What Does the Subject Know? — Some Notes on Melancholia

At the beginning of a love affair one might ask — depending on which kind of person one is: a person who prefers the future, or a person who prefers the past — What am I getting into? Or, What am I getting out of? It is common sense to assume that every entrance is also an exit.

Lars von Trier's entire body of work is like an ongoing, many-voiced conversation, but his most recent films Antichrist and Melancholia (2011) — written during the height of his depression — engage in an intimate, despairing pillow talk. They depict themes of mourning and melancholia, tragic loss and the end of the world, catastrophes that have already happened and yet to be experienced. Like Antichrist, Melancholia begins with a slow-motion sequence, an eight-minute overture1 set to the Prelude of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Von Trier has commented that aesthetically the intent of the overture is to take some images out of context and strike themes that involve images of a cosmic collision and Justine's (Kirsten Dunst) visions of the end of the world. The overture, a “series of moving tableaux” , is composed of lush and disastrous images that recur in the rest of the film: a close-up of Justine's half-eyed catatonic gaze; dead birds dropping, followed by a shot evoking the highly sculptured lawn of Alan Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad ; visions of the planet Melancholia; Justine's favorite horse, Abraham, falling back on its hind legs; Justine dragging sludge in her wedding dress; the static long shot of Justine's sister Claire and son, a medium shot of electricity emanating out of Justine's finger tips; a shot of Pieter Breughel's Hunters in the Snow, which also appears in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris ; and an image of Justine floating down the river like Ophelia from Hamlet. One shot, a vision of two planets that collide, looks like a breast with a nipple, an archetype for maternal regressiv