I did not much like Melacholia...
That said, I love Steven Shaviro's reading of Melancholia. I love it even more than the movieâthe true mark of great criticism. He makes many important points, one of which concerns depression:
Many people who have experienced extreme depression (a group in which I include myself) have strongly felt that von Trier gets it right in this movie. He really conveys a sense of what depression feels like. Melancholia traces the contours of depression from the inside, better than any other film I have ever seen. As Trevor Link puts it, in his beautiful essay on the film, von Trierâs âfrequent use of jump cuts and changes in focus help convey this puzzling and erratic state that lacks a strong sense of direction⌠[von] Trier has experienced depression so deeply and gets something about it so precise that his images are entirely suffused with the stillness of the depressive stateâ (Link 2011).This significant door into the film, depression, is, I admit, closed to me. I'm familiar with sadness but not with depression. Sadness has no finality to it. You can live, go to work, make love, make dinner, be happy, and still be sad. The sad person never feels the end of the world but sees no end of the world. Sadness is like a slow journey across a deep and dark sea. Sometimes you see the sun, sometimes you see the land, sometimes you see the clouds, sometimes you see nothing. But you keep going.