In December 2011, all manner of "Best of 2011" lists appeared. I took note of the ten-best list that David Edelstein discussed with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Thursday, December 22, 2011. He was talking about the year in film, and revisiting his own ten-best list.
You can find the transcript here.
"EDELSTEIN: On this very show, I described Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" as a masterly film. I think I called it a hateful masterpiece. And I'm not somebody who throws around words like that and then doesn't follow up on my 10-best list.
"I just couldn't - I put it down on my list, and I just couldn't do it. It is such a hateful film. It's a – it's the work of a nihilistic annihilist. For Lars von Trier, the world, when it ends, is, well-lost. Capitalism has poisoned it, and families are useless, and the heroine, the protagonist of the movie played by Kirsten Dunst, is so utterly hateful that she's really quite happy that everything is going to hell.
"And I guess I - when one chooses, you know, the things that one loves and one wants to recommend, how - it's a very difficult question: Can you love a film, can you recommend a film that highly that peddles a worldview that you find so utterly hateful, even poisonous? I don't know the answer to that. I struggled with it."
I think that David Edelstein puts his critical finger on a problem that has been plaguing readers (of all stripes) for a good long while. His review of Lars von Trier's Melancholia rests upon the ethical or moral disposition of the viewer. And he assumes, casting a broad ethical and moral net, that the end of the world--no matter how artfully it might be depicted--is disagreeable to the film's viewer.
Melancholia may be a sad, bleak, fated, and morbid film. But to call it "hateful" is simply naïve. The approaching planet of Melancholia, like Justine (Kirstin Dunst), we should read as human mortality in its most unadorned form. Ultimately, neither human, nor animal, nor golf cart will cross the bridge beyond the film's private golf course and escape into the seeming sanctuary of the never-seen village. The question posed by the film, however, is: How shall we react to all of this? With numb depression and nihilism? With crippling anxiety? With a wishful optimism followed by suicide? With fantasy? Each character poses his or her own possible response to the approaching planet Melancholia, and it is up to the viewer to chose his or her own point of identification.
Stay tuned for part 2 to see how I read this film in a less "hateful" light than David Edelstein.
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