Melancholia why is justine american

For Justine, things ending puts her at ease, but things continuing causes her real life to fall apart. For Claire and arguably the other characters and their materialistic world , things ending puts her in anxiety, while things continuing causes her to lose sight of mortality.

So the beauty in this film and in real life is found in all those moments in between knowing that ourselves and all things will end, and knowing that we have to continue until they finally do. Melancholia the planet threatens earth, in part, as an analog for the doom facing the west which today is in steep decline.

Authenticity has been replaced with commodity. Instead, Justine opts to go into the woods with the child, in part symbolizing her own renewed inner child, and to find sticks. The magic cave symbolizes a more healthy, more honest dwelling place for humanity, a dwelling place for our living, which is also the place where we die. I think it no accident that the magic cave is like a teepee. Melancholia the planet is like the juggernaut of the west that came down upon and wiped out indigenous peoples everywhere, including the native american indians, and replaced their way of life with something else: a materialist dream, rooted in a blind industrialism that is ultimately destroying the planet and that leads to the ugly social dysfunction manifested during the wedding party.

This film is a rejection of those materialist values and an embrace of something much more basic. Let us give up all the pretense. Let us embrace the simple, the primitive. Let us face death together authentically.

Let us enjoy the gift we have been given of this earth. Death is coming, and yet we sell our souls for corporate jobs so we can buy expensive real-estate and join golf clubs and drive fancy cars and follow all the dreams that advertising can paint.

The money is everything what her Boss dream of. Actually most of the advertising companies are doing the same with us. Melancholia and every other Film of Mr. Trier are full of showing our real problems on earth, One more time to think about how misery we are, how lost we are with our jobs and family life…. I think not. That might be the eternal sin Justine was referring to. Kids are innocent. Noticed how Justine rather spends time with tugging in her little nephew than spending time with her husband on the evening of the wedding and wants to be bathed like a little child herself?

Hence, nomen est omen. Justine stands for justice, Claire stands for making things clear. Two sides of the same medal. Thank you all for your very interesting analysis of this remarkable film, they have certainly enriched the experience of watching it. I consider myself a melancholic person so the connection and empathy was total from the title to the very end. Part of my melancholic state comes from the fact that I am unfit for social life as it is underrstood by the so callled normal people or neurotypicals.

Being differently wired makes me wish for one catastrophical end of this world that is so full of suffering, misunderstanding and illusion. A planetary collision is far more poetical, natural and fair than starving, having cancer, breathing polluted air. The collision is merciful compared to watching helplessly all life slowly disappearing from the planet. In this sense, the film represents a rather optimistic vision through the eyes of a melancholic disillusioned person. If you are so bold to carry this statement further, at the very beginning of the DVD or stream press play on the title track of the album.

No, really, just do it. A report into mental health depiction in film and TV published in May by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the prevalence of mental illness in the top films of was way out of step with the real world.

Out of 4, speaking characters, only 18 or 0. What's more, in cases where depression was depicted, it was most often shown as having an identifiable cause — like the death of a loved one Collateral Beauty, Manchester by the Sea or a physical disability Me Before You, Miracles from Heaven — where, in reality, it does not always have a dramatic trigger.

The study also showed how it is often included to express signature story themes involving stigmatisation and suicide. In other words, it is still instrumentalised for the sake of a broad narrative beat or sweeping social point.

By contrast, Melancholia doesn't use depression as a device: it is instead part of its very texture. Now in her mid-twenties, she saw Melancholia and casually enjoyed it as a teenager but was retroactively awestruck by the parallels when she rewatched it in Like Justine she had married in a castle, and as with Justine in one particular scene, she found herself at the time of her wedding in a bath, motionless with emotional pain.

When Part Two opens, Justine is the walking dead, a state that Julie remembers from her own experiences of depression. It was a very dreamlike state. Whenever I could, I would go back to sleeping or a sort of cocoon. Julie understands the logic here. You just want to feel something. You want to feel like you're part of this moment in space in time. Jamie Graham is another film writer for whom watching Melancholia was incredibly raw; now Editor at Large of Total Film magazine, he recalls first seeing it at its Cannes premiere in May , while privately in the grip of a depression that lasted three to four years.

So it felt very personal to me. Then it made sense when I found out that Kirsten Dunst had also suffered from it because that performance feels so lived in and authentic. In the film's second part, the end of the world looms — and amid others' anxiety, Justine is calm and lucid Credit: Alamy. What rings particularly true to him about Von Trier's portrayal is the way in which he drops us into Justine's depression with no exposition or backstory or attempt to make sense of her state of mind.

There wasn't something like, you know, my parents had died. It settled on me like this cloud from out of nowhere. The film really understands that. She seems quite a privileged person. She's got this incredible wedding, she's marrying this gorgeous guy who's for the most part is understanding and clearly loves her.

She's got a good job. She's got all these things going on. But none of that matters. And when you have depression, nothing matters.

Nothing touches it. You can't make a dent in it. He was also deeply struck by the way in which Von Trier showed the physical side of depression — how it creates a heaviness that settles in the bones, making everything an effort.

In Part Two, in another bath scene, Claire tries to coax a naked Justine to step over the porcelain rim into the water. But she can't make it and just sags in Claire's arms. And I've never seen that in another film. Unless one has actually experienced melancholia, the pain it inflicts is invisible, a blind spot to outsiders. First, she pretends she wants to marry the man she has just married, but rather than spend time with her new husband, she walks through rooms, a ghost, in a beautiful white wedding gown.

She looks gorgeous, a sentiment echoed throughout the first half of the film. And the agreement is that Justine would be happy. Here, Justine is blind and Claire is the sighted one, guiding her blinded sister. The unspoken supposition is that if Justine would just be happy, everything would be perfect. All she has to do is see how wonderful everything is. But if Justine remains melancholic, the world might just stop. At the end of Part One, Justine begs her parents, to listen to her.

Just get the hell out of here. It is inside her. She cannot make it go away. Like her mother, Gabby, played by Charlotte Rampling she knows the truth, and the truth is that the world is a terrible place. When she does, she wastes no words. Before the entire wedding, she announces her hatred of weddings and of marriages, then she sits back down at the table, looking relieved.

Until her sister finds her. Seeing and not seeing are at the core of the film. In Part One, only Justine sees. Aside from Justine, no one else is present. The word hallucination means, for most, seeing or hearing something that does not exist. The word is connected with madness, whether in the form of a drug-induced hallucination or the mental illness called psychosis.

In either way, to hallucinate is to be put in grave danger: the police or an ambulance will probably be called. Seeing what others do not see means being wrong. In this case, Justine is a saint. She sees the superficiality of the wedding — the rote manners, the mindless schedule of wedding events, the insistence on her being happy— and this acute form of seeing nearly kills her.

In fact, in this case, sight and death nearly collapse into one another. She is consumed in a blackness and yet she has the gift of sight. Blindness and sight are the two opposites on this pole. Does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, or his discernings Are lethargied—Ha! Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Justine, in the first half of Melancholia , is, though upbeat, also inside a sleeve of death. She knows the truth, that marriage, rituals of domesticity and conformism are mere steps toward her own spiritual death. Instead, she gets drunk and, isolated in the study, she rummages through art books for images of sorrow, leaving the books open for anyone to see. Her displaying of the artworks is her language, the only means she has left to express what she has been forced to hide.

This is her last attempt at speaking; her last attempt to communicate with others what it is she is seeing. Before the darkness fully consumes her, she abandons the festivities in the mansion, urinates in her wedding dress beneath the moon, and has sex with a younger coworker.

And then finally she resigns herself to sleep. The next morning Claire finds Justine asleep on the couch in the study and somehow summons her up. The two take their horses riding. This scene is shot from above and we can see the two on horseback as they race through the fog, riding through the blindness. This disappearing of individual objects into a common whole […] comes across particularly impressively in fog; for fog shows us a totally altered world compared with the observable world of daytime.

In fog, things lose their tangibility, they glide into the incomprehensible and acquire by this very process a newly menacing character, stronger than that which we have already perceived in the forest.

He will stay only inside the fixed space of the enclosed land and not venture past the gate into what he does not know. Justine stands beside Abraham and looks into the daylight sky.