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Midsommar - Nature vs Monogamy

The Hårga - Midsommar’s subversive Swedish cultish commune believe in the cyclical force of nature. They don’t believe you die and your spirit is lost, to them your energy is bestowed into new life. To this end, at 72 you are made to commit ritual suicide - during the same festival that features bizarre copulation ceremonies. Thus, your life force is not wasted and the cycle begins anew. 

The film’s title refers to the pivotal stage of life that is central but also, in some ways, superfluous to this cycle. As Pelle, one of the hosts and friends of the visitors explains early on, if childhood is spring, ages 18 to 36 is summer, 36 to 54 is autumn and 54 to 72 winter, then mid-summer is your late twenties or early thirties. An age where many in the world outside of this commune struggle and lament over relationships; whether it’s not having someone or having someone you don’t want, it is a common curse. The message of this cult and perhaps by extension, this film, is that summer is for reproducing and not for monogamy, the only connections that are worth anything are your connections to a communal human family and that of this family to the earth and the natural world. 

Until you are 36, you are considered immature, and sleep in a barn filled with crying babies and children, you are not given any respect and privacy until you reach this age. Men until then can be used disposably for their seed, and women are treasured as a childbearing vessel. It is clear then, that Ari Aster went into this film with a dim view of relationships. The relationship at the core of this film is a dire and broken one, as a grief-stricken Dani weighs on her sulky and unavailable boyfriend Christian. This stunted, tiring and unhealthy bond is the crux of the film and it delights in slowly pulling apart their doomed relationship at the seams and exploiting the character’s vices. The only relationship that the Hårga celebrate are their large familial ones, something that Dani has recently had taken away from her, and so she is adopted and crowned into this new family instead, it seems entirely by Pelle’s design. Just as her old family were connected by hoses and car fumes in a gruesome cycle, her new family are connected through natural energies, bolstered by a liberal application of magic mushrooms at several junctures. Her life under Christian is frankly miserable, and ridding herself of his, as they call it, ‘holding’ presence lets her finally smile again in the film’s final shot. The feminine escape from a malignant male presence here is powerful, and her unfolding realisation of this necessity is what drives her character forwards, even as it breaks her in the short term. Monogamy has no place in this cult’s natural energy cycle and none of them mention or discuss any kind of partnerships beyond sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers. 

This could encourage you to think that Christian is the antagonist of the film, something I would like to dispute. Firstly, no, he is not likeable and is quite often something of a pathetic figure. His shoulders seem to slouch with the burden of having an adult relationship and the expectations he is not prepared to rise to weigh heavily on him. He is immature and a coward, as we see in his early exchange with his friends, where as they are encouraging him to break up with Dani, he refuses because in his words, “what if I want her back?”

In many ways, this grief makes him the symptomatic modern man. He can’t be the protagonist because he is a victim, not just at the hands of the Hårga, but of the plight of young masculinity, caught between your freedom and your partner, your testosterone and someone you really believed for a moment that you loved. His friends want him to be single, as they are young men who still have their freedom to pursue women and get high and generally live without responsibility for someone else, and Dani’s presence removes Christian from them slightly in that way. Monogamy, Midsommar argues, is for the likes of Christian, a fight against nature. This is highlighted again through the Hårga finding a ‘perfect’ mating partner for him, in Maja. Through a bizarre courting process involving being made to eat and drink her pubic hairs and menstrual blood, Christian, it is decided, must mate with her as their genes are compatible. The commune members pay no heed to the fact that Christian and Dani are in theory, a couple, all they see are good mating genes. You could argue that he doesn’t kick back against this process enough, as his eye had been caught by Maja before this process, but the Hårga also make it near impossible for him to fight it, guiding him to her on a path of petals. For him to fight against cheating on Dani like this, he is fighting against nature, in the eyes of the Hårga. 

Aster explains himself that Midsommar is a breakup movie, and thus perhaps we need to take the view presented here regarding relationships with a dose of scepticism. I don’t honestly believe that he is trying to renounce all monogamous relationships, but through the deep exploration of an extremely flawed one, he gets into the head of those trapped inside, and gets to the core of why it is failing. Dani’s reliance on Christian pushes him away from her, and deep inside his head he questions the value of monogamy, and his views are perhaps represented in the Hårga’s, that nature is more powerful than the social construct of monogamous relationships. Dani’s experience is converse, she was clouded into believing she needs him, and that she is ‘lucky to have him’, when really if she can force herself to shed his stiltifying and restrictive presence she can self-actualise and become a Queen.

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The Circle- Jerk: The Case Against Blackkklansman

‘You’re jerking my chain, you’re jerking my chain, the chiefs giving me a reacharound from behind, it’s a god damn circle-jerk!’ This is spoken around half-way through Spike Lee’s ‘Blackkklansman’, by Ken Garito’s Sergeant Trapp - the man in charge of the two protagonist’s KKK investigation. Under the pressure of operating an undercover investigation into the Ku Klux Klan, he snaps and spits out this rant. The circle-jerk I want to discuss is not actually this particular one amonst a team of police investigators, but the circle-jerk between the film and it’s audience.

It’s a line played for laughs, and is an example of the strange tonal middle ground that the film opts for to tackle some of the biggest issues of our modern era with a determined and perhaps misplaced sense of fun. The film practically celebrates these inconsistencies and wears them on its sleeve in its based-on-a-true-story documentary like approach to some of its big moments. In general that isn’t such a bad thing, it does make for a very entertaining two hours, bolstered by a very watchable performance by John David Washington. Where the problems come in is only when we start analysing the films message. The message - while theoretically a strong socially positive one about diversity and acceptance, is potentially just that bit too obvious to all those who will have taken an interest in the film. Equality, unity, the accounting for and processing of past wrongs, it’s great, but there’s nothing new here, not really. Perhaps the film’s greatest mis-step is how it then draws a thick line connecting the KKK in the 1970s and the right wing of America today. This is done partly through the use of several of the right’s rallying cries, in particular, ‘America First!’ This, while unquestionably problematic and brazen in itself, is then confounded by an ending montage featuring clips from the infamous Charlottesville rallies in 2017, and speeches from Trump condemning each side equally. I don’t argue that this move isn’t powerful and it is a strong vindicator against the fallacies and short memory of the right wing today. I do believe that this kind of unsubtle riling and aggressive filmmaking aimed across the political divide is simply irresponsible in today’s America.

In a cultural climate where the lines of division are running deeper and deeper and provoking more and more violence - the most important thing a piece of art such as Blackkklansman could do is provide the basis for nuanced conversation that includes both sides of the political spectrum in it. That is not what this is. It’s a film filled with liberal ideals, marketed for liberals. Chances are, not many of the large and growing political right wing are going to be interested in this film in the first place. The famously liberal Hollywood agenda means I doubt many would take a second look at anything this overtly political. So then, ultimately what I really wanted to ask after coming out of the cinema was, who does this film help? Could it be considered another step for black representation in Hollywood? Again, I’m not sure, I think other films have done more and with far less exploitation of the current climate in this regard, ‘Moonlight’, ‘Black Panther’, even Lee’s own ‘Malcolm X’. Does it help anyone to make the already firm-minded liberals feel more justified in their position, and even more ostracised to those with differing views? Who does it help? Or is it just another log on the fire of division that won’t really end up helping anyone, just driving more divisive wedges between a people that desperately need to start finding some common ground. Blackkklansman is not a film that will in any way help the growing problems facing a divided America. It’s a god damn circle-jerk.