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acks away from the deeper tragedy that fitzgerald draws of the world s very animating soul draining out as hope dims i m sure i m not the first person to compare gatsby to the kierkegaardian knight of faith who says to himself that even though his love is impossible i nevertheless believe that i shall get her namely on the strength of the absurd on the strength of the fact that for god all things are possible the thing about the knight of faith though is that he has first to accept that his love is really not possible in this world and i don t think luhrmann s gatsby ever gets there for one thing luhrmann takes away the condition that the love be thoroughly impossible by showing those scenes of daisy with the telephone thinking about calling she even reaches for the phone at one point and the camera cuts back to gatsby s phone ringing and his emergence from the pool only to be shot allowing viewers to think along with gatsby that this is in fact daisy calling the slow motion tragedy of gatsby falling back into the pool is the moment of romeo seeing his future with juliet being drawn away from him by the tunnel of his own death it s not until afterwards that viewers get the punchline that it was just nick on the phone gatsby s hope that daisy will call is not at all unreasonable or absurd in the movie which takes away some of its poignancy to be honest i m not sure that fitzgerald s gatsby qualifies as a true knight of faith either kierkegaard explains that childlike simplicity and innocence can also account for impossible hope that is just naïveté rather than true faith based on the renunciation of earthly possibility but fitzgerald s vision of gatsby is nonetheless darker and more complex than luhrmann s and gatsby s last moments are an experience of a dead empty world left lifeless when hope has gone he must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass a new world material without being real where poor ghosts breathing dreams like air drifted fortuitously about what s striking about these lines is the transformation of natural beauty into uncanny horror and is gatsby himself one of these poor ghosts breathing dreams like air if so it s another transformation from a vision of himself as drawing strength and vigor from his dream to one of himself barely clinging to life through it another line of kierkegaard s comes to mind through faith i don t renounce anything on the contrary in faith i receive everything it s as though gatsby s faith has been giving him the world up until this moment and now suddenly the world is taken away even though it s still in front of his face it s not just daisy who vanishes in this tragedy but everything and not because of gatsby s death but because he wretchedly remains alive fortunately this world of shadows sends forth its avenging angel ritual and melancholia january 17 2012 at 2 18 pm posted in affect film gender love repetition ritual 1 comment as a poetry teacher i loved melancholia i m always telling my students that in poetry as in all literature the best interpretations are the ones phrased in terms of both and rather than in terms of either or and that s exactly how lars von trier s film begs to be read the film is divided in two parts in the first half kirsten dunst s crippling depression threatens to sabotage her fairy tale wedding and in the second half a rogue planet called melancholia threatens to obliterate the earth the absurdly obvious symbolism of a planet actually called melancholia that might actually destroy the earth is so ludicrous as to demand further interpretation yes i can hear myself saying to my imaginary poetry and film students the planet stands for depression but are you satisfied with that what else might it mean the first thing i should point out is that the second half of the film when the actual end of the world is nigh feels like a relief the first half is tense and awkward and upsetting you sympathize with justine dunst s character because you realize that depression is a medical condition and she can t just think herself out of it but you also wonder along with her relatives why she can t just on this one joyous day actually be happy when her sister claire played by charlotte gainsbourg tells her to at least put on a smile and go through the motions for the benefit of everybody in attendance including the groom it sounds both reasonable and insensitive this dilemma cuts to the heart of what is for me the central problem with weddings they are supposed to be about things sincerely and deeply felt by the bride and groom but they generally take the form of elaborate complicated ceremonies followed by elaborate complicated parties that seem to exist much more for the benefit of family and friends than for the actual people getting married what if you wake up in the morning on your wedding day and you re just not in the mood to deal with all that nonsense what if you agreed to deal with all that nonsense because your fiancé and your family want it but you are medically unable to enjoy it the right thing to do in both cases seems to be to soldier on and pretend to be happy because ruining your wedding might ruin your marriage and or hurt or upset your family members but then suddenly there is a troubling absence at the center of the ritual american mainstream culture seems able to tolerate empty ritual in just about every case except weddings at funerals we recognize a wide range of stages of grief and it s perfectly okay if you feel numb or angry instead of properly melancholy if you are a regular churchgoer you will sometimes feel religiously moved by your sunday services but it s okay if some weeks you re there more in body than in spirit and there are hundreds of less religious rituals where the divorce between practice and feeling is widely recognized and accepted my mother for example is planning a retirement party for a woman who it turns out really doesn t want a retirement party but is probably going to get one anyway and she will probably smile her way through it but the idea of just smiling one s way through one s own wedding is unthinkable whenever a bride in a movie is a tiny bit less than ecstatic about her wedding it s taken as a sign that the love in question is not true and dustin hoffman is likely to pound on the glass shouting her name at any moment grinding the false ceremony to a halt my favorite version of this incidentally is when patrick dempsey literally busts into the chapel on a white horse at the end of the dreadful film made of honor um spoiler alert and the other side of the coin is that whenever a groom is less than enthusiastic about his impending wedding he will inevitably grow up just in time to undergo the ceremony with wholehearted and authentic feeling clearly there are gender dynamics that might be investigated here the bride has been pushed into something she doesn t feel while the groom has been pushed into something he does feel but i m less interested in that problem than in the way that both these clichés are rooted in a fantasy of absolute authenticity one of the most troubling things about melancholia for me was that justine s groom actually does leave her right in the middle of the wedding reception because of how unenthused and disengaged she is about the proceedings he seems to buy into the hoffman dempsey movie logic that the rest of the film is trying to put into question which at first just felt like a misstep on von trier s part to me but the more i thought about it the more i realized that it s actually not so inconceivable that an otherwise loving fiancé might back out of a wedding under these circumstances because we are so conditioned by film to think of weddings as absolutely authentic experiences in the second half of the film the question of ritual again resurfaces in the face of the end of the world this is a circumstance that we have no ready rituals for because it has never happened before so we have to make them up claire proposes a glass of wine on the terrace which justine violently rejects instead justine gathers up claire s child who would of course not have been able to enjoy the bourgeois ritual of the glass of wine and runs to the forest to gather wood which they fashion into a makeshift teepee where claire eventually joins them the teepee is an invented ritual it looks like a ritual because of its primitivism and it is endowed by justine s performative fiat with magical protective properties this ritual unlike the one claire proposed was clearly designed with the child in mind it was meant to include and to comfort him it also feels more authentic than either the wedding was or the glass of wine would be because it was tailored to this specific purpose a unique ritual for an unrepeatable event j l austin of course has argued that it is precisely the fact of their historical repetition that gives utterances such as with this ring i thee wed their power to make things true in the world but since at least wordsworth we ve expected powerful feeling to take the form of spontaneous overflows which seem difficult to square with the iterative nature of most rituals this is the kind of inauthenticity that the first half of melancholia deals with justine s desire to feel authentically leads her to wander out on the golf course in the dark instead of staying at her wedding reception and cutting the cake but the second half of the film presents a more durkheimian view of ritual as something that permits structures contains and maybe even produces powerful feelings one of the answers i expect my imaginary poetry and film students might give if i asked them what else does the planet stand for is justine s wedding at first the prevailing opinion of melancholia is that it will pass by the earth at an incredibly close distance and provide an exciting but safe astronomical spectacle it seems itself like a rite of passage humanity will have its brush with death but will emerge unharmed it is eagerly anticipated by claire s husband and son and presumably by many other people around the world but like justine s wedding what was supposed to be a transformative close encounter turns slowly and agonizingly into a catastrophic collision it s the very externality of the end of the world that makes the second half of the film feel less awful than the first half unlike justine s depression the planet melancholia is a real observable physical object that everybody eventually agrees is a huge bummer rituals to greet it therefore stand on far less ambiguous emotional ground than justine s wedding did both claire s proposed glass of wine and justine s teepee have specific situational goals and reflect specific attitudes toward the end of the world claire proposes a classic bourgeois down with the ship attitude akin to the orchestra on the titanic while what justine offers is something both more imaginative and more sacred but i don t think the film comes solidly down on the side of either formal ritual like the wedding or spontaneous personal ritual like the teepee the wedding scenes are utterly gorgeous and i think ultimately von trier presents the wedding not as a straitjacket from which justine needs to escape but as an ambitious failed project both this glamorous complicated event and the very idea of marital bliss are enormously difficult feats for a person with severe depression what is easy for such a person is of course the end of the world it seems like something justine has been expecting the planet stands for both depression and ritual then among other things and von trier asks us to consider the disconnect between situation and emotion in both cases if ritual is supposed to structure and produce powerful feelings it certainly presents problems for people whose feelings don t function in the usual way impossible loves essays december 12 2011 at 1 35 pm posted in personal 2 comments i am delighted to announce the publication of impossible loves essays when my friends heather and steve started up rock paper tiger press last year they proposed that their first book be a collection of essays from this blog and i was thrilled and honored the essays have been edited polished and a little de blog ized for publication and i hope you ll like them here s the copy from the back cover to read mcnellis s essays is to find yourself having one of those late night conversations you always thought awaited you those conversations where for two hours before dawn everything made complete sense she s good very good on ideas and thinkers excellent on poets and she s miraculous on love there is a real discursive ease of thinking in the essays a desire to communicate the difficult joys of being human and the reader can only hope to reciprocate dr timothy c baker ph d author of george mackay brown and the philosophy of community possible loves are for fools the wise have impossible loves reads a journal fragment from christian mystic simone weil whose life and works are examined here amid a seemingly unlikely assortment of topics an argument for maintaining a reverence for commitment while rejecting a traditional sentimental embrace of outmoded family structures becomes an inquiry into weil s drive toward self sacrifice a consideration of what weil might have had in common with libertine and frequent critic georges bataille develops into a discussion of timothy treadwell the tragic grizzly bear enamored subject of werner herzog s grizzly man later delving into the tradition of reticence in american poetry is brought into relief against the author s own experience at burning man where the beat never stops like a long discussion with a sharply intelligent friend impossible loves moves effortlessly from topic to topic without ever losing its focus nearly every paper in my academic career has the secret or not so secret message of please please try to love one another and i think it would not be exaggerating to say that many if not most works of art have exactly this message as well mcnellis writes admitting in the same essay that emotions are embarrassing embarrassing complex even impossible though it may be love is still the answer but that doesn t make the questions any less interesting you can get the book from amazon or you can order it through your local bookstore for those of you keeping track i have now finished my ph d in english and am about to stumble across the finish line of my first semester of adjuncting but i will have a nice long six week winter break during which i hope to bring you a slew of new posts on the occupy movement and on what i ve been reading cheers on violence and dreaming november 20 2011 at 7 20 pm posted in ethics excess film political violence 2 comments the spectacle of police officers at uc davis pepper spraying peaceful seated students last week has right...