The acts of profane illogic, the breaks from reality, the rapid-cycling mood swings, the high heights and then the dead-eyed anhedonia – these qualities apply to Lars Von Trier’s woeful leading ladies and to the style and rhythm of the films themselves, making his oeuvre a solid starting point for the development of a conception of “bipolar cinema,” a concept coined by David Coleman in his book “The Bipolar Express: Manic Depression and the Movies.” Coleman articulates “bipolar cinema” as a three-pronged umbrella concept – there are films that center on bipolar disorder, films created by those with bipolar disorder and films that evoke the qualities of manic-depressive episodes in their narrative strategies. Von Trier squarely belongs in the third category, offering a nuanced and clear-eyed visual representation of the experience of the condition’s manic upswings and depressive lows. Due to this expressionistic approach, Von Trier not only offers fully realized heroines with complex psychological profiles but also allows the audience to embark on their emotional journey on an intimate level through his moving storytelling. Von Trier expresses his themes not only explicitly in his screenplays but also through the use of such tools as visual metaphor, recurring motifs, thoughtful camerawork and overall evocative mise-en-scene. His films, with these hyper-connections and frequent tonal shifts, themselves operate like the bipolar mind

Warrick, Alexandra Grace

Columbia University Academic Commons

  	1	Alexandra Warrick Professor Caryn James Lab in Writing Film Criticism Wednesday, December 16, 2015  MORE FROM THE SUNSET:  LARS VON TRIER AND “BIPOLAR CINEMA”   “I’ve always demanded more from the sunset.”  So confides Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the harrowed heroine of Danish director Lars Von Trier’s two-part opus Nymphomaniac.  More colors, more intensity, a bigger high, a more blistering peak: this is the drive and the downfall of Von Trier’s women, who, by this compulsive pursuit, are inevitably burned up, burnt out.  All three women experience similarly volatile emotional journeys: Dancer in the Dark’s Selma (Björk), a sweet-hearted, distractible factory worker, dreams of a world that bursts into song and dance and raucous color like her favorite classic musicals before her degenerative eye disease makes the stage go dark.  Melancholia’s Justine (Kirsten Dunst) plunges from the cake- and rug-cutting of a dream wedding to pitch-black, hopeless catatonia.  Nymphomaniac’s Joe, who we’re first introduced to as a laconic youth (Stacy Martin), fights against existential numbness throughout her life by seeking out constant orgasmic release in increasingly risky ways, a compulsive itch-scratching that ultimately ruins her life.  What comes up must go down for these women, a hallmark of Von Trier’s dark fairy tales.   The acts of profane illogic, the breaks from reality, the rapid-cycling mood swings, the high heights and then the dead-eyed anhedonia – these qualities apply to Von Trier’s woeful leading ladies and to the style and rhythm of the films themselves, making   	2	his oeuvre a solid starting point for the development of a conception of “bipolar cinema,” a concept coined by David Coleman in	his	book	“The	Bipolar	Express:	Manic	Depression	and	the	Movies.”		Coleman	articulates	“bipolar	cinema”	as	a	three-pronged	umbrella	concept	–	there	are	films	that	center	on	bipolar	disorder,	films	created	by	those	with	bipolar	disorder	and	films	that	evoke	the	qualities	of	manic-depressive	episodes	in	their	narrative	strategies.		Von	Trier	squarely	belongs	in	the	third	category,	offering a nuanced and clear-eyed visual representation of the experience of the condition’s manic upswings and depressive lows.  Due to this expressionistic approach, Von Trier not only offers fully realized heroines with complex psychological profiles but also allows the audience to embark on their emotional journey on an intimate level through his moving storytelling.  Von Trier expresses his themes not only explicitly in his screenplays but also through the use of such tools as visual metaphor, recurring motifs, thoughtful camerawork and overall evocative mise-en-scene.  His films, with these hyper-connections and frequent tonal shifts, themselves operate like the bipolar mind.  Von Trier is no stranger to the ravages of mental illness, and his explorations of the theme are, by his own admission, intentional.  A longtime sufferer from depression, he shared with the press that he uses the filmmaking “to get out of bed” – his depressive episodes would cause him to avoid eye contact with interviewers at festivals and sequester himself from the public for long stretches of time.1  Von Trier was first inspired to write Melancholia after advice from his therapist that he create a filmic meditation on 																																																								1 Coleman, David. The Bipolar Express: Manic Depression and the Movies.  Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Print. p. 303-304. 	  	3	his experience of grief; the film joins Nymphomaniac and Antichrist in a trilogy he dubs the Depression Trilogy for its heavy commitment to the theme, with Dancer in the Dark 2belonging to the Golden Heart Trilogy of women facing depressing circumstances and maintaining their dogged positivity.  His films explicitly examine one side of the manic-depressive spectrum closely; however, Von Trier depicts the havoc of hypomania as well, whether intentionally or not.  The result is a clutch of films that offer expressionist portraits of the suffering bipolar disorder causes in those affected by subjecting audiences to a cinematic approximation of its whiplash effect.  His cinematic experiences thus succeed in being transformative emotional experiences; they also foster a sense of empathy in neurotypical audiences and recognition in those who have experienced similar mental health struggles.   PREMONITIONS OF CATASTROPHE  This dynamic is first established by the moody, metaphorical musical interludes that open all three films, introducing their universe by instilling a lingering sense of dread typical of the disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV.2  Dancer in the Dark opens the curtains on its tragedy through a profoundly unsettling depiction of the visual experience of going blind, Selma’s ultimate fate.  The overture is scored with sumptuous horns and the swirls of color are pleasing, feeling perfectly at home in Fantasia.  However, in light of the fact that the experience of macular degeneration begins with your vision being blurred by a smudged hodgepodge of color (as described by sufferers), the opening takes on a darker tone.  The film’s 																																																								2	"Bipolar and Related Disorders." Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Association, Web. 	  	4	overarching symbolism speaks to joy and its snuffing out – Selma idolizes the hyperactive visual kinetics of musical theatre, but she is progressively unable to experience them.  She is slowly becoming, at least in one facet, dead to the world.   The fact that the film sets the audience up for her ultimate loss of a pleasurable sense directly conforms to the anhedonic nature of bipolar disorder; the sense of its inevitability does as well, as those suffering from manic depression report their expectation of the cyclical return of their absence of feeling. Selma understands that the arrival of her fate, being hereditary, is only a matter of time, and we as an audience join her in the countdown.  The film’s perpetual mood is one of dread, even during the rambunctious musical numbers (which themselves inevitably end in Selma breaking machinery and endangering herself in her carelessness).  The worst is constantly breathing down our necks.   Melancholia is similar in its upfront, Cassandra-esque nature, as our first shot of Justine directly informs us of the end of the world that arrives at the denouement of the film.  Within the shot, Justine is uncannily immobile while dead birds rain down out of the sky behind her; the stillness is agonizing.  Imagery of Justine that ensues features her in a crucified pose surrounded by billowing winged insects and a shot of her raising her hands, a half-smile on her face, as electric beams of light connect her fingertips to the ether.  The loss of her life is imminent, yet she is calm, even comforted.  This is in keeping with the bipolar depressive’s ruminating, doomsday-ready acceptance of the worst; after all, Von Trier was directly inspired to write the film after his therapist prodded him to explore how those suffering from clinical pessimism of this nature often receive disasters with a sense of serenity.  Once again, Von Trier intends us to begin the   	5	film with the knowledge that the worst is headed our way – all we can do is sit back and wait for disaster to strike.  Nymphomaniac’s setup echoes its grim conclusion by somewhat subtler means; while its significance is undetectable one one’s first watch, it still successfully sets up the film’s prevailing mood.  Nymphomaniac, which ends with some nasty business involving the urination on Gainsbourg’s character by her betrayer, begins with the suggestive trickling of water, a somewhat off-putting but deft instance of symmetrical foreshadowing on the part of the director.  The camera goes on to glide around alleyways until finally arriving on a tableau of defeat: Joe lies on the concrete, beaten, humiliated and alone.  Once the kindly Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) discovers her, the film goes on to function almost entirely in flashback; of course, the conclusion of the tale she recounts is already evident, allowing the audience to understand that all of the moments of comfort and happiness that visit Joe are to be short-lived.  This anticipation of the bleak is quintessentially Von Trier, who is quoted as saying that “some things may be thrilling precisely because we know what's going to happen, but not how they will happen.”  It is also a hallmark symptom of catastrophizing in mood disorders; the afflicted are always sure of the “what,” even if the how is “how” is unclear.    HYPOMANIA According to the DSM-IV, among the symptoms of hypomania and mania are the afflicted feeling an extreme sense of elation or euphoria, having delusions that one’s day-to-day is operatically larger-than-life, and making rapid, seemingly unrelated connections   	6	between concepts.3  Dancer in the Dark’s spontaneous musical numbers are exuberant explosions of dizzy feeling: colors become more vivid, quotidian machine noises become a techno symphony and the co-worker/dancers surrounding Selma adore her as much as she adores them.  The world is ecstatic, idyllic and just as it should be; suffering is a million miles away, a common belief of the manic.  Selma’s world snaps into a hyperdrive that is instantly dropped, however, once reality sets in; the reality segments of the film instead take place under downcast, depressing Washington skies, shot in a drab near-sepia with little enchantment to be found.  Selma is no hyper-charismatic performer, as she is in her dreamland; in her drama classes, she is limp as The Sound of Music’s Maria, struggling with her blocking as her vision slowly goes.  Selma’s world is a jagged line graph: she soars to the high heights of elation in her elaborate fantasy worlds before plummeting back down to her oppressive existence.    Melancholia is a film fond of portraying its lead in shots that aestheticize Justine’s suffering in an operatic way, vaunting her to the level of a work of art or icon – a sort of visual grandiosity, if you will.  Towards the beginning of the film, she strikes a Jesus pose; several moments later, she is Ophelia in the waters, replete with flowers.  This sense that her experience of existential ennui is larger-than-life, overshadowing all things, is visually embodied by the planet Melancholia itself, as we see shots of it slowly but surely dwarfing Earth.  In a hypomanic or mixed state, to quote Pearl S. Buck, “a touch is a blow…a misfortune is a tragedy…and failure is death.”4  Her ambivalence, her 																																																								3	"Bipolar and Related Disorders." Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Association, Web.	4	"Pearl S. Buck Quotes." Pearl S. Buck Quotes (Author of The Good Earth). Goodreads.  Web.   	7	catatonia, her doubts and her fears – all manifest in the shape of an all-eclipsing, world-destroying rock floating through space on a direct path, coincidentally, towards the side of the Earth occupied by her stately house in the country.  Von Trier’s choice of artistic, religious and celestial symbolism in this film clearly evokes the experience of bipolar delusion as Justine’s inner emotional turmoil inflates to staggering proportions.     Nymphomaniac is creatively structured around the tangential, often wildly off-topic connections made by Seligman and Joe as they discuss her past.  Religion, art history, philosophy, mathematics, music, and even fly-fishing are looped into their conversation, often connected by a completely tenuous thread.  This is one of the film’s strengths as a propulsive framing device, but it often evokes the kind of scattered thinking typical of someone in the throes of hypomania; the two leapfrog from discussions of cake forks to gun-shaped tea stains with utter confidence that their statement will resolve itself in a Grand Point.  Hypomania and creativity of thought and rhetoric are well documented as linked, leading to many of people with bipolar disorder entering the arts and producing a large volume of work; the creativity of Seligman’s allusions, metaphors and parables therefore completely conforms to the symptom.  (This does not always mean his digressions lead somewhere insightful, however; “I think this was one of your weakest digressions,” Joe frankly replies to one of his harder sells.)  DEPRESSION Of course, then comes the downswing, wherein our heroines are hit with the immobilization and spiritual exhaustion typical of the cycle of manic depression.  Von Trier’s representative motif of this exhaustion is, consistently, the bed – after all, when 																																																																																																																																																																						  	8	people hit an emotional wall, a universally relatable impulse is to cocoon oneself in one’s sheets to insulate oneself against one’s inner anguish.  The bed becomes a running visual theme of Von Trier’s throughout the films, linked to the characters’ lowest moments of despair.  In Dancer in the Dark, the significant bed is Selma’s flimsy prison cell cot, on which she is detained before execution.  Von Trier shoots her with shaky handheld camera as she lay weeping on the cot, the shot a claustrophobic close-up as she peers out from behind her fidgeting hands.  We are given a voyeuristic look of this woman’s last moments, experiencing the last creature comfort she will in her life – the ability to lie down and rest.   Justine’s prison in Melancholia, however, is her wedding, wherein she is confined by the pasted-on smile she is forced into by her relatives, whom she tries desperately to escape; once again, the bed appears as a visual motif tied closely to the character’s pitch-black mood.  One of the first indicators of the character’s depression comes when she is able to sneak away from the festivities and cuddle up in bed away from guests’ eyes, mountains of frothy wedding dress still imprisoning her.  This is shot in claustrophobic close-up as well – the bride can truly never escape someone’s prying gaze, even if it is that of the camera.  She attempts to describe her emotional state to her sister Claire (frequent Von Trier collaborator Charlotte Gainsbourg) when discovered: “I'm trudging through this gray woolly yarn, it's clinging to my legs, it's really heavy to drag along…”; later on in the film, she must be physically dragged from her bed and towards a bath, her emotional catatonia is so extreme.  This is again shot voyeuristically as the camera bobs behind Claire’s back, peering over her shoulder at Justine as the bride lies with the responsiveness of a corpse.      	9	Nymphomaniac’s second half opens with Joe’s legs sticking out from under her comforter, despondent over the fact that her ability to feel sexual sensation has mysteriously disappeared in the middle of her intercourse with Jerôme (Shia LeBeouf); the film then transitions to the kind of extreme close-up of her affectless face characteristic of Von Trier.  This loss of one of her five senses directly hearkens back to Selma’s loss of eyesight and inability to watch her cherished Hollywood musicals: both women cannot take pleasure in their driving forces and primary sources of joy due to this deterioration, which echoes depressives’ hallmark inability to enjoy what once gave them pleasure.  (It’s also worth noting that alternating between hypersexuality and loss of interest in sex – the film’s driving theme – is a prominent symptom of bipolar disorder.)  In a Von Trier film, the bed is a soporific, immobilizing symbol of all-encompassing anhedonia – it’s quicksand from which the characters struggle to escape.   VON	TRIER’S	BIPOLAR	CINEMA		 You	are	sentenced	to	death	for	a	crime	you	were	coerced	to	commit.		A	rogue	planet	destroys	Earth	and	everyone	you	love.		Everyone	you	trust	winds	up	betraying	and	taking	advantage	of	you.		With	overwhelmingly	feel-bad	grand	finales	like	these,	why	is	it	that	people	continue	to	seek	out	Von	Trier’s	emotionally	punishing	films?		What	qualities	make	his	movies	so	hypnotizing	in	their	bleakness?		Is	it	mass	audience	masochism,	or	is	there	something	more	at	play?		Simply	put,	Von	Trier	takes	his	audience	to	drastic	emotional	realms	many	viewers	may	have	not	immediately	experienced.		One	leaves	his	films	as	cratered	as	his	heroines	are,	and	the	collective	methexis	shared	by	the	audience	as	it	carries	the	same	emotional	weight	is	a	testament	to	the	power	of	Von	Trier’s	filmmaking.		The	empathy	this	  	10	fosters	is	especially	important	in	today’s	world,	where	mental	illness	is	still	consistently	misunderstood,	mischaracterized,	stigmatized	and	demonized	in	cinema.		The	source	of	villains’	senseless	evil	in	superhero,	horror,	and	other	such	genre	flicks	is	consistently	indicated	to	be	mental	illness,	despite	the	fact	that	the	mentally	ill	are	statistically	more	likely	to	be	victims	than	perpetrators	of	violence.		A	way	to	approach	an	understanding	of	where	Von	Trier	fits	in	the	spectrum	of	David	Coleman’s	developing	theory	of	“bipolar	cinema”	is	to	compare	and	contrast	his	films	with	others	that	belong	under	the	term’s	larger	umbrella.		While	it	can’t	definitively	be	said	that	his	work	belongs	under	the	first	and	second	prongs	of	the	umbrella	(films	centering	on	and	made	by	bipolar	sufferers)	as	the	characters	are	not	explicitly	diagnosed	and	Von	Trier	is	by	his	own	admission	unipolar,	his	work	is	a	clear-cut,	stellar	example	of	the	third	category	–	movies	that,	through	mise-en-scene	and	other	storytelling	techniques,	evoke	the	qualities	of	the	quintessential	manic-depressive	episode.		For	the	sake	of	example:	David	O.	Russell’s	Silver	Linings	Playbook	belongs	to	the	first	category;	Vertigo,	the	second	(Alfred	Hitchcock	purportedly	suffered	from	hereditary	manic	depression.)5			The	third	category	that	Von	Trier	occupies	might	potentially	share	the	designation	with	Baz	Lurhmann’s	Moulin	Rouge!,	Chantal	Akerman’s	Je	Tu	Il	Elle	and,	more	recently,	Rick	Alverson’s	Entertainment	as	films	that	attempt	to	expressionistically	depict	the	mental	experience	of	manic	depression.		As	the	theory	of	“bipolar	cinema”	is	still	being	fleshed	out,	there	is	admittedly	no	definitive																																																									5	Coleman, David. The Bipolar Express: Manic Depression and the Movies.  Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Print. p. IX.	  	11	consensus	on	its	parameters.		However,	the	fact	that	the	theory	is	being	explored	at	all	is	an	exciting	step	in	the	right	direction	for	healthy	media	portrayal	of	mental	illness,	a	cause	of	which	Von	Trier	is	decisively	leading	the	charge	with	his	exquisite	portraits	of	women	on	the	edge.			

More From the Sunset: Lars von Trier and "Bipolar Cinema"

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8NC68T2/download

More From the Sunset: Lars von Trier and "Bipolar Cinema"

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Columbia University Academic Commons