忧郁症

拉斯冯提尔自称是世界上最好的导演。作为道格玛95早期的代表人物，其作品一直关怀人物抑郁的内心和残酷的命运。冯提尔曾经是各大电影节的宠儿，直至他两年前备受争议的作品《反基督者》。 新片《忧郁症》看似科幻惊悚片，其实跟《反基督者》一样，仍然关注的是心里灾难。
　　《忧郁症》分为两个大的部分。第一部分里，妹妹贾斯汀是一个意图借结婚来正常自己生活的女人。她竭尽全力在婚礼上扮演符合人们期待的自己——甜美幸福的新娘，却终究被情绪的洪流击垮，忽视父母的战争，未婚夫的失落，姐姐姐夫的希冀。自私地做自己。而第二部分，小行星对地球的接近，肉眼可见，且速度越来越快，对姐姐克莱尔的生活造成毁灭性的影响，巨大的恐惧导致她精神和行为都渐渐失常。面对死亡反倒是贾斯汀表现镇定，与她之前所表现出的坚定独立倒是相互应和。最终姐妹俩跟克莱尔的儿子三人坐在象征性的“保护棚”里迎接命运。
　　影片的序曲，就是一个大胆的尝试。用唯美圣洁的升格画面，且之间无关联可寻，花了约10分钟的时间，把故事“展现”了一遍，好像看图说话一样。古典油画般的意向性画面，夸张刺耳的背景乐，令这个序曲充满意识的张力和给人以联想的空间。关于结局的前置，导演解释为，很多电影其实我们在看之前已经能知道结局了，比如007系列，谁都知道结局一定是007会搞定生还，但大家还是会去看，想看事情将如何发展，人跟人之间会发生什么。事实上，这个序曲倒是没有削弱观众看下去的兴趣，只是影片后两个部分尤其是第二个部分，张力相对较弱，确实不如序曲那么精彩，有点虎头蛇尾，十分可惜。
　　而关于“忧郁症”的主题，一部分来自导演自身的经历，一部分仍然跟他过去作品中的主要人物的情绪类似。很多人看完影片后认为，这是一部释放情绪之作。大概因为，以前他作品中的许多人物，总是十分压抑自己的情绪，最后借由外界力量的推动爆发。而这部电影中的贾斯汀，对自己放任自由，不再受超我束缚。外界也没有任何力量能压迫她，连世界毁灭都不能。简直是超乎寻常强大的心灵。用剧中贾斯汀老板扮演者，斯特兰斯卡斯加德的话来说，这是一部导演不控制任何东西的电影。而拉斯冯提尔自己也表示，拍这部电影的时候感觉很好，不像拍《反基督者》那时备受折磨。像习武之人，一日打通任督二脉，忽而脉络疏通，功夫猛进。且不说冯提尔是不是最好的导演，相信算是最好的之一，如果他能通过拍摄电影，消减自己内心的灾难；又能够通过释放自己的心灵，拓展创作的意境，那不论对他自己还是对影迷们，都将意义非凡。
　　值得一提的是夏洛特甘斯布在片中有非同寻常之鲜明贴切的表演。两年前她曾凭借主演《反基督者》获得戛纳电影节最佳女主角的称号。两年后她在冯提尔的调度下又成功塑造出一个被疯狂与恐慌两种情绪同时主宰的女人。表演深切自然，情绪由内至外，跟《反基督者》中的妻子有某种相似，又截然不同，很有再度角金的实力。

有图的版本（没图还介绍个毛）... ...

http://www.douban.com/note/218806198/

首先是片头第二个镜头出现的画作《雪中猎手》

The Hunters in the Snow 雪中猎手 Artist ：Pieter Brueghel the Elder Year ：1565

这幅是老布鲁盖尔的画作，关于老布鲁盖尔的一些情况可以参见由另外一部《磨坊与十字架》引申出来的介绍：

http://www.douban.com/note/212570175/

这幅画作于1565年，也另名为猎手归来。是老布鲁盖尔广为称道的一副板上油画，亦被认为是北方文艺复兴运动的代表作之一。

画面表现了在猎狗陪伴下的猎手打猎归来的场景。但显而易见的是这次围猎并不太成功，猎人们拖着沉重疲倦的步伐，狗儿们看起来都悲惨而垂头丧气，只有一名猎人扛着他瘦弱不堪的狐狸尸体，显现出他们窘迫的处境。整幅画面处理得十分冷静，笼罩在一片冰凉而阴霾的天气之下。色调灰白，树木几乎片叶不存。在山脚下的山谷中，一个轮子结冰的水车被冻住了，冰封的山尖看起来十分遥远。在冻住的湖面上还有一些像剪影一般的人。

1560年正处在荷兰宗教改革的时代，布鲁盖尔（以及他老板）或许试图描绘一种他们希冀的，想要的农村景象。

这幅画并不是第一次在电影中出现，俄罗斯导演安德烈.塔可夫斯基就在他的影片飞向太空/索拉斯星/Solaris(1972) 和镜子/The Mirror(1974)中也用到过这幅画。

然后Justin在房间里的场景，她看到书架上摊开的都是现代主义画作，几乎全是冰冷的几何抽象以及构成主义。于是重新翻开几本书盖了上去，第一幅画仍然是布鲁盖尔的雪中猎手。之后几幅能够看清的有下面这两幅，出自同一位英国画家约翰.埃弗雷特.米雷斯爵士：

非常熟悉的奥菲利娅/Ophelia, 作于1851年左右的板上油画，画的是哈姆雷特的情人坠亡在水中的场景。这幅画现藏于英国泰特美术馆，市值估计在3千万英镑... ...

这幅画后来广泛地影响了很多其他艺术，电影和摄影。Laurence Olivier的电影哈姆雷特/Hamlet(1948)中奥菲利娅之死场景便基于此画。本片片首Kirsten Dunst漂浮在水上的画面也毫无疑问来源于此。

据说John Everett Millais都是习惯先画场景，再把人物画上去。当时房间的取暖条件大概不太好，他让模特儿在冰冷的浴缸里泡了若干小时使得可怜的姑娘几乎得肺炎死掉，姑娘的父亲差点和他打官司...

另外一副：守护林人的女儿 The Woodman's Daughter 1851

显然这本画册这一页介绍的是英国的前拉斐尔派（The Pre-Raphaelite）。

那么之后是大名鼎鼎地卡拉瓦乔绘制的手提歌利亚头的大卫。关于这幅画评议很多，说的是旧约中讲述的犹太人的王大卫用石子击杀巨人歌利亚的故事。米开朗基罗的雕塑大卫表现的也是这位王在击杀前的瞬间。

据说这幅画中的头颅就是卡拉瓦乔画家本人，我好懒，有时间再慢慢写。有兴趣的人可以去找BBC的纪录片《艺术的故事》中关于卡拉瓦乔的那一集，有比较有趣和详细的解释。

剩下的几幅都一闪而过看不清楚，最后姐姐Claire走进同一间房找药片的时候，似乎还扫到了克里姆特的吻。这幅是维也纳分离派时期的作品，金光闪闪，华丽异常，十分受广大人民喜爱。

画基本上就是这些。此外询问朋友后得知，片中没完没了我痛苦啊我痛苦世界上我最痛苦用到的曲子是瓦格纳的歌剧《特里斯坦与伊索尔德》序曲。看个欧洲导演的失心疯片儿容易么，需要全面复习西方艺术音乐史，太有文化有时候往往反而是种残障，思考过多生命力衰竭，你不抑郁谁抑郁呢。

         我不认为加入那些所谓的艺术画面就可以描摹出复杂的人物情感。同样的，设计一个逻辑上的必定结果也一样。
        导演的主旨是当不可否定的结局来到的时候，那些悲观主义者反而会得到解脱，因为他们的一直预想的结果终于来到了，他们反而会坦然的面对，这种表面化的解读，太他妈幼稚了！按照这个逻辑，是不是说，那些饥饿的非洲儿童该更开心？他们的问题迎刃而解了。
       《银河旅行手册》里，有个科学家建立了一个房间，为了教育他的老婆。他老婆进入这个房间里看到宏大的广袤无垠的星系和自己渺小的卑微的形态，地球就像是一粒沙，而自己根本就不存在。于是最后她自杀了。本片似乎就是在给大家呈现这个房间：首先设定一个不可辩驳、不可逆转的结尾，仿佛把观众绑架在一个十字架上，然后逼迫着观众去悲观。
        主角贾斯汀有抑郁症，她对一切事物都保持着悲观的预期和对自己无法把握现实的无力感。这种无力感被导演以一颗小行星撞地球的方式表现出来，导演无非想提出一个问题：如果！你明天就要死了，这种结局是无法改变的，那么你也会感受到抑郁症者的内心。
         “如果！”。关键的问题是，没有如果。没有一个庄园，有精心剪裁的园林、蜿蜒起伏的高尔夫球场、黑缎带一样皮肤的骏马和一天完全不用操心的起居餐饮。甚至到了世界末日，还有佣人为他们奉上精美的早餐，打扫马厩和修剪杂草。当小行星真的要撞地球的时候，大多数人是在污秽的空气、肮脏的街道、大喊大叫的拥挤人群和没完没了悲天悯人的电视节目下度过的。
          当世界末日来到的时候，一个人是健全还是残缺，是正常还是不正常，任何区别都不重要了。影片最后，一家人跑到一个假想的保护之下相拥而死，抑郁症患者找到了自己的人生使命，这重要吗？无论此时，你是和家人一起还是你正在监狱里，还是你正在被癌症折磨，还是你刚刚结婚，还是你正在被强奸，你的内心、你的情绪、你的所有的一切都不重要。这就是那个科学家老婆看到的，因为你对于宇宙来说如此之渺小。
         那回到导演提出的问题，当世界末日来临的时候 ……抑郁症患者……。当地球被毁灭时……小蘑菇……
          至于创新性，本片导演之前的《反基督者》就有类似的油画电影的手法，一用再用，作为一个艺术家应该感到羞耻。如此费尽心机的去呈现人的情绪变化，我都为那些美丽的油画的作者扼腕惋惜。《问诊》只用了2个演员，一个房间，单纯的对话就可以呈现人内心中的痛苦和困境和人与人之间的理解障碍。

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) stages an interesting reversal of this classic formula of an object-Thing (an asteroid, alien) that serves as the enabling obstacle to the creation of the couple. At the film’s end, the Thing (a planet on a collision course with Earth) does not withdraw, as in Super 8; it hits the Earth, destroying all life, and the film is about the different ways the main characters deal with the impending catastrophe (with responses ranging from suicide to cynical acceptance). The planet is thus the Thing-das Ding at its purest, as Heidegger would have it: the Real Thing which dissolves any symbolic frame – we see it, it is our death, we cannot do anything. The film begins with an introductory sequence, shot in slow motion, involving the main characters and images from space, which introduces the visual motifs. A shot from the vantage point of space shows a giant planet approaching Earth; the two planets collide. The film continues in two parts, each named for one of two sisters, Justine and Claire.

In part one, ‘Justine’, a young couple, Justine and Michael, are at their wedding reception at the mansion of Justine’s sister, Claire, and her husband, John. The lavish reception lasts from dusk to dawn with eating, drinking, dancing and the usual family conflicts (Justine’s bitter mother makes sarcastic and insulting remarks, ultimately resulting in John attempting to throw her off his property; Justine’s boss follows her around, begging her to write a piece of advertising copy for him). Justine drifts away from the party and becomes increasingly distant; she has sex with a stranger on the lawn, and, at the end of the party, Michael leaves her.

In part two, ‘Claire’, the ill, depressed Justine comes to stay with Claire and John and their son, Leo. Although Justine is unable to carry out normal everyday activities like taking a bath or even eating, she gets better over time. During her stay, Melancholia, a massive blue telluric planet that had been hidden behind the sun, becomes visible in the sky as it approaches Earth. John, who is an amateur astronomer, is excited about the planet, and looks forward to the ‘fly-by’ expected by scientists, who have assured the public that Earth and Melancholia will pass each other without colliding. But Claire is getting fearful and believes the end of the world is imminent. On the internet, she finds a site describing the movements of Melancholia around Earth as a ‘dance of death’, in which the apparent passage of Melancholia past Earth initiates a slingshot orbit that will bring the planets into collision soon after. On the night of the fly-by, it seems that Melancholia will not hit Earth; however, after the fly-by, background birdsong abruptly ceases, and the next day Claire realizes that Melancholia is circling back and will collide with Earth after all. John, who also discovers that the end is near, commits suicide through a pill overdose. Claire becomes increasingly agitated, while Justine remains unperturbed by the impending doom: calm and silent, she accepts the coming event, claiming that she knows that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe. She comforts Leo by making a protective ‘magic cave’, a symbolic shelter of wooden sticks, on the mansion’s lawn. Justine, Claire and Leo enter the shelter as the planet approaches. Claire continues to remain agitated and fearful, while Justine and Leo stay calm and hold hands. The three are instantly incinerated as the collision occurs and destroys Earth.

This narrative is interspersed with numerous ingenious details. To calm Claire, John tells her to look at Melancholia through a circle of wire which just encompasses its circular shape in the sky, thus enframing it, and to repeat this 10 minutes later so she will see that the shape has become smaller, leaving gaps within the frame – a proof that Melancholia is moving away from the Earth. She does this, and grows jubilant when she sees a smaller shape. However, when she looks at Melancholia through the frame some hours later, she is terrified to see that the shape of the planet has now expanded well beyond the frame of the wire circle. This circle is the circle of fantasy enframing reality, and the shock arrives when the Thing breaks through and spills over into reality. There are also wonderful details of the disturbances that happen in nature as Melancholia approaches the Earth: insects, worms, roaches and other repellent forms of life usually hidden beneath the green grass come to the surface, rendering visible the dis-gusting crawling of life beneath the idyllic surface – the Real invading reality, ruining its image. (This is similar to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which, in a famous shot after the father’s heart attack, the camera moves extremely close to the grass surface and then penetrates it, rendering visible the crawling of micro-life, the repelling Real beneath the idyllic suburban surface.)

The idea for Melancholia originated in a therapy session von Trier attended during treatment for depression: the psychiatrist told him that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under extreme pressure or the threat of catastrophe – they already expect bad things to happen. This fact offers yet another example of the split between reality – the social universe of established customs and opinions in which we dwell – and the traumatic, meaningless brutality of the Real: in the film, John is a ‘realist’, fully immersed in ordinary reality, so when the co-ordinates of this reality dissolve, his entire world breaks down; Claire is an hysteric who starts to question everything in a panic, but nonetheless avoids complete psychotic breakdown; and the depressed Justine goes on as usual because she is already living in a melancholic withdrawal from reality.

The film deploys four subjective attitudes to-wards this ultimate Event (the planet-Thing hitting the Earth) as Lacan would understand them. John, the husband, is the embodiment of university knowledge, which falls apart in its en-counter with the Real; Leo, the son, is the cherubinic object-cause of desire for the other three; Claire is the hysterical woman, the only full subject in the film (insofar as subjectivity means doubts, questioning, inconsistency); and this, surprisingly, leaves to Justine the position of a Master, the one who stabilizes a situation of panic and chaos by introducing a new Master-Signifier, which brings order into a confused situation, conferring on it the stability of meaning. Her Master-Signifier is the ‘magic cave’ that she builds to establish a protected space when the Thing approaches. One should be very careful here: Justine is not a protective Master who offers a beautiful lie – in other words, she is not the Roberto Benigni character in Life Is Beautiful. What she provides is a symbolic fiction which, of course, has no magic efficacy, but which works at its proper level of preventing panic. Justine’s point is not to blind us from the impending catastrophe: the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement.

Justine is thus the only one who is able to propose an appropriate answer to the impending catastrophe, and to the total obliteration of every symbolic frame.

……………………..

Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth – natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually overgrowing human arte-facts. In imagining the world without us, we, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence, and, as Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to observe the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence (the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, the parental copulation, or of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn). The World Without Us is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we hu-mans spoiled it with our hubris. So while The Tree of Life escapes into a similar cosmic fantasy of a world without us, Melancholia does not do the same. It does not imagine the end of the world in order to escape from family deadlock: Justine really is melancholic, deprived of the fantasmatic gaze. That is to say, melancholy is, at its most radical, not the failure of the work of mourning, the persisting attachment to the lost object, but their very opposite: ‘melancholy offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object’.

Therein resides the melancholic’s stratagem: the only way to possess an object that we never had, which was from the very outset lost, is to treat an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost. This is what provides a unique flavour to a melancholic love relationship, such as the one between Newland and Countess Olenska in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: although the partners are still together, immensely in love, enjoying each other’s presence, the shadow of the future separation already colours their relationship, so that they perceive their current pleasures under the aegis of the catastrophe (separation) to come. In this precise sense, melancholy effectively is the beginning of philosophy – and, in this precise sense, Justine from Melancholia is not melancholic: her loss is the absolute loss, the end of the world, and what Justine mourns in advance is this absolute loss – she is literally living in the end time. When catastrophe was just a threat of catastrophe, she was merely a depressed melancholic; once the threat is here, she finds herself in her element.

And here we reach the limit of event as re-framing: in Melancholia, the event is no longer a mere change of frame, it is the destruction of frame as such, i.e., the disappearance of humanity, the material support of every frame. But is such a total destruction the only way to acquire a distance from the frame that regulates our access to reality? The psychoanalytic name for this frame is fantasy, so the question can also be put in the terms of fantasy: can we acquire a distance towards our fundamental fantasy, or, as Lacan put it, can we traverse our fantasy?


Zizek, S. (2014) Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books Ltd.