When worlds collide | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

DVD REVIEW

A few years ago I happened on a series of releases on DVD of an ancient US science-fiction television programme called Tales of Tomorrow. It was broadcast during 1951-2, when memories of World War II and the horrific revelations of its final years were still quite fresh. They gave rise to a widely felt pessimism about human nature that was apparent in the movies of the post-war years _ shadowy American film noir culminating in Robert Aldrich's apocalyptic, still-terrifying Kiss Me Deadly, French existentialist parables like Wages of Fear, and many of the Japanese classics made during the period.

MELANCHOLIA
(Denmark, 2011, colour, 136 min.) Directed by Lars von Trier and starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Stellan Skarsgard, Cameron Spurr, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt. Original English and dubbed Thai soundtracks with optional subtitles in English and Thai. (Available locally on a United Region 3 DVD. There are also Region B Blu-ray versions from France and the UK.)

In the half-hour Tales of Tomorrow scenarios, the Earth was threatened week after week with extermination by some run-away technology or extraterrestrial menace, and the stories almost invariably ended with the world really being destroyed. There were usually insightful or visionary Cassandras who could see what was coming, and they always paid the price for their warnings. This was also the time of Senator Eugene McCarthy's communist witch-hunt and HUAC in the US, of new political brutalities in Eastern Europe, and of the first hydrogen bomb tests. The tensions that resulted found expression in the popular arts.