LA GROTTA MAGICA
MELANCHOLIA DI LARS VON TRIER E IL PENSIERO DELLA COMPLESSITÀ

Giuseppe Fornari

The paper develops some meaningful implications of the theory of complexity by taking inspiration from a movie, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The main character, a young woman, brilliant and ambitious as much as subject to depression, messes up her matrimony and sinks in a gloom existential “melancholy” divorcing her from reality, but paradoxically she rediscovers her authentic self while the whole world plunges into a huge catastrophe caused by the imminent collision of Earth with a rogue planet, whose emblematic name is Melancholia. It is apparently a subjective and psychiatric story projected on a cosmic scale, but it does stress a pathological relationship of our world with a pseudo-reality emptied of any objective (ontological) and objectual (symbolically qualified) significance. The movie shows how a de-humanized science can easily become the sheer support of such unreality. From here comes the warning addressed to the theory of complexity not to forget the most profound and decisive complexity, that regarding the real nature of the strange animals capable of knowledge and science, the human beings along with their very long history and its main feature, spirituality.