Lars Von Trier's Melancholia 1/3

Transcript from the video essay. Prefiguration.

Intro: Since posting this as a video essay in 2019, I’ve received numerous requests for a transcript. At this moment, the video has been viewed 33,000 times. The essay is based on draft material for my forthcoming book Ego & Extinction: Ecopsychology and Science Fiction (2023, Anti-Oedipus Press). The transcript is divided into sections, in order to make it a little easier to read online.

MELANCHOLIA

If He pull it down because evil, how shall He be free from the evil that made it evil? —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (59)

What gives to everything tragic, whatever form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly, it leads to resignation. —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, (433)

Prefiguration

Lars von Trier’s science fiction film Melancholia (2011) occupies a rogue position within the constellation suggested by When Worlds Collide (1951), George Pal and Rudolph Maté’s adaptation of the Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie story, first serialized in the pulp magazine Blue Book (September 1932—February 1933). Sixty years later, Melancholia’s restrained operatic staging, its philosophical and psychoanalytic latency break with the spectacular hysterias and ruin-tourism of Hollywood catastrophe narrative, supplying a vivid, yet ambivalent luminescence. It does so through an alignment with Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and others. Schopenhauer’s masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1818, the same year as Frankenstein, and developed over subsequent decades, presented the harrowing relation of will and intellect.