Comedy of Abandon: Lars von Trier's Melancholia

Author(s): Marta Figlerowicz

Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Summer 2012), pp. 21-26
Published by: University of California Press
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 Comedy of Abandon:
L ars von Trier ’s Melancholia

Marta Figlerowicz ANALYZES AN OfF-THE-SCALE, CARNIVALESQUE APOCALYPSE

1
As Melancholia starts we hear the overture to Wagner’s Tristan
and Isolde. A huge close-up of Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) face
appears onscreen. She opens her eyes. Dead birds fall from
the sky behind her. These tableaux start to change once every
few measures. Justine is held down by cords of fabric; a horse
falls in a dark empty field; Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
clutches her son Leo (Cameron Spurr) out on a golf course.
They are all in extremely slow motion and it takes a while
to notice they are moving at all. Finally a blue planet rolls
toward Earth. In perfect pace with Wagner’s crescendo, the Melancholic excess
two spheres collide. Dancer in the Dark. © 2000 Zentropa Entertainment 4 Aps, France 3
Cinéma, Arte France Cinéma, Trust Film Svenska, Liberator Productions &
The last time Lars von Trier stunned us with music, his Pain Unlimited. DVD: Film 4 (U.K.).

score heightened intense, grueling pain. “This is not the last

their collective melancholy—could they all be so splendidly
song, / It’s the next to last song,” sings Selma Jezkova (Björk)
sad at the same time?—seems almost (if never just) a joke.
in Dancer in the Dark (2000) until her voice is choked
“Is there a deeper meaning?” chuckles von Trier in his
by the hangman’s noose. Von Trier makes it seem that
commentary. “Probably, somewhere.” There’s truth both to
nothing matters so much as this single human’s suffering.
the hint and to the chuckle. Compared with his past grisly
Each detail—from her guard’s crumpled face to the glasses
creations, Melancholia is a rite of spring. This is the closest he
Selma clutches—reflects back reasons why her feelings
has come to comedy; to what is at once a comedy of manners
are supremely difficult to bear. The sheer length of her
and a comedy of abandon. Von Trier has been famous for
vigil, paced by screams, faints, and official telephone calls,
making us see more than we want to see, for longer than we
is laden with tragedy. To Melancholia’s tableaux there’s a
should endure, with more gravity than we might be used
similar grandeur. The opening tableaux could not be more
to giving sad feelings. Melancholia’s strangely enthralling
shameless about their beauty, or about the scale of their
mismatches of emotional scale and duration celebrate these
subject matter. A great sadness is upon us—a great planet—a
melancholy excesses, but also lift the standards by which such
great cinematic event. But this Wagnerian opening lacks
feelings might be given philosophical, personal, or aesthetic
Dancer in the Dark’s intense tragic concentration. Indeed, it’s
weight. Depression has its pageants, it turns out: and this is
poised to make us feel comically disoriented, unsure about
one. This pageant won’t teach you anything serious, properly
its center of emotional weight. You can’t bring into focus
speaking. But what it shows about seriousness and proportion
two dimensions of the opening: its speed as well as its scale.
as such is enough to make Melancholia a radical questioning
Every shot in turn is caressing and languorous, but we pass
of how we try to make ourselves believe our feelings matter.
between them with the near-flippant briskness of a plot blurb.
Planetary, human, and tinier-than-human dramas, tableaux
2
and musical phrases, are rhymed so deftly and insistently that
We spend the first hour of the film at a wedding. Justine is
getting married to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). Her sis-
Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4, pps 21–26, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. ter Claire and Claire’s husband John (Kiefer Sutherland)
All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2012.65.4.21 are hosting and paying the expenses. When the party begins,

FI L M Q UARTERLY 21

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 Marriage
Melancholia. © 2011 Zentropa Entertainments27 ApS, Memfis Film International AB, Zentropa International Sweden AB, Slot Machine SARL, Liberator Productions SARL, Arte
France Cinéma, Zentropa International Köln GmbH. DVD: Magnolia Home Entertainment.

Justine is radiant. And then a screw comes loose. “I’m trudging
through this grey woolly yarn,” she tells Claire, “and it’s cling-
ing to my legs. It’s really heavy to drag along.” Claire winces:
Justine’s paralyzing sadness has returned. In Dancer in the
Dark, Manderlay (2005), and Dogville (2003) depression and
its sibling resentments wreak murder and rapine. In Antichrist
(2009) they make Gainsbourg’s character cut off her clitoris.
Vinterberg’s Festen (1998), which Melancholia’s wedding also
nods to, studies incest. Justine does cheat on her spouse with
a stranger she fells and straddles in a golf course. But that’s as
much of von Trier’s trademark interpersonal violence as we’ll
be getting. And even this small thrust is quickly blunted as
Justine’s Bottom-like victim proves charmed by his adventure.
(“We had good sex!”) Instead, Justine pays her temper’s costs
in bourgeois luxury goods. As her depression spirals she loses
a dream husband and an executive job, and makes her rela-
tives very impatient. These losses are sustained at a reception
that involves several indoor and outdoor meals, limos, fire bal-
loons, and high-ceilinged ballrooms; amid Bruegel and Goya
reproductions, to the recurrent sound of the Tristan chord.
None of von Trier’s prior characters ever had such a lush, pro-
tective setting in which to stage their sufferings. None of his

22 sum m er 2012

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former unhappy lovers were ever given such a weighty cul-
tural backdrop, a backdrop that seems to make them the voice
of melancholy high-income generations.
Yet even as Justine bucks under her guests’ expectations,
the film as such doesn’t dutifully carry this cultural weight.
Soon you’re not sure which is more spectacularly funny and
pitiable, the characters or their majestic decors. The greater
the gifts Justine receives—her starry-eyed groom at one point
gives her an apple orchard—the more self-indulgent she seems
in morosely rejecting them. The more operatically characters
express frustration at Justine’s inappropriateness, the more
wanton a figure each of the bride’s detractors cuts against their
always grander setting. (“She ruined my wedding—I will not
look at her,” repeats the French wedding planner played by
Udo Kier and covers his eyes whenever Justine passes.) On the
other hand, these paltry figures also pull their oversized social
structures down along with them. If Bruegel’s Hunters in the
Snow and Wagner’s Tristan are such good outlines for their
petty quarrels, maybe this party’s insignificance is merely the
insignificance of the cultural models it tries to follow.
A film bent on existentialism or social commentary
would trace these breakdowns of scale back to some
individual or communal point of origin: it would make
Justine’s disproportionate sadness symptomatic of her
personal alienation, or her bourgeois family’s decay.
Melancholia never lets itself get so serious. Instead it stages
an escalating, ever more spectacular trompe l’oeil. Larger and
smaller time frames and cultural frames keep overlapping
and blending into each other. Each moment of pathos gets
a comic lining, and each comic moment is made vulnerably
sad. In the end, the wedding’s large and small collapses seem
to celebrate not any serious sense of tragic seriousness but the
half-discomfiting, half-enthralling dizziness of realizing that
your sense for these proprieties has failed amid the party’s
many incredible melancholies and resentments, that you’re
enjoying yourself or finding yourself moved despite this loss
of purpose or proportion.
Melancholia prevents these larger tensions among its
plot, setting, and soundtrack from resolving in great part
through its montage. As in the overture, von Trier plays with
our sense of the wedding’s implied real time. Each event
seems to take at once a very long and a very short time; to
require at once less and more emotional effort than you’d
think at first. After the opening sequence, we zoom down to
Justine and Michael’s limo struggling along a country dirt
road. The mood is cheerfully zany: Michael and Justine kiss,
misuse pedals, and dent the car a little, as they help their
driver along a particularly hard turn. Finally they get to
Claire and Michael’s house on foot. The sequence takes five
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minutes. But it turns out the couple have kept their guests
waiting for over two hours. Claire lashes out. “I won’t even
bother saying how late you are.” The gravity or inconsequence
of Justine and Michael’s trespass could only be measured by
their guests’ wait, but that wait is obscured. Rather than give
you grounds for anger or frustration, von Trier lets you take
in these negative feelings without a timescale that could
justify or dispel them. He’s not making light of the feelings
themselves, not exactly, but of the standards of seriousness by
which we might want to test their weight.
These temporal undulations persist and augment.
Whenever Justine wanders away from the reception, von
Trier cuts back and forth between her and her guests in a
way that blurs how long her walks are taking, how quickly
the others’ impatience escalates, and how much of the
wedding everyone still needs to bear through. And when
Justine rejoins them, his cuts at once prolong and rush the
party’s rhythm. In a striking short sequence a quarter into
Melancholia, the wedding band starts playing “La Bamba.”
Michael dips Justine. Everyone cheers; it’s the newlyweds’
first dance. But Michael and Justine don’t go on dancing.
After the two opening measures, he passes Justine to her
boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgård). After another two she’s twirled
around by John. Another turn and she bends down to her
nephew Leo, offering to put him to bed. With each such
change of partner, the camera cuts to a new angle. It hurries
around joltingly as if Justine’s vigor were hard to keep pace
with. But the song only skips a beat once, gently, right before
Leo appears. Between the jagged montage and the near-
seamless soundtrack, it feels at once that we’re watching
the party as it happens and that it’s been schmaltzily cut
and sound-edited, as in a wedding-day home video. It’s as
if Justine has barely danced one number, but also as if she
has already done three. If we knew how long this dance has
taken we could praise or admonish her as kind or conformist,
rebellious or slack, depending on whether we prefer our
sulks to be long or short. Without this knowledge her effort
seems at once weighty and weightless. We also have to smile
at our notions of emotional stamina; they seem so arbitrary
now that von Trier has prevented us from unselfconsciously
applying them.
The objects von Trier’s characters handle and consume—
blankets, flowers, pieces of paper, cakes, balloons, puffy
dresses—mirror these problems of proportion and duration.
They wilt, deflate, crease, catch on fire, fall apart while being
eaten. In the process, they dramatically lose appeal. These
tiny collapses echo Justine’s grander meltdown—and the way
that, as we already know, Earth and Melancholia will soon
fold into each other. In the course of the wedding not much
FI L M Q UARTERLY 23
 is made of this self-consciously silly triple rhyme between the
cosmic, the human, and the ornamental. But Melancholia’s
next hour will devote most of its energies to exploring such
imbalances of not just duration and social pitch, but sheer
physical scale.
3 music are “a piece of shit.” Claire protests feebly, then
As Melancholia’s second section starts we’re still at Claire and
John’s grand mansion. Justine has come to stay with them:
she’s finally accepted her unruly feelings need her sister’s
care. Even before Justine gets there, emotional proportion is
all the characters talk about: John and Claire constantly quar-
rel over whether John should take Claire’s anxieties seriously.
When Justine arrives these emotional self-scrutinies
increase. “She’s a bad influence on you,” John tells his wife.
Around John, Claire’s anxieties get undercut. When she’s
with Justine, they are blown up and bored into beyond any
proportion her husband would allow. But von Trier keeps
upsetting our sense of the greatness or flimsiness of what the
sisters’ dramas could explain or be responding to. Sometimes
he gives us spectacular interpersonal events without any clear
outward causes or effects. In an early scene, Claire tries to
show Justine how nice and warm the water is in the bathtub.
“You’ll like it, Justine!” Claire holds her sister up from
behind, palms arched away from Justine’s breasts so sharply
that her tendons stand out. The embrace looks determinedly
platonic. Later, at night, Claire sees Justine wander off into
the forest. She follows and hides behind a tree. Justine
spreads herself out on a riverbank entirely naked. She basks
in Melancholia’s glow, masturbating. Justine touches with
her palms the very parts of her body over which we’ve just
seen Claire’s hands hover. Touch, warmth, nakedness, and
water, are combined again, but this time the context is
sexual. Claire’s mouth falls open; her eyes widen. The film
then cuts to Claire leaning back on a lawn chair the next
morning, visibly tired. For all we know, this could have been
Claire’s nightmare. Except Justine is also the only person
in the film who would spin out her helpless nakedness so
perversely. This might be one sister’s dream, the other sister’s
budding psychosis, or a dramatic mutual recognition of the
two siblings’ shared incestuous longings. The sequence’s
thrill and appeal hinge on how persistently it refuses to either
save itself from triviality or to plunge headlong into it. What
we’ve seen might just as well be a major emotional discovery
as an imaginary nonevent; and there’s something grandly,
blatantly comic about how hard it is to tell the difference by
merely looking at Claire’s and Justine’s faces.
The sisters’ feelings reach an even higher pitch when
it becomes clear that Melancholia is going to not merely
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circle Earth, but crash into it. Justine’s cynicism and Claire’s
anxiety keep stoking each other. Von Trier describes them as
constantly “changing parts,” alternately becoming the film’s
emotional center. Justine tells Claire that “the universe is
evil,” that there is no life beyond Earth, and that Claire’s
notions of celebrating their last minutes with wine and
cries and hyperventilates. No other character takes Justine’s
negativity as seriously as Claire. And no one but Justine lets
Claire fall so far into her visions of deaths and catastrophes.
But the crueler Justine becomes, the deeper Claire falls into
hysterics, the more von Trier’s pans play up the nouveau-
riche perfection of Claire and John’s lawns and porches, to
which John’s shiny scientific equipment and the bright blue
planet seem, for the time being, similarly kitsch additions.
The power of this sequence comes, again, from the way its
lack of immediate outward counterbalance gives Claire and
Justine’s dialogues at once more and less weight than you’d
expect such an apocalyptic set of exchanges would muster;
from the way it makes their plight seem as vertiginously silly
as it is sad.
As objects start to appear against which the characters’
feelings could potentially be gauged, Melancholia tampers
with their scale—the way it did in the overture, and also in
its rhymes between the wedding’s collapsing persons and
pastries. Sometimes, a single thing grows larger or smaller.
At other times, von Trier creates visual parallels between
different human or cosmic scales. These shifts of scale are at
first underhanded. Before it is clear Melancholia will destroy
them, Claire and her family attend to many small round
objects that diminutively announce its qualities. John’s patio
is decorated with stone globes, and his windows have ringed
iron railings. Leo rolls small balls at each other and makes a
metal loop with which to measure the waxing planet. Claire
picks blueberries and gets a bottle of pills. While she and
Justine are in the garden, flower petals rain down on them.
Taken together, these little spheres and circles seem to sum
up all you will need to know about the fly-by: it’s hard, it’s
blue, it’s looping back, it’s falling toward you, and it’s deadly.
Surely, you think at first, these parallels can’t be intentional:
they take away so casually the seriousness of these characters’
impending doom.
While the fly-by recedes, and then starts getting
bigger, earthly objects appear to change size, too. Human
faces emerge from shadows in large close-ups that mimic
Melancholia’s rise on the horizon. And then these same
characters are shot from a distance, perched on a tall stone
fence, so that they look like children or toy figurines. The
family alternates between watching the fly-by through John’s
 obscure objects and desire

Melancholia. © 2011 Zentropa Entertainments27 ApS, Memfis Film International AB, Zentropa International Sweden AB, Slot Machine SARL, Liberator Productions SARL, Arte
France Cinéma, Zentropa International Köln GmbH. DVD: Magnolia Home Entertainment.

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 fancy telescope and Leo’s loop—apparently with equal trust
in both. As Claire tries to drive over to the village for help,
she keeps getting into ever smaller vehicles. She goes from a
huge SUV in which she completely disappears to a rickety
golf cart that can hardly hold both her and her son.
These sequences also deepen the first section’s breach
between the communal and the individual, between
momentary sensations and long-term disasters. The scales
we now have to balance are now cosmically, spectacularly far
apart. “There’s this girl that has a depression,” says von Trier
in his commentary. “At the same time, strangely enough,” he
smirks, “there’s this planet approaching.” Writ just as large
are parallels between the catastrophic union of these two
planets and the disastrous wedding we were just witnesses to;
between the end of life on Earth and Justine’s deathbound
moods. Justine tells Claire she knows the universe is evil
because she knew how many beans there were in a bean
lottery jar: “I know things, Claire.” Claire, Justine, and Leo
are trapped in the house because their cars will not run, but
they’re also trapped on Earth as such because Melancholia
will destroy it. Claire’s chest keeps heaving, but it’s not clear
whether this is because Melancholia is pulling away the
Earth’s atmosphere, or mostly because she’s having a panic
attack: no one else has such severe breathing problems. Soon
after John commits suicide by drug overdose, Claire and Leo
get stranded in their golf course as little pill-like grains of
hail fall down on them in an enactment and a mockery of
his death. The more you notice how comic these parallels
are, the more amazing it seems that so much comedy
could come of such variously morose material. Their very
shamelessness carries with it a sort of majesty.
4 might think: for society, for art, or even for ourselves. This
In the ending, these smaller thrills fuse into a grand dis-
sonant catharsis. Von Trier calls this “the happiest ending
he’s ever made.” His prior ones work toward a similar dou-
ble sense of excess emotional distance and closeness. But
they do so by violently, alienatingly pushing their emo-
tional gravity to the limit—as when Selma is hung mid-song
in Dancer in the Dark, or when Grace (played by Nicole
Kidman, then by Bryce Dallas Howard) slaughters terrified
villagers in Dogville and flogs her black lover in Manderlay.
Melancholia’s finale, by contrast, seems teasingly uncon-
cerned with our sense of proportion. Great things happen:
Justine perks up, the sisters reconcile, and Earth shatters.
Faced with so many breakthroughs, you don’t know whether
you should laugh or cry—and the buildup is such that it’s
hard to keep yourself from either. As the last shots start
Claire, Justine, and Leo huddle together inside a skeletal
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tent made out of sticks. Justine’s persuaded Leo it’ll shelter
them, so he stays calm. Weeping, Claire gratefully clutches
Justine’s hand. You see each person in large close-up. And
then you zoom away until they’re antlike silhouettes against
the brightening sky. The Tristan chord booms again, dwarf-
ing the characters’ emotional exchanges but now itself
comically dwarfed by the cosmic body wiping out human
culture altogether. As Melancholia takes over the entire hori-
zon, its size is overwhelming. But cast behind the stick tent
and the forest it also looks gorgeous, with the slight overkill
of a psychedelic back-to-nature poster. And there is some-
thing ridiculous about the notion that you would need such
a big planet to kill three persons in a stick hut; or, conversely,
that Claire’s family could stand in for the entire biosphere
dying with them. These disjunctures are more precarious,
and more readily risk being misread, than von Trier’s prior
spells of grueling gravity. Yet their comic precariousness also
drives home more powerfully than those hangings, shoot-
ings, and scourgings, both how helplessly ungroundable
his characters’ feelings are and how helpless they are before
these feelings’ grand urgency.
Melancholia is not, strictly speaking, philosophical. Still
less is it weightlessly aesthetic or self-absorbed. Its power
comes instead from placing you on the threshold of all
these forms of seriousness. Von Trier makes you feel at once
confined and liberated, confused and tippled, by not letting
you cross into these realms. This is not to call Melancholia
tentative. Rather, it is to say that Melancholia recasts what,
in prior von Trier films, were overwhelmingly universal
questions, as questions that might only be raised by a passing
mood or feeling. Maybe there’s nothing particularly serious
about our sadnesses. Maybe they’re not as weighty as we
comic kind of self-scrutiny marks a break with von Trier’s
past works. But as a way of commenting both on them, and
on our sense of emotional propriety in general, it gives his
visions a refinement that’s as new and impressive as anything
in recent cinema.
MARTA FIGLEROWICZ is a graduate student in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
ABSTRACT: The piece reviews Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). This film marks a break
with von Trier’s prior work. Rather than push its plot to the limits of emotional intensity and
gravity, Melancholia studies and comically questions our sense of feelings’ proportion and
scale.
KEYWORDS: Melancholia, Lars von Trier, comedy, emotional proportion, emotional scale.
DVD DATA Melancholia. Director: Lars von Trier. © 2011 Zentropa Entertainments27 ApS,
Memfis Film International AB, Zentropa International Sweden AB, Slot Machine SARL, Lib-
erator Productions SARL, Arte France Cinéma, Zentropa International Köln GmbH. Publish-
er: Magnolia Home Entertainment. $26.98, 1 disc.