Time to talk about myself.1
Ever since I was a teenager I’ve struggled with mental health issues, and as I’ve gotten older the list has only increased into an alphabet soup of dysfunction that often keeps me unable to function and perform even the simplest tasks, dependent on two fistfuls of pills daily to keep me in some kind of an operational state. Thank heavens I work a job with sick time, or else my copious mental health days would have already lead to my dismissal. My dogshit brain is so broken it thinks my gender is at odds with my physical sex, necessitating a complete physical transformation just to make the incongruence and discomfort diminish.2
But my biggest psychological bugbear has to be, by far, depression.3
So naturally I have been drawn in my media consumption to things that feel like they “get me” so to speak, media which reflects back at me the reality I perceive. This has proven easy with music, since every popular genre has plenty of wistful, sad, distant, melancholy tracks for easy consumption, and since I am an absolute plebian when it comes to music4 it’s easy to compile playlist after playlist of despondent songs to cry to, again and again, though I do usually call them writing playlists for the purpose of false dignity.
When it comes to film and books5, it’s trickier. There’s plenty of depressing material, sure, but what about material about depression itself? That’s harder to come by, at least in my usual tastes of absurdism and pitch-black nihilism. So when something comes along that does speak about depression, it’s worth taking notice of.
Enter Melancholia, part two in the Depression Trilogy by Lars Von Trier6 and, like the other two films in the series7, a slow burn drama, though without their sexual content and violence. Instead, this middle film aims a rogue planet called Melancholia at the Earth and, after a bit of suspense, destroys the world before cutting to black.
The primary characters through which we witness the apocalypse are two sisters. Justine is a depressive who, throughout the film, engages in risky behavior for poorly explained reasons, is sometimes unable to move, sleeps for an outsized amount of time, and swings between curt and listless. In other words, she’s a perfect picture of what depression does to someone.
The other sister is Claire, who is not depressed but starts to exhibit some of the symptoms as the planet Melancholia comes closer. As she begins to descend, Justine begins to cheer up, seemingly looking forward to the end of the world, and in this we can see the difference between chronic depression in Justine (a state of pure melancholy that extends through all aspects of a person, up to and including their beliefs), and situational sadness and despair in Claire, which on paper sounds like depression but lacks the all-encompassing aspect of true depression. Claire has hope, and that is why she panics and cries and can’t handle the end, while Justine waits, almost meditatively, as the summation of her illness comes closer.
This is the true nature of the depressive. There is no hope. There is no redemption, there is no way out, no path upward into better days. There is only cruelty, and pain, and finally the gift of death. “Earth is evil,“ Justine tells Claire. “No one will miss it.”
So it’s a good film about depression, but strangely enough it’s nor a depressing film. It’s too peaceful, and too gorgeous8 to be really depressing. As a triumph of human achievement, it actually works against its subject matter.
Which made me turn to the other well-known movie about depression and the end of the world: The End of Evangelion9.
Now, that’s not to say this is a less well-made movie than Melancholia. In fact it’s a triumph of animation and art design, well directed and well-acted10 and altogether a pleasure to watch. But whereas von Trier sought to depict depression, Hideaki Anno sought to make the viewer depressed. That makes a for a huge difference in approach and result, and it means that I came away from the viewing with the burn of melancholy in a way that Melancholia couldn’t provide, even though it’s in the name.
I had my first depressive episode after watching The End of Evangelion. It’s that kind of film for me, a formative experience, one that fucked up my relationship with god11 and introduced me to an emotional range I was, up until that point, unaware of.
It’s a very different movie from Melancholia. For one thing it’s animated, but it’s also the finale to a long-running television series as well as, perhaps most importantly, an action movie as opposed to a drama. Death becomes commonplace quickly in The End of Evangelion as the members of the NGO NERV are systematically taken out by JSDF troops at the behest of a secret society, and it’s up to Shinji, our teenage hero, to pilot the eponymous mecha and save the world from their doomsday plot.
Except he doesn’t. Because of everything he’s seen and done up until that point12 Shinjiis so stricken with depression he, like Justine, is catatonic, and no attempts to jumpstart him seem to work. Somehow he finds himself at the center of the apocalypse, with a choice to make: Destroy all life on Earth and turn humanity into a gestalt organism, or spare them and allow them to live separate lives. Shinji, being a teenager and again, depressed, chooses to let the world end. And so it does, in glorious anime fashion, to the heavy-handed lyrics of a song that sound suspiciously like “Hey Jude.”
The money shots are fundamentally different in the two films. Melancholia ends on the eponymous planet smashing into Earth, and then a fade to black. The End of Evangelion opts for surreal imagery, much of it pulled from Christian and Jewish mysticism, though both prominently feature a celestial body or bodies and both love to fill the frame with pale, naked female forms. More importantly however the film keeps going, with Shinji having to examine the reality of his choice through a series of dream sequences that allow him to, ultimately, return to his corporeal form, alone in the world except for his fellow pilot Asuka, who he immediately attempts to strangle, only for her to reach out to him in comfort.
It is the gradual nature of the apocalypse and the viewing of the aftermath that makes it so painful to watch. We get to see, individually and up close, several members of the cast turn into primordial soup, which is then followed by Shinji having a conversation about the nature of human existence and loneliness and individuality and pain. And then, at the end, he must live with his actions.
It’s that last bit that really drives home something about depression that Melancholia only glosses over. Both use the end of the world as a kind of spectacle-laden metaphor for suicide, the merciful but terrible ending to a life of depression13. Justine succeeds and completes, and there’s no moral judgement there, it simply is. The end is something that happens because nature does what it does. But Shinji chooses the end, and the entire scenario leading to that choice is manufactured. Man is his own undoing in The End of Evangelion, the cause of depression14 and the one who makes his own cure, but it fails. Shinji must live in the wreckage his disease has wrought.
Melancholia chooses to have Justine blow up her life in the first half of the movie, during her wedding, and then makes little reference to it afterwards. The focus is on the symptoms themselves, not the kind of social, financial, and personal wreckage that can come of depression. There is no moment where she at last comes out of her episode only to go, What have I done? Instead it’s kind of set aside in a way that is less satisfying than Shinji’s being forced to live with the results of his illness.
The causes and results of depression are often ignored in favor of simply ascribing the diagnosis and moving on. It’s a tragedy, to suffer from depression, but it simply can’t be helped. In reality, lots of things can contribute to depression, from childhood trauma to economic status. The world we live in and the people we encounter, the forces which drive us and the actions of others can and do contribute to a serious mental illness which can and often does kill. That’s a truth all too often glossed over. People hurt each other in so many ways, and it’s hard at times, especially when one is of melancholic disposition, not to see the world as wicked.
Melancholia is a film about depression, The End of Evangelion is a depressing film. That doesn’t make one better than the other. It doesn’t mean that one orb-based world ending scenario is superior, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Both succeed in using the end of the world as a catalyst for blowing depression up to cataclysmic proportions.
I often feel like the world is ending, in some nonspecific way, that this cannot continue forever and there must be some kind of an ending made one way or another. Depression becomes a world-wrecking problem, something that will destroy everything I hold dear15 if allowed to run unchecked, something that creates wreckage I must then live in, something that has causes and meanings and origins that I can or can’t access and must be struggled against in esoteric ways.16
Nowadays when we think about depression in media we often think of sitcoms like Bojack Horseman17 or You’re the Worst that mix humor with bleak realism into an accessible slurry of feelings punctuated with lines that make us go, Whoa. They often seem to load up on the substance abuse too, because substance abuse is fun to watch. I don’t really want to knock this kind of media. It is what it is, and it gets the job done, but it doesn’t really tell us what it feels like to be depressed, nor does it depict the totality of the havoc it wreaks. It’s just a limitation of the form, since a sitcom still exists to make people laugh.
One of the things art does that makes it irreplaceable and invaluable is that it reflects upon us our experiences, and allows us to be less alone. Sometimes that’s watching the joy of another human being, sometimes it’s someone else’s confusion at a baffling world, sometimes it’s carnage that is woefully too familiar, and sometimes it’s the experience of watching something inside of you so dark and insidious it becomes great enough to destroy the world.
It is a beautiful terror to behold.
My favorite topic, and one I’ve already covered thoroughly but obliquely on this newsletter, but it’s my party so deal with it. This was originally going to be about Showgirls but I’m saving that for something bigger, so instead you get navel-gazing. Sorry.
If you have a problem with gender transition as a treatment for gender dysphoria I suggest you take it up with the general consensus of doctors who recognize it’s efficacy, as well as the millions of trans people who are now living better lives than they ever did as their birth gender. You might also want to prove that being gay is a choice while you’re at it, or perhaps bring back female hysteria as a legitimate diagnosis.
I am technically, as far as I know, bipolar, which means I’m a manic depressive, not a major one. That said, the periods of hypomania I experience are far less dangerous and diminishing than my episodes of depression, at least since I quit drinking. My depression starts as a great weight of sadness and progresses into a steady diminishing of sensation, to where I do not receive validation for tasks completed or pleasures taken, before falling into a complete lack of any kind of feeling, and then further into something so bleak it’s difficult to describe. It is a swallowing lack of vitality, a blackening pit that threatens to turn me inside out before devouring me. Along the way there’s physical pain and catatonia, but at the lowest point there’s nothing at all.
My favorite artists are Brand New, Kanye West, Childish Gambino, and Death Grips, truly pretentious entry-level trash for those who think themselves enlightened. I barely listen to jazz and ignore traditional European music entirely, with the exception of my bi-yearly rewatch of Amadeus, which should tell you all you need to know.
One day I will write one of these about a book, I promise.
We are not going to talk about the director’s politics here. Needless to say they, at the very least, give one pause.
Antichrist, which may be a masterpiece, and Nymphomaniac, which I refuse to watch sober and therefore hopefully will never see again.
Von Trier is a genius when it comes to actual filmmaking, and his cinematographer Manuel Alberto Carlo delivers on sumptuous, icy colors and beatific lighting. The slow-mo prelude alone somehow outdoes both Zack Snyder and Ari Aster at the same time. It’s just excellent craft and vision.
I watched the Netflix dub. It’s not the same but I didn’t have energy to read subtitles, which would have also been inferior to the original translations.
The dub isn’t that bad, even if it changes the translations of iconic lines like “I’m so fucked up.”
Inconvenient when, 16+ years later, it was necessary for me to turn to a higher power to fight substance use disorder.
His mother died when he was young, his father is distant, he was forced to kill a friend, and most recently, he jerked off over the comatose body of his friend and rival Asuka.
Even in my heavily medicated state I still fantasize about dying young, the death drive being harder to tamp down that active suicidality.
It’s possibly what he has is more PTSD, but that can include depressive symptoms so we’ll just call it depression.
And has destroyed, fairly recently, some things I would have given anything to hold on to.
The old saws about meds, therapy, diet, exercise, and vitamins are all effective, but they cannot undo the void heart of despair that hollows me out.
A show I enjoyed but one over which so much ink was spilled that I’m slightly alarmed.