Slavoj Zizek on 'Melancholia'

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.

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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.