Kaygıya ya da Varlığa Batmak: Melancholia Filminin Psiko-Felsefi Bir Çözümlemesi
Sinking into Anxiety or Being: A Psycho-Philosophical Analysis of The Movie Melancholia

Summary/Abstract: Some objects, like thoughts, have massless behavior. This feature is considered much more important than their physical characteristics. Such meaning-laden objects trigger the deepest feelings of people with melancholic and permeable selves, who are highly sensitive to cosmic forces and supernatural beings. Celestial bodies such as a meteor, a comet or a flying saucer (UFO) heading towards the world, or strange birth events can still be the cause of many conscious and unconscious fantasies and concerns today. Such facts indicate that an objective reality may be accompanied by a psychic component. Therefore dreams, insights or visions may be productions of an unconscious archetype related to a physical event. In works of art, in which the unconscious is used as a material, an apparently material object can also be an archetypal image in which a psychic content is reflected. Lars Von Trier is a philosopher-director who cares about expressing the mental with images. Von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) is an important cinematic work in which the unconscious is visualized as an image projected onto an object in the outside world, independent of the individual psyche. The film Melancholia deals with the manifestations and consequences of existential anxieties caused by the planet Melancholy, which threatens the Earth and life. In the film, which is a metaphorical narrative of the unconscious, the planet Melancholia, which assumes a psychic function associated with the main character Justine, performs an autonomous activity of the unconscious. Justine’s psychological experience with this planet is based on her vision of the circle image, the archetype of the Self (wholeness) expressed in mandala shapes. This study aims to reveal the ontic and ontological existential concerns revealed by the planet Melancholia, which has turned into a collective phenomenon in the movie Melancholia, through Heidegger’s concept of ‘anxiety’ (angst) and Jung’s archetype of ‘the Self’. As a result of the study, it was determined that the planet Melancholia is not subject to the law of causality as it is a materialized psychic thought. It has been seen that the planet Melancholia, which reflects the understanding of the characters about himself, is a projection of the Self archetype in the outer world and acts in a way to compensate Justine, who has ontological existence anxiety.

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