words by J.A.G. Mabbutt | image credit Alamy
Do depressed people react better to disaster? Do they inhabit a calmness that is lacking in others? Is judgment day just another day in the calendar of someone who is possessed by melancholy? These questions orbited Lars Von Trier’s head enough for him to make a movie that offers us some answers. His 2011 film, Melancholia, isn’t exactly easy to watch, and at no point should the narrative or content of the film be digested without a trigger warning. However, despite the caution, it is a film that is rich with reality.
Depression isn’t an easy subject to capture. Whereas musicians like Elliot Smith and Sufjan Stevens have managed to realise authentic expressions of depression, and Vincent Van Gogh has offered up a visual representation of the subject, cinema has often fallen at the final hurdle. Yes, some might be able to list a menagerie of titles when thinking about the broader scope of mental illness, films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Manchester By The Sea, but depression isn’t an easy subject, and Melancholia is, to some extent, one of the only films that is up to the challenge. The film follows two sisters, Justine and Claire, as a mysterious rogue planet hurtles toward Earth, intertwining cosmic catastrophe with the advancing impact of depression. Through dreamlike imagery and a haunting atmosphere, the film portrays depression as both intimate despair and an apocalyptic inevitability. Like Von Trier’s film, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, ‘A Coney Island of the Mind, 8’, is a text that is interested in acknowledging depression amongst the chaos of the mundane. Ferlinghetti’s free verse stylistics about urban clashes stand in stark contrast with the cosmic domesticity of Von Trier’s film, yet both investigate the truth of depression as an intimate force with universal effects.
Throughout Ferlinghetti’s poem, the encroachment of something is haunting and unavoidable. Its formatting supports this, as the disjointed line-breaks and spacing trap the reader in an unconventional reading rhythm, confusing their ability to recognise what will happen next. Like depression, this formatting spirals into chaos, and eventually can be translated into an odd pattern. Depression is exacerbated by the unending motions of routine, whose perception is distorted until these routines become imprisoning rather than liberating. The language and content of the poem are initially misleading. What at first appears to be a romantic rendez-vous for the married couple is soon transformed by the speaker into an uncomfortable reflection on the submerged habits of depression. For the wife, whose nonchalance and seeming relaxation belie something deeper, this bucolic dreamscape is eroded. Whereas some readers might find themselves shocked by its sudden change, Ferlinghetti does pepper his poem with sometimes idle, sometimes active signs of depression. Depression itself can originate from nothingness, and at times it surprises both the sufferer and those around them. The poem enriches itself with a trajectory that saddens the reader even more. In the final stanza, the description of the wife lying ‘flat’ helps us recognise the descent of her mood. In becoming horizontal, the wife symbolises the puncture of the buoyancy of the poem. Furthermore, the saturation of the stanza with words such as ‘just,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘nobody,’ and ‘without’ gestures towards a sudden sense of absence, where a poem that was once bejewelled by serene scenes is now under siege by depression’s most dangerous armament, numbness. Ferlinghetti’s poem is relatable in its ability to translate this erosion, which takes place without a discernible cause. Yet despite a lack of clarity, we can move towards something that liberates our understanding.
The absurdist theory of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Philippe Sartre might be able to encourage some realisation. In the route of the wife’s apparent alteration from ‘normal,’ non-depressive behaviour, to the disquiet of sudden depression, we can locate a shift not too dissimilar from Heidegger’s ‘being-in-life,’ towards the existential ‘nausea’ coined by Sartre. For Heidegger, ‘being-in-life’ is the embedded nature of humans within society. As individuals, we cannot truly separate ourselves from the world around us, and in this, we cannot truly exist in isolation, but instead as essential fragments that establish the whole. Through this, Heidegger recognises that we are forced to operate as part of a whole, in relation to the routines and rituals of social norms. These routines, or as Heidegger refers to them, ‘they-worlds,’ are practices formed from ‘being-in-life,’ tangible links to our own inclusion in the world we exist in. Sartre’s ‘nausea’ is a recognition of the arbitrariness of the structures around us, causing a reaction of numbness or extreme ‘existential vertigo.’
We can use these ideas to envision how the wife from ‘A Coney Island of the Mind, 8’ has experienced a recognition of reality, a detachment from the regulation of routine, mundanity, and commonalities of life which distract us. The actions she performs in the earlier stages of the poem might have once provided her life with meaning, but at the turning point of the poem, on the precipice of her depression, she might have entered a state of nausea, whereupon what once provided her meaning now imprisons her. For the wife, this change seems to originate in her observation of the world’s nothingness. She watches birds calling to each other: ‘in the stilly air / as if they were questioning existence / or trying to recall something forgotten.’ And in response to this, she begins to ‘just lay there looking up / at nothing.’ Here, in this parallel of observing the activities of birds and then sitting there observing nothingness, the wife is made by Ferlinghetti to experience this erasure of her trust in reality. It isn’t an external disaster that leads to this transformation, but more so an internal unravelling of faith in reality. The blankness of the ‘certain awful look’ and ‘terrible depression’ we imagine, for the wife, is the absorption of Sartre’s nausea, the absolute depression that comes with decoupling from ‘being-in-life’ and its trance-like leisure.
Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, explores something similar via a different lens. For Justine (Kirsten Dunst), her wedding is an interesting setting for her own nausea or depression to establish itself. The social routines and ritualistic, performative habits of such an event mimic the everydayness of Heidegger’s ‘they-world.’ Like the wife in Ferlinghetti’s poem, Justine and the other attendants are forced to act according to social expectations rather than their authentic feelings. In this context, the emergence of Justine’s depression sabotages her ability to perform and instead alienates her from the rituals that surround her. Von Trier uses this setting because it helps the audience understand how Justine’s depression is ontological rather than solely psychological. Yes, the external pressures of her parents, her romantic life, and her career assist in creating the conditions for depression, but at its core, her depressive state exists within her being because of her own decoupling from the societal conventions and expectations that surround her. For Justine, the paralysis brought about by her depression is a response to the absurdity of her own life. Where she feels forced into places and roles, her depression counteracts this and creates new conditions that submerge her in chaos. For her family and friends, this chaos is indulgent and improper, yet to Justine, it makes sense. If reality is no longer anchored and logical, if its foundations are endangered, and the materials found rotting, surely it makes sense to inhabit a new state of mind? Justine thinks so, and her depression bestows upon her a nuanced lens through which to see the world and its many barbs and banalities.
For the wife in Ferlinghetti’s poem, the observation of birds in random flight and the nothingness of the sky possess some poignance contributing to her degradation. For Justine, it is her domestic vicinity that leads to her depression. But what Ferlinghetti’s poem doesn’t offer is a window into depression’s prolonged impact. Its ending on the word ‘depression’ implies that depression is terminal. However, for Von Trier’s narrative, depression isn’t the end, but instead an inciting incident that propels the narrative into interesting territory. The ominous news of the incoming rogue planet Melancholia, which is due to collide with Earth, presents Von Trier with an opportunity to explore absurdity at an intersection with depression. On the reception of this news, society falters and splinters, looking for answers and solutions to the looming destruction that is likely to befall them.
By the film’s second half, Justine’s sister's, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), ability to live meaningfully in the world collapses; only Justine, paradoxically, achieves serenity. Having already confronted nothingness, she has seen through the illusion of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’. Her calmness before destruction is expressed in the line "The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it." This exemplifies what Heidegger would call authenticity: an acceptance of annihilation that strips away illusion and performance. In this way, Melancholia extends Ferlinghetti’s exploration of depressive perception into the existential realm, suggesting that depression, rather than an endpoint, may constitute a radical awareness of the world’s absurd and transient nature. At the film's conclusion, Claire, her son Leo (Cameron Spurr), and Justine congregate in waiting for the planet’s end. They construct a ‘cave’ from branches, and beneath its sanctuary, the three of them hold hands.
This makes explicit use of the Platonian allegory of the cave, in which prisoners, confined to shadows on a wall, perceive an illusory reality until they are exposed to the truth outside. In Von Trier’s film, the branch-constructed cave functions as a fragile sanctuary, a symbolic threshold between illusion and reality. Beneath its shelter, Claire, Leo, and Justine confront the ultimate truth: the imminent annihilation of the world. Just as the prisoners in Plato’s allegory must face the blinding light of reality, the characters are forced to confront the stark, unmediated reality of death and cosmic indifference. The cave, paradoxically, offers both protection and revelation; it frames their final moments, allowing them to experience a sense of shared presence and acceptance even as the boundaries between life, death, and the cosmos collapse. In this way, the scene mirrors the existential insight that Justine has already achieved, an awareness that reality is indifferent, life is transient, and meaning must be reconciled with the absurd, rather than imposed by illusion.
Both Ferlinghetti’s ‘Coney Island of the Mind, 8’ and Von Trier’s Melancholia depict depression as a lens that exposes the fragility and absurdity of reality. The wife’s quiet disengagement and Justine’s cosmic confrontation reveal how despair can strip away illusion and routine, forcing an encounter with the impermanence and indifference of existence. In both works, depression is not perceived solely as a terminus, but a mode of heightened awareness, one that confronts chaos, nothingness, and mortality with clarity, presence, and an unsettling, yet lucid, acceptance. Depression isn’t something to wish for, or even view as a positive. But when we are safe enough to see the other side of it, we might be able to look beyond what has transpired and see the world around us differently.