Melancholia and the infinite gladness – The Movie Filter
While the 2011 Cannes Film Festival praised Terrence Malick’s cosmos-searching art film Tree of Life, the Croisette treated controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier like he and his latest dark drama depicting the end of the Earth by collision with another planet were twin lunatics. And yet, a month later, scientists from the U.S., Japan and New Zealand published evidence supporting the existence of “wandering” planets that do not orbit stars but roam the galaxy. This, after astrophysicists at UL-Lafayette made headlines suggesting a planet four times the size of Jupiter may loom on the outer reaches of our solar system, and just before those at UC-Santa Cruz proposed that Earth once had two moons that impacted each other to form the one we know and love.
Astronomy, like the best cinema, is an exploration into the unknown, a search and a longing for answers. Both disciplines collide this month with the U.S. release of Von Trier’s Melancholia.
Like Mike Cahill’s recent indie drama Another Earth—in which a twin Earth suddenly appears from behind the sun—Melancholia brings with it a new planet that threatens life as we know it. If scientists have been claiming this year that we know less about the universe than we previously thought, these filmmakers are in wholehearted agreement.
Many will write these films off as depressing, but that misreading does a disservice to their real, more nuanced theme: longing. Brit Marling is Another Earths breakout star and co-writer, and her character Rhoda longs for the inner enlightenment necessary to forgive herself for a terrible, family-destroying accident worthy of a John Irving novel. Melancholia star Kirsten Dunst’s character longs for absolute truth, for something real within the ritual of marriage and the pageant of life.
Like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield or Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, Melancholia’s protagonist feels trapped emotionally and spiritually in a world marred by, in Bennet’s literate language, “the inconsistency of all human characters,” and in Caulfield’s teenage tongue, a glut of “phonies.”
While the astronomical abnormalities in these films are mere devices to reveal hypocrisies, the striking poster for Melancholia poses Dunst as painter John Everett Millais’ famous version of Hamlet’s tragic heroine Ophelia, floating and floral even unto death. Unlike Shakespeare’s version, Dunst is not singing blissfully in a river, “incapable of her own distress,” but dejected for missing out on more moments of reality at this, the moment of truth for her life. For her, longing is empowering in its rejection of the surface and status quo.
“There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them,” wrote Victorian novelist George Eliot, who called longing essential to being thoroughly alive.
Saint Augustine went further.
“The continuance of your longing,” he wrote, “is the continuance of your prayer.”
Melancholia debuts Nov. 11.
