Lars von Trier was born in Copenhagen in 1956 and came to prominence in 1984 with The Element of Crime, a mannered if not ostentatious thriller. He looked like a noir stylist hoping to develop an international career. But in the early 1990s he was a leading figure in the Dogme 95 movement, a northern European attempt to purify cinema. With Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995, he nailed a set of theses to the door to filmmaking: no extravagant commercial funding; no genres; shoot on location, not in a studio; sound must be recorded live; use color (because it is lifelike); there should be no opticals or special effects (stay with the world as is); the camera must be handheld; the director should not be credited.
This drive for integrity was dogmatic and shallow, but there was a germ of interest in every insistence: films had become absurdly expensive; Renoir had believed in locations and live sound; the Soviet cinema had restricted itself to state funding; many felt that Hollywood genres were archaic and inflated by effects; nearly every director was indifferent to whether other directors got credit. Von Trier lived by or ignored his Dogme in Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009), and then Melancholia.
I found Melancholia prolonged, pretentious, and insufferable. But in Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “A giant achievement. A work of genius. A movie masterpiece,” while in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern called it “a film that sweeps you up and takes you out of yourself.” (Any critic knows that kind of rhetoric, and has used it, but it may be worth asking how far its suppositions conform with Dogme 95.)
Melancholia is in three parts: there is a prologue, laden with Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, a montage of images in which we see the impending collision of one planet with another. Much of this is beautiful, arresting, and very promising.
The second part is a wedding between Michael and Justine, at a grand country estate in Sweden. It may be a real place, but it seems as symbolic as Shaw’s Heartbreak House. We meet the family, and the occasion is as awful as weddings often are. But the couple insist that they are happy. They kiss endlessly and they break away to have sex. Still, there is a flaw in the serenity: Justine is suffering from melancholy, depression, or bipolar disorder. It is not spelled out clinically, but Kirsten Dunst does an impressive if unsettling job at conveying the outer symptoms. (Characters on the big screen and in the bright light who lack energy quickly seem alien or anathema.) She becomes less gregarious or happy. She has sex with a passing acquaintance in a bunker on the estate’s golf course. The marriage breaks up even as it is being celebrated.
The third part is named for Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine’s sister. The estate is owned by Claire and her wealthy husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland). The wedding is over. Justine is close to catatonia, but Claire is increasingly distraught because the planet of Melancholia is approaching Earth. Will there be a collision? John, who has a modest telescope and knows how to do the calculations, assures Claire that it will pass by safely. Justine moon-bathes on the bank of a stream in the woods, allowing us to see that Kirsten Dunst has an exceptionally beautiful body—I’m not sure this display is statistically associated with depression, though it can often be found in art movies looking to hold an audience.
I won’t give away the ending: you should suffer yourself. At 136 minutes, Melancholia needs cutting—unless you feel it could go on forever. (J. Hoberman admitted in The Village Voice that “When I left the theatre, I felt light, rejuvenated and unconscionably happy.”) It is a simple enough story, granted that the resonance wants to be immense—its reach is quite like that of its close contemporary, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Both films opened at Cannes in 2011, when Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or, while Kirsten Dunst took the prize for Best Actress. Prizes are foolish, we all agree, and those at Cannes have a record of eccentricity to live up to. But to reward Kirsten Dunst while not honoring Charlotte Gainsbourg is beyond eccentricity.
Melancholia cost over $7 million, accumulated in small amounts from many sources, and when it opened in the United States, it did quite well: $270,000 from nineteen screens on its first weekend. After four weeks, as word and reviews spread, it had grossed $2 million. Although it deals with clinical melancholy and the end of the world, the film has a curious air of money. Just about every character is wealthy, well dressed, and amply provided with sleek household appliances. The common man or the huddled masses are nowhere to be seen, despite that Dogme severity. (Bourgeois audiences appreciate the screen’s world looking nice. Poverty can upset them. These are legacies from advertising.)
The one item in the Dogme code that persists in Melancholia is the faith in handheld camera work. This seems like voodoo thinking. If a tripod counts as unfair technology, why pick up a camera at all? If the camerawork in the film is viscerally or neurologically disturbing, that is not necessarily art any more than a badly proofread version of Paraside Lust would be a literary breakthrough. The fixed base, or stability, of shots—in that they are anchored to a tripod—is a convention of order and respect and an aid to attention. If architecture is an art and a social function, isn’t it best if the buildings don’t fall down? If Facebook is a community, isn’t it preferable that no one is hacking its intimate information?
You can see the film to make your contribution to the argument. But the most conventional character in Melancholia (though he cracks before the end) is the most orthodox of performers: it’s Kiefer Sutherland as John. He’s also the most believable and interesting person in the film, and I found this from Sutherland himself, who came to work with von Trier in a high state of anticipation. This comes from a published interview:
“There’s one constant in every job I’ve ever done, which is you get to work in the morning, you read it through with the other actors, the director or you and the director block it out, you rehearse it and you shoot it. That constant has never been broken,” he says.
Until that inaugural morning on set when von Trier led him and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg to a door and told them to walk through and start the scene.
“I realize we’re not going to block it, we’re not going to rehearse it, he’s just going to shoot it. I panicked,” he recalls.
“Once I surrendered to that, there was an unbelievable freedom to it. What it did for me is it did deconstruct everything I knew about what I’m used to doing as an actor. I was so busy trying to kind of figure out between Charlotte and I in the middle of making the scene, trying to hit the points I thought were important, I became completely unaware of where the camera was, never saw it, actually. I was in a moment and that was a huge education for me.”
Kiefer Sutherland is a case worth studying. He was an actor for years, probably more notable in supporting parts (A Few Good Men, 1992; and Freeway, 1996) than when he starred in low-budget pictures. But in 2002 his life and his image altered as he became vital to one of the most intriguing and influential television series of the twenty-first century, 24. As Jack Bauer, secret agent at the Counter Terrorist Unit, he was another “JB,” a taciturn superman who kept saving the world. But his world was vulnerable to technologies Bond had never thought of: not just nuclear wipeout, but data retrieval, surveillance, cell phones, and torture. I don’t mean that American torture was new, but it was for the public, and in 24 it got a strange, uncritical attention that told us it had been there for a while without our noticing. The show had a striking first season, and a very good second, but it was pitching its own dramatic stakes so high that hysterical and inadvertent self-parody were likely.
Sutherland’s Bauer was faultless and appealing in what was already an archaic acting style. He was also, from 2002–10, a producer on the show and one who took a close interest in the story line and the numbers. When he had done A Few Good Men (1992, playing the surly southern sergeant), he earned $250,000. By now—and there may be a 24 movie—he has a net worth of $65 million.
Good luck to him: a hit has always been ready to change the world for the lucky few. But 24
is part of a pattern of reiteration with raised blood pressure that affects us, too. Some of the executives (Alex Ganser, Howard Gordon) behind 24 moved on in 2011 to the series Homeland, on Showtime. Once again, the first season (which concluded on December 18, 2011) was something not to be missed. It resembled 24 in that it brought terrorist threats to the doors of American government. It went a little further in suggesting how American crimes had given a sense of justifiable revenge to the terrorists. Above all, Homeland was valuable in presenting a family context, with several female characters who were original and involving.
It’s the story of a Marine sergeant, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who has been kept prisoner in Syria and Iraq by a terrorist for eight years. When he comes back to America, a very smart but troubled CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), suspects that he has been turned in captivity and is now a terrorist in waiting in Washington, D.C. Brody has a family—a wife who has been having an affair in his absence, a young son, and a teenage daughter (Morgan Saylor) anxious to rebuild a relationship with her father.
The point about the show is that we cared deeply for maybe half a dozen characters, and as the series advanced, it became clear that Danes was giving a vivid and disconcerting performance as a deteriorating victim of bipolar illness. In every dramatic sense, Homeland cried out for resolution, maybe not as devastating as that in Reservoir Dogs (where no one is left alive), but with tragedies, damage, and even lessons or conclusions. I know, that recipe sounds formulaic or old-fashioned, but anyone who followed Homeland will know what I mean about the story’s gathering need for a convincing ending—and the last episode of season one was not the normal hour, but ninety minutes.
In that twelfth episode, the show suffered from conflicting urges—to tidy up, while indulging a frenzy of implausibility—but it left all the key players available for a second season (announced at the end of October). Don’t you want to see more of Carrie, Brody, and the others? Don’t the actors and the writers deserve steady work? Aren’t we making money? The answers are obvious, and you have to have known actors and writers to understand their insecurities. So Carrie will be on the brink again, until the brink becomes the cliff on which her integrity is hanging.
Still, in the business, the hourly reports on box office numbers for a first weekend are desperate or delirious. That is why there are always so many nervous people in the room called movies, increasingly unaware that their space might be part of a much larger house. Jack and Jill grossed about $26 million in its opening weekend (November 11–13). That was at the low end of expectation for an Adam Sandler picture. Interpreting these figures is habitual now but unreliable; it’s more spin than history, yet our taste for so much discourse has shifted that way. Jack and Jill finished second on the weekend, about $7 million below Immortals, an R-rated swords-and-sandals epic. Some observers felt Sandler might have lost part of his regular audience to that film and to the way young males (the sixteen-to-twenty-four age range) were seeing fewer films and playing more video games. November 8 had also marked the release of the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, with $400 million in immediate sales in the United States and the United Kingdom. No movie has ever approached that number on a first weekend.
Call of Duty had competition. Only a few days earlier, Battlefield 3 had appeared, nearly as successful, and in the New York Times, Seth Schiesel said that “Visually the depth of field and rendering quality in Battlefield 3 [made it]…the most visually realistic shooter on the market.” He added that “Call of Duty isn’t trying to be realistic; it’s trying to be fun.” He concluded his “critic’s notebook” piece on the front page of the Times Arts section, with a color illustration: “Both games are ultimately about letting men have their virtual taste of combat without getting off the couch or up from the computer. Would many of us really prefer a draft?”
I have put these titles in italics to make them seem comparable to movie titles. Yet their performance is at a quite different altitude, one that reminds us of the earlier sway of movies. So it’s deflating to add that Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar (which opened on November 9, 2011) grossed $11.5 million in its first weekend. That meant a little over a million people saw the Eastwood picture. In the next three weeks, it fell off by 54, 49, and 68 percent. It was a disappointment, if not quite a flop, for Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it’s a lackluster film, spoiled by the customary caution that is seldom mentioned as part of Clint’s public image.
The culture of the opening weekend is predicated on impatience and forgetfulness, yet franchising seems to suggest the system believes in loyalty. There are newspaper articles and Internet items that gossip over these numbers, and try to explain what they mean. But they are as irrelevant to the real progress of “the business” of screens as the daily oscillations in the Dow are to our economy. One way or another, the business maintains that its box office income is vibrant, but the number of people going to see a movie in a theater declines. Everyone knows that one day everything will stream; this is happening already, and that’s why there are moves in Congress and from the MPAA to “outlaw the piracy” of new movies. Then the defenders of the Internet protest that we should not interfere with the Net’s “liveliness.” By the time movies are available on your computer or your thumbnail or a chip in your head, it will be left to museums and archives to maintain a few big screens—if they can find proper prints to show.
We have come to a strange pass for the movies and their shining light if the depression of Melancholia is out there with a genre called “shooters.” Sadness and tragedy have a necessary place in fiction and drama; that’s what Homeland deserved. But isn’t depression antagonistic to the light itself, and close to what Lew Wasserman regarded as a “downer”? Isn’t it as upsetting as watching kids—your own kids—building their kill counts? There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for Fred Astaire to sing “Never Gonna Be Depressed,” and then sink into a heap in a corner of one of those deco sets. He believed in being an entertainer. But maybe Fred’s and Hollywood’s reign of happiness and its stress on well-being left a hangover that taught us how far we were falling short in the American pursuit. Movies gave us a heady idea of fun, but was it an unkind education? Are we left with no better choice than having a draft, seeing the fun in Call of Duty, or joining in the family of Facebook?
Can’t there be a difference between dread and depression? In advance of AIDS, Alien (1979) was a haunting metaphor of bodily betrayal, and a great show. Directed by Ridley Scott, it cost $11 million and grossed $185 million. In 2012 Scott offered Prometheus, which tried to recapture the fears and tropes of the original. That cost $120 million and quickly grossed twice that amount. But the profit ratio on Alien was 17 to 1; to match that, Prometheus would need to earn $2 billion. People still dream about Alien; they are forgetting Prometheus.
Epilogue: I Wake Up Screening
How many funerals have there been for the death of cinema?
The coming of sound was termination for some people. Photoplay magazine mocked the claim that sound had been perfected: “So is castor oil,” it said. Then the audience dropped off in the 1930s. In 1951 there was David Selznick wandering in an empty studio and crying, woe is us—we betrayed our chance, we made so few worthwhile pictures. Television seemed the obvious and natural way of watching moving imagery, including movies. Later in the 1950s, attendance fell for good and a few smart films nudged us and said, “Aren’t movies stupid?” We killed Technicolor; we betrayed black and white. From 1960, for a few years, Godard was a surgeon excising every stale convention with a look of contempt and superiority. Then video was offered as an easier way of seeing more pictures. We gave up cinematography for digital. We knew that so many movies had been lost for all time, and still there were too many to see. One day in July 2007, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died, not together, but as if in a pact that wanted to teach us something. Yet the ghosts go on about their business, like Michael Myers in Halloween or the Living Dead he
aring their cue. We still like to look.
In San Francisco, it is 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning (August 27, 2011). I am on the sofa, ready, in the old way; it is nearly time for the match (and a 90-minute game is like an old movie). Since about 1953, I have followed a London soccer team, Chelsea. For years I stood on the terraces in southwest London in crowds close to seventy thousand watching the Blues. It is a habit and a devotion. But here, six thousand miles away, I can watch Chelsea versus Norwich, live, as it happens (it’s 3:00 p.m. in London), on high-definition color television, with a little tea and toast. This is playing on Fox Sports, and part of our cable package (which rents at about $200 a month), whereas if I were in London, I doubt I would afford a ticket to be at the stadium (at least fifty pounds). See how enabling the screen and the media are these days? And in that very game (a 3–1 victory for Chelsea), a new player, Juan Mata, made his debut and you could see—you had to see—the way he turned and moved, his fluent instincts, the soccer of it. Seeing something can still be as moving as watching a naked woman in Muybridge turn to the right, or waiting for the moment in Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number when he spins and the camera soars above him. At seventy, I have found nothing to match motion and emotion running together. John Wayne walking, a child making its first movements, Juan Mata—they all do it for me. I like to watch.
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