A movie is a window or a mirror? Windows open to the outside, mirrors, to the inside. Melancholia doesn’t seem to fit any alternative.
It doesn’t automatically give us any insight into ourselves or the outer world. Nevertheless, it seems to produce a powerful effect in the attentive spectator. Why?
Soundtrack
The theme song, Wagner’s prelude of Tristan und Isolde, plays all along the movie. A movie with mainly one song is unique and odd, but it certainly creates an hypnotic effect.
Tristan und Isolde was not only Nietzsche’s favorite composition of Wagner. A notable megalomaniac, Nietzsche could see in a music an historical revolution. Tristan und Isolde was for him, in the words of Archimedes, a lever long enough to move the world. It triggered Nietzsche to believe, at least for some time, that Germanic culture was starting to get the deepness and boldness of Greek’s tragedy. This is the main theme of his Rebirth of Tragedy, written in 1872.
Later on, Wagner started flirting with nationalism. Contrary to some old fashioned theories, Nietzsche deplored nationalism and anti-semitism as a cheap form of mass thinking. He broke his friendship with Wagner when he identified the later composition, Ride of the Valkyries, a symbol of this form of nationalism, and gave up on the idea of tragedy’s renaissance.
The prelude of Tristan und Isolde starts in a mysterious crescendo, always with a tense background. The instruments are scarce, only chords. Movement is slow and thoughtful. The mood is undeniably grounded in tragedy: in the beginning you can feel some hope, some life and even joy, but it is clear from the outset that something terrible will come. This initial bits are a celebration of something that is transient and ephemeral.
By the end of the prelude, when the theme is repeated, it still contains, at least in some measure, its former joy, but now one can feel it sounds like a last breath. Then, there’s a big silence.
Ordinary movies are only enhanced by good soundtrack. But Wagner is so overwhelming that Melancholia seems to be constructed to be the right background to the music.
Imagery
The camera sometimes emulates a dogma 95 movie. Flickering and natural, it zooms and gets away, like in a personal perspective. In these moments, the movie shows superficial, banal human actions.
Other times it goes to its complete opposite, like as if the movie is seen by an omniscient being, distant and impassive. Some scenes portray the characters and the landscape as miniatures, as if there’s some master plan already laid out.
The imagery is taken from surreal paintings, but colors are economic and somber, tending to sepia.
Themes
The tragedy portrayed in the movie is nothing but the biggest one possible: the end of the world.
But it is not a hollywoodian apocalypse, with explosions, despair and finally, heroism. The world ends slowly, irreversibly, in a way that feels natural, like a river following its course. The choice of the theme is intentional: to use Hollywood’s theme in vogue, but only to turn it upside down.
Older tragedies romanticize love, with Romeo and Juliet as the canonical example. In Melancholia, marriage is, as a first impression, depicted as passé and corny, like it is in so many pretentious but shallow contemporary movies.
Nature is represented mainly by its feminine character. In some scenes, nature fuses itself with the main character. Roots grab her legs, but not in a way that suggest nature to be holding her. Instead, it is an allusion to oneness. Lightning comes from her fingers, not suggesting power, but curiosity about its own abilities: our own lack of knowledge about ourselves.
Women are a main theme in Nietzsche’s writings, and this theme may well be the most infamous part of it. But regardless of how one reads it, there’s clearly a recognition on Nietzsche’s part of the mystery and wildness of the feminine. That may very well be part of 19th century’s view of women as less rational than men, and therefore, closer to nature. But the truth is that even today — in the West, to be fair –, where considering women less rational is a prohibited opinion — we still keep, somehow, the connection between femininity and nature.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This connection is old and perennial. As Bertrand Russell notes, religion starts almost universally by idolizing Earth and its fertile powers. After all, religion is a product of agriculture. Reason is the instrument with which we realize that we must wait, and it struggles with our desires to reap our pleasures before due time. Agriculture is a rational pursuit of dominion and control over Earth’s natural fertility. The analogy can’t be clearer.
The man in the movie is simply surprised by the flow of events, like someone who suddenly reaches a conclusion, and decides to simply abandon everyone. The woman senses everything and her slow mental decay is physically synchronized with the decay of the world around her.
At this point, one realizes the theme is not about the superficial difficulties of marriage, but about the fundamental, antipathetical differences of the sexes. These differences are interpreted as natural instead of constructed, as our Zeitgeist came to believe.
This is how the movie departs from romantic tragedy. Romantic tragedy sustains a possibility of conciliation between the sexes, namely, love. Couples are meant to each other, but social structures prevent them. Here, society is not the problem, but a deeper incompatibility in the individuals themselves, in nature itself.
They are not twin souls, they are nemesis.
