One general truism about science fiction is that aliens provide an indication about how society feels about itself. In periods of triumphalism, when we are confident in our future, aliens are typically threatening, and humanity is vindicated by its ability to defeat their menace (Independence Day would be a paradigmatic example). As a corollary, when aliens act as beneficent guides, intervening only to help us overcome our destructive tendencies, it suggest a lack of confidence in our future and uncertainty about our collective capacity to meet the challenges that we face (think The Day the Earth Stood Still and the panic over the discovery of atomic weaponry).
From this perspective, Midsommar suggests a very dim appraisal of our current state.
Midsommar is, as much as anything else, a movie about a cult, and historically cults are not good. Classic Satanic cults in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Race with the Devil and The Omen, are seemingly omnipotent and omniscient forces of evil, bent on achieving power, against which the protagonists are helpless. The pagan cult in Wicker Man is more complex and represented in more detail than its Satanic counterparts, but the eeriness of its practices and the willingness of its adherents to commit ritual murder remain dominant motifs. Documentaries about groups like Rajneeshpuram community or Jim Jones’ People’s Temple describe groups that, while far less powerful than those in movies, are equally murderous.
Midsommar shares much of the DNA of these earlier films: the cult, the Harga, is certainly eerie and its values well outside of the mainstream; it is also clearly in command of events throughout the entirety of the film, and the murders depicted are gruesome enough for anyone.
The difference with this film and its antecedents is that it represents the “real” world—that is the world of normality, outside the cult—as fundamentally failed. In cult films, emphasis is on escaping the nightmare. When the protagonists of Race with the Devil trying to outrun the cultists in their van, for example, pick up an Amarillo radio station, the relief is palatable, because that means they are almost home and home means safety.
In Midsommar, that home is no longer any kind of refuge. Dani, the protagonist, suffers profound trauma—the murder of her parents by her mentally disturbed sister, who subsequently herself commits suicide. And society fails her, at every turn. Although her sister clearly has a record of disturbing and threatening behavior, there is no indication that anyone has tried to help the family. Just before the final attack, Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, dismisses the ominous notes the sister has been writing as attention-seeking, and the implication is that his attitude is general: between her calls to Christian, Dani is shown talking on the phone to an unnamed friend, worrying that her neediness is driving her boyfriend away; the advice she receives, while seemingly well-meaning, is generic and fails to speak to her situation. Afterwards Christian is shown trying to console her as she violently weeps, but is uncomfortable and ineffectual.
In contrast with this, Pelle, who belongs to the Harga, tells Dani that he too lost his parents, but he was “held.” There isn’t any explanation as to what this means, but, in a scene late in the film, we are given an indication as to what it might involve. Dani sees Christian having sex with another cult member and has a breakdown, sobbing and screaming uncontrollably. She is then surrounded by the other young women of the cult, who mirror her, performing her cries with her, and eventually the performance becomes rhythmic. The significance of this episode is open, but it seems to take her out of her pain, and stands in stark contrast to Christian’s earlier awkward efforts.
The director and screenwriter, Arri Astor, had this to say about Dani’s narrative trajectory: the Harga is “codependency made manifest, right? So she’s moving from a codependent relationship to, like, the ultimate codependent relationship. So it’s like she’s really not actually being liberated from anything, she’s being tethered to a new thing that will be impossible to untether herself from.”
But that begs the question as to what liberation really is, and we could ask—as Pelle might—if going though life untethered is any kind of freedom. People do need each other, and Dani comes from a world where expressing any kind of need is treated as grounds for avoidance, if not outright rejection. Earlier, one of Christian’s friends described Dani’s frequent telephone calls to him when she is concerned about her sister as “literally abuse.” She is locked up with her misery, with no tools to escape it. The Harga at least acknowledge her suffering to recognize an obligation to try to help her.
This is not to say, of course, that the Harga or groups like to represent any real alternative to the contemporary world—to say the least! But, the film does, despite what the director may think, emphasize the consequences of our extreme valorization of independence and our coincident fear of engaging meaningfully with each other.
Travel Only By Night 