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"Melancholy is psychically characterized [...] by the loss of the ability to love, by inhibition in response to any activity, and by a dejection of self-feeling which finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment" [Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (in Metapsychology)]
A review of Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier was written on Debaser a few years ago. So why write another one? Because, after watching it for the sixth or seventh time, I thought it would be interesting to see a slightly different perspective from that of the user who wrote the previous review, perhaps analyzing different aspects.
The film retraces the life, from childhood to the present, of Joe (a monstrous Charlotte Gainsbourg in adulthood and a beautiful Stacy Martin in youth), a woman affected by nymphomania, who tells her story to a solitary man, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). I am not inclined to recount every single episode in detail, because I believe that discovery is one of the greatest pleasures, and I do not wish to deprive you of that pleasure.
Nymphomaniac is the third chapter of the so-called "trilogy of depression," which began in 2008 with Antichrist and continued in 2011 with Melancholia. In my opinion, it is the heaviest, transmitting the most negative sensations, painting a world completely corrupted by evil and selfishness, devoid of love, even where one would expect to find it. And even when Joe finds someone to love, they invariably abandon or betray her (in this sense, the ending is absolutely chilling). The atmosphere that permeates all four hours of this film is icy, even more so than those of the two previous chapters, right from the very first sequence. Indeed, all three films begin with a sequence of beauty and elegance rarely found in contemporary cinema. However, the opening scenes of Antichrist and Melancholia are always accompanied by a musical score, while that of Nymphomaniac is without music; all we hear are diegetic sounds that describe an isolated, cold, and depressing place (like the life that Von Trier represents in this film), until we first see a detail of Joe: only then does music come into play, which, however, is not a classical piece (Antichrist had the aria Lascia ch'io pianga from Rinaldo by Händel; in Melancholia, the prelude to Tristan and Isolde by Wagner), but an industrial metal piece, a song by the German band Rammstein, Führe mich, another hint of the greater rawness and harshness of this film.
I am a terrible human being.
These are some of the very first words that Joe tells Seligman when he brings her safely to his home after finding her in bad shape in a nearby alley. This phrase, and many others to come, reveal an extremely important psychological aspect that all three protagonists of the depression trilogy share: what Sigmund Freud calls Melancholie, melancholy, described with the words I've quoted at the beginning of the review. Now I would like to analyze Freud's definition of melancholy point by point, in relation to our protagonist: therefore, from this point on, there will be SPOILERS that, if you haven't seen this masterpiece yet, I recommend avoiding.
The loss of the ability to love becomes evident in Joe after her father's death (although from her youth, she, along with her sex-addicted friends, organized a group that explicitly opposed society based on love) and is reflected in all her relationships with others: all the relationships that she managed to construct with difficulty crumble, either due to Joe's insatiable libido (as in the case of Jerome and their son, whom she abandons to continue the sessions with K, an expert "beater" whom women go to for abuse) or because they betray her, for instance, P, the young girl she cares for like a daughter after beginning her debt collection career; or again, all of Joe's lovers before her love for Jerome believe she loves them, so much so that one of them abandons his family (wife, Uma Thurman, and three children) to stay with her... and when Thurman visits Joe with the three children, the protagonist is forced to tell the truth ("I don't love your father," after she had told him "I love you too much"). Love is a ghostly feeling in Joe's life: it's either nonexistent or, when present, fades painfully.
The dejection of self is manifested during Joe's dialogue with Seligman, in which she repeatedly speaks ill of herself, painting herself as a monster, a terrible human being. And, if we may, the self-directed violence she is compelled to undergo because of her sex addiction might be seen as punishment subconsciously inflicted by her self for her malice.
The continuous juxtaposition of Joe's degrading life story with cultural aspects brought to our attention by Seligman, in my opinion, might imply how modern cultural world is in decay, becoming squalid and completely negative, so much so that Joe often ignores her interlocutor's incursions and, when she doesn't, she criticizes them (as in the chapter "The Eastern and Western Church (The Silent Duck)," where Seligman tries to guess what kind of knot K uses by explaining the story of a mountaineer, to which Joe responds by saying "That was your weakest incursion" (quoting from memory, he probably didn't use those exact words). When culture tries to penetrate our lives, we tend to avoid or denigrate it because the modern world is in slow and inexorable decay.
Discussing the technical aspect of this work of art is almost pointless: Lars Von Trier reaches his stylistic peak here, delivering a truly extraordinary directing performance, even better than in many other masterpieces (like the previous chapters of the trilogy or "Dancer in the Dark"), merging diegetic and extradiegetic images into a single entity: Rammstein, in the song heard at the beginning of the film, say "Zwei Bilder nur ein Bild," two images in one image, exactly what Lars does in this film (consider the description of some of her lovers in the chapter "The Little Organ School").
P.s. I am not a psychologist nor do I study psychology, but this is a field that interests me, and so I enjoy reading and delving into psychological topics: therefore, what I have written, which is more an analysis than a review, might be a well-founded argument or entirely unfounded.
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