Melancholia (2011)

The apocalypse is our favorite dream. A quick survey of the streaming platforms proves the case. We like that media where everyone dies (or almost does). If this planetary death-wish is not the zeitgeist then I don’t know what is. Meanwhile the planet continues to die, along with its human inhabitants and at an accelerating rate: do we care? Kirsten Dunst does not. Having been guillotined in the very good Marie Antoinette (2006), she returns from the dead to exact vengeance upon existence. A growing niche in the apocalypse genre is one of rogue planets colliding with ours; in this case the planet is Kirsten Dunst’s catastrophic depression. Psychoanalysis claims that the rogue planet Melancholia is real; it is a peculiar property of a certain kind of psychosis that the intensity of feeling seems to exist outside of one’s body: the feeling is bigger than life. Sylvia Plath had been to there: “this is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” Oceanic feeling becomes the killer planet. The absurd and terrible demands of the ad industry, parents, expensive weddings, and the french revolution have pushed Kirsten Dunst over the edge—she must destroy the world. Earlier in my life I imagined an existential kill-switch: one knob that would turn off the universe. Would you hit it? Though our collective dream of apocalypse is becoming more real by the day, it is likewise beneficial for us to recall that the apocalypse has been happening for a long time. Humans in general, and Christians1 in particular, have been very thorough and systematic in the destruction of many vibrant worlds. No surprise then that our morbid zeitgeist has achieved its wish: the irreconcilable and barbaric contradictions of our so called “modernity” have induced a collective melancholia that has now summoned its own killer planet—the only one that we can live on.