Teaching criticism this term has been an intense experience. One of the more salient aspects of this experience is the attractions and resistance to interpretation we encounter everyday. Interpretation always begins with a feeling—something’s off, or something’s right. But the resistance to interpretation is also a feeling, often a strong one. “It’s not that deep, bro” — a kind of motto of contemporary common sense.
Perhaps the best recent work of art about the interpretation of feeling and the feeling of interpretation is Midsommar. And as it is Halloween, maybe some criticism of a horror movie is in order. Not least because the criticism of the film I have read is disastrously shortsighted. The New York Times called it a “cautionary tale about bad relationships and worse vacations,” as if the surrealist horror allegory we witness might appear in a Rick Steves’ guidebook under Travel Mistakes. No — the brilliance of this film about interpretation can only be recognized through interpretation.
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The contrast in the film is stark: an American scene in which communication is always fraught with multiple meanings against a Swedish Eden of no night, where meaning is abundant, traditional, and ritualized. The film begins with a familiar contemporary scene of mundane communication: a phone call between a girlfriend, carefully modulating her tone away from her profound anxiety, and her boyfriend, disguising his exasperation. They are talking about her sister, and whether her threats of self-harm are serious or not. The interminability of interpreting these third-party feelings is a source of conflict between the suggestively named Dani Ardor and her boyfriend Christian. We see her on the phone, trying to solicit his care and comfort, in light of the disturbing messages she is receiving from her sister and her non-responsiveness.
What is this supposed to mean? is a question that gets its answer from Terri’s violent act: the murder-suicide she commits by piping car exhaust into her parents’ bedroom and directly into her own face. Death is the ultimate fact—it permits no further communication. The film is not subtle here: as we see Terri’s dead body with a hose duct taped to her face, the camera moves just above her to her computer screen, where we see all of Dani’s unread messages.
Christian, for his part, is found in a bar among his fellow graduate student bros. They all counsel him to dump Dani — she is “abusing” him with emotional games. They make arguments, including how much better he will have it when they go to Sweden if he is single. He is uncertain, but we see him waver. When he eventually takes Dani’s call, she is mid-keening: he was wrong, she was right. We see him comfort her, awkwardly, though we know that moments before he was contemplating a break-up.
Dani’s grief is consigned to a few shots, and eventually we see her attempt to return to “normal” life at a party with Christian and his friends. They are discussing their trip to Sweden — something she hasn’t heard about until this point. After a fight, Christian invites her to come along, news he springs on his friends with little notice before Dani enters their apartment, assuring them that though he invited her, she “won’t come.” The reception of Dani is chill. Pelle, the anthropology student who is the Americans’ connection to the Hårgas in Sweden, a small and secretive tribe that these anthropologists are going to study together, is the only one sympathetic to Dani’s presence. He is considerate, thoughtful, even artistic, and shows interest in her accompanying them on this trip. When they arrive in Sweden, they are immediately offered psychedelics. Dani is hesitant, but under peer pressure gives in to taking the shrooms. We watch the group trip together. Pelle narrates the experience for the group: “Do you feel that? The energy, coming up from the Earth?” We follow Dani on her trip, as her arm turns to grass. Pelle continues: “Nature just knows instinctually how to stay in harmony.” Dani then is sent on a bad trip, dreaming about the horrifying murder of her family, relocated into the idyllic summer sun of her Swedish environs. When they arrive in Sweden, it is Dani’s birthday, something her boyfriend Christian has forgotten. But Pelle has remembered and gives her a gift: a portrait of herself, drawn by him.
Birthdays may be seen as the most individualistic of holidays, even more so then the feast day or name day celebrated traditionally in Sweden. But note the runic inscription at the bottom (which he makes no effort to explain) and his illustrator’s style, muting the facial features that make Florence Pugh, the actress playing Dani, distinctive. She is already wearing the crown of the May Queen. This is not a celebration of the individual, but a claim upon her as belonging, already, to his family. Later, in the May Dance, we see her wearing a dress, already prepared with this runic inscription.
Throughout the film, runes and symbolic imagery surround the characters. Josh, a graduate student in anthropology, is committed to interpreting the Hårgas’s sacred text. When he finally gets the chance to have the Scripture interpreted, he is told
“We describe it like emotional sheet music.”
“What does it mean?”
“Well, each of the runic figures stands for one of the sixteen affekts, which are graded from most holy to most unholy.” The first page is a series of these runes, but every subsequent one is painted over (we see Ruben, a mute product of incest, fingerpainting in an earlier scene) as if by an Abstract Expressionist. The elder flips to the end of the work, to show that it has blank pages. “This is because it is a work forever in progress.” Here we may first think of something like Talmudic interpretation, a living scripture that each generation must interpret for itself. But when Josh asks who decides what gets added, the elder informs him that “this iteration” is penned by Ruben: one of the mute and deformed products of Hårgas incest that appear (though infrequently) throughout the film. “He draws, and we, the elders, interpret.” But is the joke here on interpretation or the patriarchal, authoritative, arbitrary claim to produce one? Ruben is “unclouded by human cognition” — he is pure affect. “All of our prophets are products of deliberate inbreeding.” Josh asks if he can take a photograph. The elder becomes incensed: “Absolutely not!” Anthropological interpretation, one performed by an outsider, is inadmissable. We see him trying to make sense of it in his notebook. One of his notes reads: “no empirical evidence…” He is clearly doomed.
In a poignant moment, Dani returns to her habitual request of Josh for a sleeping pill, something clearly prepared by him because he understood the difficulty of sleeping in pure daylight. That night, he pretends to sleep, and when the others have conked out, he sneaks into the hut where the Hårgas scripture is held. He begins to photograph its splotched pages with his phone. But he has walked into an ambush: he is summarily murdered by Ruben, wearing the face of another murdered American, with a hammer blow to the head. We are left with the image of his blood stain as his body is dragged away—a stain that looks surprisingly similar to the blotted stains in the Scripture itself. Here, the holy writing is not something to be constantly interpreted, but the record of violence against all those who have attempted to interpret it.
The ritualized violence and stylized displays of the corpses are dangerous: they invite to the question of why things are “this way” that led the victims to their death. Christian, Dani’s boyfriend, makes it the longest of the group, as he is willing to forego explanations and betray his friends in the pursuit of his personal ambition (writing what will clearly be a groundbreaking dissertation on the Hårgas) and his lust (engaging in a Hårgas mating ritual and so cheating on Dani). But Christian’s self-interest is set against the background of a horrific harmony. Dani hears the singing of the mating ritual and runs towards the building where it is happening, despite being warned. She peers through door, and is devastated by the sight of her boyfriend engaged in ritual sex with a Hårgas woman.
It is in the following scene, where we see her despair embraced and echoed by the other Hårgas women, where the horror of harmony truly begins to unfold. As Dani wails, the women wail with her. This emotion is one of the runic types—grief, perhaps. Everyone is prepared to wail with her just as they wailed at the ritualized deaths of their own cult members. Here we see the fulfillment of Pelle’s promise to her. In an earlier scene, he talked to her of how he understood her grief: he too was an orphan. But he was adopted by the Hårgas, and she can be too. Here, in the performance of emotional sheet music, she now has a family.
As the winner of the Dionysian May Queen right, where whoever does not fall from the exhaustion of dancing is crowned and given the right to sentence either a Hårgas or one outsider to death, Dani is given the choice to assign a random and willing cult member to the flames or her cheating boyfriend. She chooses Christian, and the final scene sees the Hårgas wailing again, as dead and living bodies are burnt inside a special temple. The film ends with Dani, in her floral crown, smiling, looking on the enormous pyre. This moral satisfaction, the destruction of her selfish and feckless former lover, is the seal or her entrance into the full harmony of the Hårgas.
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Meaning endlessly interpreted or meaning ritualized — these are the two worlds presented to us in Midsommar. The horror is that the second, despite all of its violence and gore, is undeniably more attractive. We find an almost parodic vision of this in the flatfooted Times review: “The stateside stuff drags (the movie runs two hours, 20 minutes) but when the story shifts to Sweden, everything changes, including the light.” Yes — interpretation drags. It is filled with darkness, uncertainty, and often the pain of confronting the meaningless. When the film turns away, everything is sunlit — an almost hammy allegory of clear meaning — in the Midsommar festival when there is little dark. Interpretation cannot prevent violence. Dani’s sister, as we see in one haunting scene, looks at her with a darkness that presages the act she eventually commits. All Dani’s worry about it, all of Christian’s denials of this significance, have not resulted in anything other than horror. But the forbidding of interpretation, the ritualization of every part of life, requires violence.
The difference, of course, is that interpretations are not all equal. They can be better or worse. But living within a world of interpretation is also a world in which not everything is meaningful. Not every part of the signal is message: something is always noise. There will always be error. As the brilliant Niklas Luhmann wrote, “A preference for meaning over world, for order over perturbation, for information over noise, is only a preference. It does not enable one to dispense with the contrary.” But in the fully harmonized world of the Hårgas, it is meaning that rules over world. Everything else must be eliminated. The attraction of the Americans to this world is a sign of what is so miserable in their interpretations: they wish for their readings of other people’s feelings ( as well as their own) to be knowledge. They are all anthropologists, in a high comic joke: those humans who seek to interpret humanity. But interpretation is saved by recognizing that it is only ever partial, incomplete, and unable to achieve certainty. What makes interpretation miserable in the American scenes of Midsommar is not guessing at meaning, but making those guesses assurances.
The horror genre both elicits and subverts our moral feelings. In its pulpy form, it is the tedious tale of comeuppance, karma, revenge. The best of horror makes mincemeat not only of bodies but also of our neat moralistic categories. What Midsommar presents us with is the misery of interpretation against the horror of harmony. Are you, too, willing to be seduced by the daylit clarity of feeling echoed without interpretation?
Happy Halloween!