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Last Friday
evening, on what happened to be the Chinese New Year, we watched Melancholia directed by the controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier and starring Kirsten Dunst. The
movie had a profound effect on me not only while I was watching it but
afterward: I had vivid dreams about it that night, waking up the next morning
still in dream reality, feeling like Justine, the heroine of the movie,
enveloped in melancholia, barely able to move because of rapidly growing vines
that were wrapping themselves around her body and legs. The sensation was so
disturbing and like nothing I had ever felt that I told Russet I though I might
be having some sort of medical emergency.
But my emergency
wasn’t medical: it was a spiritual!
While some might
attempt to interpret this movie more in terms of a cosmic apocalypse resulting
in the physical destruction of the Planet Earth, the movie is more of a
metaphor about a woman suffering from melancholia (major depression) who has a
spiritual transformation – something that could be describes as a personal
apocalypse.
There is
supporting evidence for my view.
The word
‘apocalypse’ has not always mean destruction, damnation, and the end of the
world. Originally in Greek, it meant “lifting of
the veil" or "revelation"... A disclosure of something hidden
from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and
misconception.2
Jungian analysts
consider the process of ‘apocalypse’ very important, viewing the phenomenon as
a fundamental pattern or archetype underlying all human behavior; Jungians
retain aspects of both definitions mentioned above, each of which is perfectly
expressed in the movie:
• The coming
together of energies in a momentous event that moves us toward growth and
increased consciousness
• The shattering
of the world as it has been, followed by its reconstitution3
In fact, the
renowned Jungian analyst, Edward
Edinger, considered the advent of apocalypse to be a necessary ingredient
to successful treatment with his patients: “Every depth analysis is a
mini-apocalypse.”4 Certainly, Melancholia
was a mini-apocalypse for me.
Melancholia initially affected me in a highly-charged, schizophrenic sort of way,
tearing me apart with conflicting emotions of ecstasy (the hypnotic beauty of
the blue rogue planet looming closer and closer but then not crashing into the
earth with an explosion of annihilation but with a gentle erotic merging like
two cells replicating) while – at the same time – of absolute terror (the shattering of my world as I had
always known it).
The effect on my
state of being and emotions was similar in many ways to my first reaction to viewing Hannah Yata’s painting, Monarch. As I wrote at the time:
"This
painting by Hanna Yata shocks my sensibilities, conjuring up in my imagination
bipolar images of the best of times and the worse, of being and nothingness, of
the beginning and the end.
"The Monarch strikes me as
an entrancing fantasy of stunning, evocative, erotic beauty and, at
the same time, an apocalyptic nightmare of our planet’s last gasp, a
final brilliant flash of orgasmic pyrotechnics as all life on earth – each
species exquisite and irreplaceable – fades into extinction never to be seen
again..."5
These wrenching emotions have
subsided over the last week. Now the transformational aspects of Melancholia’s apocalypse are settling
into my marrow, replacing the rushing adrenaline of fear and ecstasy
with a renewed sense of peace and existential
faith.
I feel like Justine, the heroine of
the movie, is a role model in how she overcomes her inertia and finds the faith
to take charge as the blue rogue planet hurtles closer and closer to Earth. She
is not only able to dissuade her loved ones from giving up or killing
themselves but shows them how to build a magic teepee and find safe refuge
inside.
And that, strange as it may seem, is
the core source of my renewed sense of peace and faith: the magic teepee.
Despite what science or religion may claim, the
best refuge of last resort – and ultimately the only one that works – is a sacred canopy each of us must weave from
our own imagination, a symbolic ritual that gives our life – especially in
the face of death – meaning.
XXX
1 The central theme of Stanislav Grof’s book Spiritual Emergency,
is “the idea that some of the dramatic experiences and unusual states of mind
that traditional psychiatry disguises and treats as mental diseases are
actually crises of personal transformation, or ‘spiritual emergencies.’”
2 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.magick/qtDd-ou3C0Y
3 Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse; also as discussed in the live
Webinar on1/18/14, At the Brink: What we fear and why http://ashevillejungcenter.org/webinars/w17/
4 Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse
5 http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/2013/10/our-shame-for-lifetime-of-denial-and.html
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