Apocalyptic Cinema as an Earnest Thought of Death Kierkegaard and Melancholia Roger Mas Soler

309 Pages·2017·1.55 MB·English

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PhD Dissertation

Apocalyptic CCiinneemmaa as an Earnest Thought of Death
KKiieerrkkeeggaaaarrdd and Melancholia

Roger Mas Soler

PPhhDD Programme: Philosophy
Universitat AAuuttòònnoommaa de Barcelona - Department of PPhhiilloossoopphhyy
Københavns UUnniivveerrssiitteett - Department of Arts and CCuullttuurraall Studies

SSuuppeerrvviissoorr:: Dr Begonya Saez Tajafuerce ((UUAABB))
Co-SSuuppeerrvviissoorr:: Isak Winkel Holm (KU)
Co-SSuuppeerrvviissoorr:: Laura Llevadot Pascual ((UUBB))

2017

Écoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville,
Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée.
Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut
lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne
disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années
endormi dans les meubles et le lingue, qu’il attend patiemment
dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les
paperasses, eu que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le
malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses
rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.
La Peste, Albert Camus

Acknowledgments
To my family, for their unconditional love and support, and for creating everyday new
occasions for me to be grateful to them. Especially to my mother, for her endless
sacrifices, which I do not deserve.
To all my friends, for everything. I have no words to describe how much I owe them.
Their presence has filled my life with great happiness. My eternal gratitude to Ignasi
and Toni, for sustaining me when I was unable to stand on my own.
To my colleagues in the United States and Denmark, for to accompanying me and
helping me in this process. To Guðmundur, Rasmus, Claus, Sam, and Uroš, for their
love when I was going through one of the worst periods of my life. To Bjarke and Stine,
for their friendship, advices, and assistance.
To the Hong Kierkegaard Library, the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, the
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona—
with a special mention to its Department of Philosophy—for accepting me as a
researcher. To all the people of these institutions, for their teachings and for providing
me with the means to carry out my investigation. To Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund
for their dedication.
To the Government of Catalonia for granting me a FI fellowship, which allowed me to
write this dissertation.
To my teachers and to my students, who have made me a better professor and a better
person.
To Isak and Laura, for their collaboration. To Begonya, for putting her trust in me, for
her supervision, and for her tireless commitment. Without her this dissertation would
not have been possible.

In loving memory of my grandparents.

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Abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to argue the potentiality of some apocalyptic movies to
be a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s own death in the terms explained
by Søren Kierkegaard in the discourse “At a Graveside” (1845). In order accomplish
this, I will first examine Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in his corpus, in which he
criticises the external understanding of death and underlines its inexplicability and its
irreducible subjective aspect. In this section I will focus specifically on what is stated
in the aforesaid discourse. Second, I will defend cinema itself as a privileged medium
to convey the apocalyptic imaginary. Third, I will examine the field of apocalyptic
movies in order to define a type of cinema—which will be called montrage
apocalyptic cinema—that, in the light of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in “At a
Graveside”, will be considered as a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s
own death. In this regard, I will argue that, for their features—which revolve around
the essential ambiguity of our existence—, these apocalyptic films have the capacity
to allow us to subjectively confront and appropriate the thought of one’s own death.
And finally, I will analyse Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) as a paradigmatic
example of this type of montrage apocalyptic cinema.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. 5
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 6
Abbreviations of Søren Kierkegaard’s works ................................................................. 11

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 15
1. Methodological introduction ....................................................................................... 17
1.1. Genesis and objectives......................................................................................... 17
1.2. Structure, state of the art, limits, and exclusions ................................................. 20
1.3. Final methodological considerations ................................................................... 25
2. The thought of one’s own death .................................................................................. 27
2.1. Awareness of mortality ........................................................................................ 27
2.2. Death as taboo in contemporary Western societies ............................................. 28
2.3. Critiques of the taboo argument .......................................................................... 31
2.4. The contemporary episteme of death................................................................... 36
3. Approach to Kierkegaard ............................................................................................ 39
3.1. Authorship, indirect communication, and the hermeneutic problem .................. 39
3.2. The single individual: subjectivity, truth, and anxiety ........................................ 52
3.3. Kierkegaard as a key strain in the philosophy of death ....................................... 58

Chapter I: Death in Kierkegaard ................................................................................. 65
1. Early writings .............................................................................................................. 67
2. Middle writings ........................................................................................................... 80
3. Late writings ................................................................................................................ 87
4. “At a Graveside” .......................................................................................................... 92
4.1. Preamble .............................................................................................................. 92
4.2. The Epicurean position ........................................................................................ 93
4.3. Memento mori and living as dying ...................................................................... 94
4.4. The problem of representation ............................................................................. 97
4.5. The earnest thought of death ............................................................................. 102
4.6. The certain uncertainty of death ........................................................................ 109
4.7. The fear of death ................................................................................................ 111
4.8. Death’s retroactive power .................................................................................. 113
4.9. The temporal double-movement of the earnest thought of death ...................... 117
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4.10. The earnest thought of death and repetition .................................................... 121
4.11. Self-examination .............................................................................................. 134
4.12. Final notes ....................................................................................................... 136
4.13. One step further ............................................................................................... 137

Chapter II: Apocalyptic Cinema ................................................................................ 139
1. Historical approach .................................................................................................... 141
1.1. Pervasiveness of apocalypticism ....................................................................... 141
1.2. Apocalypse as a literary genre ........................................................................... 144
1.3. Sources of the apocalyptic genre ....................................................................... 146
1.4. Contemporary nuclear dread ............................................................................. 151
1.5. Secularisation of the apocalypse and penetration in popular culture ................ 153
1.6. Mass appeal of apocalypticism .......................................................................... 159
2. Apocalyptic cinema ................................................................................................... 164
2.1. Cinema as an apocalyptic medium .................................................................... 164
2.2. Post-9/11 pessimistic turn .................................................................................. 170
2.3. Apocalyptic movies and the thought of one’s own death .................................. 180
2.3.1. The unthinkable and anxiety....................................................................... 180
2.3.2. A montrage apocalyptic cinema ................................................................. 184
2.3.3. Montrage apocalyptic cinema and one’s own death .................................. 204

Chapter III: Melancholia ............................................................................................ 223
1. Initial approach to Melancholia ................................................................................. 225
1.1. Reception ........................................................................................................... 225
1.2. Synopsis ............................................................................................................. 228
1.2.1. Prologue ...................................................................................................... 228
1.2.2. Part I: Justine .............................................................................................. 229
1.2.3. Part II: Claire .............................................................................................. 231
2. Melancholia as an occasion for the earnest though of death ..................................... 234
2.1. A cinematic translation of anxiety ..................................................................... 234
2.2. Indeterminacy of the object and fantasy realism ............................................... 236
2.3. Indeterminacy in the transgression of cinematographic genre .......................... 244
2.4. A montrage ambiguity ....................................................................................... 249
2.4.1. Structure ..................................................................................................... 249
2.4.2. Intimacy ...................................................................................................... 252
2.5. The aesthetic ambiguity of the apocalypse ........................................................ 264
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Conclusions .................................................................................................................. 277

List of References......................................................................................................... 285
Works cited ............................................................................................................... 287
Websites cited ........................................................................................................... 302
Films cited ................................................................................................................ 306

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