Melacholia
Leah Mensch
*
An adult woman bearing the weight of another adult woman always means grief this. It is a grief, and so when I watched the newlywed Justine holding onto the walls to stand up straight, trying to get herself into the bathtub, or more accurately, her sister Claire trying to help her into the bathtub, I wept. Claire heaved. She shoved her hands under Justine’s armpits—lift your other leg Justine, just a little higher, she coaxed. Of course, outside, dead birds fall all around the wedding venue as the planet Melancholia obscures Antares. The world is going to end, but Justine doesn’t know this. Or maybe she does. But she’s getting married, and she’s trying to dance and this is what I’d remember. Her crumbling façade. The way her unraveling spared nobody. I thought I knew her.
The first time I watched Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, I was twenty years old, and I felt the pin on the hand grenade in my head coming loose. Was I particularly interested in stopping this? Not back then. Probably, I was stoking it, the sadness and madness, because I didn’t yet take my precious life seriously enough to consider the outcome of true crisis. Knowing everything I know now about the way my grasp on life splintered and unraveled in the years following, I occasionally want to slap twenty-year old me hard across the face for wringing my body against the early moments of what would become a yearslong depressive episode rather than plunging for its heart. But I ignored the geometry of crisis for all the same reasons twenty-year-olds do what they do. I still believed I could will away the inevitable.
Melancholia is the second movie in Danish filmmaker’s Lars Von Trier’s unofficial Trilogy of Depression, all of which star Charlotte Gainsbourg, none of which are inherently related save a theme of despairing women in a fucked-up world. Melancholia is the perfect fatalist film. It begins where it ends, presenting you with a ruined basket of fruit, images steeped in a paralyzing hopelessness. The opening scene is not a scene at all, but a series of images set to a mournful violin score: the planet colliding with the earth in breaking motion weaving through black birds croaking, a rain cloud, a sundial casting twin shadows across a barren landscape. It leaves nobody to witness because it makes everyone a witness. The film’s most famous image arrives within the first few minutes: Justine in her bridal gown, floating upstream like a bloated fish.
Structured like a Diptych, Melancholia focuses on two sisters: the depressed bride in Part 1 (Justine) and Claire (Justine’s sister) in Part 2, though Claire’s portion of the movie is still witness to Justine’s deterioration, as the planet Melancholia is about to collide with the earth and collapse the world. Justine’s depression appears connected to the solar event, metaphorically and magically so. I know things, she tells Claire after her wedding, declaring the outcome of the collision. She then proceeds to tell Claire exactly how many wooden beads were in the guessing jar at the wedding.
To say Melancholia moved me at age twenty would be a misnomer—Melancholia, at least as a whole, didn’t make me do, or even want to do, anything. I considered it memorable only because Kiefer Sutherland played Claire’s husband in a way that made me want to tell him he should remain permanently in the action genre, and because nothing really happened in its two-hour run time. But in the months and years following, I thought often of Justine. After I graduated college, I moved to New York, and by then, I was no longer washing my hair or changing my clothes and my façade was collapsing with a rapidity that I understood was beyond my control. Our house in Brooklyn had a bathtub and no showerhead, so we had to turn on the faucet and wash our hair with a mason jar on our hands and knees. One day in October, two months after I moved, I undressed and tried to get my leg over the rim of the tub, and I thought I couldn’t go on anymore.
At twenty-one, I did not register Lars Von Trier as a prolific and careless grown man lobbing his depression and pain at a film budget,. I only recognized him as a man who had experienced the kind of depression so profound he could not lift a fork to his mouth.
*
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In college, before New York and the bathtub, right around the time I first watched Melancholia, I read the esteemed poet and literary critic Al Alvarez’s study of suicide, The Savage Gods. In the first chapter, anchored in Alvarez’s friendship with Sylvia Plath and her prick of a husband Ted Hughes, Alvarez remembers visiting Plath at her home in London a few weeks before she killed herself. Plath was gardening, and writing, but even then, he attests, “she was far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her.” His ultimate assertion at the end of the book, using Plath as the keynote example, is that some people are just born suicides. There is little we can do to save them from themselves.
I was trying to grow tomatoes on my fire escape in Pittsburgh that spring. The plants languished and grew sideways, their stems so brittle that a stiff breeze ended my endeavor one afternoon. Because most depressed twenty-year-olds believe they are both the wisest and only depressed twenty-year old alive, I was also reading and writing about Voltaire’s Candide, which tells the story of a man banished from his utopian homeland, only to find a world threaded with lost riches and dead lovers and a mentor gone mad with syphilis, which eventually ends with Voltaire’s famous line: we must cultivate our garden.
Everything is a binary, or else a direct exchange, when you are young, and I thought Voltaire was vying to oppose fatalism: if we take care of ourselves, the world will take care of us in return. If I care for my tomatoes, they’ll bloom. If I somehow endured the crushing sadness, I’d come out the other side healed. But I couldn’t save my dying tomato plants and I thought this was an argument against cultivating a garden. I thought, some people are just born suicides. I didn’t realize tomato plants needed full sun to grow.
After I wrote an essay about Voltaire and my dying houseplants, my professor, an artist in his seventies, told me that he tried to kill himself when he was twenty-four because he didn’t want to do his laundry. His sentiment was the first in a long string of grown men disclosing suicide attempts and periods of debilitating depression in their twenties to me. I didn’t understand. He concurrently challenged my reading of Voltaire. Maybe, he suggested, cultivating the garden only meant trying as hard as we could to be gentle, to care for ourselves and one another, and divorce that effort from outcome, from fate. Then, he tried to do an impression of an old therapist he had—a southern lad who smoked cigars during psychoanalysis and wore straw hats in the winter and said, I don’t wanna go to heaven; all the good people are in hell. Except he could not get the words out of his mouth without bursting out laughing mid-sentence at the seemingly irrelevant commentary (he was known for digressions), choking on his own spit, shaking his head in apology, tears in his eyes. He sent me onward while he chugged a Diet Pepsi.
At the end of the semester, he called me into his office and told me he thought I had the makings of a real writer, so long as I was (his words) ready to be broke as fuck and overworked to the point of humiliation.
I asked him if he had any advice.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just don’t kill yourself.”
*
*
One of my friends feels such disdain toward Melancholia that, each time I bring up the film, he groans and says I fucking hate that movie in a way that makes me wonder if he is about to break into a visible rage sweat. I don’t feel this way. I don’t feel anything about the movie at all, really, which makes me sad. The writer Kate Braverman used to tell her students that literature should make the reader want to drive a stake through their forehead. Melancholia doesn’t make me want to do anything. It’s all bones and no heart. Despair lathered on despair lathered on despair. There’s no love. Not even love of language, of sisterhood, of landscape. With the exception of Kiefer Sutherland’s character, John, who looks at the planetary eclipse in awe. In one of the movie’s most quotable lines of dialogue, and I mean this in a derogatory way, Claire calls melancholia “that stupid planet,” and John corrects her.
“That wonderful planet,” he says.
Claire’s part of the film leaves us with wedding carnage and a further depleted Justine, as the three slowly realize that Melancholia and earth will collide. The horses go quiet in the stables and Justine sits in a porch chair, proud of her nihilism, waiting for the inevitable. It is clear now. Biblical catastrophes loom in an echo chamber as Claire runs for her life, toward nothing, and gets caught in a hailstorm. Claire finds John dead in the stable: the talisman of hope commits suicide. There is no longer a point to anything. And maybe this is the sentiment that I find so exhausting. I’ve spent enough of my life around dudes waxing poetic about how life is meaningless via melancholia and the news and poorly interpreted reads of Camus, who, in fact, argued against suicide and for revolt: a survival inside of meaninglessness.
Not all of Von Trier’s work makes me feel like I’m being lectured over drinks by a guy I met on hinge. Some of his movies do have heart, but I stopped watching Von Trier’s films about a year after I first saw Melancholia, largely on account of an extended tirade he embarked upon at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival—ironically Melancholia’s premiere—that landed him on the festival’s “persona non grata” list. He didn’t love what Hitler was all about, he told media, but he also kind of understood Hitler: “I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end...,” Von Trier said. “I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit.”
Then, he clarified later that he didn’t hate Jews, nor was he racially prejudiced or anti-Semitic in any way. In this case, in all cases, the artist and the art are inextricable. The artist who has no regard for language has no art. Or maybe I just distrust any artist who believes they can polymorph monstrosity into language.
*
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When, my senior year of high school, my English teacher asked if anyone knew who Sylvia Plath was, I raised my hand. In earnest I asked: is she the one who stuck her head in the oven or the one who put stones in her pocket and walked into the river? The answer earned me a few laughs from my fellow classmates, but the implications are clearer now. I grew up in a generation of literary women who knew Sylvia Plath by way of her manipulated eulogy: she was not an artist, but a mere metaphor for self-destruction and the caricature of the pretty sad woman begging to be hurt.
I knew Ted Hughes and Al Alvarez—the poet and critic who wrote The Savage Gods, who hypothesized, using his observations of Plath during the last month of her life, that some people were just born a suicide—were good friends. But in 2023, after reading Emily Van Duyne’s book Loving Sylvia Plath, the context of The Savage Gods became much clearer to me. It was Alvarez, Van Duyne argued, who first initiated the framing of Plath’s suicide as inevitable, a losing gamble for her art, largely to shape a mythology that did not implicate Hughes and his alleged abuse in his wife’s death. After which, Van Duyne writes, “people began to look for events in her life that corresponded directly with her poetry, in ways that mirrored Alvarez’s claim that ‘Lady Lazarus’ predicted Plath’s death by suicide.”
That Ted Hughes tarnished and sealed Sylvia Plath’s legacy was not a new idea, but here was a tangible example. I thought about all those years I walked down sets of subway stairs, hiked through canyonlands in Arizona, thinking about suicide Those years in college I quoted Alvarez in my journal, and decided like Plath, my own suicide was inevitable. I was mere carnage in Sylvia Plath’s false legacy, her false archive. My grand theory of suicide was anchored in a false pretense, a false mythology built by one powerful man vying to protect another. One man with power saying, this is how it is.
Maybe what I am trying to say is that I have seen enough sensational iteratives of depression as no way out, depression as a calm nihilism at the end of the world, depression a storm with no exit wound. I have lived this. And I’m no longer interested in this metaphor.
*
*
I lived in New York for five months before I checked myself in the psych ward. It was voluntary and unceremonious and probably, it saved my life. I’m still not convinced the hospitalization alone helped redirect the next several years of my life, though I know I did not leave the hospital worse off, and for that, I am grateful. What really helped heal me was everyone else in my proximity. We are all voluntary, which is to say some part of us wanted to be alive even if many of us were so depressed we often wished to be tranquilized. I was no longer unique in my suffering, nor was I unique in my desire to survive. I was relieved.
Upon discharge, I wrote to my professors about missing coursework. Along with suggested accommodations, one specific professor, with whom I’d spoken only once the entire fifteen weeks, disclosed that he’d had a rough go several decades ago in his twenties, too. It kicks your ass, he wrote. But you keep drinking water and putting one foot in front of the other, and it gets so much easier.
I don’t know if I ever responded to his email. I could hardly take care of myself back then, and thus, I doubt I was showing up in return for anyone who tried to help me. But sometimes when I’m driving through Tucson, when I’m watching the crossing guard hold children tenderly as she helps them across the street, I feel a love so strong for my fellow humans that I feel vaguely like I might puke. I cry fast and hard these days mostly about love. I understand that my other professor, who challenged my reading of Voltaire at age twenty and disclosed his five-decade-old suicide attempt, was trying to say the same thing as the professor who emailed me after my hospitalization: Me too. But look, I’m still here.
Or less eloquently, everything will turn out fine so long as you fucking keep yourself alive.
*
*
In my memory, I always stabilize more quickly than I really did. I spent another semester in New York, and while I wish I was softer, I was mostly a bystander to my own rage. When someone walked too close to me, I wanted to pull my mask down and scream; when a man elbowed me in Times Square on the way to the doctor’s office, I pictured my fist shattering his jaw; when my classmates told me my work was funny, I wanted to pound my fist on the table and say fuck every one of you.
I was writing about my own pain. I was writing about Kate Braverman, who was, at the itme, doubling as my pain doppelgänger back then. When I wrote about her walking around in the bathrobe, drugged up on lorazepam in the hills of Napa Valley, I was tracing the path of my own concurrent unraveling. My classmates were not interested in these images, brutally anchoring my work, and were instead pointing to moments that elucidated humor, asking me to spend more time writing about wonky phone calls I had with university librarians, the story about Kate’s estate executor calling me in the morning’s early hours from Greece. Your work is funny, people would often tell me. I hated this, as if humor somehow negated scholarly value.
But the writers around me weren’t wrong. Or rather, we were all right. My work was brutal and it was also really funny. It was really fucking funny to be so obsessed with an obscure dead poet that I found myself on the phone with an 80-year-old former friend of hers every Saturday night, that the Sonoma State library groaned when they saw my correspondence, so desperate to get Braverman’s master’s thesis. My classmates saw something inside my work I was trying to resist. They were vying to communicate that, despite the stale crackers and the weeks crossed off a calendar sans a single shower, I was making them laugh. It was easier to lob my pain and rage at everyone in my vicinity and call it art than examine my own vulnerable turmoil, out on the page. These lines are blurred. It is a practice of generosity and self-awareness, two things that I am not always good at, but to which I remain committed.
It’s a commitment born mostly from G, the poet I fell in love with after moving to Arizona in 2023. When we met, I still felt, though I’d have denied this, that there was something virtuous about suffering, about melancholia, about the death drive. I told them, one night about a patient in the hospital who used to yell in bed at night that he was tired of being alive. G, I thought, would understand this.
“Sure,” they said. “But I’m also pretty tired of wanting to die.”
*
*
In the translation of Candide I read in college, a woman he meets at the end of his journey tells him: “A hundred times I have wanted to kill myself, but always I’ve loved life more.”
In a different translation, also of prestigious acclaim, she says, “A hundred times I have wanted to die, but still, I love life.”
*
*
Today, as I write this, it’s been four years since I was unceremoniously discharged my ten-day psychiatric admission in New York City. Most years, on the anniversary of my discharge, I count down the days. I send my roommate a postcard, or at least give her a call. Last year, I baked a pie.
This year, though, I would’ve forgotten completely had my phone not shown me the photo my mother took outside the ER entrance: I hold my arm up toward the camera, a FALL RISK bracelet still wrapped around my wrist, and give her a thumbs-up. All my clothes are stashed in an NYU hospital system branded bag. When I see the photo, I’m begrudgingly watching Melancholia for the second time in a week.
The first time I watched the movie, I kept waiting for something to happen, and then the end arrived, and Claire’s soul-crushing fear metastasizes and explodes as the rouge Melancholia planet collides with the earth. Flames gut the field where the women sit, and as Claire screams, Justine is calm through the annihilation, as if to suggest her depression prepared her for the apocalypse, as if to suggest she was the apocalypse. And from the kitchen, G starts screaming OW, GOD DAMN IT, FUCK FUCK FUCK. I turn to see them standing at the kitchen sink holding their (attached, thankfully) pinkie finger, blood rushing down the side of their hand and onto a pile of dirty dishes. That stitches are in order is evident within five minutes, and so, here I am, four years later, on the other side of the country, back in the emergency room. This is the Von Trier experience, my friend says. When the doctor comes into the exam room to apply adhesive, he speaks to both me G and earnestly. So about an hour ago, you sliced your pinkie finger with a butter knife? A butter knife. G and I look at one another across the room. They’re still holding their hand above their heart. We both burst out laughing.
When we arrive home several hours later, the Christmas tree lights and TV glow illuminate the living room. My streaming service asks if I’d like to rewatch Melancholia. I select no and subsequently delete the movie from our que completely. I wash the bloody butter knife and G draws a bath, since they can’t put their hand in water for the next five days. Love makes every day feel like a miracle. It’s nothing new, this love, nor does it arrive in despair’s absence. I practice finding, I practice feeling. Look at us. We’re still here—all this love, all this despair—working with what we’ve got.
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Leah Mensch is a dues-paying member of the Ander Monson Alumni Association. Find more, if you dare, at leahmensch.com.
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