Hatred of life (Melancholia)

A few lightly-written notes (because I'm lazy and that's all) about Melancholia.

• The boomer mother played by Charlotte Rampling, who asserts her hatred of marriage during her supposedly benevolent speech, humiliating, belittling and demolishing her kids in the process. I've never seen this in any other film: this hatred of life in the very people who conceived us. This hatred of all commitment and therefore all constraint, this hatred of traditions and of everything that has marked human life since the dawn of time, this hatred of everything that is undoubtedly a little kitsch, a little ridiculous, but which consists in denying the fundamental misery in which we find ourselves. Boomers are both big kids and icy, demonic contemplators of human life and its realities. Great children and merciless old men at the same time. They are death, and nothing will be possible until the last of them has expired. This liberation doesn't happen, however, in the film; death wins.

• The character played by Kirsten Dunst reminds me of F... in the "unreliable girl" genre – I say girl, not woman; these specimens never become women, they remain girls forever, in every sense of the word: little girls and whores. An unreliable girl, then, whose extreme and changeable moods, whose total irrationality threaten any normality, any stable life, any project. And the husband, a good-for-nothing, who waits and waits and waits for her to give him a look. And who knows from the start, deep down inside, that he's hoping for nothing and that everything's going to fail miserably, that he's a willing victim. I've been that man.

• Justine's (Kirsten Dunst) complete inability to be happy. The inability to pretend, to make an effort, and to hold back the people around you even a little. I understand it and have experienced it too. And that paralysis during the break-ups, which seems like coldness when it's really just petrified horror, waiting for deliverance; because if the break-ups are heartbreaking, the nothingness that follows looks restful, attractive, so simple.

• The spectacle of bourgeois/managerial moral bastardry. The violence behind the smiles, the costumes. The juicy businesses, bastard countries like Benelux. The boss character immediately reminded me of those Luxemburgers or Belgians, I don't remember, I'd seen at a fancy wedding in 2014. They gave off an unbearable moral stench, the stench of big money.

• This planet colliding with Earth is the stupidest, most meaningless, most out-of-nowhere, and therefore most terrifying, ending for mankind. Even a nuclear apocalypse, however absurd, remains a consolation insofar as it is the product of our own behavior, and can be interpreted as collective punishment, or the crime of a madman. The destruction of the Earth by the planet Melancholia is not interpretable.

• Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Jew, revolted by this religiously absurd ending from a Judeo-Christian point of view; God had not foretold anything so terrible. On the other hand, there's Kirsten Dunst, the pagan, who bathes naked outside in the moonlight, to Wagner music, and for whom this cataclysmic ending is perhaps religiously more acceptable; the laws of nature prevail and Man is not the center of the universe.

• But behind this dichotomy (which exists only in my interpretation of the cast, and perhaps in Lars von Trier's intentions) lies the triumph, the victory by heredity of the mother, Charlotte Rampling. "Life on Earth is bad", says Justine to her sister, I don't know whether textually or in substance, to convince her that the arrival of Melancholia is a good thing. Life is bad, marriage and reproduction are bad, happiness is pointless, abortion and euthanasia are good because death is good. The boomers win and the world ends with them.