With its careful attention to Justine���s condition, and especially with Dunst���s amazingly sensitive and nuanced performance, Melancholia refutes clinical objectivity, and instead depathologizes depression. For depression is all too often stigmatized as a moral or intellectual failure, a kind of unseemly self-indulgence ��� this seems to be John���s attitude towards Justine. Or else, at best, depression is understood reactively as a deficiency in relation to some supposedly normative state of mental health ��� this seems to be Claire���s attitude. But Melancholia suggests that both these positions are inadequate. By focusing attention so intensively upon Justine���s own emotions, it treats depression as a proper state of being, with its own integrity and ontological consistency. This is not the least of the film���s accomplishments.

I would go so far as to say that, in this regard, Melancholia is profoundly antiNietzschean[...] For Nietzsche has no empathy at all with the state of depression. Rather, he stigmatizes it in emphatically normative terms. Nietzsche insists upon ���the futility, fallacy, absurdity, deceitfulness��� of any ���rebellion��� against life. ���A condemnation of life on the part of the living,��� he writes, ���is, in the end, only the symptom of a certain type of life.��� Even the judgment that condemns life is itself ���only a value judgment made by life���: which is to say, by a weak and decadent form of life. Nietzsche seeks to unmask all perspectives ��� even the most self-abnegating ones ��� as still being expressions of an underlying will to life. This universal cynicism is the inevitable counterpart of Nietzsche���s frequent, and strident, insistence upon the necessity of ���cheerfulness.���

Contrary to all this, Justine���s will to life has been suspended. Her depression is a kind of positive insensibility or ataraxia, or even what Dominic Fox calls ���militant dysphoria���. This is a state of being that no longer sees the world as its own, or itself as part of the world. As Fox puts it, ���the distinction between living and dead matter collapses. The world is dead, and life appears within it as an irrational persistence, an insupportable excrescence���. Through its refusal to affirm or celebrate life, dysphoria subtracts itself from the will to power, and therefore from Nietzsche���s otherwise universal suspicion about motives. Depression is the one state that cannot be unmasked as just another expression of the will to power. The underlying assumption of Nietzsche���s entire critique of both morality and nihilism is that the human being, and indeed every organism, ���prefers to will nothingness rather than not will���. But depression, at least in von Trier���s presentation of it, must be understood as a positive not-willing, rather than as a will to nothingness, or a destructive (and self-destructive) torsion of the will.

From Steven Shaviro's great esssay on Melancholia