Author : Jos Hermans
“Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ has a 30-page discussion of what is the greatest work of art of all time. Proust reaches the conclusion that it’s the overture to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, so that’s what we pour all over this film, pushing it for all it’s got. I haven’t used so much music in a film since ‘The Element of Crime’ (1984), but here we wallow in it. It’s kind of fun, actually. For years, there has been this sort of unofficial film dogma not to cut to the music. Don’t cut on the beat. It’s considered crass and vulgar. But that’s just what we do in ‘Melancholia’. When the horns come in and out in Wagner’s overture, we cut right on the beat. It’s kind of like a music video that way. It’s supposed to be vulgar. That was our declared intention. It’s one of the most pleasurable things I’ve done in a long time. I didn’t have to force it out, like in ‘Antichrist’, not at all. Cutting on the beat is pleasurable.“
LARS VON TRIER, FILM (Danish Film Institute), mei 2011
Film reviewers had no idea but when the manic-depressive bad boy of arthouse cinema delivered his apocalyptic masterpiece Melancholia in May 2011, perhaps the most remarkable thing was how close he had now come to Richard Wagner. Vigilant observers could have noticed beforehand how his trilogy (The Idiots, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) had displayed an undeniable kinship with themes from Wagner's oeuvre. Someone like John Rockwell in The New York Times, for example, who wrote in 2001 : “The deeper connection to Wagner is Mr. von Trier’s ability, throughout this trilogy, to mine the emotion of film as a replacement for the emotion of music, and his uses and abuses of women (...) With von Trier the women serve a specific, hyper-Romantic role, and from film to film within the trilogy the notion of female redemption is considered and reconsidered. Bess in ‘Breaking the waves’ is closest to Elisabeth in Tannhäuser; her redemption is also explicitly, not to say blatantly, Christian, just like Elisabeth’s. Karen, the central figure in ‘The Idiots’ is the strongest of the three women; the person she redeems is herself. And Selma in ‘Dancer in the dark’ suffers the most bleakly, her goodness unredeemed and unredeeming.” With Melancholia, Von Trier now wanted to dive into the abyss of German romanticism.
Ink-black death wish
Melancholia falls into 2 parts. The first part recounts the dramatic wedding party of the depressed Justine; the second is the prelude to the destruction of the world as seen through the eyes of her sister Claire. The whole is preceded by an eight-minute overture. To the tones of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde, he shows us a series of beautiful nightmarish images : birds fall dead from the sky, a horse crashes trembling, a planet threatens to collide with the earth. When the latter actually happens, two hours later, you have experienced one of the most excruciating climaxes you can witness in cinema. And so one cannot avoid the observation: has there ever been a cleverer symbiosis between pellicule and opera music ? And is it possible to experience the prelude to Tristan und Isolde in a more intense way? It is inevitable that Wagner - founder of all film music and with his Bayreuther Festival idea also fundamentally the inventor of cinema (!) - would have loved Melancholia.
Inkblack is the death wish of Tristan and Isolde. Inkblack is the death wish of Justine in Melancholia. “All I know is life on earth is evil. I know we’re alone” , she stammers. She loses herself in the empty ritual of her marriage but feels reborn as the end of the world approaches. Kirsten Dunst, herself an experienced expert on depression, gives an unforgettable portrait of a young woman who has become mentally unbalanced. She is at once young and old, wise and immature, internally deadened and at the same time reacting violently to the dark drives of the world, and above all : she is Von Trier himself. A better definition of depression as her mumbling: “I’m trudging through this grey, woolly yarn. It’s clinging to my legs. It’s really heavy to drag along”, you won't find anytime soon.
In one extraordinary scene, where Dunst displays her beautiful body naked before our voyeuristic eyes in the blue glare of the advancing planet, she seems to recharge herself from that energy field. In her mind, the old world has to go. Completely. What follows is a resigned farewell to the old world that plunges us into a kind of nihilism familiar from the finale of The Ring.
Justine's desire to be swallowed up by the inescapable cosmic event is no different from Isolde's surrender to nirvana. Von Trier therefore believes that his film ends with a happy ending . This, in turn, is consistent with the view of directors such as Peter Konwitschny who interpret Isolde's love death as "life-affirming."
Von Trier : “My analyst told me that melancholiacs will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, partly because they can say: ‘What did I tell you? But also because they have nothing to lose.” That was the core idea behind Melancholia. After that, things moved quickly. Less than a year later, the script was ready, the actors had been found and the crew was filming.
Von Trier's identification with Wagner also reaches into the biographical. Just as Wagner never seems to have been entirely sure about who his father was, Lars Von Trier learns that not the Jew Ulf Trier is his father but a certain Walter Hartmann, a German. He learns this on the deathbed of his mother : ”When my mother was on her deathbed, I found out that I wasn’t a Trier after all but came from a German family. I always found Nietzsche interesting and now I’m reading Thomas Mann. The Germans have always influenced me. At one point, I was tapped to direct Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle in Bayreuth, but it turned out that they didn’t have the money for it anyway, because I was far too ambitious. I have always flirted a bit with the good Herr Wagner, and in ‘Antichrist’ we inched towards a kind of German Romantic painting. Indeed, sturm und drang and everything that followed.”
And then came Cannes and the identification with Wagner could go one step further.
Kamikaze in Cannes
"I understand Hitler and I even sympathize with him a little bit". "I found out that I am actually a Nazi". "I am for all Jews, even Susanne Bier, well not all Jews because Israel is a pain in the ass". "I admire Albert Speer". With these statements during the Melancholia press conference, Lars Von Trier shocked Cannes to the point that excuses ("I am not a Nazi and not an anti-Semite") were not enough for the organizers afterwards. The former festival favorite became persona non grata.
This is how the cinephile magazine Filmmagie summarizes the moment of scandal that occurred at the Cannes festival in mid-May 2011. Initially still "cool" when he posed with "FUCK" on his fingers during the photo call, Von Trier got everyone all over him after his kamikaze press conference. The festival condemned his "inadmissible, sad and lamentable statements" and the press talked about "his sense of provocation that made him regress to adolescence" (Le Monde), "an inexcusable folly" (Liberation) and "an obscene derailment" (Nice Matin).
Filmmagie, however, gave a much more objective account of the events. Whereas the journalists present, who know Von Trier (and his Jewish wife) enough and saw everything as a silly provocation and, above all, a bland misplaced joke, the images of the press conference went around the world and his statements were taken literally. "With us, his career would be over," it sounded in the US, referring to extremist Mel Gibson, who can now only play with hand puppets. To which I must then make the reflection as to whether I should not find this frightening. Doesn't this say enough about who pulls the strings in Hollywood? Once again in Cannes it could be seen how sensitive Jewish toes really are, especially those of chairman Gilles Jacob. Whereas a festival management, which knows better than anyone else the true facts of such statements, is supposed to defend its artists! Cannes made the same mistake as Bayreuth did last summer in the Nikitin case.
A storm of protest immediately arose in Jewish circles. The European Jewish Congress saw in it an example of "growing respectable anti-Semitism." The Association of Holocaust Relatives declared that Von Trier was insensitive to the suffering of the victims of Nazism. Above all, I see in it proof of to what absurd proportions Jewish hypersensitivity can inflate a lame joke in these times of political correctness.
Filmmagie continues: the fact is that the filmmaker became a victim not only of his own stupidity but also of his own image. For more than 25 years, Lars Von Trier has been playing the role of provocateur, of challenging artist defending deviant aesthetics and the movie-as-fist-punch concept. That is his vocation, his cross and also the basis of his cult status. But also the reason why his films are wrongly viewed and poorly understood. With Antichrist, all attention went to the "outrageous" horror scenes whereas the mediocre hara-kiri Von Trier commits with Melancholia diverts attention from the fact that this apocalyptic drama is, via the figure of a depressed diva (Dunst's character), the self-portrait of an enfant terrible (Lars himself). "It is a pity that he has destroyed his own film" concludes Thierry Frémaux, artistic director of the festival. In which he forgets that Lars Von Trier actually played the role that Cannes likes to see him play, that of a mediagenic clown. Only that this clown wrote his own screenplay or improvised clumsily. And the scandal was not confined to the safe bubble of "cinema," which was the case with turmoil in the past surrounding films such as Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Antichrist. Anyone honest with himself realizes that actually scandal marketing should be declared "non grata" and that the tyranny of provocation had gotten shockingly out of hand.
Von Trier himself initially responded with amusement to the uproar and his outcast status. In the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, he noted he was proud because "this is the first time in film history that something like this has happened. I think one of the reasons is the fact that the French themselves treated the Jews badly during World War II. That's why it's so sensitive. I respect the Cannes festival, but I understand that people are very angry with me now. I am not Mel Gibson, and again I want to express my regret to everyone".
When Iran's Minister of Film Javad Shamagdari (in an attempt to retaliate because of the pro-Panahi actions at Cannes?) described Von Trier's exclusion as "fascist behavior" the filmmaker felt obliged to respond :"Freedom of expression is a basic human right, but my statements at the press conference were unwise, ambiguous and needlessly offensive. The point I wanted to make was that the potential for extreme violence, or the opposite, is in every human being, whatever his nationality, race, position or faith. When we explain historical disasters only through the brutality of individuals we destroy the possibility of understanding human mechanisms. And that is precisely what is needed to avoid future crimes against humanity."
And this is no longer the foolish, obscene derailment of an adolescent. Von Trier's morally superior critics, the heralds of politically correct thinking so to speak, should be allowed to hang this message in kingsize letters above their beds as a daily reminder of their own hypocrisy. Actually, Von Trier is saying exactly the same thing that British brain scientist Kathleen Taylor, author of "Cruelty, human evil and the human brain," recently revealed in Knack magazine. When asked why so many Germans went along so easily with the atrocities of the Holocaust, her answer was of sobering simplicity : "Most people would have! Just as you have a very small minority who become addicted to the atrocities, you have a very small minority who resist the atrocities. The vast majority of people are somewhere in between and participate, enthusiastically or otherwise. Morally undesirable behavior we always associate with the out-group, with the others. We would never be capable of such reprehensible acts. It is the others, the rotten apples, the bad guys. It is what we push away, we want nothing to do with. And that is the wrong attitude. We should instead learn to understand how it works, why everyone is susceptible to it. Only then could we prevent it better."
With his catastrophic press conference, Von Trier's identification with Wagner went to the point of character resemblance. For who else than Wagner has so often shot himself in the foot by statements that have continually damaged his career, always following the adage : "I don't seek quarrels with anyone, but about what comes into my mouth, I speak my mind, ruthlessly."
“I took for granted that they knew I was not a Nazi,” Von Trier will later say. “I don’t think there is a right or wrong thing to say. I think that anything can be said. That is very much me. The same with film—anything can be done in a film. If it can be thought in the human mind, then it could be said and it could be seen on a film. Of course you get troubles for it afterwards, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t make it wrong. To say I’m sorry for what I said is to say I’m sorry for what kind of a person I am, I’m sorry for my morals, and that would destroy me as a person. It’s not true. I’m not sorry. I am not sorry for what I said. I’m sorry that it didn’t come out more clearly. I’m not sorry that I made a joke, but I’m sorry that I didn’t make it clear that it was a joke. But I can’t be sorry for what I said—it’s against my nature.” Completely Wagner, in a sense.
What remains is Von Trier's fascination with Nazi aesthetics which he will later confirm in an interview as follows : “Yes, the Nazis certainly cut on the beat. They didn’t pussyfoot around. I’ve always had a weakness for the Nazi aesthetic. A Stuka will outlive a British Spitfire in our consciousness by millennia. That’s my point of view. While a Spitfire has all those rounded forms and was a very beautiful airplane, the Stuka was a revelation. A lot of Nazi design was amazing. They had such big thoughts. The Stuka was a dive-bomber that swooped down and dropped its bombs with great precision. A special feature about the Stuka was that its bombs were equipped with a little whistle, which is staggeringly cynical but also a sign of artistic surplus. Someone was thinking, ‘How can we make this bomb even worse than it already is?’ The whistles were supposed to erode the enemy’s morale. The sound of that whistle was so scary. I was talking with some Danish elite soldiers who told me that when you’re attacking a group of people, let’s say in Afghanistan, you send the first two shots into the abdominal area of those in front. It’s extremely painful to be shot in the stomach. So the ones who are hit in the stomach start screaming, and when they do, the others get scared and lose their concentration. If they had been shot in the head, they would just fall down. There’s this rule to aim the first two shots at the abdomen and the rest at the head.”
Would Von Trier admire Leni Riefenstahl? With this view, he already joins essayist Susan Sontag who, in "Fascinating Fascism," expressed her fascination with Nazi aesthetics as follows: “It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism - more broadly, fascism- also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is dishonest as well as tautological to say that one is affected by Triumph of the Will and Olympia only beacuse they were made by a filmmaker of genius”.
After watching Melancholia, Von Trier received the following comment from colleague and Dogma filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg : " How do you make a film after this? ". Let us hope that Von Trier is not quite finished with Wagner. Did he not declare several years ago to The New York Times : "I have just decided that to film Wagner, that would be the ultimate goal of my life. The Ring cycle. I could die happy". Please do, Mr. Von Trier.
Actors involved :
Kirsten Dunst (Justine), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire), Kiefer Sutherland (John), Alexander Skarsgård (Michael), Cameron Spurr (Leo), Charlotte Rampling (Gaby), John Hurt (Dexter), Jesper Christensen (Little Father), Stellan Skarsgård (Jack), Brady Corbet (Tim), Udo Kier (The Wedding Planner)