Observations on Reality in Melancholia

An assignment for a class on visual rhetorics at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Stephen Phillips, 2012

Our collective nature is grounded on assumed realities. In the world with which we interact at a daily level, we use these accepted facets about our environment to comfort us. They cradle us, at times removing our need to question their true value. Enter Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Within it, a deep discussion about perception is accumulated, centered around the true solidity of objects upon which we rely in life. By juxtaposing these banal things in an extreme situation, Von Trier attempts to criticize the verity of their archetypal associations in our society, thereby undermining their value to our sense of reality. Whether a painting, a window or a teepee, all objects in which we invest ourselves through symbolism fail truly to rectify our situations. While Melancholia places this discrepancy in a rather absurd situation – the end of the known world – Von Trier’s point is ubiquitous in meaning. Played through his imagery, the world is decomposed and questioned through its common assumptions about ordinary entities in our lives.

Earliest on, Melancholia poses the viewer before a painting rich with nostalgia. When seen especially through the lens of the European culture into which Von Trier introduces this trope, the symbolic nature in the image of a burning painting holds deafening value. Von Trier slows the camera, accentuating the doom of the picturesque winter scene. In burning it, he calls to question the homey values in the artwork. The image goes further to construct a multilayered analysis. On a more material level, he judges our investment in something which is, in the end, only a canvas and some paint. Its slow immolation reveals that it is no more a memory, no further an appreciated artwork sprinkled with zeitgeist and technique. To the contrary, it shrivels before the audience’s gaze. Even within the chosen image, this duality is played out, harping to an important theme throughout the film. What appears and what actually exists are two distinctly desperate beings in the Melancholia-styled interpretation. As is so, the image depicts a picturesque winter skating scene, yet in reality the camera shows this cold environment being taken up by flames and heat. We are brought to interrogate the happiness demonstrated by the worriless skaters and frolicking hikers. How can their joy be true when it is left static as the composition is consumed?

As the film progresses, we are again presented with an image of dissolution. This time, it is by the symbolism and the interpretation of a window. The architectural aperture of our homes, windows naturally function in a conventional sense to expose us to that which is outside our inhabitancies, revealing to us that which is beyond our immediate apprehension. We place in them our trust to connect us to a viable perspective on the outside world. Here, Von Trier once again plays on the expected (itself a construction both held by and produced within our collective psyche) and the reality, a far less subjective force, something more inherently existent. The composition of the trickery goes beyond the basic level of understanding intrinsic in its components, relying further on coloring to set a specific reading. The frame and the room surrounding the window are painted a deep black, suggesting a darkened interpretation of their intentions.

Whereas white framing would symbolize purity, definition and straightforwardness, the obscured nature of the set’s shade hints at skewed motives. It is as if the window hides something from us, blurring our comprehension of what it depicts. Beyond the foreground, Von Trier further questions our perceptions and assumptions. We see a burning bush, the sole enflamed object in the landscape beyond the windowpanes. While this conjures inferences to the Bible, in which a burning bush ignited the Israelite’s march to the Promised Land, Melancholia employs the imagery as a precursor of the end of life as we know it. This intertwined mashing of symbols and implied constructed meanings thoroughly disorients and questions how we understand the elements presented to us in the film.

Possibly of greatest importance is the film’s final scene, flittered with religious sting. Herein, Von Trier incorporates the semiology of a teepee to further deepen his stance. Though the characters huddle below its roofline, their hands clenched together in a circle, they are nevertheless vaporized alongside all other vestiges of life on Earth as the rogue planet, Melancholia, collides. The imagery is toned blue, even as the explosion swipes by the screen, eventually fading away into white. These swatches are of particular interest for their unrealistic nature. Again, Von Trier plays in the space between assumption and actuality. In the blue, he brings a nearly calm composition to the apocalyptic situation. This, in turn, transfers to the white fadeout which concludes the film.

As the color of purity, this transition suggests that the characters’ release from their oppressive assumptions. No longer exists there a mode of escape in their illusion-laden constructions. In the end, their religion has done little to save them. The symbolic perception of worship as saving us from evil is broken. In fact, the entire notion of evil itself is questioned. Melancholia is neither divine nor sinister. It is in all ways a neutral force. As is such, it appears softly blue in the final shots. It is a vague entity, and Von Trier makes a point to interject the notion that no supreme being has come into play. Instead, sheer coincidence has brought the two planets into alignment. If anything, the cloudy, sea-covered nature of Melancholia’s appearance in the end sequence shows its true indifference to both human existence and mass religion.

By toying with our perception of what is initially expected and what is inevitably delivered in the image, Von Trier effectively fools the mind by negating its abilities of assumption. In doing so, he argues that our grasp on the way things exist is perhaps further from actuality than first thought.