Midsommar: The Lost Reflection
Millennial director Ari Aster’s second feature film Midsommar (2019) shares several elements in common with early attempts to combine opera and film such as Powell and Pressburger’s adaptation of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). Midsommar unfolds upon the pagan community, Hårga, as though it were a stage filled with choreography, colors, costumes, and decorative art. Just as with Hoffmann’s féeries, a world is conjured out of music: its landscapes are constructed by melody, its sung furies transfigure the real world instead of apprehending it. In turn, melody succumbs to furies in the climactic moments when the Hårga mirror Dani’s every sound and movement as though they were accompaniments. As though, Dani, like Hoffmann, had lost her own reflection. At the same time, the camera explores the expansive physical reality of the characters, perusing suburban hamlets, Brooklyn apartments, dive bars, an airplane cabin, and the Swedish countryside. Yet, the oversaturated photography which is reminiscent of early technicolor masterpieces renders these familiar scenes into an ornamental accent. What is initially unsettling, then, is this clash between the elements of operatic fantasy and cinematic realism.
This tension is restrained from coming to a head and is subordinated as an effect towards an attempt at harmonious aesthetic meaning. In the thriller, sadistic conspiracies brood even within everyday surroundings — any trusted classmate, such as Pelle or Dani, may turn out to be a monster. Post-traumatic stress, prescription sedatives, psilocybin mushrooms, and magic potions serve as the vehicle through which normal and abnormal mental states, reality and fantasy, become indistinguishable. This facilitates a complete immersion into Dani’s psychological deterioration. Where the poet Hoffmann conjures, through his pining for a new beloved, the tales of his three great loves of the past, the psychology student Dani, “a girl who everyone knows is with the wrong guy,” becomes spellbound by vengeance. This same trajectory in romantic comedy plays out differently, for instance, in Modern Romance (1981) where the fear of losing the beloved is rendered humorous. As Robert contrives ever renewed arguments for why he would be mad to wed Mary now, after all she had done, after all he had said, one laughs to oneself that it is only more certain that he actually wishes he was just mad enough to do it. In Midsommar the same discrepancy provokes the paranoia that is intended to excuse and rationalize Dani’s lust for violence. One step further, Dani’s revenge is intended to be a therapeutic resolution as in a morality play.
Still from Ari Aster’s, Midsommar. 2019.
Still from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, 1951.
The thriller has a precursor in anti-Nazi propaganda films in which civilian violence was used to portray the brutality of fascism. [1] The continued prevalence of violent acts of cruelty after the war in thriller films indicated that the inner disintegration underlying such sadomasochism had become a much more widespread phenomenon. The early attempts to imbue the thriller with some kind of moral meaning veered towards two kinds of therapeutic resolutions: psychological or religious. In the former, a police detective or therapist helps the victim piece together the scattered fragments of her soul to show the way towards recovery, opening up the possibility for a new life, for instance in Gaslight (1944). In the latter, when confronted by the open-endedness and uncertainty of civilization, the victim seeks community among the faithful where the compassionate clergy look after those who lack mental fortitude, as in Black Narcissus (1947). Without a hint of irony, Midsommar offers a strange reversal more reminiscent of grindhouse sexploitation films such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978).
The man who would in the earlier thrillers most likely be considered the villain, Pelle — who systematically manipulates his friends to become sacrificial offerings to Hårga — is instead here portrayed as “the right guy… under [Dani’s] nose.” Dani loses her parents at the hands of her sister’s murder-suicide, and gains a new “family” in performing the rites of the tribe. It seems to her that in contrast to her American friends, the Hårga appear “present” and “connected” to life and to the people and the world around them. Although, what is at the heart of this tribe for Dani is not a totem or a fetish as in early human communities, but rather — what has become a pop psychology buzz-word in the twenty-first century — a “philosophy of mindfulness.” [8] By simply existing in unity with existence the Hårga appear mindful. At the same time, the predominant dynamics of modern group psychology at play illustrate how mediated these relations in fact are. For instance, when the elders sacrifice themselves, Dani is haunted by images of her family struck by the grief of losing her parents, and rage at her sister. In exchange for giving herself to the tribe, she gains the ability to express and aestheticize the violence which is otherwise necessarily tabooed and repressed. Thus, the urgency of Dani’s emotional need, especially her fear of losing her hopes for a future family in Christian’s love, is satisfied by her participation in acts of cruelty: above all the act of burning him alive.
Still from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s Black Narcissus, 1947.
Still from George Cukor Gaslight, 1944.
This leads Sophie Lewis of Commune to claim Midsommar “may well be one of the most radically feminist interventions of twenty-first century cinema.” After spending the film being “triggered” and “unsupported” by her American friends, Dani shows she is “unshakably capable of joy” according to Lewis, who also describes the murder of the American men in the film as “totally delicious.” Lewis’ delight in brutality shows that Richard Brody of The New Yorker is not wrong to recognize regression in the “bloody totalitarian mind control” which Aster masks “under the rhetoric of pleasure, freedom and the warmth of a virtual extended family.” Similarly, Carlos Delgado of World Socialist Website interprets the meaning of the film in terms of a middle-class romanticizing of barbarism in rebellion against civilization. [12] Although, for Brody, unlike Delgado, it seems that Midsommar’s deeper regressive message is for Americans to “stay home” in line with “America First.”
These various attempts to reduce Midsommar to some kind of political messaging — in support of the progressive Democratic Party coalition ostensibly against xenophobia, racism, and sexism — is itself indicative of a two-fold regression. On one hand, the artistic horizons for film have been even more deprecated since the 2016 US Presidential Election. For instance, mechanistic genre-play and “injected” moral messaging is now widely regarded as “high-art horror.” On the other hand, society may actually appear to be a battlefield of irreconcilable worldviews in which there is no place for the individual and in which the totalitarian horror of the everyday world remains unrelieved. So far, horror has never been incorporated into film in a meaningful way. The attempt to do so by bringing in elements of romantic comedy and opéra fantastique suggests that what is feared most is sexuality itself. There is a projective identification with either the prey or the predator, the abuser or the abused. Dani in Midsommar may unintentionally be a symptom of such paranoia. The return of “art” to film even if such gestures are mere semblance, may indicate, however obliquely, a renewed desire to reconsider the medium. If film hopes to do more than furnish welcome aesthetics to various agents and interests, then it must itself not become a blind and passive victim. //
Still from Ari Aster’s, Midsommar. 2019.
[1] Kracauer, Siegfried. “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique, no. 89 (Spring-Summer 2003): 105-110.