On 11th of October 2023 CAPAS screened what has been dubbed, in a somewhat sensationalist sense, “the greatest film about depression ever made.” The final film to be screened in the previous semester’s Apocalyptic Cinema series, Melancholia was an apt film to wrap up the programme at Karlstorkino. The film has found a place in many of the discussions at CAPAS because it is, on first sight, one of the few examples of representations of the apocalypse as the total destruction of all of mankind that epitomizes modernity’s linear temporality and denial of transcendence as well as the possibility of revelation. Robert Folger (CAPAS director) argues that the focus on depression and meaninglessness in the prevalent interpretations of the movie fail to take into account the potential of redemption implicit in the thinking of a radical ending.

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

What is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia about? The most obvious and common answer is the result of autobiographical interpretations sustained by the films title, the filmmaker’s explicit clues, and, of course, the movie itself. Said, perhaps obvious, answer is thus: it is about melancholy, black bile, the four forms of bodily humors or fluids of premodern Aristotelian-Galenic medicine, and the outdated description of a pathological condition we today call depression. Melancholia is often lumped together with Trier’s previous film Antichrist (2009), and the following Nymphomaniac (2013) under the rubric “Depression Trilogy.”

The perhaps popular conception of the film is, according to Wikipedia, as follows:

The idea for the film originated during a therapy session Lars von Trier attended during treatments for his depression. A therapist had told von Trier that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under heavy pressure, because they already expect bad things to happen. Von Trier then developed the story not primarily as a disaster film, and without any ambition to portray astrophysics realistically, but as a way to examine the human psyche during a disaster.

In this sense, confirmed by Trier’s remarks, Melancholia is, in spite of the remarkably poetic if not surrealist aesthetics, a kind of realist or naturalist experiment that throws a character, specifically a female protagonist suffering from depression, into a social milieu and particular situation and ‘observes’ how the plot unfolds; specifically the deformations and pathologies caused by society.

Critics have rightfully pointed out that gender is paramount in this movie because the melancholic subject is a woman. Melancholia is a film about female depression.1

From this hermeneutic perspective it could be said that Melancholia is about the meaninglessness of life for the melancholic or depressed subject for whom all is senselessly in vain: family, job and career, sex, friendship; in short, one’s own life. The increasing sense of loss experienced due to depression culminates in the loss of world, or, better said, the end of the world. The sustained level of satire of the ‘Western’ way of life, is revealed in aspects such as the nuclear family, capitalism, the idle rich who don’t even realize their privileges (Claire’s relation to her butler, for example), and patriarchy which provides an iron cage that the individual cannot escape but only violently destroyed, just as planet earth eventually in the film.

In this interpretation, that overarching plot line, the destruction of the the world, or planet earth, is a kind of allegory for the inevitable loss of world for the depressed female subject and, as some critics have pointed out, an unsustainable way of life as it characterizes our present. Allegory, as an age old literary device which also encompasses various artistic forms from narrative to visual interpretations, represents often hidden political or moral meaning. Allegory is, then, also an aesthetic principle: the masking of “real meaning“ under some sort of ‘clothing.’ Medieval and premodern scholars used the term integumenta: clothing or skin, that has to be revealed. The beauty and difficulty of the hermetic operation produces a sense pleasure and also, potentially, beauty and thus also serves a didactic function.

It is worth delving into the history of allegory and its premodern meaning, practice, and function. In Greco-Roman antiquity allegory was a rhetorical principle; in the Christian world it became part and parcel of what C. S. Lewis has called the “Discarded Image,” the premodern world view, its ontology, and epistemology in which all of existence and all of what exists, is made meaningful by the metaphysical principle of God and the redemption by his son Jesus Christ. The whole world and all within said world, was, as such, readable but that was a difficult, perhaps impossible, task.

In the 5th century Father John Cassian formulated for the first time the principle of the four-fold sense of scriptures; occasionally the term quadriga, the Roman word for a chariot drawn by four horses, was used.

Littera gesta docet,

quid credas allegoria

moralis quid agas,

quo tendas anagogía

My own personal translation of this is closer to a direct translation while other more freely translated versions can, of course, be found. For the sake of clarity I translate said quadriga:

The letter teaches what happens,

Allegory what you believe

Moral meaning how to act,

Anagogy where you go to

The first literal meaning of scripture equals history in the modern sense of the world: events happening in linear chronological time. The allegorical meaning refers to articles of faith, the promise of redemption to a fallen mankind through faith. The letter of the word also implies a moral or ethical lesson, the right way to act to merit salvation. Anagogy, finally, the most elusive, difficult, but also important sense, is a relation of present things and events to the last things, eschatology, and the redemption of the just in the Final Judgement.

Allegory, then, has an intrinsic relation to eschatology and the end of the world, because each an every instance and event only makes sense in relation to the end; which is why Frank Kermode labelled the apocalypse the archetypical form of a narration that must be always told with the end of the story in mind. This is why the the quadriga as a mode of biblical hermeneutics is not a cornerstone of a “discarded image,” as C. S. Lewis would have us believe, but has an afterlife in a secularized world. Melancholia begins with the end. Von Trier makes clear at the beginning that the story he tells is about the unavoidable end of the world. As the world-endist emplotment, and the role of allegory indicate, the reference to the four-fold is afforded by the film rather than just a whim of somebody who was, and probably still is, a medievalist.

I am not arguing that the allegorical interpretations of Melancholia—depression as the end of an individual’s world, the unsustainibility of the capitalist-patriarical world—are wrong. Rather, I argue that the other senses must be taken into account in the reading of the movie. On the literal level, Melancholia tells us about the end of the world, the planet and mankind, to be precise. This story is told under the condition of a secularized world without transcendence. Contrary to common representations of the apocalypse in products of the cultural industry, epitomized by Hollywood, the world is not spared and nobody survives. In the absence of a metaphysical principle the end of the world is senseless; it marks a point of no return, a radical break on the scale of linear time. This ending is, what German philosopher Günther Anders has called a “naked apocalypse,” the destruction of the world without a “kingdom” to come. Unlike most end of the world stories, there is no moral aspect of apocalypse in Melancholia: nobody is responsible for the end (see the recent movie Don’t look Up, for example, that blames the end of humanity on human stupidity); it cannot be stalled or prevented. There is no meaningful way of going out of existence, as indicated by Justine’s scathing comment on her sister’s hackneyed fantasies of having a glass of wine on the terrace and listening to music.

Anders’s naked apocalypse, and, apparently, von Trier’s story of the end of the world, negate human actions in the light of the end as senseless; this is, ultimately, another layer of the satire of the modern world and way of life shown in the film. Although Anders speaks of the naked apocalypse, his notion of the end world is actually anti-apocalyptic because he denies the possibility of redemption which is the rationale or horizon of history, allegory, ethics, apocalypse, and what ultimately gives sense to human existence.

Is Melancholia, then, also anti-apocalyptic? After all, it depicts a world without beliefs and values (allegorical sensus ) and ethical compass (moral sensus ) that is irredeemably destroyed. How come that some critics, including Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, have called Melancholia an optimistic film then? Denying any kind of post apocalyptic aftermath, which characterizes the hegemonic cultural imagination, Melancholia is a thought experiment and mise en scene of a true and radical sense of ending. For all her depression and supposed cynicism, Justine cares; specifically for her nephew Leo. Instead of making plans and relying on instrumental rationality, Justine—let’s not forget her “sadistic” attitude toward the rest of the world—cares with serenity for another human being. When the world ends with a bang and not a whimper, in a blast of sublime beauty caused by the destruction of the planet Melancholia and, by extension, Earth, the “magic cave” built out of branches may provide shelter and become the starting point for a world that cannot be known without thinking and enduring the radical, truly apocalyptic and ultimately redemptive ending of the world as we know it.

Robert Folger is Director of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) as well as Professor in Romance Literature at the Department of Romance Studies at Heidelberg University and a co-editor of Apocalyptica. His research focuses primarily on the literature and culture of Spain and Latin America, as well as literary and cultural theory.