Shock and Awe: It’s the End of the World As Lars Sees It

Written by Nina Allan Monday, 14 November 2011

Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark

"A film should be like a rock in the shoe" - Lars von Trier

The first Lars von Trier movie I ever saw was Breaking the Waves. I rented the video mainly because of Emily Watson, an actress I greatly admire. I’d vaguely heard of von Trier as the director of The Idiots, a film that seemed to get a lot of people’s backs up, but aside from that I really didn’t know much about him. I found Breaking the Waves breathtaking, both in the quality of its image-making and the audacious scope of its subject matter. It wasn’t until I started to discuss the movie with other people that I discovered what I had interpreted as a film about the oppression of the sensitive individual by a restrictive society was widely seen by others as a case of misogyny run riot. Lars von Trier, I have discovered, tends to divide opinion. Some might say he gets on people’s nerves. Knowing and loving von Trier’s work as I now do, I have the feeling he sees that as a part of his vocation.

Von Trier is not afraid of the genre movie. His first three features, the often underrated ‘Europa Trilogy,’ make free and subversive use of the police procedural, the SF catastrophe movie and the spy thriller. In 1994 he sent the TV hospital drama to the insane asylum in his extraordinary miniseries The Kingdom. 2009 brought us Antichrist, a film that some critics saw fit to compare with the video nasties of the 1970s. Genre, with its licence to surprise, subvert, confront and constantly reinvent itself is clearly a fertile sowing ground for von Trier, and after publicly being branded a Nazi I guess the taint of ‘horror director’ loses some of its sting. For his next trick he brings us Melancholia, the bastard lovechild of Solaris and Armageddon. I looked forward to seeing this film, as I look forward to seeing any film by a director of von Trier’s originality and maverick genius. Watching this eerie and beautiful nightmare gave me the bizarre sensation of having my dreams burgled. I was thrilled and captivated and humbled by what I saw.

Melancholia tells the story of two sisters, Justine and Claire. Rich and privileged, they exist like enchanted princesses in a distorted fairytale reality behind castle walls. Yet Justine is the victim of suicidal depressions that drive her to rip the fairy tale apart from the inside, and Claire, the strong one, the sane one, is about to have her world destroyed by a force of more implacable magnitude even than her sister’s self-obsessed rages.

The opening of the film, a stately cinematic montage set to the orchestral Prelude of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is also the end. As in Wagner’s final opera Götterdämmerung, we bear witness to the destruction of the world. We also see the central characters appear in a series of tableaux vivants we don’t understand as yet but that seem replete with mystery and terror. A girl gazes at the heavens while lightning darts from her fingertips. Her sister charges across a lawn with a child in her arms, sinking into the earth up to her knees. A transfixed bride, garlanded like Ophelia, seems crushed by the weight of her own despair. This prelude, like the funereal filmic pavane that opens Antichrist, serves both as an introduction and a summation, a reminder of the pure visual power of film to stir the senses and ignite the imagination. It is proof, if proof were needed, of the visionary quality of von Trier’s artistry. This is a director who still believes in film as magic, as alchemy.

The long central sequence, entitled ‘Justine’ in the movie, centres upon a party given to celebrate the marriage of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), the limp young protégé of Jack (Stellan Skarsgård), head of a powerful advertising agency and Justine’s boss. The party takes place at the opulent home of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), an enthusiastic amateur astronomer. John and Claire have poured a vast amount of time and money into this occasion, but the gulf between the fantasy they’ve dreamed up and the reality as it exists in Justine’s head is symbolically evident from the start, when the limousine bringing Justine to the castle proves too large and too cumbersome to get up the drive. The whole thing is clearly a sham. Tensions seethe and old scores are settled and the marriage that is being celebrated is founded on sand. It fails to survive through till morning.

There are bigger troubles waiting in the wings, however. As the next day dawns, Justine notices that a star she asked John about earlier is no longer visible in the sky. Antares, in the constellation of Scorpio, has been eclipsed by the wandering planet Melancholia, now coasting towards Earth at a fast rate of knots. The film’s second extended section, entitled ‘Claire,’ tells the story of what happens when Melancholia arrives in Earth’s orbit. The scientists are divided about whether the two planets will collide. John has assured Claire that there is no danger, that the event they are about to witness will be a ‘fly by.’ Justine is not convinced. She seems to be telling her sister to prepare for the worst.

Von Trier has described Melancholia as a ‘psychological disaster movie,’ and I guarantee that Melancholia is like no other disaster film you’ve ever seen. The ‘end of the world movie’ is a sub-genre in itself, and the basic ingredients are well known. Whatever the exact nature of the catastrophe, what global disaster would be complete without scenes of mass panic, frenzied supermarket looting, gargantuan motorway tailbacks, salvation rockets crewed by rough diamond desperadoes and that final flickering TV address from the president of the good old US of A?  To say that von Trier avoids these clichés would be a cruel understatement. Melancholia’s area of focus is so tight that you’d be forgiven for believing that the rest of the world had been wiped out before the opening credits. On the face of it, Von Trier seems totally uninterested in global politics or the fate of humanity at large. He concentrates his efforts on unravelling the fraying storylines of one dysfunctional family. The characters that people this film are not even immediately likeable – there is no easily identifiable hero and indeed Melancholia renders the very concept of a hero all but meaningless – yet it is precisely in the way it limits itself that the power of this film is to be felt. Newspaper statistics detailing man-made atrocities or natural disasters are famously hard for the human mind to grasp. The thought of a planet being destroyed – even our own – is so huge that we blank it, and it risks being reduced by the commercial media either to a cheap thrill ride or stock images of apocalypse which are now so familiar they fail to move us. But we cannot blank the agonised tears of Claire as she finally comprehends the fate of herself and her young son Leo. We cannot blank that empty garden, lonely and doomed and beautifully terrifying as a landscape by de Chirico or Delvaux, as a vast blue megaworld hurtles towards it on an immutable collision course.

This is our sister, our garden. This is us.

Like many European directors, von Trier is not afraid to plunder the cultural treasure trove for potent symbols. He has stated that Melancholia is actually a film ‘about German Romanticism,’ and so perhaps we’re not surprised to find castles and wicked queens straight out of the Grimm brothers, mist-wreathed panoramas that might have been painted by Caspar David Friedrich, music by Richard Wagner. In a scene from the wedding sequence, Justine angrily takes down a display of art books highlighting the sterile, minimalist works of Malevich and replaces them with the ecstatic imaginings of Brueghel and Dürer. The opera that permeates this film and that could be cited as its musical equivalent is Tristan und Isolde, a story that ends with the ‘Liebestod’ or ‘love-in-death’ of its eponymous heroine. Melancholia is the story of Justine’s death-wish. Chaos is what she creates and what she longs for; she embraces the apocalypse as the desired and logical conclusion to her pain.

Melancholia is a film in love with film. The final breakfast on the terrace seems to echo the scene of soon-to-be plague victims banqueting in tuxedos in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu; and I couldn’t look at the terrace itself without thinking of the garden of the hotel in Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad, its stark shadows and surreal topiary. The verbal fire-fight between Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt, brilliantly cast as Justine and Claire’s divorced parents, the moment when Justine tells her boss Jack that he’s a ‘power-hungry, despicable little man’ – these crises-within-crisis are an instant reminder of Festen, Thomas Vinterberg’s scorching indictment of ‘family values’ and the film with which this segment of Melancholia has justly been compared.

Festen is Vinterberg’s daring take on the scenes of bitter recrimination and accusation we all dread every time we head home for Christmas. But true to form von Trier has to go one better, and his vision of family hell is a dry run for the destruction of the entire planet. In ‘Justine’ as in ‘Claire’ the elegant gilding hides a rotten structure; orbits decay and horrifying truths are revealed. When families come under stress, familiar roles are often reversed. The Claire who organises the wedding party and is her sick sister’s main line of defence against the world is obliterated by terror in the face of her own extinction, yet the Justine who is terrified of even getting into a taxi by herself at the start of the second sequence is able to meet her end with equanimity and even wonder. The banality of ordinary routine and social convention terrifies and paralyses Justine; the apocalypse is less terrifying because she has expected it all along. Von Trier uses powerful visual imagery to reinforce the ‘dark-light’ mirror relationship between the two sisters: Justine is fair, Claire dark. The brightness that seems to surround Justine in the wedding sequence, personified in her white satin dress and veil, sets her apart from everyone else, making her a potent and uncanny symbol of ‘the other,’ the old soul who ‘knows things’ and perhaps the angel who will in the end avenge us all.

If it’s possible to encapsulate the implications of global catastrophe by focussing on the fate of a single family, von Trier appears to find it equally possible to equate the psychological impact of clinical depression with global destruction. The ‘Melancholia’ of the film’s title is not only the name of the planet, it is Justine herself, and by implication the predatory muse that threatens to destroy the artist even as she inspires him.  Justine is the artist’s alter ego; the rogue planet is her madness, and her real bridegroom. She embraces its arrival as the demon lover she has always sought.

The planet Melancholia is a cipher for depression itself. It blocks out the sun, and smashes everything in its path into so much cosmic dust. The ‘magic cave,’ the insubstantial house of sticks that Leo and Justine build as protection against the apocalypse is simultaneously the symbol of futility and human compassion. Justine’s stance against a complacent and mendacious world is unyielding and stark, yet she feels love and pity enough for her nephew Leo to come to a compromise with her principles and comfort him with a necessary lie. The cave of sticks, a make-believe shelter, is all the protection we finally have against death.

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a magnificent attempt to convey the horror and glory of what it is to be human. It may well turn out to be my choice for best movie of 2011.

There is something about Lars von Trier that gets to people. He has been denounced as a bullshit merchant, a woman-hater, and a purveyor of empty vessels. For some critics he is the ultimate naked emperor. In his 2009 ‘review’ of von Trier’s film Antichrist, Christopher Hart of the Daily Mail expressed his displeasure at the film’s appearance in the following words:

"You do not need to see Lars von Trier's Antichrist to know how revolting it is.

I haven't seen it myself, nor shall I - and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment."

I have to confess that while the film – powerful and affecting as it is – resonated with me rather less than Melancholia, this review has lost none of its power to provoke outrage. The idea that you can judge a work without seeing it for yourself belongs nowhere outside of the kind of authoritarian regime Mr Hart’s paper purports to be a bastion against, and the Daily Mail’s decision to print Hart’s fallacies says more about its social attitudes than much of its more, shall we say, politically outspoken journalism.

I believe that Lars von Trier, in common with other revolutionaries in the field such as Michael Haneke and David Cronenberg, arouses passion because he is not afraid to strip himself metaphorically naked in front of us, to admit to us that he also is afraid. He has a talent for confronting us with our worst fears in a quiet, insidious way that worms its way into our system and makes a home there. I believe that we should thank him for that.

The truth is that it is part of the artist’s job description to provoke, to needle and to nag, to confound complacency everywhere it arises. The role of the speculative fictioneer cannot be overstated in this regard. What is the use of taking viewers to other worlds when those other worlds turn out to be just like our own? Where is the crime in crime if we are no longer shocked by it? What is the point in horror that is safe? Speculative fiction that does not shoot us out of our armchairs is, quite simply, not speculative enough.

Critics like Mr Hart, who believe they have the right to condemn a work on mere hearsay, might well suspend their disbelief long enough to find a use for Mr Wells’s most excellent Time Machine, with the proviso that it return him to the eighteen-nineties where he belongs.