It consists of a lot of over-the-top clichés and an aesthetic that I would distance myself from under any other circumstances. I hope that under all of that, a film is hiding that I actually have some love for. It reminds me of those Luchino Visconti films I always enjoyed that were like whipped cream on top of whipped cream. I went overboard, blasting Richard Wagner. I made the film with a pure heart and I couldn’t have done it better, and everyone did a good job. But when I see clips from it, I think, “I’d be damned. That was unpleasant.” I’m usually madly in love with everything I do. I’m probably the most self-satisfied director you’ll ever meet. But this film is perilously close to the aesthetic of American mainstream films. The only redeeming factor about it, you might say, is that the world ends.
And the significance of this problem is also something of which the filmmaker is completely aware:
He worried that some moments in “Melancholia” have ended up “in the area of kitsch,” which both attracts and disgusts him. Referring to a tableau in the film in which Ms. Dunst’s character lies naked on a riverbank under a glowing blue orb in the sky, Mr. von Trier said, “Hitler would have thought this is really art, and that’s also a little shameful that you are now suddenly into this art of the Third Reich.”
This brought him back to the question that started it all. “The vulgarity of the fascistic art has a naïveté and a power that is quite interesting,” he said. He called the architect Albert Speer and the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl “wonderful artists,” and emphasized that he was expressing admiration for aesthetics and not ideology. “The ideology, since it’s so clear, since it’s one-sided, makes it easier to make a design that has some power to it,” he added.
To me, these quotes are also examples, beyond the works themselves, of why von Trier is, among artists, both courageous and honest in quite a rare way.