Melancholia

I watched “Melancholia” a few weeks ago for the first time. It was an Amazon Prime video recommendation, and man, were they right.

I cried like a baby at the end.

It was a sci-fi movie. Not a romance drama, not a romantic comedy, no one’s puppy died, it wasn’t a sci-fi dystopian film. It was a science fiction movie about a planet called Melancholia.

I’m not going to make this post a spoiler, as I want everyone to watch it and hopefully experience what I felt. I watched it twice that week.

When something moves me, I take time to examine why. My husband says that I’m hard to impress, so when I am impressed, I need to know why so I can seek out more of those things.

I think about the sci-fi movies I love: Contact, Voyagers, Gravity and now Melancholia, I see a theme. They’re about the psychology and sociology of humanity with an astronomical event as the backdrop. Human behavior is typically predictable. But these types of movies introduce an entirely new variable about our understanding of the universe and ourselves. That’s where I can lose myself. They’re called sci-fi dramas, and I’m in love.

I tend to be intuitive. I told a friend that I’m intuitive because I can take a few data points about a situation and/or person and fill in the blanks based on my past experiences. My intuition tends to be right about people and things that I’m familiar with, like marketing. The more I know about something, the less data I need to make the decision. I’ve had 37 years of observing human behavior – my decision-making model about them is pretty sound.

These sci-fi dramas are thrilling to me because patterns go out the window. On a regular earth, I know that the nerdy guy is going to end up attracting the “unattainable” girl. In sci-fi dramas, the realization that we’re not so special may make the nerdy guy realize he wants to spend his short blip of time on this planet, with an equally nerdy woman that he can wax philosophically with.

Because of this revelation, I now have a queue of sci-fi dramas. I watched “Another Earth” and was equally moved. It’s not as artsy as Melancholia, but I cried at multiple points in the movie.

What should you take away from this? What I keep saying. Be attuned to what moves you, what makes you tick. You’ll likely be a happier person if you do so.

*Apologies for multiple posts in one day. I’m leaning into the fact that sometimes my brain is firing on all cylinders and sometimes it’s not. I could schedule posts to post at a later date, but I think that’s inauthentic. Have a problem with it? We probably can’t be friends.