Melancholia: This is The End | Scanners
The movie proper begins with a comedic exercise in frustration that hangs over the rest of the film: a loooong white limousine, carrying Justine in her wedding dress and Michael in his tux, attempts to negotiate a winding driveway lined with old stone markers, and can't quite make one of the turns. By the time they arrive for their own reception dinner they are two hours late, making the ceremonies seem all the more interminable. Poor Michael has invested his heart and future in Justine, but all she wants to do is shut down and take a nap as the procession of hollow, mandatory wedding rituals drag on and on and on: the meal (remember to pass from the left), the awkward toasts, the dance, the cutting of the cake.... If there's anything more hellishly tiresome than a wedding, it's one that doesn't even delight the bride. By the end of the evening (near the end of the middle of the eternal night), the marriage of Justine and Michael is stillborn... abandoned and forgotten, just another a path not taken. Her last words to him are, "What did you expect?" Justine has moved past clinging to any expectations, beyond desire, beyond hope.
"We're alone. Life is only on Earth. And not for long.... All I know is, life on Earth is evil. Nobody will miss it." -- Justine
In the depths of her despair, Justine finds a certainty that keeps her calm in the face of universal annihilation -- which is merely an external manifestation of what she feels inside, anyway. She welcomes the apocalypse, a suicide without guilt because nobody is left behind. "Melancholia" effectively submerges the viewer in Justine's near-catatonic emotional state (that's one of its most powerful achievements), yet the movie itself is not a depressing experience. There's (evidently hard-won) humor behind almost everything -- including those utterances from Justine, above. That final absurd sentence hit me as particularly funny, and insightful into the way the depressed mind works, an endless spiral of contradictions: We're all alone, life is evil, and nobody will miss it. Well, yes, if all life is extinguished, Justine, you can be fairly certain there will be nobody around to miss it. (I think this is the ultimate form of the old joke about the food being terrible -- and such small portions!)
I will venture to say this: There are few movies in which someone (like me) who has suffered from clinical depression recognizes the authentic sensibility of depression (it takes one to know one): "Persona," Cronenberg's "Crash," "Fight Club" ... and certainly "Melancholia." Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe had some pretty deep depression scenes in "Antichrist," but once they got into the woods the movie turned into a freakshow and the real horror was lost. By showing where "Melancholia" is going at the very start, and then following through, von Trier captures the futility of true depression, when your only conviction is that everyone is utterly alone, life is evil, existence is and has always been meaningless, and you need to make it all end soon, if only you had the energy to stand up.
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