…and good heavens, but can I ever relate to that.
I have two responses to this section:
•
On acting out
•
Justine's behavior struck me as a textbook example of a
:
I get where she's coming from, and I get why those around her would be
pissed off by her behavior.
This is supposed to be Justine's special day, yet she has the wedding
planner lurking behind her to chide her that, no, no, she must pass the
food around the table counterclockwise.
Now she's supposed to walk through a bunch of rituals that are
meaningless to her, like throwing a bouquet to a bunch of people who are
only there out of obligation rather than affection.
Even the moments that are supposed to be particularly magical —
e.g., the guests scribble love messages all over huge sheets of paper,
that are then turned into hot air balloons and set aloft — are
just luxury-package ideas from some corporate office, nothing special to
Justine and her new husband at all.
So if what would make Justine comfortable on what is supposed to be
her day is to escape from this horror to have a bath, then she
should go have a bath!
If her reaction to her boss asking her to write advertising copy on the
evening of her wedding is to tell him what a loathsome human being he is
and to quit, that seems both entirely justified and very brave!
At the same time, if I went to a wedding reception and it kicked off two
hours late because the bride was being flaky, I doubt I would have a
basketful of you-go-girls at the ready.
And if I organized something this elaborate for someone, on
request, and then received this little appreciation for it, it could
endanger the relationship.
How seriously depends on the type of relationship.
I mean, I am not unfamiliar with what it's like to be attached in one way
or another to people prone to melting down in public.
I've done the "she's not feeling well" routine with concerned friends my
share of times.
Doing this sort of damage control is the sort of sacrifice that you don't
think twice about making for someone you love — but it is a
sacrifice, and to have it taken for granted is corrosive.
And of course there are different degrees of acting out.
The bathtub stunt is quirky, but some of Justine's other moves go so far
beyond the pale that they torpedo her marriage before it even begins.
•
On parties
•
Again, while I am emphatically not on board with everything Justine gets
up to during her retreats from the party, for the impulse to retreat from
parties in general I have worlds of empathy.
On the very rare occasions that I have found myself at parties, I have
nearly always wound up absconding to an empty room after a few minutes
and going home not long thereafter.
Justine's party in particular, with its formalwear, bickering relatives,
and re-enactment of other people's traditions, would have me eyeing the
exit the moment I arrived.
And yet, in the true spirit of the crosswalk, I simultaneously feel no
small amount of resentment at being left out of events like these.
A while back I happened across some pictures of interesting-looking cakes
online, and that prompted me to search for some more, and I noticed that
a lot of the cakes that popped up had numbers on them, the most common of
which was 40.
I turned forty this year, and I didn't get a cake.
I felt like I should do something to mark the occasion, though, and I
happened to be on an early schedule at the time, so I went to my favorite
breakfast place.
At the table next to me, two women were finishing up their meal, and when
the check arrived, they did the usual routine: "What do I owe you?" "Don't
be silly, it's my treat!" — and then the one paying added, "It's
your birthday!"
Then she immediately got up to go to the bathroom.
I was about to turn to the remaining one and say something like, "Hey,
happy birthday — it's my birthday too!", except (a) I very
rarely talk to people in public and (b) I suddenly realized how that
conversation might go.
"Oh, how about that! How old are you?"
"I'm forty."
"…Today's your fortieth birthday and you're eating by yourself? How
big a loser are you?"
And in fact I spent the entire day completely alone.
If there were a clearer signal that I had fundamentally failed at life, I
couldn't imagine what it might be.
The one silver lining: at least I wasn't stuck at a birthday party.
And my cognitive dissonance about parties is really just synecdochic for
how I feel about everything.
Given that my life has taken a severe downturn over the past two years,
and that I was never really happy even before that, I am pretty much
constantly consumed with envy of virtually everyone.
I've gathered that this isn't an uncommon phenomenon in the Facebook
age — I've read many an article about how we have a distorted
sense of our acquaintances' lives because we only see their curated
highlights and not their problems and anxieties.
Certainly my list has its allotment of people who feel compelled to crow
at regular intervals about how awesome their lives are.
The thing is, for the most part, the lives these people describe as so
awesome pretty much always strike me as a species of hell.
Like, many of them have achieved success in their fields and have
lucrative jobs and big houses and fly around the world all the time and
whatnot… but I wouldn't actually want to trade with them, because
I have no interest in those fields, am quite glad that I don't have to
wake up to an alarm clock, wouldn't be able to make any use of
,
and don't have any particular desire to spend any time in London or
Tokyo.
A lot of them have kids, and in the past I have written at length about
how I've always wanted a daughter, but while I do still feel a touch of
envy when I see amusing or touching parent-child interactions out in
public, seeing what the parents I know go through from day to day has
punctured any daydreams I've had about what raising children would be
like.
Not to say that there's anything wrong with anyone's particular
kids — often I've thought that the kids were wonderful, and
still breathed a sigh of relief that I got to go home and didn't
have to deal with the constant demands for attention, much less the
defiance and the squabbling and all the rest of it.
And as much as I've wished for a more successful romantic history, I
certainly don't envy anyone their specific partners.
Even in those cases where I once had a crush on someone, I now thank the
fates that the crushes never came to anything: invariably our lives have
gone in radically different directions since then, and the idea of making
a life with any of those people would be a ludicrous proposition.
In summary:
In the fable the fox acts like it doesn't want the grapes because it
softens the blow of not being able to get them; I'm like a fox that's
gnashing its teeth over not being able to get the grapes, even though it
doesn't actually like grapes.
(Except I do like grapes. Change it to cucumbers and it works.)
Gosh, that's quite a bit of blather and I haven't even talked about the
whole last hour of the movie.
Moving on.
The last part of Melancholia is what elevates it from a
slice-of-life thing I would forget pretty quickly to something that will
stick with me for a while: it turns out to be a
Pattern 8 movie, one
that isn't at all the sort of film it initially appears to be.
For it turns out that while the wedding planner has been counting beans
for a guess-how-many prize, and Justine's father has been swiping spoons,
and all the rest of it, the Earth has been on a collision course with
a rogue planet and is about to be annihilated.
The key dynamic of this section is that Justine, who since the end of the
previous section has become catatonic enough that she needs assistance
getting into a taxicab or a bathtub, turns out to be the one person on
hand equipped to deal with the situation.
Her brother-in-law is in denial, and her sister is out of her mind with
fear and despair, but Justine is untroubled.
There have been a number of studies suggesting that one of the chief
manifestations of what we call "depression" is viewing the world
accurately — that nearly all of our lives really are
as shitty as I perceive them to be, but the non-depressed delude themselves
into thinking that things are great.
As far as Justine is concerned, the rest of the world is just catching up
to what she's always known: that existence is a catastrophe.
"Life on Earth is evil," she shrugs. "We don't need to grieve for
it."
Melancholia is not exactly what you would call
scientifically accurate.
Not only is the trajectory of the rogue planet impossible, but the Earth's
crust would be shattered by tidal forces during the initial fly-by,
killing everyone and making the eventual impact academic.
That's fine — this isn't supposed to be hard SF.
But what about Justine's insistence that there is no life anywhere else in
the universe?
Given how common the conditions for life have proven to be, this seems
.
In any case, it raises the question: would extraterrestrial life be as
evil as the local variety?
I think about this a lot.
On the one hand, natural selection seems like it would operate in much
the same fashion throughout the universe — after all, the
basic principle that qualities that assist in survival tend to survive
and those that hamper it tend not to shouldn't really vary by
location.
And those helpful qualities, from teeth and claws to instinctive fear and
hatred of the Other, tend to make creatures pretty nasty.
But others fall on the positive side of the ledger — cooperation
is a survival strategy, after all — and happenstance shapes
genetic change as much as selective forces.
If evil biospheres tend to wipe themselves out, maybe the life that
manages to sustain itself is mostly good?
(Probably more of that delusion talking.)
Once the movie was over, I went back and watched the prologue again to
have another look at those images and see whether I might be able to get
anything out of them knowing what was to come.
It turns out that they're not exact flash-forwards to the last few moments
before the catastrophe — they're more like representative
tableaux vivants, and yes, they're a lot more meaningful the second time
around.
(E.g., it turns out that the important thing about the second shot is not
the landscape but the shadows.)
And that got me thinking: it was certainly handy for me that I was
watching this on my computer and could just click back to the
beginning.
The reason I stopped going to movie theaters in the early '00s was that
I couldn't deal with people's increasingly obnoxious behavior —
talking on cell phones during the film, that sort of thing —
but now that's almost incidental.
The reason I watch everything on my computer nowadays is primarily that I
have come to watch movies the way I read books: I'll watch a scene, hit
pause, think about what I've just seen, watch another scene, hit pause, go
back a minute and listen to the dialogue I didn't quite catch the first
time around, etc.
I imagine that some might object to this sort of thing and argue that it's
not seeing the film the way it was meant to be seen.
But it seems to me that, first, the model of "sit in a chair for over two
hours and watch the movie unfold without interruption" is not one chosen
by filmmakers, but an artifact of technological limitations that no longer
exist — and second, how on earth are we supposed to get
anything out of the prologue in a single viewing?
Are we actually supposed to process a series of images that don't yet
connect to anything and retain them with photographic clarity for 130
minutes?
That was one of the things that always bugged me about literary criticism
back in my academic days: nearly all of it discussed texts as experienced
by someone who had read them and reread them and re-reread them and become
intimately familiar with every line.
And that is usually unrepresentative.
Most reads are first reads.
But the flip side of this is that there are certain texts that aren't
entirely intelligible on a first read, or a first viewing, and
Melancholia is one of these.
If this had come out during the '90s and I had been watching it in a
theater, I would have had to pay for another ticket to go back and fill in
the gaps, and I probably would have resented it.
As it stands, it was just like flipping back to the beginning of a book,
and I bore no grudge against the prologue for its initial opaqueness.
So in this case, yay for the evolution of media.
Melancholia
