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.