Melancholia
Most films about depressives end with a sort of psychological sunburst. The gloomy protagonist, through adventure or misadventure, realizes that their worldview is unreasonably dark, that happiness on earth is possible and, however sporadic, worth living for. Lars von Trier's new film Melancholia inverts this threadbare formula and resolves the problem in a more interesting way: Not by brightening the outlook of his protagonist until it is matched to reality, but by darkening reality until it is matched to the outlook of his protagonist. For once that has occurred, the depression is "cured" insofar it has ceased to be pathological and become the only reasonable response to what is happening.
Pascal said of man's predicament on Earth that, “not to be mad amounts to another form of madness.” The statement implies that there are two types. Those who realize their true predicament and become hysterical; and those who have successfully repressed an awareness of their true predicament and achieved a genuine but genuinely psychotic happiness. The depressive, however, fits into neither group. He truly believes that he lives in the worst of all possible worlds but views this fact with morbid resignation—and this is why he can face catastrophe and annihilation with relative equanimity: Because his suffering has already reached a certain critical mass to which the addition of new causes of suffering can have little effect and because a large part of the horror of such an event is the irremediable crushing of all human hope of which he had none to begin with. Perhaps the high functionality of depressives in times of disaster is even a plausible evolutionary explanation for the "disease." |
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