About the 2019 Art-House Horror Movie Midsommar....
It's generally a bad sign if you fall asleep in the middle of a horror movie. I had to nudge my girlfriend awake once. Not that I felt she was missing much. Just that the iPad was on her lap, tilting dangerously, and I became fascinated with just how bad this movie is. Well, not that fascinated. I did check my cell phone, as maybe someone was reaching out about renewing my apartment insurance, or one of my comments on Facebook got a Like. As there were plenty of scenes in which the characters are doing absolutely nothing but sitting and looking around, pretending to be worried about something, I felt I wouldn't miss anything.
Midsommar may not be as satisfying as a Like on a comment you just made in Facebook, but it is puzzling enough to deserve some post-movie commentary. As with all bad movies, it's simply poorly-made. But it's the way in which it is bad that I found fascinating. Midsommar is what happens when juvenile males with the emotional complexity of still-born squirrels set themselves the task of presenting deep, powerful disturbing psychological truths -- the kind we can't confront in our own lives without the help of brilliant, insightful writers. I want to slap the keyboard from their hands, tell them to go live life for a few hundred years, and then come back with something to say. Midsommar wants us to feel just how scary and powerful emotionally-disturbed girlfriends can be, and how powerful and important it is to belong to a family (oh the evil we will do to belong somewhere!), but comes away feeling more like a PSA against watching poorly-written movies by morons-given-money in Hollywood.
You have been warned.
A synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:
Dani and Christian are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, a grieving Dani invites herself to join Christian and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in a land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing. From the visionary mind of Ari Aster comes a dread-soaked cinematic fairytale where a world of darkness unfolds in broad daylight.
I'm not sure what movie this describes, but it surely isn't the one I saw. "Dread-soaked?" consists of our heroes sitting motionlessly at a long dining table waiting for the signal to eat. The village-commune-cult members are all perfectly silent and motionless. Our six American student-anthropologist/psychologist/tourist visitors (yeah, it's kinda complicated, and to no particular point other than they want to "study" them) sit a little less silently (or we'd be well into a Warholian 24-hour film of the Empire State Building). In fairness, they also sit in fields tripping on mushrooms being amazed that it is still daytime. And they stare with looks of boredom and incomprehension at the village-commune-cult people in white shirts with their arms in the air. This is intended to be suspenseful, or amazing, or something other than boring, I suppose. We're all waiting for the jump scare that never happens. We're all waiting for the red-blood spatter across those white clothes. Again, never happens. Trying for silent-looming-dread, I am reminded of Thanksgivings during which we all sat at our places silently, in front of stone-cold food, pretending we weren't there, waiting for my parents to finish arguing a point about who is to blame that the table is wobbling at the far end, or who let Uncle Lester get so drunk, before we could tuck in. The effect is just get on with it.
A "world of darkness?" The Swedish cult members speak English and seem professionally friendly, as if they were all retired SAS airlines flight attendants. In fairness, they give one member of our ill-fated group a blood eagle (great horror movie stuff!), but we never get to see it happen. And they do it in a chicken coop. And the floor is clean. And we never really know why they did it. They do sew one up into a bear skin and set him on fire, but the fellow's bemused expression, as if he'd just been woken up and asked make sense of a Donald Trump Press Conference, fails to fit the circumstances. The death is presented as mundane, which should be disturbing, but it's really effectively mundane. More fog than darkness.
No wait! Maybe these genius filmmakers are trying to make a point about the banality of evil! They looked up Hannah Arendt in Wikipedia! Read all about it! Great counter-intuitive concept! The Swedish Village-Cult members are genuinely banal. And they give one of the American tourists a blood eagle. So the contrast must be creepy! That makes it a horror movie! Nope. The whole scene is just banal because we can't find any way into the why. We don't know why they need to blood eagle anyone. We just can't access the professional flight attendant cult-members' joy-in-evil. So without jump scares, we fall asleep.
The Rotten Tomatoes synopsis was written by someone with a stake in the film's success. It entirely avoids the "emotional arc". What I found was a movie that centers on a caricature of an emotionally-unstable-young woman who gives the cult permission to kill her jerky boyfriend for having super-weird orgy sex while she's off planting corn and a liver in a field. This means she gains acceptance in the emotionally-responsive and involved cult-family she has always wanted (since she was recently orphaned). The person who came up with this deep-psychology story arc has no clue what it is to be human. No clue what it is to be an orphan. No clue what it is to be female. Or male. Or emotionally disturbed. Or afraid. In my humble opinion, horror movies should be written by people who have known fear and can find creative (metaphorical) expressions of the experience. Here we find writers trying to convince themselves that by layering cliches, they'll say something profound.
In fairness, the banality of evil is a perfectly powerful concept. It was explored so very well in the 1988 Dutch movie The Vanishing. The bad guy is super banal. And this movie is super scary. (ignore the crap 1993 Hollywood remake). You come away understanding how easy evil can be, and that it is too easy, and that it is enjoyable for some of us. You don't come away from this movie without the shakes, looking strangers and loved ones in the eye, and wondering what they could be capable of.
The lack of intelligible feeling is Midsommar's failure. No emotion ever feels genuine. Our heroine Dani is supposed to be constantly upset for two reasons. First, that her boyfriend is a jerk who wants out of the relationship because she's clingy. Second, that her sister murdered hear parents and then committed suicide. Which should bother her more and cause the endless crying that bores her boyfriend? We can't really tell, except that she tries to be not-needy and screams a lot in bathrooms and forests. Her boyfriend is just a jerk who can't break up with her, then has wild orgy sex with a teenage-seductress cult member in a super-unsexy ceremony. Frankly, I would have lost my boner when his seducer puts her pubic hair in his lunch. But somehow he keeps it up all the way through to his orgasm, all the while looking confused, and like he would rather be getting stoned and eating pizza with his bros. Maybe he faked his orgasm. That would be believable.
By order of the script, the "normal" people in this movie do not react to events the way normal people do. The evil people do not act or react in any accessible manner. It leaves the rest of humanity on the outside looking in at what seems to be a collection of mismanaged actors. Frankly, the actors here all deserve a shout-out. They need work, after all. If the writers and director hand them unintelligible garbage to act out, there's no way but South for them to go with it.
My theory of how such a movie came about is simple. Perfectly competent male writers let their juvenile side get the better of them, let themselves be convinced that a cliched-ultimate-angry-emotionally-unbalanced-girlfriend-revenge scenario was powerful because their juvenile sides are afraid of it, unable to grant humanity to women, too caught up in themselves to get to know a woman. So they argue to the rest of humanity "hey-aren't emotionally-unbalanced girlfriends scary because when they get angry at their boyfriends they let them be sewn up in bear carcasses and burned alive?" just, well, isn't scary because it's absurd. Our heroine would have to lose her humanity, at some point, and do so for some good reason. But there isn't one. The village-commune-cult people aren't particularly attractive to her. So the idea is absurd. And absurdity isn't scary. It's funny.
If you're after jerky juvenile males being punished by women for being jerks, the torture-porn movie Hostel fits the scare-bill just right. It's scary, not absurd, because the angry women don't fully realize the consequences of their actions. This is universally human, a common life experience, and thereby a powerful horror trope.
Comments