My column in Taki's Magazine attempts to put the extraordinary opening overture of Lars von Trier's 2011 End of the World movie Melancholia in its aesthetic and philosophical setting stretching from Pythagoras to Stanley Kubrick. What do outer space and musical harmony have to do with each other?

There are a lot of amusing ironies about von Trier, the Mel Gibson of the art house, which I'll try to get to in the future. First, though, it's worth examining one specific example of how rich the Western cultural tradition is.

Also, Melancholia has a lot of golf course settings.

Read the whole thing there.