Melancholia (2011)

Less than a year ago, I was a literature student, and as such, used to do things like read and think about poetry by John Donne. In one of his poems, he visualizes the apocalypse, which at the time made me think that it would be a marvellous privilege to be included in the last generation of human beings that witnesses the death of mankind. In a sense, being one of the last people on earth is thrilling much in the way being the first person on earth would probably have been. Melancholia provides this vicarious pleasure of witnessing the apocalypse—the best moments of the movie are the opening five minutes, in which we are provided with scenes of frozen, fantastical beauty that foreshadow moments to come, and the final five minutes, in which we witness the end of the world with Wagner on full blast. (It will be a challenge to all future film directors, topping von Triers’s end-of-the-world scene). Those ten minutes are mindblowing enough to warrant sitting through the more predictable, contrived wedding banquet scenes. 

It is odd that the movie, which is very much about depression both literally (in the figure of Justine) and figuratively (in the way the planet named Melancholia inches towards helpless earth and its inhabitants) should be so fixated on beauty. After all, beauty is cold comfort for someone who suffers from depression. But perhaps that is the point—even though the opening scenes of the film are breathtakingly stunning, and some ethereal moments make one think that beauty justifies even the darker sides of human existence, eventually the end of the world still feels like the right thing, that as Justine says, life on earth is evil and there is no need to grieve for it. Although crude, the metaphor of the planet as slowly encroaching depression was well done, given how it makes one sympathize with both Justine, the depressed sister who calmly accepts, if not welcomes, the end of the world, and Claire, the practical sister who dreads and fears it. Melancholia the planet comes dangerously close, recedes, and reappears, much in the way the illness does—depression may recede from time to time, but anyone who has once experienced serious depression knows that it shall soon reappear, and that she will eventually succumb to it. Justine, who is very familiar with depression, understands that fighting Melancholia’s approach is futile, and thus in one of the movie’s most stunning scenes lies naked in the light of the planet, as if she were completely submitting to and soaking in its blue shine. Even as Justine seems to be the rational one in this end of the world scenario, one also understands Claire’s hysteria and anxiety—she fears Melancholia not so much because she treasures her own life, but because she worries for her little boy, who in this crude metaphor embodies hope, the part of oneself that one timidly loves best. The depressed person for whom total obliteration would be a relief still cannot help feel a stir of sentiment for hope, for the life that could have been, which depression turns into ashes. It is a sick little in-joke among depressed people, perhaps, that Justine, the depressed, dysfunctional one, becomes the sane one, while the practical Claire is clearly maladaptive (note, for instance, the scene in which Justine reasonably tells Claire that Claire’s plan to drink wine on the terrace while waiting for the planets to collides is shit). It also makes one think about whether madness and depression are merely normative, sane responses to this world we live in. 

The Skin I Live In (2011)

Foucault pitches Discipline and Punish as a history in which he traces how the state gradually learns to use the mind as a tunnel through which it renders bodies docile, and more importantly, productive. Foucault’s premise is that the subjection of people by the state was created as myth and slowly implemented to become fact. Control of the mind is significant insofar as it leads to direct control over the body. There are whiffs of this idea in The Skin I Live In, mostly in its examination of male control over the female body, but it stops at a superficial level—the film is enjoyable not because of its ideas, but because of its luscious, gorgeous surface beauty. 

Dr. Ledgard, played by the very handsome middle-aged Antonio Banderas, engages in constant surveillance of Vera through a camera, and is obsessed with creating a docile female body through which he can relive the sexual pleasures he experienced with his dead wife. The focus is fixed on the female body, which is the main object and target of male power. One could of course make the cynical argument that love may merely be a means through which one subjugates the mind and ultimately gains control over, and takes pleasure from, a docile body. Dr. Ledgard certainly seems uninterested in any kind of emotional connection (without giving too much away, it would be ridiculous to argue that Dr. Ledgard feels love for Vera on an emotional level given the context) and much keener to get in bed with his lovely creation. If he whispers sweet words to Vera or makes promises with her, it is to physically own her—Vera’s end of the deal is to remain in the house as his prisoner. The film constantly shows men who are drunk with desire for beautiful female bodies; men subjugate women by heartlessly raping them, or by covering their imperfect bodies with a questionably designed but luminous super skin. The memorably steely female characters from Almodovar’s earlier films (mostly played by Penelope Cruz) are absent. Vera is trapped in her body suit, subject to constant surveillance, closed behind layers of doors and gates, and Norma, while feeling claustrophobic in her clothes, voluntarily shuts herself in a closet when she feels unsafe. The odalisques that grace the walls of the mansion act as reminders of the long history of female subjugation to the male gaze. 

Are any of these ideas about imprisonment or gender violence new? Not really. At times the film seems to be a mockery of itself, as it is apparent that the director has painstakingly designed each scene to be stunningly beautiful, while showing less concern for narrative coherence. Colours blossom and hip music pulses throughout the film, making it easier to forgive the movie’s obvious B movie qualities, inconsistencies and logical leaps. In the end, the movie is attractive and enjoyable because it is beautiful and empty, all glossy skin in a fake pretty kind of way, just like Vera. 

Twilight, Breaking Dawn Part I

When I am under extreme stress during waking hours, I have the same dreams in which I climb up ladders where rungs disappear, or find a second row of teeth in my mouth. In one of the most cliched of these recurring nightmares, a medieval-looking hooded figure with a skeletal hand and a dagger chases me through strange cities and landscapes. In the dream’s final moments, the hooded figure catches up with me and sinks the knife into my chest; I feel the numb, scalding hot blood gushing redly onto my shirt and my hands. 

I then wake up, and continue, sanely, with my life. I brush my teeth, push a knife around an apple, put my shoes on. The horror of the dream is sharper and more flavourful than any type of dread I experience in real life, and in a sense this nightmare makes my waking hours more bearable—I am relieved to wake up in my own tiny room with my relatively tiny problems. The hooded figure is almost comforting because he exists in my dream as an explanation for my dread, my sense of being chased. My mind likely created him in order to explain my more aimless, less specific fear. Paul Groussac writes that it is astonishing that we maintain sanity every morning after we experience the shady madness of dreams, but perhaps we are able to be sane because nightmares exist as outlets in which we are licensed to weave narrative threads out of dormant cesspools of madness. 

Watching the latest Twilight movie today made me think of dreams, because the movie, with its deep forests and chalky glowing vampire figures, has that nightmare texture to it. I won’t talk about the bad acting or the dreadful lines. Of course, the movie would have benefited if the baby had actually turned out to be monstrous, and were not so obviously cute, cute enough to make Taylor Lautner collapse on his knees; if Kristen Stewart didn’t mumble so; if Robert Pattinson didn’t predictably say on the morning after, with a pained expression, that it was the best night of his life. Putting all that aside, the film fascinates because it is a blockbuster manifestation of a pretty basic female nightmare, in which the young girl is torn between her tugs of sexual desire and her dread that sex is a form of primal violence, a type of irrevocable loss. As is custom in nightmares, the horror is frighteningly embodied, and Bella is punished for acting on her sexual desires by the growing monstrous thing inside her which sucks on her blood, cracks her bones from within and snatches away her beauty. The earlier scene in which Bella dreams of a cake strewn with corpses is terrifying because she finds bloodstains soiling her hand and white dress. This is an absolute, Manichean world for her, in which she has to either be pure or soiled. In one of the film’s rare moments of brilliance, pregnant Bella, who had once felt a visceral fear from the bloody corpse-cake, eagerly sucks blood through a straw from a styrofoam cup. After several gulps, she declares that it is good, and as she speaks we see the blackish blood staining her pearly teeth.

Since we’re talking about conflicted sexual desires, think about the gorgeous Taylor Lautner, who until recently was a minor. Lautner is a sex symbol who makes money for the Twilight franchise by routinely ripping off his shirt—in fact, he rips off his shirt in the very first scene of the latest movie—but was also a minor, sexually out of bounds. As a friend once told me, there is also the example of the Jonas Brothers, who were hyper-sexualized, but were expressly forbidden to their female fans with their chastity rings. This is a culture that encourages young girls to feel sexual desire, while scaring them from acting on those desires.

The Twilight series has value, perhaps an unintended one, because it makes these conflicts more explicit in its exaggerated, embodied forms. The earlier three Twilight films were forgettable (in fact, I watched them all pretty recently, but cannot remember the plot for any one of them) but this one is memorable despite its weaker moments and dismal reviews because it is an outlet for this clumsy terror that I’m sure many girls experience. Does the movie offer us any solid Mormon morals? Probably not. I left the theatre, however, much in the way I exit a bad dream—feeling refreshed, for having purged unpleasant thoughts. 

The evolutionary purpose of non-life threatening minor diseases could be that they function as signals to the body to take a break. Anyhow, I’m on sick leave until tomorrow and find myself with lots of time on my hands on a week day, when bodies aren’t crowding streets and shops are fairly empty. Men are hammering and drilling outside my window (an antique shop across the street is closing business, and they are taking down their marble sign) so I moved out to a cafe a little bit down the street which is of course empty, except for two Italian men, who are talking with their hands more than with their lips.

Illness makes me think of books, and for all the major illnesses in my life I can remember the books that accompanied them. This time around, I finished “Gilead” in the hospital waiting room (Marilynne Robinson writes like Cormac McCarthy without the poetic fire and brimstone, an anaesthetised and religiously righteous version of him) and stayed in bed yesterday, reading Julian Barnes’s latest in one sitting. I’d been avoiding the cliquish circle of middle-aged male British writers and their stories of passive-aggressive ex-public schoolboy protagonists, but my shipment from Amazon is yet to arrive and on my way back from the hospital I bought an emergency novel from Dymocks. (On a side note, Dymocks divides novels into two sections, “Fiction” and “Literature.” Given that J.M. Coetzee is sometimes placed under Fiction and Sophie Kinsella under Literature, I’d say the division is arbitrary). Predictably, it was about English public school boys, a girl with a secret, the narrator’s unreliable memory and a near-Oedipal epiphany at the end (which could have almost been shocking if it hadn’t been so tiredly over-used). Perhaps I should stop habitually reading untested hardcovers, and return to aged novels that have survived time, but then there are always the gems that come along and make it all worth it… I am eagerly awaiting the Amazon shipment and the new Don Delillo short story collection in it.

Enough about novels, enough wasting words—there are things that need to be done…