Apart from the invaluable service this service did in giving me occasional fresh infusions of intellectual vanity of an evening -- as well as a plenteous supply of however many old noirs and Japanese ghost movies -- it was also quite possibly the only reason I was ever exposed to the work of some of the most interesting of contemporary directors. For this I am eternally grateful.
Among the directors I have in mind: 1) Ruben Östlund -- of Turist fame, and, more recently The Square -- 2) Andrea Arnold -- maker of utterly riveting kitchen sink dramas about lower class British people screaming at each other, as well as a picaresque American film with much the same aesthetic (it was Filmstruck that introduced me to her unforgettable short "Wasp," and thence to the equally memory-imprinting Fish Tank)-- and -- the chief subject of this post -- 3) Lars von Trier, whose name had been vaguely familiar to me before, without meaning anything until I watched his Antichrist (2009) via Filmstruck.
What is this movie you say?
Much like that other, earlier great un-categorizable horror/psychological thriller/art movie Don't Look Now (1973), Antichrist begins with two parents grieving the death of a young child. While it will end up as a needlessly surrealist succession of gruesome and uncomfortable visuals seemingly designed to torture the audience -- the film includes at least two images I have lain awake nights since wishing I could un-see -- and while the movie's chief desire at last seems to be to want to tell us something both batty and uninteresting about gender -- along the way, from there to here, it also happens to say a great deal that is very true, very painful, and very interesting about the allied illnesses of depression and anxiety.
It was no surprise at all after seeing the film to learn than von Trier himself suffers from both diseases of the mind, and that in particular he struggles with a fear of flying. Antichrist is plainly the work of someone who has been through a long process of exposure therapy, and for whom it didn't take.
This led me to the next film in von Trier's so-called "Depression Trilogy," his Melancholia (2011), in which Kirsten Dunst plays a woman who has an expensive wedding reception that she ruins, as she succumbs to a spell of catatonic depression. Then the world is destroyed by colliding with a giant extraterrestrial planet called, in fact, Melancholia. For those of you who like your metaphors big and unmistakable, look no further.
Like its predecessor in the series, Melancholia is very much the sort of movie that could only have been made by someone who had suffered from the illness depicted. It is raw and utterly convincing, starting from the stunning visual and auditory metaphor with which the film begins. Amidst a longer montage of surreal imagery over the opening moments, we see in one shot Dunst (whose character's name is Justine) moving in painfully slow motion across a golf course, dragging grey cobwebs or netting behind her feet (it is an image the character will describe later in the film). The soundtrack that plays is a particularly tormenting passage from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde -- a section from the score's prelude that seems as if constantly, frustratingly attempting to burst into the main theme -- perhaps that of the Liebestod -- but never quite to make it.
Both von Trier films end on a note of total pessimism. Panic and depression in the two films, respectively, are the ultimate victors. What occurs to me, however -- and what I want to talk about here -- is that in doing so they point to what is perhaps the best path through these illnesses.
Antichrist, for one, can be viewed as a kind of satire on exposure therapy and its bromides. Charlotte Gainbourg - completely arresting and persuasive in the role of "She," the unnamed female character in this movie of only two souls -- plays the mother of the dead child. "He," played by Willem Dafoe, with the perfect kind of skeezy unplaceable off-puttingness that is needed for the role, is the husband and father, who is a therapist in his professional life, and who therefore decides that he can do a better job of treating his wife during her recovery from the shocking loss of their child.
After he takes her out of the hospital and off the medications her doctors provided, her natural grief takes on increasingly psychotic forms -- manifesting first and most prominently in a kind of agoraphobia. To this, He insists that She must revisit the scenes that cause her the greatest grief and fear. "Exposure -- it's the only thing that works," he sapiently states. "You have to have the courage to face the thing you fear" -- or something to that effect.
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From there, He takes her through a kind of cognitive behavioral process, seeking to talk her out of all the destructive beliefs that give life to her fear. The fascinating thing -- and the give-away that all this is probably based on the writer/director's actual experience -- is that pretty much everything he says is straight from the real advice dispensed in cognitive behavioral therapy. Moreover -- most of it -- for all it fails in this movie -- is precisely the stuff that worked for me, in overcoming the panic disorder that kept me for years from flying (and from doing several other things).
Specifically, the advice that worked for me came from the website of Dr. Martin Seif -- and there are sections of the film where the "He" character might almost have been reading from he latter's work -- where one suspects in fact von Trier may have been handed exactly the PDF just linked above, at some stage of his own treatment for panic and fear of flying.
The chief reason why this advice works -- or why, at least, it worked on me -- is that it lets the patient know they can do exactly what they think they can't do, what they think they must avoid at all costs. It lets them know they can be afraid, can be depressed.
This is the profoundly counterintuitive wisdom that diverts panic and depressive rumination from their ordained course.
The person suffering from either illness (and they are deeply related, maybe inseparable) generally perceives that the problem with themselves is that they are panicking, or that they are deeply unhappy. They conclude -- reasonably enough -- that the solution must be not to be afraid, not to be unhappy.
This leads to many and increasingly frantic efforts to avoid these emotions, and the things they they know -- through experience -- will precipitate them. As the narrator of John Updike's novel Roger's Version remarks: "I am a depressive. It is very important for my mental wellbeing that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me and pull me down."
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier similarly depicts several characters locked in a desperate struggle for avoidance. In that case, it is a mysterious turn-of-the-century form of neurotic malady that is believed to be heart trouble, and which the characters all suppose to be brought on by any experience of heightened emotion. Thus, the protagonist, whose wife supposedly suffers from this unnamed illness, must be continually diverting his wife from any situation that might involve passion, anger, sexual arousal, physical exercise, or anything else that could cause the distressed organ to race.
As a result, he tells us: "For twelve years, I had to watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the English call 'things' -- off love, poverty, crime, religion, and the rest of it." (This turns out to all be a crock on the wife's part, in the novel -- devised as an excuse to avoid nuptial relations with her husband -- but she gets the idea for it from her uncle, who more genuinely believes himself to suffer from this mysterious illness. Though for him too it is ultimately a neurotic delusion. He finally dies of bronchitis, and it is discovered that his heart was fine all along.)
The trouble is that it is precisely the frantic effort to avoid fear that is the very essence of panic; likewise it is the effort to think one's way out of depressive rumination that defines it. Anyone who has had a panic attack will recognize the truth of this.
Before I had had one, I wouldn't have guessed this to be the case. I'm not sure what I imagined a panic attack might be, but I suppose I thought it happened to you, as if from outside. What it really is, by contrast, is a mental process in which oneself -- all one's mind and interest -- is deeply engaged. It starts with trying to avoid something one fears -- with trying to imagine an escape route. But when one realizes the futility of the escape route, one searches for another. Inevitably, that too fails, because perfect safety is impossible -- we do in fact live suspended over the possibility of death or madness in this world. Total escape is impossible. But how then are we ever to stop the panic if we cannot find a way out?
The solution is so frustratingly paradoxical that one would not be likely to come up with it without an obnoxious Willem Dafoe arguing with you somewhere in your life or consciousness. The answer is that once you accept the fact that you are panicking and do not try to change or arrest this, it goes away. Once you realize that -- as the Willem Dafoe character and Dr. Seif both say -- "fear is not dangerous" -- you realize that the fear is not something you have to escape or avoid. It will not hurt you in itself.
But how do I know it won't hurt me? Won't the fear drive me insane? Won't it cause me to leap out of the plane mid-air? Willem Dafoe and Dr. Seif have an answer for that one too. "You won't do the thing you are most afraid of doing," says the Dafoe character. "It's like a law of physics." When the plausible neurotic creation Des Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours becomes paralyzed with fear at the possibility that he might convert to Christianity in spite of himself, these words might have offered him a life raft. (His creator of course eventually did convert to Christianity, but this seems a very natural progression from his former character, and he ultimately became an obnoxious, self-satisfied, and elitist Christian in exactly the same mould in which he had been an obnoxious, self-satisfied, elitist Nietzschean before.)
The fear that most often prompts avoidance is the fear of losing control, of losing power, of losing freedom. Yet it is precisely this fear that renders us powerless. It is what turns us into neurotics convinced that the slightest threat to our total emotional equilibrium will send us mad-- that -- as Sassoon once wrote -- we will "lose control of ugly thoughts/ That drive [us] out to jabber among the trees."
When we have the courage to face the situations that make us afraid, we expand the range of what is possible to us. Contrary to our expectations, we gain in freedom. We gain in control. We gain in power. So, dammit, the Willem Dafoe character is right, for all he is annoying!
It is because he is right, however, that it is also right that his arguments should ultimately be defeated in von Trier's movie -- that the panic and the depression should win out against him. This is because the panic and the depression cannot and should not be defeated. They are founded in hard truths about life that can't actually be avoided. To they extent that they ultimately come not to dominate or control one's life, it is not by out-arguing or evading them; it is by accepting the feelings for what they are -- allowing them to wash over you -- and not in the least bit trying to fight them.
The only times I've ever managed to halt myself while ruminating have been when I decided to let myself ruminate (as opposed to seeking paths out of it, which can only lead to -- nay, is -- more rumination). The only times I've stopped a full-on panic in process is when I welcomed and neutrally observed it (as opposed to pursuing the panic-stricken thought: "oh no, I'm panicking, how can I stop it? What can I try?")
For the same reason that it is good to let depression and anxiety win, it is equally good to seek out their company -- to spend time with them -- even to celebrate their ultimate victory with artistic tributes. In their presence, one gains in freedom and power -- the awareness that one does not have to flee, the consciousness that one can in fact survive in the face of dark and painful emotions -- in short, that one is strong.
This is why I say it is right that Von Trier's depression movies should be a kind of paean to these diseases' dominion -- a hymn-song of depression's triumph. This is why I say that -- as sound as the Dafoe character's arguments may be -- it is for their very soundness that his therapeutic efforts in the movie should fail.
This is the secret as well of the strange consolation that all the other great art and literature of depression yields to the fellow patient -- whether it is Book of Ecclesiastes, or those classics of Victorian pessimism and chronic melancholy -- FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat, Housman's poetry, Hopkins' "No worst there is none," James Thomson's "The City of Dreadful Night."
It is a consolation the truth of which James Thomson acknowledges in his most famous and lasting poem:
Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
And wail life's discords into careless ears? [...]
Because it gives some sense of power and passion
In helpless innocence to try to fashion
Our woe in living words[.]
And because it breaks the solitude of the sufferer -- it offers reassurance that one does not suffer alone.
I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.
Housman acknowledges the same strange comfort in his "Terence, this is stupid stuff." Speaking of the astringent taste of his own odd medicine of pessimistic, despairing verse:
[...] if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
Von Trier's Depression films offer the same kind of unexpected reassurance.
I don't believe such films can do any harm. I certainly don't think they will talk anyone into a depression -- though perhaps they might manage to convey a bad mood. One who is not prone to depression already is not likely to pick it up from an artistic source -- the behavior of the disease's victims onscreen will be simply incomprehensible to such a one. As I said in a recent post, "if you do not already see the force and strength of it as a problem, you probably cannot be brought around to doing so by any argument or words." And I find that James Thomson in this as in much else agrees with me. Speaking of the blessed, he writes:
[...] none of these
Could read the writing if they deigned to try; [...]
If any cares for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten[.]
I think that the company of depression-- through artistic and philosophic works, if not through human companionship -- is good for depressives. It is a reminder that melancholy in fact can do us no harm -- indeed, that we grow stronger in her presence. The person who has lived with and overcome an anxiety disorder eventually comes to look upon fearful situations as a friend. They offer an opportunity for proving one's new power. Likewise, the depressive can come to regard despair as good company -- one of the greatest mates we have, for it reveals to us the extraordinary range of what we are able to do, to bear, to achieve, to endure, to withstand.
There is a reason then that Thomson ends his great poem at last with a tribute to Melancholy, which he pictures as a kind of goddess -- basing his image directly on the Albrecht Dürer print of the same subject. Thomson celebrates depressive rumination at last as a kind of triumph of human will and passion and daring -- an expression of the ultimate and total irrepressibility of human striving.
I don't mean to pretend for an instant that depression is not astonishingly hurtful and damaging. It is ruminative thought that pains the depressive -- the constant search for some path out of a cycle of miserable thoughts. In a poem addressed to "melancholy Thought," Sor Juana once aptly prayed: "Let my understanding at times/allow me rest a while,/ and let my wits not always be/ opposed to my own advantage/ [...] Oh, if there were only a school/or seminary where they taught/ classes in how not to know/ as they teach classes in knowing." (Grossman trans.)
But if there is any merit to what I have argued in this post, it is not in fact "melancholy Thought" nor understanding -- nor even rumination -- that was Sor Juana's besetting demon. It was the unwillingness to accept their company, the constant effort to eject them. The latter, in fact, is what gave rumination its power to harm in the first place, rather than to bless.
This is perhaps the reason, then, for Thomson's kind and loving tribute to the goddess Melancholy, the goddess rumination, with which he concludes his otherwise unremittingly bleak poem:
Her fate heroic and calamitous;
Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
Unvanquished in defeat and desolation[...]
Baffled and beaten back she works on still,
Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
Sustained by her indomitable will:
The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour[.]
In Melancholia, as the stray planet bears down and prepares to extinguish life on Earth, it is the depressive Justine alone who is able to regard it with something like rational poise and equanimity. The convincingly unbearable Kiefer Sutherland character who is married to Justine's sister, by contrast, is pompously certain for most of the movie that the planet can never possibly reach them. And it is he who -- when it unmistakably comes barreling at them at last -- is the first to poison himself in despair, abandoning his wife and son. Justine alone is the one with the presence of mind to look after and comfort the child.
If nothing else, depressive illnesses are a training ground for the unexpected tragedies and horrors that the world does in fact contain, that life can in fact present to us. If there is a reason Justine alone is calm at the end of the end of von Trier's movie -- if there is a reason she remarks coldly to her sister that she would be stupid to think she is afraid of a mere planet, of a mere apocalypse -- the explanation perhaps lies in this. As Housman aptly writes in one of his poems, while other people think of pleasant things, his own thoughts always:
[...] were of trouble, [...]
So I was ready
When trouble came.
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