ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLIA

This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's MELANCHOLIA, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that MELANCHOLIA seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, MELANCHOLIA belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986). All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation to MELANCHOLIA we can trace the logic of this loss, culminating in MELANCHOLIA's radical gesture of world-sacrifice; this aestheticisation of world-destruction has the paradoxical ethical meaning, I suggest, of preparing for a post-humanist beginning.