The <em>Melancholia </em>Postulate
I recently watched Melancholia, the perversely lyrical 2011 Lars von Trier film about life unfolding under the existential threat of a planet hurtling toward Earth. I thought of it after a call with a friend I know to be perennially anxious—worried over her health, her career, and every aspect of life that could go wrong. Yet, that day she sounded calm. Despite the chaos and stress of the coronavirus pandemic, she seemed, for once, at ease. She theorized to me that her constant anxiety, perhaps, had prepared her for the current moment. She found a strange peace, as the world ordered itself to match her perception of it. Moreover, despite the quarantine, she didn’t feel so isolated anymore, alone in her own way of thinking. For a chronically uneasy person, global calamity can, oddly, engender companionship: Everyone suddenly feels the way you always have.
The perspective of a catastrophe-minded person thrust into a state of actual catastrophe finds perhaps no better creative expression than in . In the face of imminent annihilation, our resident withdrawn melancholic, Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst), seems suddenly at ease,
