The Image of Melancholia

I.

Melancholia will pass us by. 

Lars von Trier's Melancholia is a disaster movie in two parts. The first, a fiasco of a wedding; proving the pessimist's adage that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. You sit transfixed, despite the unfolding calamity, by the carefully framed images, the deep, rich colors, and while von Trier's signature unsteadicam work is still very much in operation, he tampers it with its unmoving, stationary opposite: breathtakingly gorgeous slow-motion sequences that have the same painterly quality, perhaps even mythic quality, that one sees in the work of Bill Viola. You witness Justine's (Kirsten Dunst's character) wedding unraveling; you gaze into her blank, despondent stare (never directly at the camera, never directly at us); you see her forced smiles and how desperate she is to feel anything but nothing at all. You find yourself consoling Justine, saying: "Well, it is horrible yes, but it's not the end of the world ..."

Cue: the end of the world.

II.

Is it even possible to make the observation that there are far worse things than the end of the world? Or is extinction the (default) standard bearer?

III.

I'm not convinced that the purely non-diegetic use of Wagner as film score (especially since von Trier appropriates from Wagner at his most iconic) works, if only because as a composer, the Tristan Chord evokes far too many associations to the point of distraction. Is von Trier's film, because of his use of Wagner, mere metaphor about the end of tonality rather than the end of the world? Or is he perhaps expressing the trite if oft-expressed sentiment that the end of the (musical) world came as a result of the end of tonality? I exaggerate of course (just my leap of logic, not my observation that Wagner distracts). Though I wish that I were exaggerating when I say that for most people, unfortunately including many musicians, music ended in 1900.

IV.

I witness. I gaze. I see. A film ravels in its images even when it expresses the pictorial in musical terms (slow-motion has always been, for me, the province of music, despite its abandonment by composers and appropriation by video artists). In an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture, I've recently been giving much thought to the question of how music expresses itself visually, for to exclude from music the image (or the imagistic) is to rehash the old Hanslickian position that all (real) music can only be absolute music, and that if music partakes in the extra-musical, it must somehow be inferior. To adopt that position is as ridiculous as saying that words can never a describe a tree or a flower, can never paint a scene without subjugating itself to the visual; a language is poorer and less true to itself if it can never be anything other than an expression of its grammatical rules. So to argue for a pictorial turn in music is not to argue for the privileging of the image over sound, but allows for music to articulate with immediacy its full range of expression.