Are you trying to get a post out of me? Well it worked. Depressing stuff is my forte.
I said this back on Chuu when talking about
Funny Games with Greg in the movie thread, but Michael Haneke is the king of unsentimental and unrelentingly bleak films, no one even comes close to him, and those who attempt to are usually coined Haneke-lite's (Lars von Trier is the latest to get this label)
When asked about his cinematic style, his response was simply “I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”
Perhaps pinnacle of his bleakness comes in the form of the 1989 film "
The Seventh Continent" which is based on the
true story of a family consisting of a mother, father and their young daughter (like 8 or 9), who become sick of the mundane, repetitive nature of everyday life and goes on to show their response to it. The film has very few lines of dialogue, you simply watch as this family goes through the motions day by day, over and over, until finally one day they decide they can't take it anymore and the slow boil leads up to
a 30 minute sequence in which they destroy every single thing they own in their home, smashing, tearing, breaking every item that was once precious to them as their daughter screams and cries hysterically in the background. Most infamously there was a several minute scene of them flushing tons of REAL money down a toilet, which enraged audiences at the time.* Finally after this cathartic release, they prepare 3 cups of milk, one for each of them, laced with an absurd amount of prescription drugs. They sit down in front of a TV that lay atop the mountain of destruction, playing a live performance of "The Power of Love" as they each take a sip of their drinks. The final line of dialog is the young daughter proclaiming "it's bitter" as they each die off one by one. The father is the last one to go; and gets up to write down the date, time, and names of each of the dead family members on the wall for the police to find, then lays down and stares at the tv now displaying a static image until he fades out of life himself. The end.
*In regards to the money scene, "Haneke claimed to have correctly predicted to the producer that audiences would be upset with that scene, and remarked that in today's society the idea of destroying money is more taboo than parents killing their child and themselves."
Highly recommended if you are into depressing stuff, it's the top of its class in that regard, and one of the most perfectly constructed things put onto film. I also recommend all of Haneke's stuff since he's my favorite director because of his shocking consistency. Even his worst is better than most people's best.
Other legitimately (read: not sentimental bullshit) depressing stuff:
No Longer Human by Osamu Dezai [novel] He committed suicide shortly after it's publication and some see it as more of an extremely depressing life portrait rather than fiction.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath [novel] Also committed suicide shortly after publishing
Gaspar Noe's Irreversible [film]
