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News & ArtsThursday, September 20, 2012
Film Steven Shaviro on Melancholia
Posted by Charles Mudede on Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:50 AM
I did not much like Melacholia...
That said, I love Steven Shaviro's reading of Melancholia. I love it even more than the movie—the true mark of great criticism. He makes many important points, one of which concerns depression:
Many people who have experienced extreme depression (a group in which I include myself) have strongly felt that von Trier gets it right in this movie. He really conveys a sense of what depression feels like. Melancholia traces the contours of depression from the inside, better than any other film I have ever seen. As Trevor Link puts it, in his beautiful essay on the film, von Trier’s “frequent use of jump cuts and changes in focus help convey this puzzling and erratic state that lacks a strong sense of direction… [von] Trier has experienced depression so deeply and gets something about it so precise that his images are entirely suffused with the stillness of the depressive state” (Link 2011).This significant door into the film, depression, is, I admit, closed to me. I'm familiar with sadness but not with depression. Sadness has no finality to it. You can live, go to work, make love, make dinner, be happy, and still be sad. The sad person never feels the end of the world but sees no end of the world. Sadness is like a slow journey across a deep and dark sea. Sometimes you see the sun, sometimes you see the land, sometimes you see the clouds, sometimes you see nothing. But you keep going.
1
Charles,
Unless I'm remembering wrong, wasn't the only major problem the complete ignoring of the Roche limit that would have seen Melancholia actually break apart before direct impact?
Melancholia lived in a world that had never heard of Newton, or had an adequate science of matter and motion, physics.
Unless I'm remembering wrong, wasn't the only major problem the complete ignoring of the Roche limit that would have seen Melancholia actually break apart before direct impact?
2
Yo.
Chuck-
Why didn't you post that Obama's CounterTerrorism Director said the murder of Chris Stevens was a terrorist attack?
Not the result of a protest riot.....
That Stevens was on a terrorist hit list?
And knew it?
And spent the last weeks of his life fearing for his life?
And that Obama did not protect him?
Why didn't you post that?
Chuck-
Why didn't you post that Obama's CounterTerrorism Director said the murder of Chris Stevens was a terrorist attack?
Not the result of a protest riot.....
That Stevens was on a terrorist hit list?
And knew it?
And spent the last weeks of his life fearing for his life?
And that Obama did not protect him?
Why didn't you post that?
3
There's definitely a possibility that whether one has experienced depression or not affects your opinion of the movie. I saw this a bit amongst the people I know who saw the film. There were also a few scenes that I found meaning in (e.g., beating the horse to get it to go over the bridge), that those who have no experience with depression didn't get or dismissed. For me, as a "sci-fi" or fantasy movie or whatever, it wasn't that interesting, but as a study of depression, it was fascinating.
4
@1, they would have been able to see the planet coming for many, many years and would have been able to correctly deduce its path.
7
Charles, you made this point in a previous Melancholia post that there was some uncertainly about whether the planets would collide. I don't think that was the case. The second act of the movie was entirely on the isolated estate of that one family and Kiefer Sutherland's character was, indeed, holding out hope they wouldn't collide but there was nothing from the outside world that showed any doubt. The only thing I could think of would be that Dunst got a cab ride there. Who'd still be driving people around in cabs if the end of the world was imminent?
8
As far as the movie, it really is one of those films that you would have had to be clinically depressed to fully understand. Helen is another example of this type of movie. 99% of movies about depression are full of shit. Melancholia isn't.
Sadness has no finality to it. You can live, go to work, make love, make dinner, be happy, and still be sad. The sad person never feels the end of the world but sees no end of the world. Sadness is like a slow journey across a deep and dark sea. Sometimes you see the sun, sometimes you see the land, sometimes you see the clouds, sometimes you see nothing. But you keep going.Depression is when you stop. And depression is when you can't feel happiness, or pleasure, or interest, etc. It is tough to describe, but I think your description of sadness gives a good dividing line.
As far as the movie, it really is one of those films that you would have had to be clinically depressed to fully understand. Helen is another example of this type of movie. 99% of movies about depression are full of shit. Melancholia isn't.
9
Science is real, but there's no reason it has to be represented as such in film or anywhere else. And I like not always experiencing things as "real." I understand gravity, but I also love it when Wile E. Coyote hangs suspended in the air before he falls into the canyon.
10
Art and science are not really meant to describe the same things; I see little value in the former offering the latter any deference. Fact is a component of truth--an important component, no doubt, but also its pettiest and most vindictive, in many ways. Truth cannot be counter-factual, but it can be extra-factual. The more extra-factual any work of art, the more truth I, personally, am able to glean; fact mutes art the same way emotion and agenda mute empiricism.
I feel like Melancholia really did get depression right, and it seems to me that the degree to which one found the film edifying did, indeed, reflect how closely one had brushed with the most fatalistic of episodes.
Then again, I also liked The Tree of Life, so I suppose we may just like different movies, for no reasons deeper or more meaningful than those that lead us to like different foods or prefer boxers to briefs (or vice versa).
I feel like Melancholia really did get depression right, and it seems to me that the degree to which one found the film edifying did, indeed, reflect how closely one had brushed with the most fatalistic of episodes.
Then again, I also liked The Tree of Life, so I suppose we may just like different movies, for no reasons deeper or more meaningful than those that lead us to like different foods or prefer boxers to briefs (or vice versa).
11
10: Mudede is an ideologue, and like all ideologues his rigid assumptions about how things are supposed to be disables his ability to actually appreciate creative endeavors. Art to him is just a means of getting the message out. The idea of sharing in other people's perspectives doesn't really appeal to him. This makes him a poor film critic.
12
It was pretentious shit. Possibly one of the worst films I have ever seen. OMG, Melanchalia is getting closer, we better become increasing melancholic ourselves! Oh, the really melancholic character is actually calmer because she's used to all the melancholia!
Let's use a lot of in your face metaphors, pretentious art lovers will love that!
It was fucking shit.
Let's use a lot of in your face metaphors, pretentious art lovers will love that!
It was fucking shit.
13
12: Someday people will figure out that there are better words than "pretentious" to put something down, and maybe they'll stop misusing and overusing that tired-ass adjective.
15
I thought the film was very anti-scientific, but that's OK. It was anti-scientific in more than merely the character John's impotence in the face of disaster, leading him to claim his own life (himself representative of the entire field of science's inability to do anything). Rather, the anti-scientific bent is also present in anti-anthropocentrism, science itself being the pinnacle of anthropocentric thought. This is a difficult claim to make because Shaviro (and Ray Brassiere, Meillassoux and some others) probably feel that science is the only way _out_ of anthropocentrism and that it is religion that is anthropocentric (because of the anthropomorphized God). But I would argue the opposite: religion is about the "divine" realm beyond mere human existence (and not accessible to quantitative metaphors, only to thought, which is the only thing capable of grasping the absolute) , whereas science is concerned with quantities, data, information. It is like how Zizek pointed out in LESS THAN NOTHING (2012) that Heidegger said "Science does not think, but this limitation is not its shortcoming but rather its locomotive force." (paraphrasing). That is, science is powerful _because of its inability to think_ -- because it is only capable of computation. In any case, Melancholia rejects science as the ultimate horizon, potentially even rejecting causality in favor of a kind of acausal orderedness. I saw Melancholia as a quite Jungian film, with the approaching planet representing a Jungian archetype of the unconscious and Earth representing human ego. We witnessed the famed Mysterium Coniunctionus or coniunctionus oppositorum on film -- a love affair between two planets. As the Romantic music swelled in the beginning when the planets collide (Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, perfect choice) I couldn't help but think we were watching the numinous moment of contact between opposites -- the moment of loving embrace which is also dissolution, dissolving into each other, obliteration, oceanic ego-loss ...
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