"One of the most intriguing lessons of psychoanalytic theory is that sexuality and death are awfully hard to disentangle when one endeavors to identify their structuring activity within the dynamic architecture of human (inter)subjectivity."
For Alenka Zupančič (2017) human sexuality occupies the murky ground between epistemology and metaphysics and, insofar as it pertains to “the very being-there of the unconscious, in its ontological uncertainty”(12), it presents an indispensable entry point for both the enterprise of psychoanalysis as well as that of ontological interrogation.
"It is because of the tension actuated by this ‘ontological uncertainty’ that sex, as Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant (2014) point out, becomes a “site at which relationality is invested with hopes, expectations, and anxieties that are often experienced as unbearable”(vii)."
As the explosive proliferation of dystopian, (post-)apocalyptic, and posthuman imaginaries in contemporary popular culture indicates, our current age of global crises, marked by socio-economic and geo-political turmoils and the threat of severe environmental degradation, has rendered the task of confronting the difficult questions about the ontological status of the human ever so pressing. In light of this historical-theoretical constellation, this essay examines the intricate relationship between sexuality, finitude, and meaning-making, as it is explored in two works of contemporary cinema, both ambivalently positioned at the nexus between arthouse and mainstream Hollywood film-making, namely Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Offering a psychologically-grounded approach to the genre of the Doomsday film, their narratives unfold under the shadow of an imminent apocalyptic disaster, caused by a rogue planet named Melancholia in the case of von Trier’s film and by the impact of human activity on the environment in the case of Schrader's. More specifically, I focus on two sexually-charged and lyrically-visualized scenes which construe sexuality as a revelation of the ‘failure of logos,’ capable to inspire transformative epiphanies. After closely analyzing these scenes, I relate my observations to the climatic resolutions of the films in order to draw some possible links between sexual (non)relation, fantasy, and the ethical dilemmas posed in the face of catastrophe. In von Trier's Melancholia, the apocalyptic finale is revealed right from the very beginning in an introductory slow-motion montage accompanied by Wagner's “Tristan und Isolde”.
The opening sequence, which functions as a poetic ‘abstract’ for the film, depicts from a distant and disembodied vantage point the sublime event of the planetary collision between Earth and the rogue planet Melancholia and proleptically anticipates it as the inevitable telos, not only of all life in its fictional universe, but also of the film itself.
In other words, the audience is introduced into the bleak fantasy-world of the film, granted full knowledge that all the characters in it will ultimately die —an awareness and acknowledgement of finitude in its various modalities— inviting viewers to reflect upon questions such as: how does the knowledge of the transient, fragile, and fleeting nature of experience affect one’s thoughts and actions in the here-and-now? Indeed, as the plot unravels, this question forms one of the central subtexts of the film, while the different answers to it are gradually formulated through the contrasting developments of the main characters, all of whom are called upon to assimilate the knowledge of their imminent eradication into their already turbulent mental universes. The two main characters of the film, Justine and Claire, are sisters who are strikingly different from each other: Justine, played by the American actress Kirsten Dunst, decides to leave her husband on the night of their wedding’s reception and is shown to be gradually sinking into a debilitating depression with occasional outbursts of aggression. On the other hand, Claire, played by the Anglo-French Charlotte Gainsbourg, is married to a wealthy husband, with whom she has a young son, and lives luxuriously in a huge remote estate.
As Melancholia gets alarmingly close to Earth, disproving the initial scientific reassurance offered by Claire’s husband, the two sisters are shown to adopt two distinctly divergent positions: the depressed Justine grows uncannily stoic, serene, and resolute, whereas the successful Claire becomes increasingly unsettled, agitated, and neurotic. In order to better understand the growth of Justine’s detached collectedness and striking lack of panic or fear, I would like to turn to a brief scene that subtly dramatizes the recomposition of her catatonic inertia into courageous resilience. The scene, which takes place in the middle of a peaceful night, features a visual coupling of Melancholia and the moon, two discursively feminized celestial bodies, shown to be shining almost side by side in same dark sky ⇒fig. 1.
Claire suddenly notices that Justine is leaving the premises of the estate, looking mesmerized by the cold light of Melancholia and decides to follow her. Shortly, she discovers her lying completely naked on a rock beside a river in a serene and contemplative pose, staring at Melancholia, while gently fondling her breasts ⇒fig. 2. The scene cuts to a slow zoom shot of Melancholia ⇒fig. 3 and then back to a close-up of Justine’s sensual self-pleasuring and fixated gaze ⇒fig. 4, thereby creating a sense of proximity, reciprocity, and intimacy between the ‘intruding’ rogue planet and the naked Justine. Meanwhile, Claire is observing her from afar, slightly perplexed and intrigued.
"The scene is brimming with sexual tension that oscillates between homoeroticism and autoeroticism: Justine’s act of self-pleasuring is exhibitionistically staged for the (imagined) returned gaze of Melancholia, the feminized alien intruder which threatens to completely annihilate life on Earth."
Drawing on poststructuralist theory, Ellie Anderson (2017) argues that “the autoerotic phenomenon of masturbation…reveals [the self’s] internal otherness or division”(53-4), thus “refiguring the self as self-othering” (53). Rather than signaling a desire for enclosed unity and harmonious wholeness, autoeroticism, according to Anderson, “expresses an impassioned desire for connection with that which is beyond understanding, possession, or control”(68). Justine’s self-touching in this scene can be thus read as enacting an encounter with the otherness of her own inner self-division, the negativity at the site of her split subjecthood, an encounter she affiliates with the ‘dance of death’ between Earth and Melancholia. That is to say, Justine transposes her inner self-alienation, her failure to be a coherent unified self, outwards to the substantial Other of the precarious natural/cosmic order.
As Žižek (2016) notes, “the only way to overcome alienation, the only ‘dis-alienation’ possible, is … to accept that ‘there is no big Other’, that there is a lack in the Other itself, that the Other is inconsistent, traversed by antagonisms, structured around impossibilities” (37). Justine’s self-withdrawal into the abyssal otherness within herself, into the ‘night of the world,’ under the cold and indifferent light of Melancholia activates a re-orchestration of her jouissance. As Zupančič (2003) highlights, the founding gesture of subjectivity, namely “the moment when ‘one becomes what one is’ is not a moment of unification but, on the contrary, the moment of a pure split” (25). By way of aligning her fractured and fatigued self with the cosmic abyss of negativity, Justine confronts the force of the death drive, the inhuman spectral excess of life which disturbs the subject’s self-identity.
"Although it can easily be confused with the nirvana principle and misunderstood as a tendency towards self-annihilation or lowering of tension, Zupančič (2017), following Lacan, argues that the death drive aims neither at life nor at death. The drive… is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it."
The drive is by no means an expression of the subject's desire to 'return to nothingness', it is not an expression of or a response to our douleur d'exister ('the burden of existence'), for which it simply has no regard. The death drive has nothing to do with 'being-towards death,' nor with 'failing-to-be' (le manque-a-etrel): it is indifferent to death, and it certainly does not fail to be (250).
The death-drive, according to Zupančič, stands for the thrust of insistence that occurs at the site of the negativity inherent to being ; in stark contrast to the nirvana principle, the death drive denotes a persistent undead-ness that tenaciously haunts being and impels it towards the symbolic function. On a more figurative level, it can be described as a stubborn force of simultaneously creative and destructive madness, or perhaps ‘lunacy’ would be the more fitting term in this case, considering its resonances with Melancholia’s visual rendering as a ‘lunar’ celestial body and the psychological qualities evoked by the term ‘moonstruck,’ commonly associated with states such as mental imbalance, romantic sentimentality, or with being lost in fantasy. The depiction of Justine's submission to the death drive as a sexually charged event mediated through the seductive figure of Melancholia, attests to the inseparability of sexuality from death/finitude to which I alluded in the introduction.
Zupančič ’s reading of the death drive rejects the Freudian dualism of Eros and Thanatos and argues that sexuality is in some sense “synonymous with the death drive” (2017:116), in that it registers the subject’s fundamental ‘crack’ and out-of-jointness in its most palpable dimension. The sexual is what gives voice to the traumatic deadlock of non-relation/ 4ontological impasse, which the drive compulsively repeats purely for the sake of repetition: This is what is profoundly disturbing about the “death drive”: not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, the gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy. Enjoyment is the means, whereas the “aim” is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being. (Zupančič 2017:104)
In Why Psychoanalysis? (2008) ⇒READ ME, Zupančič formulates the drive’s ‘inconsistency/lack of being’ as 3 ‘the being of lack:’
“[T]he drive is nothing other than what Lacan calls the ‘lack-of-being’ that emerges (with revenge, so to say) as the ‘unreal organ,’ as ‘libido,’ as something that only exists as a constant deviation from itself and its constitutive void." This is why we could turn the expression ‘lack-of-being’ around and say that the drive is nothing other than the being of the lack/void” (18).
In Why Psychoanalysis?, Zupančič explicates the precise relation between sexuality and the void of self-relating negativity as follows: “To say that, for psychoanalysis, this void is intrinsically and irreducibly related to the sexual is not to say that the meaning of this void is sexual. What is at stake is, on the contrary, that the sexual is the edge of meaning, its border, its inner limit. And this is not simply to say that it is ‘meaningless,’ it is more than that – it is the point of inconsistency of being that induces the production of meaning. Drive is thus the impossible joint articulation of being and meaning in their very heterogeneity” (18, my emphases). It is through this circuit of repetition (aimed at repetition itself) that sexuality attains ‘spiritual’ status in the sense of being abstracted from the biological telos of reproduction and turned into an end in itself.
Hence, the re-orchestration of Justine’s jouissance signals nothing else but her becoming a pure subject of drive, one who fully embraces her lack and self-propelling loop of repeating failure, which is also what enables her to ‘touch’ the real: Justine realizes that her fundamental self-division, the ‘lack of being in the midst of her being’ corresponds to a lack/ incompleteness that is immanent to the noumenal cosmic order itself, insofar as the entire universe is marked by radical contingency, uncertainty, and precariousness.
A subject of drive does not rely on any transcendent ‘big Other’ to guarantee the purposefulness of existence; there can be no teleological ‘grand scheme of things’ to act as a source of comfort and solace — rather, there is radical openness to incalculable futures. Justine’s new subject position is one with no guarantees and no optimism, but simultaneously one of openness to the world and greater attunement to “the intrinsic division of reality itself” (Zupančič 2003: 80).
Her attainment of ‘higher’ knowledge is demonstrated in a subsequent scene, where Justine claims to “know things,” such as the exact number of beans in her wedding jar, or that “life on Earth is evil,” that humans are completely alone, that “life is only on Earth…and not for long.” At the end of the film, shortly before the collision, Claire, embodying the voice of bourgeois desire, proposes that they meet the apocalypse with a glass of wine, which Justine mercilessly dismisses as a pathetic sign of adherence to aesthetic satisfaction. Instead, Justine takes Claire’s son outside to build a teepee, which they call “a magic cave,” where all three huddle and hold hands, as everything gets consumed by fire. According to Žižek (2014), Justine’s final gesture of constructing ‘the magic cave’ is what attests to her transformation into an active inventor of meaning, in that she produces a new Master-signifier that restores some tentative order into the unbearable hopelessness of their situation: What she provides is a symbolic fiction which, of course, has no magic efficacy, but which works at its proper level of preventing panic.
Justine’s point is not to blind us from the impending catastrophe: the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement. Justine is thus the only one who is able to propose an appropriate answer to the impending catastrophe, and to the total obliteration of every symbolic frame ("Framing, Reframing, Enframing”). Following Edelman (2004) and Ruti (2012), another way of articulating Justine’s shift in perspective by way of self-negation, is as identification with what Lacan calls the sinthome, the irreducible kernel of jouissance which compulsively resists fixity and whose mobilization drastically unsettles the normative order and animates the production of new symbolic structures.
Justine’s act is thus what crystallizes the modernist sensibility underlying the entire film: having painted the world as a bleak panorama of futility, a corrupt wasteland deprived of meaning, it affirms the power of the signifying gesture and the ethical responsibility of speaking beings to courageously ‘speak’ new formations of order, even against the background of absolute hopelessness. The ethical duty apropos any surge of despair is that of facing the void with its most paradoxical byproduct, incarnated in the figure of the human: the stubborn lunacy of symbolic creativity. Paul Schrader’s First Reformed turns its melancholic gaze towards the domain of spirituality and religion and articulates its main conflict as one between hope and despair. Its protagonist, Reverend Toller is an alcoholic pastor in charge of a Dutch Reform Church, owned by a corrupt megachurch. Haunted by the death of his only son, concerned about the unfolding ecological catastrophe, and conflicted about the current state of institutional religion, he privately experiences a spiraling crisis of faith, revealed to the viewers by means of a voice-over recital of his journal entries. His faith gets further tested when he meets Mary, a pregnant woman whose depressed radical-environmentalist husband insists on her getting an abortion. Despite Toller’s attempts to impart some hope to the desperate man, the latter is soon discovered dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. The Earth’s ecological collapse becomes the central axis around which Toller’s spiritual crisis and the deterioration of his physical health are placed in dialogue, culminating in a symbolic act of martyrdom, meant both as a gesture of protest against the failings of the Christian Church and as an affirmation of self-sacrifice as the ethical core of Christian life. As in Melancholia, the worldview articulated in First Reformed has no reliable guarantees about the existence of any higher purpose, with all the anxiety this entails.
The theology espoused by Schrader here is one along the lines of the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard, which denounces the idea of peace in the Absolute and re-locates the core of Christian faith “in the breathtakingly traumatic fact that we, human mortals, are trapped in a “sickness unto death,” that anxiety is our a priori condition, that our existence is radically torn” (Žižek et al, 2009:253).
The first two acts of the film are predominantly dialogue-centered and feature austere camerawork, restrained cinematography, static shots with minimal editing and slow pans of interior spaces, which serve to convey a sense of lethargic stillness, despondency, and claustrophobia.
—My interest however lies in the single scene where all these stripped-down aesthetic choices are abandoned for more stylized imagery. It is a scene depicting a moment of physical intimacy shared between Toller and Mary, as part of a non-sexual ritual that Mary used to perform with her husband before his tragic death. Mary describes the ritual as follows: We did something we called the Magical Mystery Tour.
It sounds silly. We’d share a joint then we would lie on top of each other fully clothed. Try to get as much body-to-body contact as possible. He also called it the 80% Solution. Hands out, look each right into the eyes. Then move our eyes in unison, right, left, right, left. And breathe in rhythm. Initiating the ritual, Toller lies on the floor, and Mary lowers herself atop him ⇒fig 5. The camera starts to revolve around the pair, which slowly begins levitating ⇒fig. 6, while their surrounding gradually fade, and the interior dimly-lit room is replaced by hallucinatory images of the cosmos ⇒fig. 7, natural landscapes and seascapes ⇒fig.8, which are then replaced by images of traffic ⇒fig. 9 and waste dumps ⇒fig 10, thus rudely awakening Toller from his meditative trance.
I read this scene as an ecstatic encounter with the ‘twofoldness’ of the death drive, which is shown both in its libidinal register, as the impulse for carnal, albeit here non-genital, intimacy, affective attachment and social connection, as well as in its destructive dimension, delivered by the Anthropocene imagery that undercuts the couple’s quest for spiritual transcendence.
When Toller's face becomes visible again (figure 9) and his facial expressions seem to gradually sink into agony, he appears to be experiencing some type of epiphany. As I read it, what Toller realizes is precisely the aggressive ambivalence of the signifying order, the material forcefulness of human and social ‘dialectics,’ which emerge at the site of the lack in the order of being: the parasitism of jouissance is the mechanism driving both the search for connectedness and the elevation of the human spirit to higher realms of thinking and feeling, as well as the mindless self-destructive greed that engendered the ecological collapse. Precisely in its ‘indifference to death,’ as noted by Zupančič, the death drive impels humans to insistently repeat their failure to attain absolute satisfaction, to overcome their mortality.
Although the erotic tension between the two is certainly present, the film opts for ‘the 80% Solution’ and features no sex, indicating a radical turn on the part of Schrader away from his recent filmography (which includes a poorly-received borderline-pornographic thriller starring Lindsay Lohan and porn superstar James Deen) towards a Žižek explicates the link between the death drive and immortality by invoking Hegel, for whom “death comes as a radically external meaningless contingency – but it is precisely as such that it corrodes from within the very core of human identity and its universe of meaning…[I]mmortality emerges precisely through ‘tarrying with the negative’, through its immanent ovecoming: only a being which is not constrained by its mortality can relate to its death ‘as such’. This overcoming is paradoxically a form of ‘death in life’: a human being overcomes its mortality through gaining a distance towards its life-substance (for example, through its readiness to risk its life for some spiritual cause). Hegel’s name for this dimension is negativity, and Freud’s name is death drive.
—Immortality is death in life, a deadly force that acquires control over the living substance, or, as Paul would have put it, Spirit is the death of flesh” (2016: 340). A rather conservative turn towards Tarkovskian cinema: from its male-centric universe, to the apocalyptic setting, the aversion towards sexually provocative women, the depiction of love or the sexual act as flying or floating, up to its immanent take on spirituality.
In contrast to Melancholia, there is no interest in female sexuality here: Mary is depicted as an innocent and saintly Madonna and what ultimately motivates Toller’s final self-sacrificial act is what Edelman (2004) calls the heteronormative ideal of “reproductive futurism” (2) which posits the figure of the Child as the “perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention”(3). The film’s endorsement of reproductive futurism is confirmed in a conversation between Toller and Mary that takes place later in the film, in which Toller claims: “Every act of preservation is an act of creation. Everything preserved renews creation. It’s how we participate in creation.
A new child is the most blessed thing in creation” a line that betrays some of the conservative sentiment, which, two years after the release of film, one can witness in the disputes over abortion rights in the U.S. Rather than embracing the radical and liberating potential of the drive’s negativity, as Justine does in Melancholia, Toller retreats into the fantasy of a lost Imaginary wholeness, in which the Child, as Edelman notes, embodies “the telos of the social order” and “for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11): repetition becomes repetition of sameness. The film’s sentimental retreat into the sameness of tradition and heteronormativity is fully epitomized in the final scene: Toller wraps himself in barbed wire and pours a glass full of drain cleaner. As he is about to drink it, Mary walks into the room and interrupts him. The two immediately embrace and kiss each other passionately, as the camera glides around them, in typical Hollywood fashion, before the film abruptly cuts to black. Whether Toller actually dies or not, as Schrader himself confirms, is meant to remain ambiguous: “It’s calibrated to be read in different ways,” Schrader said,⇐CLICKME
Both possible alternatives however are equally guilty of the same feat: much like Tarkovsky does in Solaris (1972), Schrader re-inscribes the enigmatic encounter with Otherness into the framework of the production of the couple. Ultimately, what the narrative builds towards is nothing else but the unification of Toller and Mary, possibly in some ideal imagined afterlife. Thus, the film does precisely what Melancholia warns against: it seeks aesthetic comfort in the familiarity of a conventional Hollywood happy ending, sealed with a passionate kiss, the typical trope of spiritual reconciliation through love or redemption through sacrifice, and a reproductive futurism that re-affirms Christian heteropatriarchy. If we read the ending as an ecstatic vision, in choosing to depict the illusion instead of Toller’s actual death, the film further asserts the necessity and affective value of a ‘beautiful lie’. Whereas Melancholia ended with an affirmation of symbolic imagination and creativity in the service of the new, without any naive optimism, First Reformed affirms a retreat back to an idealized past, reducing fantasy to a sentimental quest for wholeness and cathartic redemption. According to Edelman and Berlant, what is really unbearable in the negativity of the drive is “its vertiginous nonidentity, the disunity we fail to comprehend however much we think we know our own and the world’s incoherence” (121). But it is this nonidentity, the ‘intrinsic self-division of reality itself’ that is shared and universal: “negativity is unchanging as structure because negativity structures change (ibid).
The key philosophical insight resounding throughout my analysis of these two films is that this negativity has been a significant part of human existence from the very beginning, not simply as one of its immanent constituents, but, even more crucially, as the very engine that ‘arouses’ the production of meaning and intercourse, moulding finite animal creatures into speaking beings confronted with the unbearable truth of their absolute freedom.
What we furthermore learn from psychoanalysis is that it is precisely the tumultuous terrain of sexuality where this fundamental contradiction is staged and thus becomes available as a matter of thought.
"One of the most intriguing lessons of psychoanalytic theory is that sexuality and death are awfully hard to disentangle when one endeavors to identify their structuring activity within the dynamic architecture of human (inter)subjectivity."
For Alenka Zupančič (2017) human sexuality occupies the murky ground between epistemology and metaphysics and, insofar as it pertains to “the very being-there of the unconscious, in its ontological uncertainty”(12), it presents an indispensable entry point for both the enterprise of psychoanalysis as well as that of ontological interrogation.
"It is because of the tension actuated by this ‘ontological uncertainty’ that sex, as Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant (2014) point out, becomes a “site at which relationality is invested with hopes, expectations, and anxieties that are often experienced as unbearable”(vii)."
As the explosive proliferation of dystopian, (post-)apocalyptic, and posthuman imaginaries in contemporary popular culture indicates, our current age of global crises, marked by socio-economic and geo-political turmoils and the threat of severe environmental degradation, has rendered the task of confronting the difficult questions about the ontological status of the human ever so pressing. In light of this historical-theoretical constellation, this essay examines the intricate relationship between sexuality, finitude, and meaning-making, as it is explored in two works of contemporary cinema, both ambivalently positioned at the nexus between arthouse and mainstream Hollywood film-making, namely Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Offering a psychologically-grounded approach to the genre of the Doomsday film, their narratives unfold under the shadow of an imminent apocalyptic disaster, caused by a rogue planet named Melancholia in the case of von Trier’s film and by the impact of human activity on the environment in the case of Schrader's. More specifically, I focus on two sexually-charged and lyrically-visualized scenes which construe sexuality as a revelation of the ‘failure of logos,’ capable to inspire transformative epiphanies. After closely analyzing these scenes, I relate my observations to the climatic resolutions of the films in order to draw some possible links between sexual (non)relation, fantasy, and the ethical dilemmas posed in the face of catastrophe. In von Trier's Melancholia, the apocalyptic finale is revealed right from the very beginning in an introductory slow-motion montage accompanied by Wagner's “Tristan und Isolde”.
The opening sequence, which functions as a poetic ‘abstract’ for the film, depicts from a distant and disembodied vantage point the sublime event of the planetary collision between Earth and the rogue planet Melancholia and proleptically anticipates it as the inevitable telos, not only of all life in its fictional universe, but also of the film itself.
In other words, the audience is introduced into the bleak fantasy-world of the film, granted full knowledge that all the characters in it will ultimately die —an awareness and acknowledgement of finitude in its various modalities— inviting viewers to reflect upon questions such as: how does the knowledge of the transient, fragile, and fleeting nature of experience affect one’s thoughts and actions in the here-and-now? Indeed, as the plot unravels, this question forms one of the central subtexts of the film, while the different answers to it are gradually formulated through the contrasting developments of the main characters, all of whom are called upon to assimilate the knowledge of their imminent eradication into their already turbulent mental universes. The two main characters of the film, Justine and Claire, are sisters who are strikingly different from each other: Justine, played by the American actress Kirsten Dunst, decides to leave her husband on the night of their wedding’s reception and is shown to be gradually sinking into a debilitating depression with occasional outbursts of aggression. On the other hand, Claire, played by the Anglo-French Charlotte Gainsbourg, is married to a wealthy husband, with whom she has a young son, and lives luxuriously in a huge remote estate.
As Melancholia gets alarmingly close to Earth, disproving the initial scientific reassurance offered by Claire’s husband, the two sisters are shown to adopt two distinctly divergent positions: the depressed Justine grows uncannily stoic, serene, and resolute, whereas the successful Claire becomes increasingly unsettled, agitated, and neurotic. In order to better understand the growth of Justine’s detached collectedness and striking lack of panic or fear, I would like to turn to a brief scene that subtly dramatizes the recomposition of her catatonic inertia into courageous resilience. The scene, which takes place in the middle of a peaceful night, features a visual coupling of Melancholia and the moon, two discursively feminized celestial bodies, shown to be shining almost side by side in same dark sky ⇒fig. 1.
Claire suddenly notices that Justine is leaving the premises of the estate, looking mesmerized by the cold light of Melancholia and decides to follow her. Shortly, she discovers her lying completely naked on a rock beside a river in a serene and contemplative pose, staring at Melancholia, while gently fondling her breasts ⇒fig. 2. The scene cuts to a slow zoom shot of Melancholia ⇒fig. 3 and then back to a close-up of Justine’s sensual self-pleasuring and fixated gaze ⇒fig. 4, thereby creating a sense of proximity, reciprocity, and intimacy between the ‘intruding’ rogue planet and the naked Justine. Meanwhile, Claire is observing her from afar, slightly perplexed and intrigued.
"The scene is brimming with sexual tension that oscillates between homoeroticism and autoeroticism: Justine’s act of self-pleasuring is exhibitionistically staged for the (imagined) returned gaze of Melancholia, the feminized alien intruder which threatens to completely annihilate life on Earth."
Drawing on poststructuralist theory, Ellie Anderson (2017) argues that “the autoerotic phenomenon of masturbation…reveals [the self’s] internal otherness or division”(53-4), thus “refiguring the self as self-othering” (53). Rather than signaling a desire for enclosed unity and harmonious wholeness, autoeroticism, according to Anderson, “expresses an impassioned desire for connection with that which is beyond understanding, possession, or control”(68). Justine’s self-touching in this scene can be thus read as enacting an encounter with the otherness of her own inner self-division, the negativity at the site of her split subjecthood, an encounter she affiliates with the ‘dance of death’ between Earth and Melancholia. That is to say, Justine transposes her inner self-alienation, her failure to be a coherent unified self, outwards to the substantial Other of the precarious natural/cosmic order.
As Žižek (2016) notes, “the only way to overcome alienation, the only ‘dis-alienation’ possible, is … to accept that ‘there is no big Other’, that there is a lack in the Other itself, that the Other is inconsistent, traversed by antagonisms, structured around impossibilities” (37). Justine’s self-withdrawal into the abyssal otherness within herself, into the ‘night of the world,’ under the cold and indifferent light of Melancholia activates a re-orchestration of her jouissance. As Zupančič (2003) highlights, the founding gesture of subjectivity, namely “the moment when ‘one becomes what one is’ is not a moment of unification but, on the contrary, the moment of a pure split” (25). By way of aligning her fractured and fatigued self with the cosmic abyss of negativity, Justine confronts the force of the death drive, the inhuman spectral excess of life which disturbs the subject’s self-identity.
"Although it can easily be confused with the nirvana principle and misunderstood as a tendency towards self-annihilation or lowering of tension, Zupančič (2017), following Lacan, argues that the death drive aims neither at life nor at death. The drive… is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it."
The drive is by no means an expression of the subject's desire to 'return to nothingness', it is not an expression of or a response to our douleur d'exister ('the burden of existence'), for which it simply has no regard. The death drive has nothing to do with 'being-towards death,' nor with 'failing-to-be' (le manque-a-etrel): it is indifferent to death, and it certainly does not fail to be (250).
The death-drive, according to Zupančič, stands for the thrust of insistence that occurs at the site of the negativity inherent to being ; in stark contrast to the nirvana principle, the death drive denotes a persistent undead-ness that tenaciously haunts being and impels it towards the symbolic function. On a more figurative level, it can be described as a stubborn force of simultaneously creative and destructive madness, or perhaps ‘lunacy’ would be the more fitting term in this case, considering its resonances with Melancholia’s visual rendering as a ‘lunar’ celestial body and the psychological qualities evoked by the term ‘moonstruck,’ commonly associated with states such as mental imbalance, romantic sentimentality, or with being lost in fantasy. The depiction of Justine's submission to the death drive as a sexually charged event mediated through the seductive figure of Melancholia, attests to the inseparability of sexuality from death/finitude to which I alluded in the introduction.
Zupančič ’s reading of the death drive rejects the Freudian dualism of Eros and Thanatos and argues that sexuality is in some sense “synonymous with the death drive” (2017:116), in that it registers the subject’s fundamental ‘crack’ and out-of-jointness in its most palpable dimension. The sexual is what gives voice to the traumatic deadlock of non-relation/ 4ontological impasse, which the drive compulsively repeats purely for the sake of repetition: This is what is profoundly disturbing about the “death drive”: not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, the gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy. Enjoyment is the means, whereas the “aim” is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being. (Zupančič 2017:104)
In Why Psychoanalysis? (2008) ⇒READ ME, Zupančič formulates the drive’s ‘inconsistency/lack of being’ as 3 ‘the being of lack:’
“[T]he drive is nothing other than what Lacan calls the ‘lack-of-being’ that emerges (with revenge, so to say) as the ‘unreal organ,’ as ‘libido,’ as something that only exists as a constant deviation from itself and its constitutive void." This is why we could turn the expression ‘lack-of-being’ around and say that the drive is nothing other than the being of the lack/void” (18).
In Why Psychoanalysis?, Zupančič explicates the precise relation between sexuality and the void of self-relating negativity as follows: “To say that, for psychoanalysis, this void is intrinsically and irreducibly related to the sexual is not to say that the meaning of this void is sexual. What is at stake is, on the contrary, that the sexual is the edge of meaning, its border, its inner limit. And this is not simply to say that it is ‘meaningless,’ it is more than that – it is the point of inconsistency of being that induces the production of meaning. Drive is thus the impossible joint articulation of being and meaning in their very heterogeneity” (18, my emphases). It is through this circuit of repetition (aimed at repetition itself) that sexuality attains ‘spiritual’ status in the sense of being abstracted from the biological telos of reproduction and turned into an end in itself.
Hence, the re-orchestration of Justine’s jouissance signals nothing else but her becoming a pure subject of drive, one who fully embraces her lack and self-propelling loop of repeating failure, which is also what enables her to ‘touch’ the real: Justine realizes that her fundamental self-division, the ‘lack of being in the midst of her being’ corresponds to a lack/ incompleteness that is immanent to the noumenal cosmic order itself, insofar as the entire universe is marked by radical contingency, uncertainty, and precariousness.
A subject of drive does not rely on any transcendent ‘big Other’ to guarantee the purposefulness of existence; there can be no teleological ‘grand scheme of things’ to act as a source of comfort and solace — rather, there is radical openness to incalculable futures. Justine’s new subject position is one with no guarantees and no optimism, but simultaneously one of openness to the world and greater attunement to “the intrinsic division of reality itself” (Zupančič 2003: 80).
Her attainment of ‘higher’ knowledge is demonstrated in a subsequent scene, where Justine claims to “know things,” such as the exact number of beans in her wedding jar, or that “life on Earth is evil,” that humans are completely alone, that “life is only on Earth…and not for long.” At the end of the film, shortly before the collision, Claire, embodying the voice of bourgeois desire, proposes that they meet the apocalypse with a glass of wine, which Justine mercilessly dismisses as a pathetic sign of adherence to aesthetic satisfaction. Instead, Justine takes Claire’s son outside to build a teepee, which they call “a magic cave,” where all three huddle and hold hands, as everything gets consumed by fire. According to Žižek (2014), Justine’s final gesture of constructing ‘the magic cave’ is what attests to her transformation into an active inventor of meaning, in that she produces a new Master-signifier that restores some tentative order into the unbearable hopelessness of their situation: What she provides is a symbolic fiction which, of course, has no magic efficacy, but which works at its proper level of preventing panic.
Justine’s point is not to blind us from the impending catastrophe: the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement. Justine is thus the only one who is able to propose an appropriate answer to the impending catastrophe, and to the total obliteration of every symbolic frame ("Framing, Reframing, Enframing”). Following Edelman (2004) and Ruti (2012), another way of articulating Justine’s shift in perspective by way of self-negation, is as identification with what Lacan calls the sinthome, the irreducible kernel of jouissance which compulsively resists fixity and whose mobilization drastically unsettles the normative order and animates the production of new symbolic structures.
Justine’s act is thus what crystallizes the modernist sensibility underlying the entire film: having painted the world as a bleak panorama of futility, a corrupt wasteland deprived of meaning, it affirms the power of the signifying gesture and the ethical responsibility of speaking beings to courageously ‘speak’ new formations of order, even against the background of absolute hopelessness. The ethical duty apropos any surge of despair is that of facing the void with its most paradoxical byproduct, incarnated in the figure of the human: the stubborn lunacy of symbolic creativity. Paul Schrader’s First Reformed turns its melancholic gaze towards the domain of spirituality and religion and articulates its main conflict as one between hope and despair. Its protagonist, Reverend Toller is an alcoholic pastor in charge of a Dutch Reform Church, owned by a corrupt megachurch. Haunted by the death of his only son, concerned about the unfolding ecological catastrophe, and conflicted about the current state of institutional religion, he privately experiences a spiraling crisis of faith, revealed to the viewers by means of a voice-over recital of his journal entries. His faith gets further tested when he meets Mary, a pregnant woman whose depressed radical-environmentalist husband insists on her getting an abortion. Despite Toller’s attempts to impart some hope to the desperate man, the latter is soon discovered dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. The Earth’s ecological collapse becomes the central axis around which Toller’s spiritual crisis and the deterioration of his physical health are placed in dialogue, culminating in a symbolic act of martyrdom, meant both as a gesture of protest against the failings of the Christian Church and as an affirmation of self-sacrifice as the ethical core of Christian life. As in Melancholia, the worldview articulated in First Reformed has no reliable guarantees about the existence of any higher purpose, with all the anxiety this entails.
The theology espoused by Schrader here is one along the lines of the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard, which denounces the idea of peace in the Absolute and re-locates the core of Christian faith “in the breathtakingly traumatic fact that we, human mortals, are trapped in a “sickness unto death,” that anxiety is our a priori condition, that our existence is radically torn” (Žižek et al, 2009:253).
The first two acts of the film are predominantly dialogue-centered and feature austere camerawork, restrained cinematography, static shots with minimal editing and slow pans of interior spaces, which serve to convey a sense of lethargic stillness, despondency, and claustrophobia.
—My interest however lies in the single scene where all these stripped-down aesthetic choices are abandoned for more stylized imagery. It is a scene depicting a moment of physical intimacy shared between Toller and Mary, as part of a non-sexual ritual that Mary used to perform with her husband before his tragic death. Mary describes the ritual as follows: We did something we called the Magical Mystery Tour.
It sounds silly. We’d share a joint then we would lie on top of each other fully clothed. Try to get as much body-to-body contact as possible. He also called it the 80% Solution. Hands out, look each right into the eyes. Then move our eyes in unison, right, left, right, left. And breathe in rhythm. Initiating the ritual, Toller lies on the floor, and Mary lowers herself atop him ⇒fig 5. The camera starts to revolve around the pair, which slowly begins levitating ⇒fig. 6, while their surrounding gradually fade, and the interior dimly-lit room is replaced by hallucinatory images of the cosmos ⇒fig. 7, natural landscapes and seascapes ⇒fig.8, which are then replaced by images of traffic ⇒fig. 9 and waste dumps ⇒fig 10, thus rudely awakening Toller from his meditative trance.
I read this scene as an ecstatic encounter with the ‘twofoldness’ of the death drive, which is shown both in its libidinal register, as the impulse for carnal, albeit here non-genital, intimacy, affective attachment and social connection, as well as in its destructive dimension, delivered by the Anthropocene imagery that undercuts the couple’s quest for spiritual transcendence.
When Toller's face becomes visible again (figure 9) and his facial expressions seem to gradually sink into agony, he appears to be experiencing some type of epiphany. As I read it, what Toller realizes is precisely the aggressive ambivalence of the signifying order, the material forcefulness of human and social ‘dialectics,’ which emerge at the site of the lack in the order of being: the parasitism of jouissance is the mechanism driving both the search for connectedness and the elevation of the human spirit to higher realms of thinking and feeling, as well as the mindless self-destructive greed that engendered the ecological collapse. Precisely in its ‘indifference to death,’ as noted by Zupančič, the death drive impels humans to insistently repeat their failure to attain absolute satisfaction, to overcome their mortality.
Although the erotic tension between the two is certainly present, the film opts for ‘the 80% Solution’ and features no sex, indicating a radical turn on the part of Schrader away from his recent filmography (which includes a poorly-received borderline-pornographic thriller starring Lindsay Lohan and porn superstar James Deen) towards a Žižek explicates the link between the death drive and immortality by invoking Hegel, for whom “death comes as a radically external meaningless contingency – but it is precisely as such that it corrodes from within the very core of human identity and its universe of meaning…[I]mmortality emerges precisely through ‘tarrying with the negative’, through its immanent ovecoming: only a being which is not constrained by its mortality can relate to its death ‘as such’. This overcoming is paradoxically a form of ‘death in life’: a human being overcomes its mortality through gaining a distance towards its life-substance (for example, through its readiness to risk its life for some spiritual cause). Hegel’s name for this dimension is negativity, and Freud’s name is death drive.
—Immortality is death in life, a deadly force that acquires control over the living substance, or, as Paul would have put it, Spirit is the death of flesh” (2016: 340). A rather conservative turn towards Tarkovskian cinema: from its male-centric universe, to the apocalyptic setting, the aversion towards sexually provocative women, the depiction of love or the sexual act as flying or floating, up to its immanent take on spirituality.
In contrast to Melancholia, there is no interest in female sexuality here: Mary is depicted as an innocent and saintly Madonna and what ultimately motivates Toller’s final self-sacrificial act is what Edelman (2004) calls the heteronormative ideal of “reproductive futurism” (2) which posits the figure of the Child as the “perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention”(3). The film’s endorsement of reproductive futurism is confirmed in a conversation between Toller and Mary that takes place later in the film, in which Toller claims: “Every act of preservation is an act of creation. Everything preserved renews creation. It’s how we participate in creation.
A new child is the most blessed thing in creation” a line that betrays some of the conservative sentiment, which, two years after the release of film, one can witness in the disputes over abortion rights in the U.S. Rather than embracing the radical and liberating potential of the drive’s negativity, as Justine does in Melancholia, Toller retreats into the fantasy of a lost Imaginary wholeness, in which the Child, as Edelman notes, embodies “the telos of the social order” and “for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11): repetition becomes repetition of sameness. The film’s sentimental retreat into the sameness of tradition and heteronormativity is fully epitomized in the final scene: Toller wraps himself in barbed wire and pours a glass full of drain cleaner. As he is about to drink it, Mary walks into the room and interrupts him. The two immediately embrace and kiss each other passionately, as the camera glides around them, in typical Hollywood fashion, before the film abruptly cuts to black. Whether Toller actually dies or not, as Schrader himself confirms, is meant to remain ambiguous: “It’s calibrated to be read in different ways,” Schrader said,⇐CLICKME
Both possible alternatives however are equally guilty of the same feat: much like Tarkovsky does in Solaris (1972), Schrader re-inscribes the enigmatic encounter with Otherness into the framework of the production of the couple. Ultimately, what the narrative builds towards is nothing else but the unification of Toller and Mary, possibly in some ideal imagined afterlife. Thus, the film does precisely what Melancholia warns against: it seeks aesthetic comfort in the familiarity of a conventional Hollywood happy ending, sealed with a passionate kiss, the typical trope of spiritual reconciliation through love or redemption through sacrifice, and a reproductive futurism that re-affirms Christian heteropatriarchy. If we read the ending as an ecstatic vision, in choosing to depict the illusion instead of Toller’s actual death, the film further asserts the necessity and affective value of a ‘beautiful lie’. Whereas Melancholia ended with an affirmation of symbolic imagination and creativity in the service of the new, without any naive optimism, First Reformed affirms a retreat back to an idealized past, reducing fantasy to a sentimental quest for wholeness and cathartic redemption. According to Edelman and Berlant, what is really unbearable in the negativity of the drive is “its vertiginous nonidentity, the disunity we fail to comprehend however much we think we know our own and the world’s incoherence” (121). But it is this nonidentity, the ‘intrinsic self-division of reality itself’ that is shared and universal: “negativity is unchanging as structure because negativity structures change (ibid).
The key philosophical insight resounding throughout my analysis of these two films is that this negativity has been a significant part of human existence from the very beginning, not simply as one of its immanent constituents, but, even more crucially, as the very engine that ‘arouses’ the production of meaning and intercourse, moulding finite animal creatures into speaking beings confronted with the unbearable truth of their absolute freedom.
What we furthermore learn from psychoanalysis is that it is precisely the tumultuous terrain of sexuality where this fundamental contradiction is staged and thus becomes available as a matter of thought.
