I’ve been engaging in some intensive debate with the irreverent Sid Volter on Lars Von Trier’s latest cinematic offering: Melancholia. Sid is of the opinion that the film offers up one of the best portraits of a character with chronic clinical depression that he has seen at the cinema. While I am not inclined to disagree entirely with this sentiment, I remain hacked off with the fact that again and again, the mainstream media insists on portraying the depressed woman against a backdrop of glamour and affluence.
For those of you who have not seen the movie, check the trailer that I have posted here. Kirsten Dunst plays a passive aggressive depressive who manages to destroy her marriage on her wedding night and later comes to live with her affluent sister, where she plays out her illness against a backdrop of idle indifference and crystal chandeliers. The imagery constantly links women and nature as seen 1min into the trailer where Dunst is depicted naked, gazing skyward as a architypal reclining nude. There’s also a hefty stench of the Freudian hysteria stereotype attached to Dunst’s role as the promiscuous disobedient wife who fails to satisfy her husband’s need for sex on their wedding night. Yes the depression is quite convincing, but what a shame that is comes wrapped in gender stereotype and archaic cliche.
I’ve blogged here before about women like Sally Brampton and Emma Forrest who seem to embody the popular perception of the depressed female. I don’t at all discount their symptoms as genuine, but at the same time I’m not surprised when journalists such as Janet Street Porter (a generally ridiculous individual for all other intents and purposes) question links between gender, depression and affluence.
There must be some well crafted female depressive characters out there in film. Would anyone like to suggest one to cheer me up a bit?
Melancholia official trailer
I rocked up to the private view of the ICA’s Freeze offering last night to check out what I would call a ‘mixed’ bag of work. Both the painterly and sculptural pieces on offer (by Jacob Kassay and Franz West) carried the dull whiff of the commercial art world, perhaps not surprising given that Gregor Muir former director of Hauser and Wirth is now at the helm.
Thankfully the work of a third artist Frances Stark, tucked away in what used to be the ICA’s theatre space turned out to be a compelling and thought provoking film installation about the intricacies of intimacy in online dating. My Best Thing (named after a slang term one character uses for his genitals) is a single channel animated video that tracks the online relationship between the artist and two men. It veers entertainingly between masturbation and sometimes self conscious intellectual debate. Both the artist and her lovers are represented on screen by avatars that have computerised voices. The male characters also have subtitled speech. While the avatars remain motionless during masturbation (thank goodness) the subtitles and robotic vocals offer staccato representations of relationships that feel intimate despite their remoteness. As the characters interact more frequently over time, the couplings begin to involve many complications, with each partner obviously revealing heavily edited versions of their offline existence. As the ICA’s free sheet points out
“Through the medium of animation, Stark raises questions about the difference between therapeutic confession and performance”
Obviously this duality between cathartic online confessional and partial self revelation reflects the kind of concerns that are central to my research. I’ve talked frequently both on here and in my MRes pitch about the increasing practice of online psychotherapy and the general insinuation made in a recent addition of Journal for Clinical Psychology that sometimes patients reveal more in depth personal information when talking to a therapist via a computer. How much of the identities revealed in My Best Thing are based on truth to life is impossible to tell, but as a viewer attempting to join the dots is fascinating.
I’ve become super interested in the evolution of the ICA as a public space since I wrote this article for the Guardian. I’m hoping that I will be well positioned to track their future progress, given that they are part of the consortia that runs the MRes I’m currently sitting. I really hope that their new director continues to show this kind of compelling video work and goes for a little less of the whiffy commercial painting!
