Gimme Cockaigne: MELANCHOLIA (2011)

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." –Don Quixote

When true doomsday comes perhaps the manic depressives and bi-polars amongst us will at last have an opportunity to shine in calm perfection while walking through slow motion rain --that seems  to be the message of Lars Von Trier's latest, MELANCHOLIA (2011). Until then of course the ordinary madness of our civilization and all its unconscious munching, adherence to unexamined cultural mores, and slow death momentum--will have to be endured. Lars, I feel ya.

MELANCHOLIA makes me nervous because I don't want to lose one of the best auteurs of our post-art house age and the film has the earmarks of a cinematic suicide note, a message from someone planning to be dead by the time you read it. His whole post-Dogme 95 life is flashing before our eyes and on some level he's reached the frontier from which no traveler returns. In order to keep going into the wilderness the film ceases to be about a frontier, or returning, but about endurance - the inability for some to handle normalcy vs. others to handle apocalypses. And Kirsten Dunst has never seemed more Nordic, as if she's spent her life scowling through meaningless sex and animal fat-enriched meals solely to get to this one vanishing point.

For in MELANCHOLIA, Von Trier dives headfirst into the same abyss that Terence Malick only wades up to his knees for THE TREE OF LIFE.  There is no real comparison between the two other than their ponderous linking of 2001-style classical music-scored outer space vistas with close family relationships but it's fun to compare them anyway: a tale of a woman's depression coming to life in the form of a wedding and world-destroying planet named Melancholia is the suicide note to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice. TREE mourns my dead father but MELANCHOLIA mourns for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet.

My girl and I saw the film this past Saturday night at the charmingly dilapidated Brooklyn Heights Cinema with its blaring, distorted speakers rumbling the seats with Wagner's aria to Tristan und Isolde as Kristen Dunst and company writhed in Bill Viola-style (see above) slowness. It was so loud I had to cover my ears. But rather than be the one to complain to the ticket taker, I tried my best to accept it. And then suddenly the music stopped. I missed it soon after.

The 1st chapter is a long tres chic wedding for our melancholy heroine Justine (Dunst) over the course of which the bride flits with ecstasy before dissolving into a deep depression. The sight of a distant star unnerves her. Soon she's telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgard), losing her groom (Alexander Skarsgard), sleeping with a kid on the 18th green, pissing off her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister's rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), infuriating the wedding planner (a great Udo Kier) and drawing gasps from everyone but her loving drunk of a father (John Hurt) and psychotic mother (Charlotte Rampling), who makes the toast "I think marriage is a crock of shit."

Handhelt verite for large social gatherings is by now almost quaint: Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Vinterberg's THE CELEBRATION, Baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. But unlike theirs, LVT's is a picture of a cold planet bathed in warmth but unable to feel warm, and if you can survive the whiplash handheld camera nausea in these scenes, you can move on to the next course. The bride, however, won't be there as she's upstairs, catatonic in the bath.

After some portions of the reception are over, Justine ducks into the library and  changes the open art books on display from abstract geometrical shapes (put there no doubt by John as they reflect his dull patriarchal-modernist tastes) to archaic pictures of female suffering, death and peasant post-wedding debauchery: ""Land of Cockaine" and "Hunters in the Snow" by Bruegel; "Ophelia" by J.W. Waterhouse; and "After the Hunt" by Bogarde. As in DOGVILLE and ANTICHRIST, this book swap seems a full rejection of the flat, dull left-brained scientific rationalism championed by Sutherland's materialist know-it-all in favor of a return to the mythic unconscious where every day is your last so you better get connected back to your Jungian roots, and hammered, before the whole tree of life goes up in flames.

John rejects such Dionysian nonsense, but his own left-brained thinking falls apart, unable to to deal with the loss of his empirical toe-hold, deluding and denuding-- as DaFoe did in ANTICHRIST-- via smug dismissal of Gainsbourg's intellectually eroticized 'feminine hysteria,' and the neglect of their co-owned horses. Dunst's depression is never fully explained so we naturally look for clues and there are plenty if you hate the fact that a rich razzle dazzle, the 'very expensive' fairy tale wedding is the closest we come in the modern era to keeping 'myth' alive. In going for high class in a materialist bourgeois competitive manner, the wedding becomes a Bruegel land of plenty fairy tale combination control freak's dream and overload nightmare, where the more money spent the less fun it's possible to have.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" ("The Land of Cockaigne"), 1567. Oil on panel.

Cockaigne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful... Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth (Wiki)

Justine prefers dearth

So a ceremony that should be mythically enriched with archetypal energy is stifled by the trivialities which the wedding planner (a marvelous Udo Kier) and the host couple cling to, insisting on guesses from guests as to how many pebbles are in the foyer vase, for example. John's outrage over Justine not coming down to cut the cake relates to her boss's slimy demands for a tag line, his weird head games resonate meta as the producers of MELANCHOLIA were no doubt hoping a tag line to this film would occur to Lars (the image the boss shows being like a Vogue cover premonition of mythic poses Justine herself will assume later in the film).

While we struggle to not get nauseous from whiplash shaky-cam, the heavy breathing Dogme sound keeps the wedding unbearably intimate: we hear every cut of the meat and every clang of cutlery on the china plates, every breath and wheeze from the gathered throng, amplified like we're tripping our faces off and boiling over in claustrophobic anxiety, trapped in this crowded dining room with all these acting actors talking over each other all at once like real people do in groups. At first we don't know why Justine is losing her grip, but we feel it's something to do with the oppressive worry of her sister ("Don't ruin this!") her brother-in-law ("this cost a fortune") and the insane ravings of her mom. The wedding is a public de-pantsing of artistic success, wherein the best riches and opulence can be is thrown up as buffer against the onslaught of Lars' depression, and crumbles like fairy dust. 

It is only in Justine's subsequent sad melt-down and later ecstasy over the approaching doomsday planet that she blossoms, for the planet is her true groom and its destruction her true union. I was reminded of my own strange exaltation on the day of 9/11 as I went racing up deserted 2nd Avenue at midnight, brain thrilling that it might the world might end any moment. New York City was a ghost town - I managed to find one cab, and me and the the cab driver were like the post-apocalypse, like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! HEY!  I knew my exaltation was not 'proper' but also, later, learned I was not alone in feeling it, especially at the uptown AA meeting I attended in the weeks that followed. We have a lot of firemen and cops up there and we felt the pain and grief, but we were strangely calm. In this apocalyptic moment, we were at peace because our constant existential dread, so useless in normal life, was suddenly the norm. Now that the world was blind, our impoverished vision made us royalty.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

                 –Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

 

John however, will have no such apocalyptic acceptance, and in the period after the wedding, he belittles and dominates Claire in a vain effort to allay her anxiety about the approaching planet. In his bland pretense he resembles past Von Trier male characters, authority figure wannabes who do their best to dominate the women in the room but come off sad and impotent. 

In TREE OF LIFE we saw the dawn of the earth, and the first vague gestures of compassion, leading up to some beach-side dream jazz heaven cast party. That's the kind of soiree Claire wants to have as the planet looms, a Cockaigne-style acceptance of the end through drink and song and togetherness. From her new husband's picture of an apple orchard he's bought for her, to 'rest' in, to the pebbles in the jar Udo Kier wants everyone to guess the number of, everything but the strange request to 'build caves' from the son, to return to Werner Herzog's CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, perhaps, and to the mythic inner reality of Jungian archetypes of which we are the shadows on the Platonic walls, is contemptible. 

Von Trier shows that all the money in the bourgeois world of wealth and rationalism won't allay or abet this impending cloud, only Justine's resolutely transcendental delusion is some kind of salvation. Hers is the peace of the twisted, the women and men who have writhed backwards through time due to years of enduring the stale, hollow pleasures of Cockaigne. Like Jack in the 1920s New Years eve picture at the end of THE SHINING, Justine moves backwards into the representations of the past until she's as indestructible as the planet Melancholia itself. I hope Lars doesn't mean to follow her quite yet, though at this point he's running out of language, image, and time. Every new film shows a little less sand in the hourglass and MELANCHOLIA shows the hourglass itself breaking into slow motion splinters. Soon he will have nothing left but sand, unless... May I suggest an Effexor + Wellbutrin + Neurontin cocktail, sir? It works wonders! Cockaigne is for suckers, as Bruegel, and Lacan, well knew. When life gives you only lemon orchards as far as the eye can see, no amount of lemonade-making can allay the soul-curling sourness. One must burn and run, even if there's nowhere to go but deeper into the ash crevasse.

POST-SCRIPT (12/7/12): As Justine gets out of the limo to head into the reception, she spots the incoming planet--still just a dot in the sky but she recognizes it--and five days after seeing the film it dawned on me that even so far away she recognizes it as our onrushing doom and her deliverance. So fuck it, she tells off her boss and dumps her groom. But isn't that what depression is all about? She doesn't bother to share her realization though, knowing perhaps that in the house of a coddling imperialist like John it's useless to bring it up. Considering this, the film suddenly comes into sharper focus for me, so thought I'd add it! 

Special Thanks to Jennifer Boyer,

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The Kinski Precipice: Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.

I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you won't play it?) Then there's Herzog's titles, which are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? That's the title of your film? Why assume they wouldn't?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old PAL VHS of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. Nothing personal. I was just a dumb Yankee at the time, and knew for example, nothing of the rest of the world and the little creatures in it.

But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced, and more tolerant of my naturalistic German side, I'm perhaps better equipped to recognize my own issues tainting the clarity of Herzog's hallucinatory nature-phobic naturalism. I am growing up/into appreciating his mix of German sturm und drang and lysergi-bucolic mysticism and how his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness turn his narrative into a static panorama. I can't help but admire and love Herzog's willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same. Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out emptied.

Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a theater production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline, and brings Peru into it. Of course. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was born to preach the gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub plays the face. Brad Dourif is a dead-on Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle with a Samurai sword stashed in his shed. Chloe Sevigny is the girlfriend who tries to channel Brad's madness by bringing him into her theater group.. but you can't shrug off holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Arsenic and Old Lace or Bye Bye Birdy. 

 Lynch regular Piper Laurie plays the mom, dead even before she dies-- she's the middle-aged version of Mary in ERASERHEAD. An inner voice warns Brad not to go kayaking with his hippie friends in Peru (they all drown, offscreen). Awakened and chastened, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception; loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront, gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his meds into the broken-glass covered street of messianic schizophrenia. Back at home his clinging mom won't stop feeding him jello. And so what can a poor man do once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries? As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"

 On that note, I think the part of Herzog's quest to find the holy grail of pure madness may be a smokescreen for his private worry he already found it and lost it, namely in the eyes of the late, great Klaus Kinski. For the recent BAD LIEUTENANT--of which MY SON is almost a sequel thanks to similar cinematic patina and supporting cast (Shannon, Brad Douriff, Imra P. Hall, and Michael Pena)--Nic Cage brought his own line of insanity to the collaboration. There was little room left for Herzog to project his post-Kinski stress disorder, but without a strong lead to delimit him, Herzog's liable to forget that it helps our appreciation of onscreen derangement if we first see someone else in the film act normal, at least once or twice, to get our bearings.

In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, period, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy; he's a charismatic actor doing a fine job of capturing the full spectrum of the manic-messianic complex, but there's no charm to his insanity, no reason we can think of -- aside from his attractive bearing -- for anyone to put up with his tantrum-esque ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him into the holy light.

Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog wanted to anyway: Kinski is a wild man, archetypal and one-of-a-kind. He's a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE. I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness, which is, as Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, the 'only performance that truly makes it." Good as Michael Shannon is, he just doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg?

Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe plays the homicide detective who tracks Brad back from the crime scene to where he's holed up with hostages, demands for pizza, etc. Udo Kier shows up as the theater director who was putting on Elektra with Shannon as the star.  Since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior.' And that's the problem, a) why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care, and b) if they weren't going to help him, why endure his holy madness if it's not fun or fascinating to be around? c) Wasn't he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.

As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with a mix of the resignation of an old queen indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy and the genuine fascination artists feel around those rare souls more fucked-up than themselves, and the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to try and make a film with someone who's completely delusional. But as with Shannon, Kier doesn't project the maniacal charisma that would possibly ground a loose wire like Brad. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a champion! And vice backacha!

Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own baggage, he gets whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And you sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part (he's great)--that Kinski is there, working ghostlike machinations, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows to give Lynch and Herzog time to become Kinski with each other. The issue at work here may as well be too much respect and not enough spittle.

The collaboration between Cage and Herzog in BL2 had a reckless, exhilarating momentum, the Lynch-Herzog collaboration doesn't have immediacy, perhaps as it neglects the 'glue' of normal 'strong' grounding characters like Eva Mendez's prostitute, or a Lynchian heroine like Naomi Watts or Laura Dern. Willem Dafoe tries to be grounded as the homicide detective on the scene, but Dafoe will never be able to play 'grounded' --the more he tries, the creepier he gets --and I mean that as a compliment. He's too nice and sweet a soul to play one on TV. He's warmer when he's colder.

In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's auteur-like motifs? He's either crazy himself, super enlightened, has done psychedelics, or--most likely--all three, in addition to hanging out with a lot of messianic schizophrenics, otherwise he'd never get so many details of the horror of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess other so very exactly right. There wouldn't be the terrible realization that the hallucination of a giant mantis alien sucking the psionic marrow out of your third eye isn't actually a hallucination but the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of aching skin walking down dangerous streets and hurtling in steely cars towards crushed oblivion is no easy thing to bear. 

 Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, generally, an order which has no way to process the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place...  coherence through artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper and he's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.

Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? Here's what else I learned from MY SON MY SON:

1. The only way to channel holy madness without causing destruction and misery is art but that has its own problems, as a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out, ala Michael Shannon's Greek tragedian. Don't think it doesn't happen! MACBETH has made plenty of actors into mounds of raving jello, and they say the Joker killed Heath Ledger, and mom's jello kills them all... served while Jack Benny smiles from afar...

2. No matter how bad things get, the old country blues and/or gospel can make it okay. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery,  I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips' (seen at left, with his double zither) who's "What a friend We have in Jee-ee-sus" has made it onto dozens of my mix tapes. For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD Frisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster than the songs of an old, dead, black, blind singing preacher. What a friend we have in Jesus!

3. There comes a special moment when even artists realize they need to break away from their urge to write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge, but unless we let go of the rope, we'll never see the bottom... never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners. 

Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with our full vision, or instead of silently watching a movie or taking in a vista in rapture, find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and speech/writing rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak.Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to feel because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will never come back, but it does, a new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip.

4.  Shannon in a Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table: a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted, all else gone to shadow.

 

The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of god, try not announcing how spiritual you are to your horrified other, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.

The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity. The longer you ignore it the sweeter its songs. But your ego's sitting on a cupboard full of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows. The person who is deemed mad is the person who who surrenders and silences the ego in a sudden snuffing so the cupboards can open and light pour out. He is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge responsibility to keep this holy state going as long as possible, rather than knowing to surrender even that goal he runs about shaking the lapels of those still asleep, but maybe they don't want to wake up, and why should they, just 'cuz you say so?

A few incarnations later, he learns that unless he's cared for by a dozen attendants and speaking daily at the ashram, he better keep the ego around, and he can balance all that in art. Within art you can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. We dismiss ideas that challenge our egos outright, but we'll always stop for a good movie, one that stealthily addresses ideas of madness and artistry and newly minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Where are the damned lepers in San Diego?

 MY SON MY SON has a lot of that kind of inner problem, the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn you into a raving lunatic. When the House is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all; roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away, unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? Whohin bist du, meinen rattemessias!? Ich liebe, Ich liebe dich so... 

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