occupiedterritories:

I don’t expect every critic to tell his life story (as I am selectively doing here), but I think it is only honest to make clear to readers: “Here I am. I am writing this.  I am not infallible.  I am just a human being like yourself.  What I have to say and the way in which I say it was determined by my own background, my own experience, my own understanding (or lack thereof).  I make no pretense to Absolute Truth.”

—Robin Wood, Preface to Hitchcock’s Films Revisited: Revised Edition

I’ve suffered from depression my entire adult life, but 2011 was the first year I began to understand and accept this fact.  In retrospect, my inability to fully embrace my depression was itself a sign and symptom of depression: above all, I didn’t believe I “deserved” to be depressed (because it felt like complaining about my life when others had it much worse, which is certainly an incorrect understanding of depression) and then I insulted and belittled myself for not being smart or strong enough to “fix” my depression, believing that others would think I was “faking it” and simply refusing to be happy and get on with my life.  Even though I can’t think of a period in my life where I’ve gone more than a month without significantly feeling the effects of depression in some form or another, I falsely and shamefully convinced myself that I was just going through a series of phases, part of the process of ironing out one’s issues on the path to adulthood.  Now, that entire idea, that depression is something wrong that must be fixed and that it is a mere obstacle on the path to maturity, is something I find monstrous, and instead, I feel the most urgent need to safeguard my acknowledgement of depression, which feels infinitely more valuable than all the promises of conventional adult normality.  The only real victory I can count is that I don’t run away from this acknowledgement anymore.  Others might see this as regressive or even self-destructive, partly because they fear depression so much they’d rather ignore it, but for me, that is just another sign of the grotesque way we deal with depression and mental illness in our culture.  One bright spot I’ve found is Lars von Trier’s latest film Melancholia, which coils unbudgingly around a similar acknowledgement of depression not just in its central character (as well as the writer/director who made the film) but as a larger fact of life.  Beyond any consideration of aesthetics, I think that it’s a hugely important film, for myself of course but also possibly important in general, and I’d like to try to explain why I think it’s so important.

The first aspect of Melancholia that seems relevant to discuss is its subject matter: this is a film that envisions the destruction of our planet and all life on it.  But while the film ends with the annihilation of life on Earth, the heart of this final image is the centered and calm, radiantly beautiful Kirsten Dunst as the film’s protagonist Justine.  There are many different ways to look at this image, but for me, a person who suffers from depression, it is beyond beautiful: it is essential.  In every way, the narrative of the film revolves around, or orbits (apropos for a film about two planets), the figure of Dunst as Justine.  We must remember that this is just a story, one we can safely walk away from, but it’s clear that apocalyptic storytelling can be productive beyond its destructive imagery.  It can help us envision the end of our own corrupted world as a prelude to the creation of a new and better one.  Or perhaps more importantly, it can realize and make concretely visible the entanglement of poisonous thoughts and feelings, perhaps no better embodied than in the figure of a planet crashing into Earth, that afflicts the depressed person, and in this way, an imagining of the apocalypse as in Melancholia can give tangible solidity to the darkest emotions of the depressed person.  By creating an exteriorization of what is inherently, tragically a self-destructively interior process, a film like Melancholia allows a depressed person to draw strength from these images: at least in them, the truth of the world as imagined or feared by the depressed mind is made real, finally, rather than continuing to plague him or her as a terrifyingly palpable, yet elusive, phantasm.  And in this final sequence of Melancholia, it is Dunst’s character Justine who remains calm and has the capacity to comfort the young boy Leo (Cameron Spurr), son of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Finally, we are useful for something!  At last, the part of us that is ugliest can serve to create rather than destroy: I can’t think of a single image in the cinema of 2011 that brings me as much peaceful contentment as the “magic cave” Justine creates for the three of them out of sticks.  It is an act of writing onto the real world that which terrorizes so many people from the inside, invisible and too often merely dismissed.  This image comforts me because it suggests that in the face of what appears as utter hopelessness, there is a safe place, a sanctuary, where we can retreat and even draw others in for protection.

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