忧郁症

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) stages an interesting reversal of this classic formula of an object-Thing (an asteroid, alien) that serves as the enabling obstacle to the creation of the couple. At the film’s end, the Thing (a planet on a collision course with Earth) does not withdraw, as in Super 8; it hits the Earth, destroying all life, and the film is about the different ways the main characters deal with the impending catastrophe (with responses ranging from suicide to cynical acceptance). The planet is thus the Thing-das Ding at its purest, as Heidegger would have it: the Real Thing which dissolves any symbolic frame – we see it, it is our death, we cannot do anything. The film begins with an introductory sequence, shot in slow motion, involving the main characters and images from space, which introduces the visual motifs. A shot from the vantage point of space shows a giant planet approaching Earth; the two planets collide. The film continues in two parts, each named for one of two sisters, Justine and Claire.

In part one, ‘Justine’, a young couple, Justine and Michael, are at their wedding reception at the mansion of Justine’s sister, Claire, and her husband, John. The lavish reception lasts from dusk to dawn with eating, drinking, dancing and the usual family conflicts (Justine’s bitter mother makes sarcastic and insulting remarks, ultimately resulting in John attempting to throw her off his property; Justine’s boss follows her around, begging her to write a piece of advertising copy for him). Justine drifts away from the party and becomes increasingly distant; she has sex with a stranger on the lawn, and, at the end of the party, Michael leaves her.

In part two, ‘Claire’, the ill, depressed Justine comes to stay with Claire and John and their son, Leo. Although Justine is unable to carry out normal everyday activities like taking a bath or even eating, she gets better over time. During her stay, Melancholia, a massive blue telluric planet that had been hidden behind the sun, becomes visible in the sky as it approaches Earth. John, who is an amateur astronomer, is excited about the planet, and looks forward to the ‘fly-by’ expected by scientists, who have assured the public that Earth and Melancholia will pass each other without colliding. But Claire is getting fearful and believes the end of the world is imminent. On the internet, she finds a site describing the movements of Melancholia around Earth as a ‘dance of death’, in which the apparent passage of Melancholia past Earth initiates a slingshot orbit that will bring the planets into collision soon after. On the night of the fly-by, it seems that Melancholia will not hit Earth; however, after the fly-by, background birdsong abruptly ceases, and the next day Claire realizes that Melancholia is circling back and will collide with Earth after all. John, who also discovers that the end is near, commits suicide through a pill overdose. Claire becomes increasingly agitated, while Justine remains unperturbed by the impending doom: calm and silent, she accepts the coming event, claiming that she knows that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe. She comforts Leo by making a protective ‘magic cave’, a symbolic shelter of wooden sticks, on the mansion’s lawn. Justine, Claire and Leo enter the shelter as the planet approaches. Claire continues to remain agitated and fearful, while Justine and Leo stay calm and hold hands. The three are instantly incinerated as the collision occurs and destroys Earth.

This narrative is interspersed with numerous ingenious details. To calm Claire, John tells her to look at Melancholia through a circle of wire which just encompasses its circular shape in the sky, thus enframing it, and to repeat this 10 minutes later so she will see that the shape has become smaller, leaving gaps within the frame – a proof that Melancholia is moving away from the Earth. She does this, and grows jubilant when she sees a smaller shape. However, when she looks at Melancholia through the frame some hours later, she is terrified to see that the shape of the planet has now expanded well beyond the frame of the wire circle. This circle is the circle of fantasy enframing reality, and the shock arrives when the Thing breaks through and spills over into reality. There are also wonderful details of the disturbances that happen in nature as Melancholia approaches the Earth: insects, worms, roaches and other repellent forms of life usually hidden beneath the green grass come to the surface, rendering visible the dis-gusting crawling of life beneath the idyllic surface – the Real invading reality, ruining its image. (This is similar to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which, in a famous shot after the father’s heart attack, the camera moves extremely close to the grass surface and then penetrates it, rendering visible the crawling of micro-life, the repelling Real beneath the idyllic suburban surface.)

The idea for Melancholia originated in a therapy session von Trier attended during treatment for depression: the psychiatrist told him that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under extreme pressure or the threat of catastrophe – they already expect bad things to happen. This fact offers yet another example of the split between reality – the social universe of established customs and opinions in which we dwell – and the traumatic, meaningless brutality of the Real: in the film, John is a ‘realist’, fully immersed in ordinary reality, so when the co-ordinates of this reality dissolve, his entire world breaks down; Claire is an hysteric who starts to question everything in a panic, but nonetheless avoids complete psychotic breakdown; and the depressed Justine goes on as usual because she is already living in a melancholic withdrawal from reality.

The film deploys four subjective attitudes to-wards this ultimate Event (the planet-Thing hitting the Earth) as Lacan would understand them. John, the husband, is the embodiment of university knowledge, which falls apart in its en-counter with the Real; Leo, the son, is the cherubinic object-cause of desire for the other three; Claire is the hysterical woman, the only full subject in the film (insofar as subjectivity means doubts, questioning, inconsistency); and this, surprisingly, leaves to Justine the position of a Master, the one who stabilizes a situation of panic and chaos by introducing a new Master-Signifier, which brings order into a confused situation, conferring on it the stability of meaning. Her Master-Signifier is the ‘magic cave’ that she builds to establish a protected space when the Thing approaches. One should be very careful here: Justine is not a protective Master who offers a beautiful lie – in other words, she is not the Roberto Benigni character in Life Is Beautiful. What she provides is a symbolic fiction which, of course, has no magic efficacy, but which works at its proper level of preventing panic. Justine’s point is not to blind us from the impending catastrophe: the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement.

Justine is thus the only one who is able to propose an appropriate answer to the impending catastrophe, and to the total obliteration of every symbolic frame.

……………………..

Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth – natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually overgrowing human arte-facts. In imagining the world without us, we, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence, and, as Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to observe the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence (the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, the parental copulation, or of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn). The World Without Us is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we hu-mans spoiled it with our hubris. So while The Tree of Life escapes into a similar cosmic fantasy of a world without us, Melancholia does not do the same. It does not imagine the end of the world in order to escape from family deadlock: Justine really is melancholic, deprived of the fantasmatic gaze. That is to say, melancholy is, at its most radical, not the failure of the work of mourning, the persisting attachment to the lost object, but their very opposite: ‘melancholy offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object’.

Therein resides the melancholic’s stratagem: the only way to possess an object that we never had, which was from the very outset lost, is to treat an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost. This is what provides a unique flavour to a melancholic love relationship, such as the one between Newland and Countess Olenska in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: although the partners are still together, immensely in love, enjoying each other’s presence, the shadow of the future separation already colours their relationship, so that they perceive their current pleasures under the aegis of the catastrophe (separation) to come. In this precise sense, melancholy effectively is the beginning of philosophy – and, in this precise sense, Justine from Melancholia is not melancholic: her loss is the absolute loss, the end of the world, and what Justine mourns in advance is this absolute loss – she is literally living in the end time. When catastrophe was just a threat of catastrophe, she was merely a depressed melancholic; once the threat is here, she finds herself in her element.

And here we reach the limit of event as re-framing: in Melancholia, the event is no longer a mere change of frame, it is the destruction of frame as such, i.e., the disappearance of humanity, the material support of every frame. But is such a total destruction the only way to acquire a distance from the frame that regulates our access to reality? The psychoanalytic name for this frame is fantasy, so the question can also be put in the terms of fantasy: can we acquire a distance towards our fundamental fantasy, or, as Lacan put it, can we traverse our fantasy?


Zizek, S. (2014) Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

我喜欢这种女主角

以为你只有脸蛋吧

人家可以只对着脸拍三十分钟你也从中读得懂剧情

以为你只有演技吧

人家也可以只对着胸拍三十分钟你也得老实承认各种角度具美

老实说

我没看出justin一开始就是抑郁症

在我们的四处周围，成长履历

这样的

怂爸恶妈

变脸王老板，

自以为是菜鸟，

神经病文艺女青年（还是广告女青年，太tmd的exactly了！！！）

恐婚，

家庭不和，

在这个社会，也太正常了吧？

请导演可以落力将“不正常”再“不正常”一点让“正常”的我们知道“不正常”吧？
----------------------------------------------------------------------

所以正常的人

已经小强到只会到地球毁灭才崩溃

而抑郁症会因为

与其他人不一样，

敢于说出真相，

或者拥有让人嫉妒的才华却不乖乖听话等

奔溃？

得出这样的结论让我失落不已

看片之前

我觉得自己开始抑郁

并企图通过看片完成深恶痛疾抑郁，达成摆脱抑郁的结果

但当我看到

影片全程

抑郁者

其实

平静喜悦，

忠于自我

身与心可坦白于天地之间

而“正常人”却恐惧不堪

逃避生命与责任




反正现在忠于自我如此困难，而地球毁灭如此简单

还不如用抑郁症拯救自己？

我承认我是被世界末日这个幌子吸引进来的...

结果是讲一个本来有忧郁症厌世而且很有可能自杀的女人因为真的人类要团灭而“恢复正常”的事情，独特的视角和思路；

看了一堆评论，没人注意到地球才是那个小行星，撞到抑郁星里嘛？

     太小众了吧，开始8分钟的画面和音乐真的让人有点抓狂了，中间大段大段的空虚情节，拉斯·冯·提尔虽然是个艺术家，可绝对不是普通老百姓的艺术家。。。
     克尔斯滕·邓斯特的表演确实没看出怎么精彩来，倒是身材确实是不错，本片前8分钟和后面30分钟很难让人坚持看下去。。。
     

首先。我是想给’较差‘的

但考虑到万一这只是因为比较小众，不是因为不好，那就很对不住喜欢它的朋友了
=============================
后来回头看，发现这个评论有这么多人跟，就觉得还是要负责任一点，嗯，这个片是给忧郁症病友看的，没有这类心里障碍的朋友会觉得这片难以理解，不过如果你看出了蛋疼的感觉，那就证明你看懂了忧郁症的不爽。
=============================
以前遇到满屏好评，出现一个差评后，大多数人都会无情拍砖差评者，认为他们是自己理解不了而满口喷粪。。。所以我先澄清，我只是想写贴给观影经验不甚丰富的童鞋，如果想看片消遣，不要对这片有太大期望


我一直自觉属于观影经验较为丰富的看客了，大多数种类的电影我都还是能接受的，但这片让我对自己的观影能力产生了疑问

片子全长2个小时，前5分钟的开场是相当惊艳的，各种nb的镜头和画面，讲了一个蓝星球浪漫地撞烂了地球的故事

然后就是1个小时的。一个蛋疼的婚礼

讲了一个女的，在婚礼上莫名其妙的崩溃，然后自我折磨然后折磨别人。不晓得是怕结婚还是讨厌世俗，还是讨厌父母的不和谐，还是讨厌拜金主义。。。。这一个小时看得我相当无语，无语是因为不理解，不理解为什么一个什么都看不惯的人还装模作样的结婚，还各种想让自己开心，然后立刻干出相当崩溃的事情让自己重新不开心。

这时候我已经忘了电影名字了（因为当时看这片完全是随机看到的）

然后我就果断回顾了一下，发现这女的原来是忧郁症。好吧一切都说得通了，这货的精神是个悲剧，所以会这么蛋疼

理解了这个人的行为，我就不理解导演了，这果断是一个专门拍给忧郁症人士找共鸣的片吧。。。我一直以为，电影看的是种共鸣，导演的任务是把某些自己想表达的，震撼的东西用某种更易懂，更有力度的方式展现出来，以和观众思想中的某处达成共鸣，让观众体会到那种想法和震撼。

但这么一种小众的情感，是想要我等世俗生活中的“现实主义粗鄙观众”找哪样的共鸣呢？完全理解不了，就开始觉得片子拖沓冗长了，不由得开始寻找镜头，影片细节方面有无亮点。

不得不说亮点还是相当多的，比如主角婚礼，一开始我还以为他们办婚礼的地方是个酒店什么的，后来发现原来是主角姐姐的家，不得不说老美真tm会享受啊，住这样的地方。。。主角你还忧郁症啊 啊 啊。。住在天朝的穷b不理解啊

好吧，根据经验。。一个片要是前期这样拍，一般都是因为导演实际上是在做细腻的铺垫，为了使后面某种惊人的事的发生更自然点，于是我就带着这样的期待，去看后面那一个小时了


后一个小时的主要任务是将这一帮人丢到世纪末日的大背景下。
现实主义世俗们无法接受世界覆灭这样的事情。好不容易整了那么nb的大房子，说完就完，那哪成啊。。。他们一开始极力否认世界会毁灭。。但当那大蓝星星真的越来越近以后，所有正常人都不淡定了，以主角姐夫（自杀）和主角姐姐（不知所错，忧郁了）为代表。而我们的主角淡定得一塌糊涂。

要我说。。这不废话吗，以我对忧郁症的理解，他们每时每刻都处于所有人都不能理解的压抑之中，每日面临的都是世界毁灭般的绝望无助，早都习惯了，他们最大的痛苦是周遭人完全无法理解他们，就如同我看这片的情感一样。

但当世界毁灭的那一刻，全世界正常人都体会到了忧郁症患者平日的那种感觉了。全世界都抑郁了。于是抑郁症患者说，你们总算能体会到我有多tm不爽了吧，突然觉得自己特有优越感。

我觉得这可以类比肚子疼。我每每肚子疼到想拉X却没厕所的时候，就浑身出冷汗。那时候，我就特不能理解为什么别人那么开开心心蹦蹦跳跳，觉得全世界都应该和自己一样肚子疼，然后满脸纠结啊。

咳，说远了

莫非这就是导演想要表达的？忧郁症患者，平时那么苦B，只是因为他们呆错了环境，因而不适应了。就好像把鱼拿到陆地上一样。
但如果把他们放到正确的环境（世界末日）里面，他们就能用表现的比正常人要好多了？

如果真是这样。。我真是服了。。。。。

后5分钟就是全篇前5分钟继续演下去。。好吧画面不错。。。

综上。。我的评论就是，够矫情，够矫情，够矫情

矫情的慢速镜头切换，矫情的叙事节奏，矫情的主角

以我对电影的适应能力来说。。适应不了

但片子的章法技巧都无可挑剔，演员演技也很好，所以绝不是那种imdb 5分一下的烂片。只是实在无法体会导演想表达什么

另外吐槽一下豆瓣影评。和imdb评分。。。不知是大家看到不懂的片就不敢打低分，还是我的理解力已经跟不上前沿思潮，竟然都这么高分诶。。。还看不到负面评论诶。。。


非常希望看这片感到震撼的人。。能帮我翻译翻译这片。。顺便帮我这愚笨的大脑开开窍