Ongoing film marathon program: "Apocalypse / Anhedonia"
Double Feature #1
"It's Coming / It (Already) Happened"; Lars von Trier's Melancholia followed by Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour

On Melancholia

I'm a little annoyed, already, by most of the reviews I've glanced at, because they all seem to fall into the same reductive trap of reading this film as "about depression", that Justine "represents" depression (and likewise, that Claire "represents" anxiety), as though Lars von Trier were making a documentary about the DSM-V. I feel it should be said, first and foremost, that this is a film with characters with complex histories; it's clearly meant to be taken on an allegorical level, but not in the sense of boringly ascribing clinical diagnoses to characters as though we're psychiatrists checking off symptom boxes. Justine, for one, is not a "lump of free-floating unhappiness", as Mike D'Angelo described her in his review (which review is, admittedly, pretty old by this point: I'm dredging up old discourse). There is, rather, a fully-realized context to her ennui: the first half of the film depicts possibly the worst-imaginable wedding: her father is an absent buffoon, and her mother is much, much worse; her asshole-ish boss is the best man and somehow still expects her to have her mind on the job on her wedding night; her sister Claire, the most sympathetic character, is desperately trying to keep up appearances and in doing so, constantly placing unfair expectations on the person actually to be married; and the husband himself is too emotionally immature to meet Justine on her level and empathize with her (we don't know much about the history of their relationship, but it's clear that this is not going to be a good partnership). Justine is not without agency throughout---we see her smile and try to go along with the whole charade, make it nice for everyone else---and then you see how this, too, is punished, for being "inauthentic".

It might only be because I also recently watched this film for the first time, but Claire and Justine's relationship reminded me of the codependency of the twins in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. They each have their own distinct "styles" for responding to the world, but ultimately always depend on the other to navigate. As "normal" as Claire seems compared to Justine, she is only able to prop up her relative stability against Justine's more visible depression. Claire doesn't know what to say in response to Justine giving in to the gravitational pull of Melancholia---which alien planet I read less as an allegory for depression as we now understand it in a clinical context, but more to do with the original psychoanalytic meaning of the term, closely related to Freud's concept of the "death drive"---because she, too, can't muster the same confident facade as her husband. There's an implied history of familial trauma from which all this originates. While Claire is taking care of Justine, Claire gets to feel like her feet are still on the ground; when Justine's ennui is proven right, she has no inner resources to draw on and is pulled into the power of her sister, Justine's power to at least see the situation with clarity, even if she has no other answers than to go into her "magic cave" and give in to the apocalypse.

This is the first Lars von Trier film I've finished, and I think I loved it. I may have more to say another time.

On Hiroshima mon amour

If Melancholia is about anticipating and being gravitationally drawn into unthinkable future crisis, Hiroshima mon amour shows how life continues after the unthinkable and is still forever drawn back into it. With this double feature, I was hoping to achieve a sense of time moving in "both directions at once", and I was happy with the results. Watching these two films back to back, there is a sense of the diptych orbiting around a central, unknowable, blinding trauma; everything in Melancholia is defined by the anticipation of its apocalyptic ending, and everything in Resnais's film is stuck in the space of the past, the characters walking forward amidst dazzling street lights but always aware of what is lurking behind them, the "thing" that propelled them to where they are now.

I honestly don't have much more to say beyond this, for now. This was a masterful, beautiful, poetic film, one of the ones probably everyone ought to watch. Again, I may have more to say later, but will be moving on with this film program into the next double feature I have programmed, which will be Godard's Weekend followed by Bresson's The Devil, Probably.

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