Philm | Melancholia (Lars von Trier – 2011)

“a beautiful movie about the end of the world” - von Trier

The complete film: Melancholia.

“Derived from the Latin astrum, the term ‘disaster’ connotes a misfortune that befalls us on account of a malevolent star.” - Christopher Peterson

Most disaster films leave us with the consolation that at least a small contingent survives, that it’s not all over: there will be survivors to tell the story, to appreciate what happened, maybe to learn from it, but, at any rate, to start up again and go on.

In 2013, Samuel Scheffler published a book called Death and the Afterlife. (1) By the title, he wasn’t referring to heaven or hell but the life that we expect will still be here after we, specifically, are gone. He makes the case that for all our evident concerns for our individual lives we also identify with those who will go on with theirs after we are done with ours. It matters to us that they will go on even if we are not around to witness. He conjures a thought experiment: suppose somehow you were assured that the world would end thirty days after you are dead. The duration and physical quality of your life will be full and unaffected, only that of everyone who survives you will be cut short. You know this. Would this make a difference to you? How you went about your business and projects? How you faced each day?

Scheffler thinks it would fundamentally change the way you view the world. It would drive home a profound futility that you would not experience if you did not have this knowledge – even if, unknown to you, the world did, in fact, end thirty days after you are dead. Ignorance, maybe, isn’t bliss, but it leaves space for it. The mere possibility of the total annihilation of the world as you have known it2 is not enough to trigger this reaction. It is significant for the thought experiment that it’s thirty days or some fathomable period. Hearing that it will be four billion years off won’t, unless you are Alvy Singer, ruin your day.

The ultimate disaster is the one that ends not only your experience but every memory, every trace of it anywhere in the universe. You would die twice over. No one asks for existence, but having been granted it, it created space for desire, at least for its meaning, if not always for its duration.

It is still an open question in astrobiology whether life like ours exists anywhere else in the universe. On the one hand, the vastness of the universe seems to invite the possibility. On the other, ever since Enrico Fermi asked “where is everybody?” the reasons why we are likely alone in the universe (or will forever be left wondering) have piled up.

In von Trier’s film, Justine, ex-bride, states with cold conviction that the world is evil, and that life on this planet is the only life there is or has ever been – “and not for long” – as she waits with her distressed sister Claire and young nephew, Leo, for the end of it.

Astropsychology
Dispositionally prepared for disaster by her depression before everyone else in the film seems to get it, Justine suggests to her nephew they build a magical cave made of sticks that will save them. Her life ended sometime before. There remains only compassion for those whose illusions still torment them – still tease them like the rogue planet Melancholia did as it flew by so close, then backed away, only to boomerang back with mathematically elegant vengeance for the kill.3 As though all of this was a mistake and should never have happened, or as if there are no mistakes because whatever you conceive as the opposite of a mistake isn’t either. The magical cave would be the last story needing telling.

Extended discussion.

Resources

• “Lars von Trier - MELANCHOLIA - Ego & Extinction - Film Analysis,” (video) an inspired and exhaustive meditation by science fiction writer James Reich: “This analysis of Lars von Trier’s beautiful ‘Melancholia’ is the first episode in a series of videos based on the work I’m doing toward a book on the psychology, philosophy, and ecopsychic content of science fiction film. In this episode I talk about ‘Melancholia’ through the work of Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, and others, and offer some thoughts on the breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nature of science fiction catastrophe narrative, the will, and nature.”
• “Hauntingly Accurate Portrayals of Severe Mental Illness at a Theater Near You,” Richard LeBeau, Psychology in Action, 12 December, 2011. The view from clinical psychology.
• “The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia,” Christopher Peterson
  Discourse, Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2013. The view from philosophical psychology.

Notes

1. Podcast interview with Scheffler. The core of the book is expressed in the free Tanner Lectures given at Berkeley, or can be listened to here.
2. Absent some quirk of personality like that of Justine in the film.
3. “New Supercomputer Simulation Sheds Light on Moon’s Origin” NASA Ames Research Center, how the moon was born, according to the latest science (2023)... Justine may have been wrong in a curious way. Maybe, the world we know is the only one with life ever, but it was the catastrophic impact of a planet size rock called Theia that reorganized and supplemented the earth’s elemental composition and permitted life here in the first place – birthing the moon on the side. But is taking consolation in such cosmic trauma rational or just something we do?... Coincidentally, the asteroid Apophis is due to flyby the earth on Friday the 13th in April of 2029. An asteroid this big only passes by the earth this close every 7,000 years. It is not “supposed” to be more than a scientific opportunity for study.

We are used to the idea that we ourselves will not be a part of the future after our deaths. In the doomsday scenario, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that nobody we care about will be a part of the future either, and that fact, I have suggested, makes the future itself seem more alien, forbidding, empty.
– Samuel Scheffler

The desire of the moth for the star
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, To —