SEQUENCE 1.2 (2014) An Allegory of a ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of a Film: Of MELANCHOLIA Rupert Read SEQUENCE 1.2 (2014) Rupert Read Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. // In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. // The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy. 6.431 As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases. 6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. // If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. // Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. Heidegger, Being and Time: If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the philosophy of psychology I: 20: [A]n interpretation becomes an expression of experience. And the interpretation is not an indirect description; no, it is the primary expression of the experience. 2 SEQUENCE 1.2 (2014) Rupert Read 1. This essay is a (more or less philosophical) i. Throughout this paper, I dance in a account or allegory of my viewing(s) of Lars von ‘dialogue’ with – am in ‘conversation’ Trier’s remarkable film, Melancholia (2011).1 It is with – Steven Shaviro’s fascinating personal, and philosophical. (The personal here paper, “Melancholia or, the romantic turns out, potentially, to be philosophical.) Von anti-sublime”: Trier’s film in turn is clearly among other things a http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence (brilliantly accurate) allegory of (his) depression; 1/1-1-MELANCHOLIA-or-The- and it is also clearly (though at the very same time) Romantic-Anti-Sublime/ (The page much more than that. In expressing my experience references that I give to his work in of the film and the world (and my experience as a these notes are to this webpage as it part time mega-melancholic – which is part of my prints out). Shaviro’s paper, with basis for using the adjective “brilliantly accurate” in which this paper is in sequence, I the previous sentence), my essay is inevitably engage with explicitly through this personal, ‘person-relative’. Furthermore: This is an apparatus of 33 sidenotes (signalled inevitable feature of therapeutic philosophy, the by the use of roman-numerals). There philosophy practiced most famously by Ludwig are also 33 endnotes for other Wittgenstein. As the later Gordon Baker for references (signalled by decimal example explained clearly2: such philosophy numerals). My aim in these sidenotes responds to the individual reader (/ viewer). And is to show how my interpretation of vice versa. In a kind of dialogue or (to use the term the film, as I see it, complements and that Melancholia prefers) dance. .i ultimately contradicts Shaviro’s. {sidenote i} 2. Why do I call my take on Melancholia a philosophical one? Well, let me seek to explain. ii. Shaviro suggests repeatedly and Let’s start with one of the apparently-odd plot- intelligently that one thing it means is features of the film. The entire action takes place that the world of the 1% is largely within the grounds of a family home, a chateau: in closed to the rest of us (Cf. also n.iv, part, because Justine (Kirsten Dunst) – and in fact, below). But I will argue below that (as later, both the two main protagonists – apparently Shaviro perhaps implies on p.6 of his cannot leave the chateau. Each time that Justine essay) there is a deeper ‘existential’ attempts to take her horse across the little bridge, meaning to it, a meaning that she fails. And near the end, the same uncanny connects for instance with the therapy failure hits Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in her present in Buddhism (to the effect golf-buggy, the last vehicle able to move (albeit that the greatest suffering comes from with the risible speed and style of a golf-buggy) in the sense of continuing self/ego, a their little world. …I believe that this uncanny suffering that peaks in the trappedness is a key to the film. What does it condemnedness-to-self of the mean?ii inveterate melancholic), and with the words of Bob Marley’s great song, 3. We can (and should) think here of Last Year at Running Away. (Other obvious Marienbad,3 so clearly inter-textually telegraphed in possible meanings would be: that it the opening images of the sculpted plants which allegorises death (this was pointed out have two shadows (In Marienbad, they cast just to me by Kristof Bodnar), or Hell, one – but the people there cast none at all).iii In which are also of course states, Marienbad too, it is impossible to escape the relevant to the film’s theme, that chateau. One is trapped, on my reading of that cannot be escaped.) {sidenote ii} marvellous, puzzling film, in one’s own Reason. In 3 SEQUENCE 1.2 (2014) Rupert Read one’s – in the film’s ‘character’s – own half-dead iii. The rich intertextuality of Melancholia hyper-rational minds. In psychosis as understood is not sufficiently appreciated, in roughly along the lines envisaged by Louis Sass in Shaviro’s essay (see especially p.2). For his Madness and Modernism.4 In the case of instance: it isn’t just that the Breughel Melancholia, we are dealing primarily, it would painting “Hunters in the snow” seem, with neurosis: with ‘affective disorders’. The appears in Tarkovsky’s Solaris as well trap in this (similar and dissimilar) case is simply (in) as in Melancholia – it plays a pivotal one’s life. The trap is one’s mind. (Neurosis is: being role in that film, a film that clearly that trapped in one’s own mind, and hating it. Psychosis Melancholia is clearly ‘in sequence’ is: being trapped in and by one’s own mind with. As for Marienbad: Melancholia is without even realising that one is.) The chateau is a clearly a rich re-writing of it. It shows lived world. The chateau is your mind. You can’t us psychopathological trappedness, as escape it.iv Marienbad does (it plays the neurotic to Resnais’s psychotic); but, unlike 4. The magnificently-depicted utter futility of Resnais’s film, in the final seven Claire’s effort to run away, by getting into a big minutes it actually offers a genuine strong car – a 4×4 – and then a golf-buggy, and escape-route. Crucially, as I remark in then just running… Where? The interaction at that section 3, above, Shaviro doesn’t point between her and Justine here is startlingly mention that the second shot of reminiscent of the interaction between Deckard Melancholia’s prelude, which and Roy at the climactic moments of the famous remembers Marienbad, shows us chase in Blade Runner, as the latter asks the former, every object casting two shadows, as Deckard seeks pointlessly to escape his fate, his whereas in Marienbad the objects being-toward-death: “Where are you going?”… didn’t cast any shadows at all; only the Justine uses the exact same verbal formulation, to people did. Marienbad was a world of Claire. ghosts, a world where mind or spirit was real and matter not; Melancholia 5. The point: there is nowhere to run to. Nowhere by contrast sees, in Justine, the to go. There is no escape. You can’t run away from midwifing of a return from a life of your own most death, nor from the present being ‘stuck’ in the mind to the actual moment. (As Leo (Cameron Spurr) later puts it: world, just in time (i.e. before the “Dad says there’s nothing to do then. Nowhere to world is obliterated). {sidenote iii} hide.”) The only ‘escape’ from what Freud called “ordinary unhappiness” / anxiety, and, still more so, iv. As Shaviro points out, it’s not easy to from melancholia, is (as Buddhism has long get into this world, either: Think back indicated) acceptance. To ‘escape’, paradoxically, to the struggle of the wedding you have to embrace. To accept what is happening limousine, which seemed a simple bit right now, to embrace it; and to embrace others. of fun at the start of the film, and (And this, as I will discuss below, is what Justine at which Shaviro decodes as echoing the this point in the film is managing, for the first time, failure to consummate of Justine and to do, in both a very direct and a symbolically-rich Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) (“How way.) There is no (other) escape. This existential do I put it in?”, Justine asks. In gear, point is starkly literalised in Melancholia by the that is…). But now (i.e. in connection whole planet being about to be wiped out. with the point I am making about the existential and psychical meaning of 6. Melancholia has a way of bashing the viewer the closed world of the chateau) it over the head with a number of stark, heavily- takes on a different hue: as connoting 4 SEQUENCE 1.2 (2014) Rupert Read signalled symbols. The most obvious of which is part of the limit-conditions of this calling the blue planet about to crash into Earth lived world.