Ari Aster, 2019        #14, 2019 Skandies

sp❁ilers

Ellie often wants to watch movies together, but I’m not a good person to watch movies with.  If it’s something I really want to see, then I want to watch it alone, or at least with so much focus that I might as well be alone⁠—no chitchat or anything.  So the movies we have watched together have generally been things I didn’t particularly care about⁠—old movies that popped up on Kanopy or someplace.  But this can be taken too far⁠—the movie can’t be something I actively don’t want to see, or, y’know, I won’t want to see it.  Midsommar fell into that slender gray area: I probably wouldn’t have watched it on my own, but Ellie had asked whether I would watch it with her, and it had placed high enough in the Skandies that I was willing to give it a look.  But only when its turn came up.  Why did I slot it into its place in the 2019 Skandies list, to be watched close to five years after it came out?  Why not just watch it when Ellie asked about it, back at the height of the pandemic?  Allow an anthropomorphized version of my OCD to explain:

I don’t watch a lot of horror movies, but even I knew enough about the genre that when the credits rolled it felt to me like I’d just seen a pretty tired pastiche.  So it turns out that the insular community’s dark secret is that it practices human sacrifice?  Isn’t that always the insular community’s dark secret?  Way back in ninth grade we read and watched a black and white short film of “The Lottery”; Midsommar uses a bingo machine instead of having slips of paper drawn from a box, but it’s the same idea.  Trapping a guy inside a representation of a larger creature and setting him on fire⁠—I mean, I saw the Rifftrax version of The Wicker Man.  People being averaged with vegetation in various ways?  I wrote about Annihilation earlier this year.  And then of course there are the broader tropes like young people getting picked off one by one and the survivors blithely acting like there must be a reasonable explanation, despite having already agreed that their situation is super creepy.  There were a couple of inver­sions I appreciated: horror is a genre we tend to associate with nighttime, so it was an interesting twist to see a horror story take place not just in bright daylight but in a place (northern Sweden in, as the title suggests, midsummer) where it never gets truly dark.  And while horror generally trades in gruesome im­agery, one of Midsommar’s primary visual calling cards is gor­geous displays of colorful flowers.  Unfortunately, the flowers come in second to the movie’s own grotesque imagery⁠—heads with faces reduced to craters, bodies mutilated in macabre ways.  And even had the movie dialed back the gore, the little touches I liked did not strike me as adequate compensation for spending two and a half hours watching a compendium of clichés.

Meanwhile, Ellie said that not only was it the single scariest movie she had ever seen, but also one of the best.  Whut?  A quick plot summary to provide context for her explanation: the main character of Midsommar is a young woman named Dani whose sister kills their parents and then herself, leaving Dani as an or­phan.  Her boyfriend, who was on the verge of breaking up with her, tired of her need for constant emotional support amid what seemed like neverending family drama, now feels like he has to stay with her for some while longer⁠—and his all-male friend group, who had been encouraging him to dump her, grudgingly recognizes that he can’t really do so in the aftermath of the mur­der/suicide.  They had all planned a summer trip to Sweden, as one member of the friend group is doing his thesis on folk festi­vals in northern Europe, and another is actually a Swede whose village puts on such a festival⁠—a nine-day celebration this time, he says, which only happens once every ninety years.  Dani’s boy­friend doesn’t mention that he’s going until right before they’re all scheduled to leave, which stuns Dani; he reluctantly invites her along, and he and his friends pretend to be pleased when she accepts⁠—except for the Swede, whose delight is genuine.  Then they reach the village and discover that one of the main events of the festival involves those who have reached age seventy-two jumping off a cliff to splash on a ceremonial rock⁠—and when one elder misses the rock and screams in agony, the lower half of his body shattered, the villagers mimic his screams until the appoin­ted officers finish him off by bashing his head in with a hammer.  The mimicry is key, Ellie explained: we see it again at the end of the movie, when Dani has been taken into the community and exalted as their May Queen, while her boyfriend and his friend group (apart from the Swede) have been selected to be sacri­ficed, and as the temple full of human sacrifices is burning down, the screams from the blazing building are echoed by the villa­gers.  Dani wants to express her grief about the loss of her family, but feels inhibited about doing so around her boyfriend and his friend group and modern culture more generally.  She’ll well up and run into the bathroom but then stifle her sobs.  And now here’s a group of people who don’t expect a stiff upper lip, but instead reflect and amplify the sorts of wild expressions of angu­ish Dani has had to keep a lid on⁠—and even her own, when she has a breakdown and the young women of the village get on their knees with her and copy her wails exactly.

Okay, interesting observation, and having heard it I have a better sense of what the movie was trying to do, but how does that make it good?  Or scary?  For that matter, how can any movie be scary?  I get scared when I sense a real threat to my safety: bicy­clists brushing by me on the sidewalk, people acting erratically while I’m trapped on public transit with them, dogs lunging at me in elevators, etc.  But the monster can’t jump out of the screen at me.  Sure, I might be apprehensive that an undesirable turn of events might be awaiting a character I like, but that’s not specific to any genre: I might think, “Ugh, I really hope this mid­dle school girl doesn’t actually send nudes to this asshole boy”, but that doesn’t make Eighth Grade into a “scary movie”.  I guess the idea is that some people project themselves into movies to such an extent that on some level they lose sight of the fact that they’re just staring at a screen, and react as though what’s hap­pening to the character they’ve identified with is actually hap­pening to them… but I don’t do that.  Ellie told me that her fear was based on her recognition that she would be an easy target for a cult like this⁠—that she would be susceptible to the villagers’ love-bombing and validation of her emotional outbursts.  That still leaves the question of why anyone would consider that good⁠—why you would want to watch something that stirs up fear.  Several generations of materials ago, the test prep company I teach for had students tackle a passage by Stephen King that addressed this topic; as I recall, King’s argument was that we evolved neural architecture that expects regular paroxysms of fear, and that going to horror movies is a safe way to give the limbic system a workout.  But that doesn’t really do anything for me.  I get more than enough fear in my diet just by looking at the swing state polls.

The thing is, while Midsommar didn’t scare me, it did leave me feeling irritated, even a little angry.  I realized that the thing Ellie cited⁠—the mass echo⁠—pissed me off.  In fact, the whole idea behind even the most innocuous parts of the festival irked me.  Drink this!  Wear this!  Sing this!  Why?  Because everyone else is doing it!  And/or because that’s what everyone else did last year, or ninety years ago, or a thousand years ago!  And, sure, I do be­lieve in the power of collective action, but at the same time, how many of the world’s ills are rooted in this kind of groupthink, this mindless mimicry?  These are the underpinnings of fascism, of theocracy.  And Ellie said as much⁠—that this was why she liked it, that it showed how easily a society can slide into dystopian ideologies and that that was a lot scarier than some serial killer or alien predator.  But put all that aside.  There’s a moment when Dani, as May Queen, is supposed to sing a song in Swedish, a language she doesn’t speak or understand, so a woman from the village says “Repeat after me” and has Dani copy a few syllables at a time… a moment that brought me back to nights in my child­hood when I had to repeat back strings of syllables in Arabic, a langu­age in which I don’t know how to say anything other than “the sheep runs in front of the farmer”.  That was also part of a ritual that I was supposed to imbibe and pass onward, but it didn’t take.  And then it occurred to me that we had just watched a movie about the midsummer rituals of a distant village… during the break offered to us so that we could celebrate the mid-winter rituals of mainstream western culture.  Sticking coni­ferous trees (or imitations thereof) in our living rooms, decorat­ing them with tinsel and dangling orbs, putting stockings up by the fireplace, singing songs from the nineteenth century, and all sorts of other practices that no one would dream up today, but which so many do imbibe and pass on in the spirit of “repeat after me”.  And I gotta tell ya, I fuckin’ hate it.  I hate all holidays.  Hate Halloween, hate Valentine’s Day, hate the Fourth of July… hell, I don’t even care for the fact that stores have different hours on Sundays.  Throwing away the schedule and opening and clos­ing at different times?  That’s as bad as watching a movie out of order!  So of course this movie about setting regular behavior aside in order to partake in nine days of inherited rituals was going to drive me up the wall.

And I thought, so there you go⁠—I’m rating this low because while people may watch movies because they want to be scared, no one watches something because they want to be angry.  As I recall, the Stephen King piece touched on the exhilaration of walking out of a horror movie and into the sunlight, safe and sound with nothing more to fear⁠—a twist on the old bit about how “I love hitting myself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when I stop”.  But there’s no exhilaration about anger, right?  It’s so irritating and unpleasant, like a burn that’s reached the itchy stage⁠—who would do this to themselves on purpose?  And then I realized, oh, duh⁠—Fox News viewers.  All of that right-wing media boils down to Twenty-Four Hours Hate: here are your targets for today, so go get furious about them.  The project is to turn entire generations into tens of millions of little outrage bombs that will go off in the voting booth, and, increasingly, outside it as well.  And again, it’s made the world scary enough that I can do without the horror movies, thanks.

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