I Want That Horror: Ari Aster's Midsommar
[Spoilers, spoilers, my god the spoilers!]
The Promise
Several years ago, Beyond the Black Rainbow waylaid me with its exacting eye for evoking nostalgia and dictating pace. Panos Cosmatos outperformed on his feature length debut, and while the film was imperfect, the imperfections did not appear to live inside the essence of the film but rather somewhere in the translation between mind, set, and editing bay. And so, won over by Cosmatos’ vision, I waited eagerly for his next film.
I waited eight years.
Cosmatos returned with Mandy, which was certainly worth the wait, but in that time I’d lost the thread.
When I saw Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary last year, it seemed a similar promise was made to the audience. Aster’s work was magnificent: detail oriented, restrained, brutal, intelligent, and stylish. But I withheld my optimism, having learned from Cosmatos that waiting with bated breath for too long leads to suffocation.
Less than a year later, while I was sitting in the theater for Jordan Peele’s Us, the Midsommar trailer rolled before my eyes. Aster’s second film would be about a pagan cult, and knowing what I knew about his abilities from Hereditary, Midsommar seemed a possible contender for my favorite horror movie of all time.
Going into the movie last weekend, I believed it would be a brightly colored horror tale in the spiritual vein of Wicker Man. I was very wrong.
I found, instead, an uncompromising vision of utopia.
When commenting on Midsommar, Aster called the film “perverse wish fulfillment.” He was referring to Dani’s (the protagonist’s) inclusion into a collective, power over her emotionally absent boyfriend, and discovery of meaning. [1] But it is also wish fulfillment for those exhausted by the rational, Enlightenment, neoliberal order. The commune in Midsommar is aggressively in the opposite direction: group oriented, intuitive, and warm. And while the visiting Americans find their customs and rituals terrifying, I found them appropriate. Life is violent, pain and suffering are real, and while our current order needs us to not dwell so much on that and get on with our shopping, the commune of Hårga integrates these realities into a system of living that solves so many existential and psychological problems we suffer today.
Below I’ve pulled a few features of the commune that strike me as particularly satisfying.
Magic & Ritual
Hereditary’s command of an occult cosmology was perhaps the best ever committed to cinema. The film never fully confronted whether the strange phenomena were in the origin of characters’ psychosis or actual magic. And while buying into the magic still made for a compelling allegory for mental illness running through generations of a family, the story was itself a well crafted horror about a neopagan cult, and at that level it managed to reveal the beliefs and activities of the cult only in the details the protagonist was likely to encounter. Despite only glimpsing slivers of the whole, the viewer had a sense that there were guiding rules to the universe of the magic, that while we never get to read the tomes that the cult adhered to, there were such tomes to be read.
That is all to say that Hereditary was a masterpiece of restraint. It never overstepped, never dropped into exposition, never overexposed. Instead, the trust a viewer places in the film is constantly validated, and as it is validated it deepens, and yet again that deepened trust is validated further. Each time is like a step deeper down into the basement, where you find that while you cannot see everything, you know there is something that could be seen, if only you had a flashlight.
Midsommar was again about a pagan cult, but a cult of a different kind. Instead of a coven of witches operating in secret among us, it is a long running society, isolated in Sweden, allowed to continue its ancient pagan practices into our current day of smartphones and social media (both of which are critical features in the first act before the main characters leave the urban United States for Hårga’s midsommar festival they hold every 90 years). They perform rituals not to take control of occult forces but rather as part of their culture. While there are love spells and other potions, the desired ends are gained within the texture of the community. Psilocybin is taken to “open up” to the influence of nature and the community. Love potions are made and surreptitiously served to prospective lovers along with social pressure and ceremonial sex involving a group of encouraging onlookers ritualistically celebrating the creation of life.
We are shown this relationship between desired change and chemicals outside of the pagan community. The protagonist Dani is prescribed and takes Ativan (lorazepam, a benzodiazapine) to manage the extreme anxiety she feels as a result of the murder-suicide of her sister and parents. This is a person who wants a change to occur (end the anxiety attack) and consumes a drug to create that change (a GABAergic induced calm). But in Hårga, social roles, expectations, ritual, and the use of mind altering drugs create a complex web of meaning and context in the lives of its members, while in our society an expert prescribes pills to mechanistically adjust neurotransmitters, dampening symptoms that render the patient less productive.
Let’s look at another example. When Dani weeps in grief for her family, her emotionally distant boyfriend holds her on the couch but does little else. When she is brought to tears in public, she runs for the bathroom, chokes down her sobs until she regains control of herself and can reemerge in public where extreme emotional outpouring would be shameful. But in Hårga, she weeps when she finds her boyfriend mating with another woman. She tries to flee to a private space (the shared bedroom, now empty and therefore somewhat private), but a group of women join her and weep with her, mimic the contours of her sobs in genuine empathy. The room fills with their unified cries. The tears are not shameful, there is no need to keep them private. The feelings are not something to run from but process, and you never have to process them alone. In Hårga, your pain is not yours to bear, your pain is ours to bear.
By situating the individual inside of the collective, by situating relationships between individuals as a product of collective will, the existential questions of freedom and responsibility that plague our society and fill our psychoanalysis sessions have no oxygen to breathe. There is no need to “cure” issues of isolation, alienation, or meaninglessness. There is no need to “discover yourself”. The psychological lacunae where these arise in our own society simply do not appear in Hårga.
Freedom From the Fear of Death
The turning point in the film for the protagonist and her companions, where they finally peak into the dark side of the Hårga commune, is when they witness the ättestupa ceremony of senicide. At the age of 72, after completing four 18-year cycles of their life (one for every season), elders leap from a precipice to their death. This makes way for new generations and eliminates material burden on their community, but what I saw was something else that was far more important: it transformed the act of death.
In light of ongoing developments in medicine, people in our society live longer and longer lives, with more and more years tacked on at the end of their run filled with brutalizing and humiliating games of needles, pill swapping, and a bed-ridden lifestyle (complete with regular bedpan drama and scheduled sponge baths). This “progress” reduces death to the final failure of trained professionals and the subject in question. Everyday survived is a victory, and every tomorrow is another field of struggle. All of us who’ve witnessed our loved ones follow this wretched path have said more or less the same thing: I don’t want to die that way.
So why do people keep dying that way? Because the only other option is an acceptance and embrace of death. And why do we not choose that? Because death is the greatest conceivable terror.
That there are societies where elders do willingly pass on (the senicidal ättestupa ceremony in Midsommar is based on a number of similar practices in ancient Nordic cultures, precipice and all) suggests that death could be something embraceable, something that isn’t the greatest conceivable terror.
Again, the key is embedding the individual inside of a societal context where the concerns of the individual are maintenance issues for members of the whole. Sprain your ankle? You want to heal, not because you need to go back to work and pursue your career but because there is food to be harvested and the community needs food. That shift in perspective effects every kind of illness, including the ultimate injury: death.
If your focus is not on yourself, if your entire life is not framed with you in the center, then your death is not the end of the world. It isn’t the end of anything. And if your death helps maintain the health and vitality of your community and its part in the balance of the living world, your death is not an injury at all. It is healthy. It is an act of communal hygiene.
Are we too late for this phase shift? Perhaps. Maybe there is already too much individualism embedded in my own psychology to move over to this way of thinking. But do I wish I had this mindset? Do I wish I’d never had this monster of the fear of death allowed inside, to make a home in my heart? What do you wish?
Pagan Dreams
The last point I’ll share here is a constiutive part of all the wonders of the Hårga commune. That is the society’s ability to create meaning and wisdom out of human experience.
As with many human societies, Hårga values intuition, ritual, symbol, dream, and myth as ways to pattern human experience into fractal reflections of the universe itself. And that is, I believe, the greatest loss humanity has suffered with the rise of Enlightenment thinking. The rationalist, scientistic perspective has reduced the world, our home, into a Rube Goldberg designed trammel of Archimedes. A byzantine construction made from trillions of forces and countervailing forces, all organized and pumping along to do nothing in particular. That idea has not only infected many of our philosophers and theologians (if it stayed in the academy it would hardly be worth noting, as an entrenched conviction that life has no meaning is the normal way to respond to spending your life in the academy). No, that idea has integrated itself into the entire fabric of our society.
The ultimate wish fulfillment in Midsommar is the possibility of a community where my own experience appears rich with meaning, is integrated into the fabric of everything that is important and holy. Life in our society has been drained of meaning (hence Dani’s sister decided to commit suicide), and we are told to create our own meaning. That is supposed to be true freedom.
What we find in this “freedom” are not subjects soaring on their own construction of life’s value, but ever rising rates of depression and anxiety, suicide, and opiate addiction. Meaning is not something that one person can create alone. Meaning is socially constructed. And if you want to experience that meaning, you need to visit Hårga.