There's a movie theater near where I live that really should be renamed "the place where people become afraid of the sky". At least, that's what I'm calling it from now on. This one particular cinema is a hidden art house display--hidden not in the sense that it's out of the way but in the sense that it's in a mall, about the last place you'd expect to see the weirdest of contemporary American films. And in it I saw the two movies that together have made me forever fearful of the great above: Take Shelter and Melancholia. 

 

These films aren't just united by the fact that they blew my mind in the same physical location. They both stand as calls to a brand new genre, something indicative of a generalized paranoia of our age, something that's a little unlike anything we've seen before. I've heard the former described as a psychological disaster thriller, and I suppose you could say the same about Lars Van Trier's latest production (with a little sci-fi twist), but that's not really right. Disaster movies imply a sort of widespread panic, the reaction of the general populous to a catastrophe. We like seeing how destruction on a massive scale impacts people en masse. But there are no crows in these two movies. There are no TV reels, no 9-11 calls, no ambulance responders. That's because the primary disasters in each narrative take place within the minds of their protagonists.

 

Take Shelter is a gorgeous and haunting narrative of developing schizophrenia. Melancholia is the same of major depression. But they're not strictly psychological films, either. The kicker to both--and allow me to spoil them for you to a degree--is that the internal sense of doom embedded deep in their protagonists eventually breaks through to reality. Their private struggles play out on a global scale by the end. Their own suffering becomes the suffering of the entire world as it finally ends. 

 

So what do we call this new trend in art films--the kind that causes us to fear the sky and the danger it might hold? The hypothesis it raises is simple enough: the destruction of the mind via internal illness and/or delusion is essentially no different from the destruction of the collective consciousness by external influences. On an individual level, it doesn't matter if we're destroyed alone or if the whole world is destroyed with us, and mental death through severe mental illness isn't much better than physical death. But as to what we can call it, I don't have a much better suggestion than "psycho-armageddon", because I'm terrible at naming things. Still, it's a force that requires recognition, and I expect we'll see more of it in future films.