Sad Girl hasn’t left her apartment in days. Sad Girl spends the time curled on her bare white sheets, clutching her pearl necklace or her silk nightgown or maybe a cigarette. Sad Girl doesn’t want to talk, or eat, or bathe. Boys still want to kiss Sad Girl, even though she’s sad, which inexplicably makes her sadder. In just a few days, Sad Girl and everything she knows will be destroyed when the earth collides with a planet that is hurtling through space on an unshiftable course.
This last scenario is the premise for Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia. Justine, a woman with depression, is the kind of Sad Girl that film and television has shown us many times before. But as the perspective of other characters is revealed, the romanticization of Justine’s mental illness collapses. Her self-destructiveness is no longer alluring, but callous. Her apathy isn’t glamorous, it’s unsettling. And Claire, her long-suffering older sister, becomes increasingly sympathetic. Her agitation over Justine’s indifference creates palpable tension, which is only compounded by insidious cosmic dread overshadowing this tableau of the human condition. As the end of the world draws closer, the tumultuous Justine is suddenly level-headed. Melancholia creates a world in which desperation for survival becomes irrational, and the content acceptance of death admirable.
It’s hard to put a finger on what society loves so much about a sad girl. Sadness is inextricably tied to femininity, beauty, fragility, and purity. We love to watch the stars implode, to see marble crumble. We love to see beautiful things destroyed. We long for what we admire, but can’t save.
At first, Justine’s attraction to the approaching planet is captivating, romantic. But when we take Claire’s perspective in the film’s latter half, we see the quiet beauty of the life Justine forsakes – including her relationship with Claire’s young son, who affectionately calls her Aunt Steelbreaker. As the looming apocalypse turns reason on its head, the unstable Justine becomes a pillar while the steadfast Claire flails in the floodwaters. It’s hard to discern who we should sympathize with – and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
Melancholia isn’t entirely innocent of the glamourization of depression that plagues depictions of women’s mental health in film, but it never loses complexity in its portrayal of its deeply flawed characters. A fragile and thought-provoking film, Melancholia gracefully examines the concept of unimaginable tragedy in an indifferent universe.
