Reconsidered: Midsommar

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

Midsommar - like director Ari Aster’s other horror film, Hereditary - is very much a film where there’s more going on than is apparent to the protagonists, with some kind of horrifying revelation coming at the climax. Think Rosemary’s Baby, or more recently, Kill List. They’re the kind of films where everything feels a little strange or off-kilter, but you can’t always put your finger on why until some kind of reveal, which puts everything you’ve just seen into context. It’s a tricky thing to pull off - if you’re too opaque, your revelation feels like it comes out of nowhere and the audience is confused. If you aren’t opaque enough, it’s obvious what’s happening, and you lose the shock of revelation.

So Aster really, really skillfully rides the line, by putting everything you need to understand what’s happening right in front of you, but doing so in such a way that you don’t realize it until it’s all over. This isn’t unique to him, but he’s mastered it in a way that few have. In the case of Midsommar, it’s in service of a story that uses the framework of a fairytale to tell a story of toxic masculinity in at least a couple of different forms - one more obvious than the other.

The Dark And The Wicked: Things Unsaid

In any ensemble horror film, there are a couple of ways that things can go - if the protagonists are sympathetic, they’ll generally band together and resist the evil preying on them, because looking out for your fellow human being is a sympathetic trait. You’ve also got the ones where the protagonists are basically selfish, obnoxious jerks who get picked off one by one. Personally, I don’t really think of the latter situation as horror, because there’s not much scary about cheering on the deaths of people you don’t like. Given the evergreen popularity of slasher films, I might be alone in that estimation.

But anyway, lately I’ve been really enjoying films that take people who are generally sympathetic and put them in a situation where they fail to come together, and everything goes bad as a result. Maybe they’re overmatched, maybe they’re deeply flawed, but even though they aren’t bad people, they just don’t or can’t get it together when it matters. Films like Hereditary, Green Room, The VVitch, and now The Dark And The Wicked, a creepy, atmospheric film about how a family’s inability to communicate or connect in the face of a tragedy allows evil to infect their lives and destroy them from the inside out

We open on a farm somewhere in rural Texas. It’s dark outside, not late-night dark, but early, early morning dark. This is a working farm. They raise sheep and goats, and chores start early. An old man lies in bed, hooked up to oxygen, unmoving. An old woman, careworn, works in the kitchen, softly singing a hymn under her breath. The house is modest, maybe even shabby. It’s quiet and still.

Until something unseen creaks a door open. Scrapes a chair across the floor. The old woman holds her breath, clamps her eyes shut, and wills herself not to look.

This is the Straker family farm, and siblings Louise and Michael have come home to look after their parents. Their father is gravely ill and wishes to die at home. Their mother has some help from their farmhand Charlie, but she’s trying to do far too much on her own. So, Louise and Michael have come home to say goodbye to their father and hopefully lighten their mother’s burden. You get the sense that it’s been a long time since the whole family was together. The siblings are worried about their mother - she seems overworked, run ragged, but that’s to be expected when she’s trying to keep a farm going and attend to her dying husband. She also seems…haunted. Afraid of something out there in the dark somewhere. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. 

She doesn’t want to talk about the thing that comes in the night and whispers to her.

This is a film that relies on atmosphere above all else. It’s a dark (thematically and visually) film with a drab palette - all of the color has been drained from this film, and the interiors are largely swallowed up by shadow, even during the daytime. It does a lot of work with silence that hangs in the air so that any interruption is startling. Doors open and lights switch on by themselves, the floorboards creak when there’s nobody walking across them. A wolf howls somewhere in the distance. As the film progresses, there are apparitions, visions, nightmare sequences that expertly punctuate the stillness. A couple of sequences verge on jump scares, but not so much that it becomes annoying, as jump scares often do. It’s as much about framing and pacing as anything else. The result is that a pall of dread falls over the film very quickly. It’s clear something isn’t right here, and that it isn’t going to get better on its own.

This emphasis on silence extends to the people in the film as well. There’s very little dialogue, and most of it is halting and elliptical. These aren’t people who talk a lot, and you get the sense that there’s pain in this house. Neither Louise nor Michael have been home in a long, long time, and they all haven’t been very good about keeping in touch. Michael’s got a family of his own, and Louise seems to be going through a rough patch. There’s definite guilt at how things have turned out, and you never get the sense that these people hate each other, but there is a bit of the feeling that this all too little, too late, that whatever damage has been done to this family is finally irreparable. Even now, in the face of tragedy, their mother doesn’t want to tell them what’s going on, doesn’t want to tell them why she told them not to come. It doesn’t seem unusual to Louise and Michael, they expect their mother not to make a fuss, to refuse help. This is a family that at their bedrock doesn’t talk about things, even things that bother them greatly. 

There isn’t a lot of character development, but people largely act like people - for as uncommunicative as they are, Louise and Michael are at least honest with each other where and when it matters, and when things start to get really strange, their thoughts turn not to how to defeat the evil that’s consuming their family whole, but how this is a bad scene and they should probably get out of there, complicated by their feelings for their parents. There’s also a refreshing lack of explanation for everything that’s happening. No serendipitously discovered ancient tome, no experts on hand to tell Louise and Michael what they need to do, no names, no origin stories, no history of ancient rituals. There’s something out there in the dark, and it’s also in there with them, and it’s feeding on all of them. Even a diary provides nothing but a litany of hopelessness and fear, and the overall feeling is that the die has been cast, and everyone is helpless in the face of something malevolent that is toying with them, torturing them, confident in its final victory. The word I keep seeing used to describe the film is “bleak,” and I have to say, it’s about right. There’s very little light in this film, and terrible things happen in the light too.

There are a few false notes. Not many, but noticeable by contrast in a film otherwise made with so much skill and attention to detail. The music is mostly tasteful strings and ambience, but gets overheated in a couple of spots, underlining the action a little too obviously. This is especially noticeable in a film that relies so much on silence and stillness and small details doing a lot of the work. One sequence falls a little into cliché, another feels less sinister than confusing, and toward the end we become so accustomed to things not being what they appear to be that one particular scene falls a little flat because you can sort of see it coming. But these are really small problems, as much about how nitpicky I get when a film is good as anything else. The overwhelming majority of this film is executed with a taste and restraint that modern horror films (at least in the U.S.) eschew as often as not, but without sacrificing any unease. In its unrelenting grimness and oppressive rural setting, it reminds me a lot of The Abandoned, and it’s one of the few films I’ve seen lately that actually made me gasp out loud more than once.

And if the damage done to this family’s relationship to each other is irreparable, then their fates are equally inexorable. The evil is already here, it’s already found its way in, there’s nothing to keep out. Evil finds its way in through the cracks in our ties to each other, it goes where love isn’t and spreads like a cancer from one person to another. It divides and conquers, and its triumph is absolute. Maybe this could have been avoided, maybe not, but it’s too late now, and it leaves you with an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach when the film ends.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Bug: You’re Never Really Safe

After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at conspiracy theories, shared irrational beliefs, the needs they meet and their consequences.

We really don’t like the unknown. From a survival standpoint, what you don’t know CAN kill you. So we look for pattern, for meaning, as much as possible. It’s wired into us, this need for things to make sense. Part of what makes horror films so scary is the extent to which they deal with the unknown, unknowable, uncertain, or unavoidable. All of the things that resist our attempts at making meaning.

But the flipside of that- the lengths to which we go to make meaning where there is none or where meaning is obscured - is equally a source of horror. This is where conspiracy theories begin - with an attempt to impose meaning on events which elude it. Sometimes, shit happens that is just too horrifying, traumatic, or too big to really get your head around, and one way people deal with it is to tell themselves a story that makes sense of it, even if that story requires you to believe in vast networks of secret organizations controlling every aspect of life. Bizarre though it might be, for some people it beats the alternative. 

Which brings me to Bug - an intense, nightmarish treatment of folie a deux, psychological disintegration, and the things we’re willing to believe to keep our lives from feeling entirely out of our control.

Agnes is a cocktail waitress in rural Oklahoma, and as the film opens, she’s dreading the return of her ex-husband, Jerry. Jerry just finished doing a bid for armed robbery, and he’s set on reuniting with Agnes - well, moving into her motel room, taking money out of her purse, and beating her when she gets too uppity, at any rate. Turns out they don’t really enforce restraining orders where Agnes lives. They used to have a son, and they don’t anymore.

So this is Agnes, lonely and worn away by tragedy and abuse, living in a squalid motel room in the middle of nowhere, her only comforts the occasional night out with friends, booze and cocaine. It’s not much of a life, and with Jerry back in her life, there’s fear now as well. And then one night her friend R.C. brings over Peter, a guy she just met not too long ago. He’s tagging along with them to a party. He’s shy, and quiet. Sort of awkward, but he seems nice. And they get to talking, and one thing leads to another. A moment of tenderness and grace in an otherwise bleak existence. He isn’t cruel, he isn’t callous.

He’s just really preoccupied with bugs.

And so as the film moves on, we learn more about Peter, about where he’s from, what he’s doing, how he sees the world. He sees bugs everywhere. He sees secret organizations behind every event in his life. There are people experimenting on him, and that’s why he had to escape from the hospital. They were turning him into a zombie assassin, just like they did Timothy McVeigh. But Agnes doesn’t freak out or run away from this. Oh sure, Peter has some weird ideas, but he doesn’t slap her around or steal from her. He’s a buffer between her and Jerry. And for someone in Agnes’ situation, that might just be enough. And in Agnes, Peter has someone who will listen to him, who takes him seriously and doesn’t call the cops when he starts going on about the bugs in his bloodstream. These are two people clinging to each other like the other is their life raft in a cold, incomprehensible world. Just as Peter isn’t Jerry, Agnes accepts Peter for who he is and what he believes, and so it becomes very easy for Peter’s explanation of the world to become Agnes’ as well. It becomes a story they tell each other about each other. one that allows each of them to feel like the horrible shit that has happened to them has an explanation. For Peter, the world is a vast machine manipulated by the military, by governments, by secret societies, and on some level, For someone who’s been through the wringer as much as Agnes, it makes as much sense as anything else, and it keeps Peter close to her. Playing along turns into belief soon enough, and it’s not long before we get a sense of just how deep Peter’s damage really runs.

The whole experience is grimy and claustrophobic - there’s maybe one sequence that doesn’t occur in Agnes’ motel room, which also illustrates the limits of her life, and the segments with Jerry exude menace. This room is almost her entire world, and Peter becomes part of that. People come and go, and as the film moves on it becomes more and more difficult to tell how much of what we’re seeing is actually happening and how much of it is Peter and Agnes’ shared delusion, punctuated with cutaway shots to hatching insects and the rush of blood through veins and arteries, as if their obsessions are invading our experience of the film itself. In this sense, this film is really good at playing with the same vagaries of perception that fuel conspiracy theories. We see and hear what we see and hear, but meaning isn’t made by eyes and ears, it’s made by the brain, and so perception is subjective, contingent on memory, our assumptions about meaning, the most accessible information we have, motivations, and biases. We see and hear what we want to see and hear, what we expect to see and hear. 

In this instance, the results are devastating. The dialogue is a little stagey at times (betraying the story’s origin as a play), but not enough to be distracting. It’s expertly paced, beginning on a note of unease, with Jerry stalking Agnes, and ticking along surely, Peter’s delusions moving more and more to the forefront the more time he spends with Agnes, who is all the more willing to believe them because Peter is, to her, the best thing that’s happened to her in some time, which is as much indicative of how bleak her life is as anything else, until the whole thing erupts into something almost operatic in its horror, the two of them finally collapsing into gibberish as their shared delusion reaches a fever pitch, two people moving further and further away from reality in an effort to make sense of their traumas. 

From the outside, it doesn’t seem plausible, how one person could believe in vast, faceless conspiracies to the degree that Peter does, let alone rope someone else into it. But spend enough time on your own, isolated and fearful, and anything that make sense of it starts to become attractive, because it makes the pain go away, and a lot of times that’s what people want. If believing some weird shit makes the pain go away, they’ll believe it. And it’s complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, albeit not at the scale of something like the Bilderberg Group or mind-control chips spread by viral transmission. Peter uses the existence of the very real MKULTRA and Tuskegee experiments as support for and justification of his own beliefs, and the appearance of a military doctor in the third act underscores this. We know Peter is delusional, but…well, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. 

Agnes and Peter are scared, in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their own lives, and if building an elaborate shared fantasy is what it takes to make the pain go away, well, that’s what it takes, and it ends badly. There are a lot of people out there who are scared, and in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their lives, and all it takes is a community of like-minded people who are all engaged in building an elaborate shared fantasy to make the pain go away, to make things make sense. As Peter says to Agnes, “you’re never really safe.” That’s a hard way to live, and so Agnes and Peter burrowed down into fantasy, burrowed so far that everything they used to be completely disappeared..

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Green Room: However This Ends, It Won’t End Well

After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at the savagery that so often attends white supremacy, the distinct gap between its lofty rhetoric and its reality, and the use of white supremacists as monsters.

White supremacists do a good line as villains. I mean, there’s absolutely a reason for that, as a viewing of Night And Fog will vividly demonstrate. But I think over time there’s a tendency to reduce them to ciphers, to a placeholder for “evil” in the absence of actual characterization. There’s any number of horror films that feature Nazi experiments gone awry as monsters, or that make human villains white supremacists as a way to amp up their menace. Some time back, I wrote up the film Frontiere(s) and gave it a lot of shit (rightfully so, I think) for making its antagonists not just cannibals, but Nazi cannibals, as if that would somehow compensate for the film’s shortcomings in other areas. Another case of thinking that a signifier replaces actual writing or story or themes. 

What this threatens to do over time is reduce white supremacists, like serial killers are reduced, to monsters devoid of any real recognition of the harm they actually do and have done to real living people. Like I said, a viewing of Night And Fog will demonstrate the folly of doing that.  

Green Room - a grim, relentlessly tense film, devoid of sentimentality - doesn’t reduce its villains. In fact, it is their humanity that makes them so unsettling.

We open up on a van, run off the road into a cornfield. It’s not violence, it’s a band on tour. Long hours on the road, the driver’s fallen asleep. They’re the Ain’t Rights, a hardcore punk band from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., on a coast-to-coast tour. They’re in the Pacific Northwest, a long way from home, and after…acquiring…some fuel, they meet up with the promoter for their next gig. As it turns out, he lost access to the venue while they were already en route. And this is an occupational hazard for touring bands in the punk scene. You aren’t represented by a management company, you don’t have a bus, you aren’t playing arenas, or even clubs sometimes. Sometimes the gigs are at coffee shops, or abandoned warehouses, or in someone’s basement. The promoters aren’t professionals, often they’re just fans themselves, flying by the seat of their pants. 

So gigs fall through. But the Ain’t Rights - Reece, Tiger, Pat, and Sam - are indeed a long way from home, and they needed that gig money to keep going. They’re going to have to end the tour and limp back to D.C. on one tank of gas and whatever they can siphon out of SUVs in parking lots along the way. The promoter says he can line something up - it’s a little out of the way, in rural Oregon, outside of Portland. It’s a matinee, two other bands, $350.00 guarantee. Considering their last gig netted them about 28 bucks, this is what they need to get back home. One slight catch. As the promoter puts it, it’s mostly a boots and braces crowd down there. Skinheads. 

“Play your older stuff,” he says. “Don’t talk politics.”

Here’s the thing about the Pacific Northwest: Once you get outside the big (diverse, progressive) cities like Portland and Seattle, things get very white and very mean very fast. As it turns out, they’re not playing at a bar so much as they are at a compound - a bunch of buildings way out in the woods, far away from prying eyes. Lots of Confederate flags, National Front logos, White Pride World Wide stickers. It’s pretty clear what the politics are. 

But, to their credit, the ones running the venue are consummate professionals - they get the band loaded in, tell them the schedule, and put them in the green room to hang out until soundcheck. Tiger, the group’s hotheaded vocalist, decides they’re going to open their set with a Dead Kennedys cover - “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” It does not go over well. But that’s not the problem - once they launch into their own material, the pit opens up and everyone has a good time. They play a solid set, collect their pay as promised, and start loading out. But Sam realizes she left her phone in the green room, and so Pat goes to grab it…

…and walks in on four people sitting around a very dead young woman.

Pat’s seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. Something, for that matter, that wasn’t even supposed to happen. The last thing these folks want is police attention, and now they have to make the problem go away. And the Ain’t Rights are now part of that problem.

So this is a siege film. The Ain’t Rights are locked in the green room with a couple of skinheads, and they’re pretty sure that they don’t have long to live. They’re out in the middle of nowhere and a very long way from home. And in walks Darcy Banker, the owner of the venue. He’s older, calm, measured. He doesn’t raise his voice. He’s a working man, with a number of different business interests and a passion for “racial advocacy.” As he reminds the crowd, “remember - it’s a movement, not a party.” If the crowd is the people there for the party, then Darcy brings in the people there for the movement, the loyal soldiers, the “true believers,” ready to do what they’re told, ready to make their bones, to earn their red laces. He issues orders like a man who has handled situations like this before. His eye for detail and icy pragmatism are even more chilling, somehow, because they’re so methodical and detached. There’s no yelling, no ranting, just cool appraisal of the situation and consideration of all the factors. Banker isn’t just a committed white supremacist, he’s also a businessman, and he can’t afford having the cops come around his place for reasons that have nothing to do with the murder. He and his loyal soldiers know the law, know how the law thinks, know the limits of the law. And so the Ain’t Rights, a bunch of 20-something musicians, have to figure out how to outwit a building full of people wholly comfortable with violence, a strong motivation to make this whole thing go away as quickly as possible, and a pretty good idea of how to do so.

The result is a tense, claustrophobic film that avoids a lot of easy clichés. First, it gets the setting exactly right, and that setting brings with it its own dread. It’s easy for film and television to get subcultures wrong, usually in ways that only members of that particular subculture will notice. This is a film about a hardcore punk band trying to tour, and what happens to them when they get in way, way over their heads. And it rarely, if ever, strikes a false note on that front. The shows attended by eight people, crashing in people’s houses, siphoning gas, falling asleep at the wheel, it’s all true to life. You’re hurtling across the country basically on the goodwill of others, and sometimes they come through, sometimes they let you down. I was a punk rock kid too, and went to shows in cruddy DIY venues where the soundproofing was mattresses shoved up against the windows, shows ended early when the cops showed up to shut it down, shows where people in KKK and neo-Nazi t-shirts mingled freely with the rest of the crowd, shows where some of those people put other people in the hospital after the show. In some parts of the country, it just comes with the territory - you go out to see bands and the faint hum of imminent violence is just always there. Culture at the margins attracts people at the margins, and things get gritty. The setting, then, rings instantly true. It’s pretty clear to any audience that the protagonists are among a rough crowd, but if you’re especially familiar with the milieu you’ll get the same empty feeling in the pit of your stomach I did as soon as they pulled up to the club, because you know this situation. You’ve probably been in this situation. In this subculture, you learn how to read the room, and you know when bad shit is brewing. It’s absolutely true to life.

Next, it gets the characters right and affords them a great deal of humanity. The Ain’t Rights aren’t action heroes, but they’re not entirely helpless either. Touring coast-to-coast out of a van breeds a certain amount of resourcefulness and tenacity, and they’re not about to let themselves get slaughtered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There aren’t any hysterics, any breakdowns, they keep their wits about them, which makes everything that happens that much worse in a way. They’re doing the best they can, they’re just wildly overmatched, and their best isn’t necessarily going to be enough. And the skinheads are people too. It’s not unusual for film and television to turn white supremacists, especially white-power skinheads, into two-dimensional fanatics, constantly rabbiting on about purity and the master race and all that. But that’s rarely how people talk or act. Even Nazis have lives and conversations about things other than being Nazis, and so the antagonists don’t go around throwing up Roman salutes or engaging in gratuitous sadism. There’s no leering, no monologuing. They’re not especially happy about the situation either, but it’s happened, and they have to take care of it. Some of the younger members of the crew are eager to prove themselves and welcome the prospect of doing so with bro-ish enthusiasm, while the older members are all business. They’re not looking forward to this, but they aren’t backing down either, and they have no problem taking lives. So this is not a film populated by caricatures. It isn’t a character study, but you get a good sense of who people are from how they carry themselves, how they talk, how they act, and they’re largely real.

So we have people who feel real in a place that feels real, and what happens also feels very real, and this is where the horror really is. This is a violent film, but it isn’t the gratuitous, tossed-off violence of the slasher film. People cry and moan and bleed out, and the damage is visceral. It’s a desperate struggle to stay alive, things happen quickly and without buildup or fanfare as often as not. Someone’s alive one second, then they’re not. It doesn’t revel in gore, a lot happens just off-camera or is cut away from quickly, with a few graphic depictions of violence providing excruciating punctuation. It’s broken glass and box cutters and shotguns and machetes and attack dogs and choking people out until they turn purple and just…stop. It’s hard to watch. It’s supposed to be. The violence matters here in a way that often isn’t true in horror films and vividly illustrates the stakes.

Which isn’t to say that it’s wall-to-wall ultraviolence, there’s a real sense of mood here as well. It’s leavened by a dark sense of humor throughout - the protagonists are acutely aware that they’re outmatched and don’t respond with steely resolve as much as bewilderment and a sense that they’re sort of making it up as they go, and the utter arbitrariness of their situation - four people just trying to get back home, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the difference between life and death a matter of a cell phone and a door that should have been locked - gives the final act a real sense of tragedy and melancholy. All of this could have been avoided, none of this had to happen, but it did, and it cost lives. 

For all their rhetoric about preserving their culture and heritage, white supremacists are ultimately bullies who hurt others to feel better about themselves. It always ends up there, no matter how polite the front they present. But they aren’t monsters, just like serial killers aren’t monsters. Monsters aren’t real, and people like this are. They’re weak, damaged, and their need to make themselves feel strong only causes needless suffering and anguish. As Darcy says at the beginning, “however this ends, it won’t end well.” And it doesn’t. Good people die for no good reason at all. That’s what this film says, and it’s haunted me since the credits rolled.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon