The movie Melancholia opens with what director Lars von Trier calls a “doomsday ballet,” a strange, thrilling, eight-minute sequence of hyper-real tableaux that unspool to an overture from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Each scene prefigures a moment from the movie. They are clearly computer-doctored, rendered in otherworldly hues and extravagant slow motion, and yet they are true, both specific and archetypal. We see dead birds falling from the sky, a woman carrying a child through a golf course, a bride walking across a lawn while tethered by vine-like tendrils, and, finally, the earth crushed by a glowing blue planet ten times its size. There have been movies whose stories and characters meant much more to me, but no other movie sequence has held me spellbound like this.

One image is Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting Jager Im Schnee (Hunters in the Snow). It’s a scene of uncomplicated, premodern life, of abundance and good cheer, and yet here it takes on a sinister aspect. After we see the painting it begins to tremble, and then small black spots slide down its surface. Are these falling leaves, (more) dead birds, or some kind of pestilence? The spots get larger and then the entire image peels away from the surface, as if it’s burning. The painting appears in the movie once again, much later, when the heroine Justine enters the library at her sister’s country estate and replaces the art books there, which are open to abstract Malevich paintings, with ones showing more troubling, figural artworks, including this Bruegel painting. After its transformation in the prologue, it can only be understood as an image of violence.

A few years ago Thomasville launched The Ernest Hemingway Furniture Collection with four lines called “Paris,” “Kenya,” “Key West,” and “Havana,” inspired by the great writer’s travels. The pieces, exaggerated versions of regional styles, had a real appeal. (The company still sells Hemingway furniture in some of these styles, but now it’s only classified by room.) The furniture richly evoked the mythology of the writer. And it was just a beginning. Thomasville could have followed with “Ketchum,” “Pamplona,” and “Oak Park.” Hemingway had so many lives, so many incarnations. Every reader can sift through them and choose the Hemingway she likes best.

After reading A Moveable Feast, “Paris” became my favorite. That memoir, in which Hemingway describes his life there as a young writer in the 1920’s, was completed in the late 1950’s, decades afterwards. In the book Hemingway remembers Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And he remembers his (first) wife, his (first) son, and his work. He rented a small, unheated garret for writing, and climbed the steps each morning with empty copy books, pencils, and a pocketful of oranges. He struggled over the empty pages all day, and the oranges sometimes froze before he could eat them. This Hemingway, remembered softly, is the one that appears in Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, and he’s entirely winning. The movie gives us a Stein, a Picasso and a Fitzgerald that are convincing, but it’s Hemingway, played by Corey Stoll, that really springs to life. He stares boldly and impassively at whomever he’s with, and speaks in slow, absolute declarations that are at once stylistically accurate and richly satirical. He’s always drinking and challenging men to boxing matches, but we don’t see any of the consequences. We only see the young man.

Eva Zeisel, the great ceramic designer, died last week at the age of 105 after a very long, very great career. She was designing new pieces at her studio in Rockland County as recently as 2009.  Zeisel first gained wide acclaim in the 1950’s, and lived long enough to see her work “rediscovered” by more than one new generation.  She was trained, in Europe, at that moment when ceramics was shifting from craft to industrial design, and from hand-making to mass production. Her designs were elegant and expressive, with shapes that brought the sensibility of hand, that is, of line drawing, into mass-produced tableware.

Zeisel’s renewed popularity in past decades owes something to our craze for mid-century modern, and something to our desire to celebrate the work of accomplished women designers who might not have gotten their due. Working in design and manufacturing from the 1920’s onwards, she almost certainly faced prejudice. And she said things herself that seem prejudiced, like this statement quoted in her obituary in the Times: “Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.” (Since women use cars, smartphones, and buildings, should we be designing all of those as well?)  It’s obvious that the kind of gender-based assumptions Zeisel encountered, and may have believed herself, are still in play. The obituary includes this howler, describing how Zeisel’s designs evolved after she had children: "Motherhood opened her eyes once more… Town & Country, designed in the 1940s, has salt and pepper shakers that nestle, one into the other, like a mother and child.” Do people look at the work of accomplished designers like Hella Jongerius and Karim Rashid with the same ludicrous, gender-based assumptions? When will it go away?

The movie Margin Call tracks, over one crucial day, the collapse of a fictional investment bank in New York City.    It shows us the the city very literally from the perspective of the bankers – as a dreamy blur as from the back of a chauffeured black car at night, and, from inside their offices at dawn, as a soft blanket far below.  In tracking the movements of its protagonists through the workday it maps the anatomy of an office building – the sea of traders desks, the glassy corner offices, the marble-lined executive washroom, and the lifeless, manicured plaza.

Very deliberately, I think, the movie doesn’t show us the building from outside. It’s curious because the office tower might be, with the exception of the single family house, the most resonant of architectural forms.  The office tower remains, all over the world, a powerful symbol for New York, for America, for banks, for money, and for power.  The absence of this very fundamental image in the movie left me longing for the Twin Towers.  It made me realize how much I miss those buildings, which I’d always understood as the platonic ideal of skyscrapers. In the months after they fell, each time I crossed Sixth Avenue and turned downtown, I felt their absence viscerally, as a physical imbalance, as if a mountain had been ripped out and taken away. I’ve never lived or work downtown, I don’t know anyone who worked inside the buildings, and I don’t observe the anniversary of the attacks.  But I miss the towers.  Each time I think of a skyscraper I think of them.