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Hiding Behind the Sun: Melancholia
KASSANDRA:
look the
cup of my pain is already poured
out why
did you bring me
here was
it for this
was it for this
was it for
- Aiskhylos, Agamemnon, translated by Anne Carson *In the Agamemnon of Aiskhylos, Kassandra knows that she will die. It is her own death she mourns, before it happens. She mourns the particularity of a death that distinguishes her from those who will go on living.
But yes think oh think of the clear
nightingale—
gods put round her a wing
a life with no sting
but for me waits
schismos
of the double-edged sword: schismos
means
a cleaving a cutting a splitting a
chopping in twoShe laments her imminent separation from the world of the living, which doubles a prior separation from her home.
O marriage of Paris so deadly for everyone
else
O river of home my Skamander
I used to dream by your waters
now soon enough
back and forth on the banks of the river of
hell
I will walk with my song torn openThe living are distinct from the dead (“everyone / else”) and Kassandra is doubly distinct among the living: first, because her death is imminent; second, because she knows this. Because she is a prophet. Thus she will die when the present catches up with her proleptic knowledge of the future, and what she knows will vanish, in time, into her own death. Death, for the prophet, is the restitution of a rift in time.
***
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud describes melancholia as the introjection of a lost object, and of one’s ambivalence toward it. The ego is split, divided, torn open by the internalization of an irrevocable absence. Schismos, Kassandra says. Cleaving: an attachment that cuts. One is divided by that from which one cannot divide oneself, though it is already gone.
Elektra is a melancholiac. In the play by Sophocles she has a sister, Chrysothemis, who accommodates herself to the loss of their father. Elektra cannot.
You are women of noble instinct
and you come to console me
in my pain.
I know.
I do understand.
But I will not let go this man or this
mourning.
He is my father.
I cannot grieve.
Oh my friends,
Friendship is a tension. It makes delicate
demands.
I ask this one thing:
let me go mad in my own way.I cannot grieve. Insofar as she will not let go her mourning, she cannot mourn. The work of mourning is inoperative. Insofar as it is without end it cannot begin. Melancholia is this self-negation of mourning, and the vector of this self-negation is the negation of the self: either madness or suicide. These are the only possible terminus of an interminable self-negation.
Never
will I leave off lamenting,
never. No.
As long as the stars sweep through heaven.
As long as I look on this daylight.
No.Friendship is a tension, and from her friends Elektra asks allowance to go mad in her own way. From herself, as the soliloquy above implies, she seems to want to permission to black out the sun and the stars. There is also a cosmological request implied in this passage: for the stars to stop their courses; for the sun to stop shining. For relief of her condition by some kind of planetary or astral catastrophe. The shattered ego wants a broken heaven and a black sun. Suicide, then, or apocalypse. But if the latter, it could never be revelation; only a negation: “No.” It could only be an annihilation of self and world from which nothing could come. Melancholia is an attachment to an absent past (a lost object) issuing in a rejection of the future and a hatred of the present. The analepsis of the melancholic is not the negation of prolepsis but a negativity internal to it, the “no” of “no future” installing itself in the now. And this is a splitting of the ego, a fracture, or void, torn by the torque of time. Madness: an interior undoing of this fracture, its psychic rupture. Death: an exterior negation of an interior void, the dissolution of its boundary. Death, for the melancholiac, is the dissolution of a rift in time.
***
Prophecy reverses the temporality of melancholia: the melancholic prophet proleptically interiorizes the future loss of her own life—a loss which, in prophetic time, has already happened, so that it can happen to her, now. She not only lives her being-toward-death, in the existential mode of projective anticipation. Insofar as she already knows when and how she will die, she anticipates nothing. She is not torn between thrownness and projection, between being-in-the-world and being-toward-death, historicality and anticipation. Rather, these have collapsed: what happened yesterday is that she died tomorrow. Their collapse is is not ekstatical but introjective, and this introjection or interiorization structures the melancholic stimmung of prophetic time.
The melancholic prophet interiorizes an ambivalence toward her own death, a temporal ambivalence which is split, torn, divided, torqued. It is temporally and affectively divided (ambivalent) because the death of the prophet is at once the beginning and the end of melancholy. One loves one’s death because it is the terminus of melancholy; one hates one’s death because it is the origin of melancholy. In a word, death is the telos of melancholy, and this telos is ambivalent. The sharp edge of its ambivalence, carving a difference between the beginning and the end, is knowledge. The proleptic having-happened of ones own death is what one knows, in the present. And death will be the end of this knowing, its coincidence with being nothing.
Time is a line upon which a fracture displaces itself: from Aristotle to Heidegger and Deleuze, philosophy has always known this. The moment of my death is that at which I come to know nothing of this displacement, at which I no longer know what becomes of time. Ignorance, says Lacan, is the strongest of the passions. All passion spent, the melancholic prophet is the one who cannot not know, who cannot be ignorant. The ambivalence of the melancholic prophet toward her destiny derives from the fact that her only access to the passion of ignorance is death, oblivion, and thus the dissolution of all passion. The ambivalence of her destiny resides in a complicit tear between knowing and not-knowing, restitution and dissolution.
***
In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Justine is such a melancholic prophet. Kassandra / Elektra: Justine.
What does she know? What has she lost?
The latter is the diagnostic question raised by the Freudian theory of melancholia: what is the lost object that cannot be let go, which has been interiorized along with one’s ambivalence toward it? This question threatens the account of the melancholic prophet offered above with incoherence. For foreknowledge of one’s own death does not necessarily entail a lost object, retrojected into the present tense so as to provoke its ambivalent introjection. One’s own death is a loss without object, since “life” is not an object to be lost.
In the case of Melancholia, however, the question begged by Freud’s account yields a precise answer: the lost object is none other than the earth itself. This is a loss that can only be lived proleptically, since the loss of this object, its annihilation, would coincide with the death of any subject to whom it could be lost. As the exterior object is lost, the interiority that could register this loss is annihilated. It is the introjective knowledge of this double eradication, in the present, that precipitates a proleptic melancholy.
Thus we can say that the subject of von Trier’s film is not only prophetic melancholia, but the relation between melancholy, prophecy, and extinction. Justine not only knows that she will die, but that her death will coincide with the end of the world. Not only her world, but the world. The annihilation of world, insofar as the existence of life on earth is the condition of possibility for the phenomena of world. Along with everyone else, she will die as the world ends; unlike everyone else, she knows this now. She does not know this as a scientific prediction or a speculative hypothesis, but prophetically: as something that has already happened though it has not happened yet.
This is precisely the formal structure of von Trier’s film. It opens with a series of tableau which are not quite still but barely moving, captured in extreme slow-motion. A close-up of Justine’s face as dead sparrows fall to the side of her gaze. A woman carrying a child, running across a golf course as though through quicksand, her feet sinking into the ground. A bride, a boy, a woman on the lawn before a castle at night, walking into the foreground, each figure attended, above, by an astronomical counterpart: a blue planet, a crescent moon, a pale sun. A boy carving bark from a stick with a pocketknife as a woman approaches through the grass. A bride trudging, in profile, across a field in front of a wood, dragging heavy woolen ropes bound to her arms and legs, attached to the trees in the background. A massive blue planet approaching the earth, devouring it in a collision. “Melancholia,” it will come to be called.
The beginning of the film thus reveals its ending, makes manifest what will never be perceived (within the world of the film) insofar as it is the end of all perception. For Justine the end of the world will be the negation, the non-being, in the now, of knowing what will be. The seamless folding together of form and content in von Trier’s film is such that the now of this ending is both the beginning and the end of the film. As the incendiary shockwave of a planetary collision devours the frame, as though burning up the screen, the screen cuts to black. Before the end, the melancholic prophet is afflicted not so much by her knowledge of this ending, but by the fact that this knowledge has not yet ended. This structure is recapitulated for the audience not as affliction but as dramatic irony, the narrative tension of a proleptically dissolved suspense. Thus the ending of the film is a kind of metafilmic resolution, the restitution of a rift in time that is also the dissolution of the medium. The earth is destroyed, the screen blacks out, what had already happened has happened. Melancholia is over. The credits role.
This complicity of prophecy and dramatic irony—content and form fused by proleptic temporality—is the metatheatrical structure of Greek tragedy. It is the structure of anankē.
***
Like Elektra, Justine has a sister. And like Chrysothemis, Claire councils accomodation to the order of things. A sensible girl, she does not want any “scenes” at Justine’s wedding.
Here you are again at the doorway, sister,
telling your tale to the world!
When will you learn?
It’s pointless. Pure self-indulgence.
Yes, I know how bad things are.
I suffer too—if I had the strength
I would show how I hate them.
But now is not the right time.Claire is pragmatic. Justine is inconsolable. She cannot force herself to endure the ceremony of false or inessential or superficial affective attachments because in the dead time of prophecy every attachment is already broken. On their wedding night her husband shows her a picture of an orchard he has just acquired (“I found our plot of land”), imagining that one day they might hang a small swing from an apple tree. “We’ll talk about that when the time comes,” she says, knowing that it won’t. Because it ultimately makes no difference there is no reason to consign one’s life to semblance, and she can’t, even if she has to perform it sometimes. What remains is not so much pessimism as a bitter authenticity.
The lost object is what one loves; because it is lost, one hates it. Internalized, the ambivalence of this affective bond gives rise to an irrevocable attachment of self-loathing and narcissism, a riven solipsism as petty and cruel as it is admirable in its loyalty to the truth of what one feels. Disdaining the other, insofar as she does not suffer from this double bind, one is also hated for an intransigent honesty. “You know what I think of your plan?” asks Justine when Claire wants to mark the imminent annihilation of the planet with a glass of wine on the terrace: “I think it’s a piece of shit.”
“You appall me,” Elektra tells Chrysothemis.
“Sometimes I hate you so much,” Claire replies.
Recrimination, refusal to mourn, fidelity to the impossible: these are the hallmarks of melancholic ambivalence. “The earth is evil,” Justine tells her sister. And then, “life on earth is evil,” a sliding precisely expressive of recriminatory identification with the lost object. “We do not need to grieve for it,” she concludes. “Nobody will miss it.” The rejection of mourning for the earth, an introjected hatred of the object that will be lost, also entails an ambivalent longing for the agent of its loss. This is the source of Justine’s erotic identification with the planet, Melancholia, which bears the name of her sickness. It’s the reason she offers herself, naked, to its light. Until the earth is destroyed, Melancholia is the proleptic agent of its loss. After the earth is destroyed, loss itself has been annihilated. There is thus a crossing, a collision, at which the “lost” object gives way to the object, absent any subject or affective investment. The ambivalent introjection of what will be lost is also a longing for the eradication of loss itself. What had been a condition tied to the lost object will simply be an object, Melancholia, and even its name will die with those who knew it. The object destroys both the reason and the capacity for its nomination.
One of the veils of inauthenticity that melancholia tears through is denial. Claire’s attachment to the earth is not ambivalent, but immediately positive. Justine “knows things;” but when Claire eventually knows the fate of the earth she cannot incorporate this knowledge. “Nobody one will miss it,” Justine tells her. This is literally true, but for Claire the force of this truth, the destitution of nobody, is unthinkable. “But where would Leo grow up?” she replies. Whereas attachment to her son’s life, which for her is not yet lost, dominates the interior of Claire’s psyche, Justine has already interiorized the extinction of interiority. The impossible structure of her psyche is the introjected erasure of the boundary between interiority and exteriority, a boundary constitutive of affective life. Justine doesn’t just know how many beans the guests poured into a bottle at her wedding; she knows that “We are alone. Life is only on earth. And not for long.” What is unthinkable is not so much that the earth will be destroyed, that “we” will be gone, that “no one” will remain, but that the universe will remain in the absence of experience. This is the unassimilable truth of extinction.
***
If one thinks of classical tragedy, of Kassandra and Elektra, it is because von Trier’s film evokes the world and the mood of myth. Claire peers through the foliage at her sister’s naked body, stretched out at night across the rocks beside a stream, ravaged by the blue light of a fatal planet. The first half of the film is dominated by ritual, a lavish wedding that will come to nothing because the bride cannot bear pretense. The setting is a palatial estate, on the grounds of which is not a labyrinth but a golf course. Twice, Justine’s horse will not cross the bridge over a river; the third time a golf cart will not do so. (“Nibiru,” an Akkadian word meaning “crossing” or “point of transition,” is the name assigned by doomsday prophets to the hypothetical undiscovered planet from which the film draws its apocalyptic scenario). At the end of the world and the end of modernity, our relation to ritual, to ceremony, to nobility, and to myth is for the most part bathetic. Insofar as Melancholia is a comedy of manners it is also the tragedy of what Adorno would call a damaged life. Frequently amusing, ultimately it isn’t funny. And the ambivalence of the film’s black humor, an ambivalence operative at the level of mode, is also melancholic.
The final sequence of the film, however, involves something like a recuperation of ritual, of collective ceremony. Claire’s husband tells their son there will be nowhere to hide if the planets collide. But what he forgets, Justine reminds her nephew, is “the magic cave.” The somewhat menacing tableau at the beginning of the film—a boy carving a branch while a woman with a dire expression approaches from behind, wielding a stick—is in fact a premonition of its most tender scene: Justine distracts her nephew from the coming catastrophe by helping him construct a small teepee in which he and the two sisters will await their death. Whatever comfort remains at the end of the world has nothing to do with the comforts of modernity: the electricity fails, the phone is dead, the car won’t work, a golf cart shuts down. Rather, all that remains is nature and myth: not a glass of wine on the terrace, but the magic cave. Juxtaposed against the fake formalities of the wedding, the authentic ceremony of the film’s conclusion entails a modal dialectic of black comedy and tragic catharsis, the beautiful and the grotesque, jaded nihilistic pessimism and the innocence of magical realism. Apocalypse reveals nothing—other than the comportment we adopt toward it, the resources with which we confront it.
***
The problem of von Trier’s film is thus ultimately the same as that of Malick’s The Tree of Life: no less than the problem of the relation between matter and spirit. In their treatment of this problem, the two films are practically mirror images. Malick’s film is concerned with the origin of life; von Trier’s with its extinction. The narrative motor of The Tree of Life is analepsis; that of Melancholia is prolepsis. The materialism of Malick’s film is perhaps compromised by its dalliance with religion; that of von Trier’s film by its pseudoscientific scenario. But both are concerned with the affective experience of loss, with the material conditions of possibility for such experience, and with the hope of spiritual restitution through collective ceremony. Perhaps also, at a metafilmic level, through aesthetic experience.
In a word, one is a film about mourning; the other is a film about melancholia.
And insofar as one is concerned with ancestral time, the other with the time of extinction, both are concerned with the problem of dia-chronicity: of a temporal disjunction between being and thinking. Life and mind, feeling and thinking, have a beginning and an end, and since these do not correspond with that of the cosmos, to think their origin is also to think what remains after their negation: material oblivion. Thus von Trier’s film answers Malick’s, insofar as it is not the affective projection of a world beyond (heaven) that enables something like spiritual restitution, but rather the imminence of the end of the world, without experiential remainder. A confrontation with this ending—at an ontological rather than an existential level—is what makes possible whatever collective communion takes place in Melancholia: the being-in-common of what has not always been and what will not always be.
But what does it mean, for a materialist, that at the end of this film the imminence of extinction is the condition of possibility for spiritual restitution? It means that, at the end of modernity, we will not survive the advent of everything we have always wanted, which has been hiding behind the sun.
* all block quotations from An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009)
