Now, the history of depths begins with what is most
terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture
Melanie Klein painted.
Gilles Deleuze, Logic
of Sense
There’s a resemblance between the two planets and Justine’s
tits. Can you see that? ... when they were kind of getting very close. That’s a
very important point.
Lars von Trier, Criterion
Forum.
As its soundtrack suggests, Melancholia is a romance, but a romance between two sisters and two
planets, apparently ‘good’ ones and ‘bad’ ones, set in a Kleinian cinema of
terror. Appropriately dominated by a register of orality and consumption, its
mise-en-scene a luxury hotel and golf resort, the film is organized around
various scenes of eating: a wedding breakfast, an end-of-the-world or death
breakfast and the special meal of a meatloaf that tastes of ashes. This paper
will argue that the film depicts what Freud calls in his essay ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ a ‘mental constellation of revolt’ in the context of the voracious
orality of a consumer culture whose acme and unsurpassable limit is represented
in the film by the luxury golf course and the 19th hole. The
prominence of the latter, clearly signalled at the beginning and end of the
film, indicates that the film’s register is largely (or simultaneously)
phantasmatic rather than realist. Here I will suggest that deliberately or not,
the film’s narrative tells a very Kleinian story of psychic development from the
earliest sadistic/oral, paranoid-schizoid phase of the infant’s relation with
the mother’s breast through the ‘depressive position’ that enables the process
of ‘identification’ (in Justine’s case with the planet) necessary for the
passage to ‘symbolization’. The latter figured, no doubt, by Justine again in
the erection of the ‘magic cave’ that provides the space for the ironic ‘happy
ending’ of the sisters’ reconciliation and successful fulfilment of maternal
responsibility. But beyond this simple allegory, my paper will consider whether
Melancholia, through its technical
means, seeks to produce a ‘kleinmatic’ cinema of depths.
Ashes to
Ashes: The Ethics, Depths, and Image of Melancholia
Panel
Proposal for the 2012 Film-Philosophy conference with Felicity Colman and
Richard Rushton
