demand, an entrepreneur whose business is subject to personal income tax would not hire or expand because of such tax increase?  And what about the fact that his costs, including salaries, would not result in any higher tax due?
I have not heard a single convincing explanation on how that increase can have a meaningful impact on any economic choice.

And what is the price of starving the government? The price is that the kind of investment for the "greater good of the country," those infrastructural investment that only a government can afford, are sorely lagging behind. The result is that  so many  Americans had to go deep into debt to simply afford an education or pay medical bills. The result is, if you let me stick a label, too, the demise of the American Dream.

The single most important contribution of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the making of this awareness and the dispelling of the myths that defined the American Dream as a function of income redistribution upward.
Sweden today demonstrates that capitalism with a human face is possible. In the words of  Robert Reich 

Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.