I imagined, while watching Melancholia the second time, how the people in the village outside the family’s private property might have been dealing with the news of apocalypse. Maybe they were generating wild conspiracy theories and attacking one another—or maybe they had stopped worrying, stopped working, and were having a great time! Maybe they were inventing new rituals, taking psychedelics, or having ecstatic sex. Maybe, like Michelle, they had all gotten sober and opened themselves to falling in love. Maybe they had all become anarchists and were freely sharing resources. As science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in an essay about the pandemic: “Amid the tragedy and death” it is possible that “at the very least, we are all freaking out together.” Or, as author and critic Olivia Laing wrote in a review of Black Wave: “The end of human existence is an opportunity, just like anything else. Maybe it’s even an occasion for enlightenment, the shaky, tender kind that robs the newly sober of their defences.”

When the wave crashes on the shore of the end-times, Michelle is sober and sur-thriving, but this is not to say she’s healthy or that “the planet is healing,” as that pandemic meme proclaimed. The planet is not healing. There are, however, methods for living in the protracted present, riding the crest of the wave, that do not require invoking the crash or drinking yourself to oblivion until it does. The first time I watched Melancholia, I was struggling to draw outlines around myself, to distinguish my psychic state from the external reality of the world. The second time I saw it, after reading Black Wave, the dichotomy I had been trying to uphold between myself and the collective had begun to collapse. And all those hypothetical possibilities for what I imagined could be happening in the village outside the private compound were happening all around me, at the same time.