You should sit low, not on a chair or a stool or a couch. A small crate will do the job. Or anything that is lower than 9.5 inches from the ground. You can’t shave or cut your hair. You can’t have sex. You shouldn’t take a shower, though you may do some light swabbing of your especially funky bits, as well as dousing your feet and hands in cold water now and again. You can’t greet people in the normal way. You definitely cannot work. No freshly laundered clothes. The list of things you cannot do is long.
What you can do is mourn. You can weep and wail, and you are encouraged to talk about the loved one who has recently died. You aren’t to take care of yourself, but to allow everyone else-- family, the community--take care of you. You are to throw yourself helplessly upon other people, and you are to confront the feelings of sorrow and loss, to bring them to the surface and let those intense feelings have their place.
This is sitting shiva. It’s how observant Jews have been dealing with grief since ancient times.
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In Ari Aster’s recent film Midsommar, a terrible thing happens. A young woman named Dani (Florence Pugh) loses her sister and parents in a ghoulish suicide/homicide. Hellish stuff, the stuff of nightmares. If anyone has ever needed help grieving, it is Dani. If anyone has ever needed a community to fall back upon, it is Dani. Does she get it? Of course not. She is, like many people living in the contemporary, globalized, post-modern world, more or less without a community in any functional sense of the word. She has some people she knows: friends, acquaintances, distant family. She has a boyfriend, a fellow named Christian (Jack Reynor). But Christian doesn’t really know how to be available to Dani, he didn’t before her family died and he definitely has no idea how to deal with Dani in the face of an incomprehensible tragedy and the overwhelming grief that comes with it. Christian and Dani are, in short, contemporary people in a contemporary relationship. They’re cool, they hang out, they text one another and party on the weekends. But they don’t know what to do or how to treat one another when the bottom falls out. For this, they cannot be blamed. The last two hundred years of global civilization have effectively, in many places, obliterated the structures of community and tradition that once gave us specific rules for what to do and how to behave in almost any situation, most certainly in the situations like mourning, when it is hardest to know what to do.
The first twenty minutes of Midsommar dwell in that uncomfortable place where the intensity of grief meets the indifference of the surrounding world. There is a short, incisive scene toward the beginning of Midsommar, for instance, where Dani is shown lying in a bed with her clothes on, staring at the wall. Christian comes in. He asks if she’s all right. Then he tells her, sheepishly, that he is going to a party … for just forty-five minutes or so. He’s being gentle and caring on the surface. But really he just wants to get away from her. He doesn’t know what to do with her, as she doesn’t know what to do with herself.
Eventually, Dani and Christian and a few other friends travel to Sweden. They are going to enjoy some time away in a remote community during the beautiful days of high summer. One member of the group of friends is Swedish, and he has invited them to spend time in his old-fashioned community and take part in a special festival there.
At this point, anyone who has ever watched a horror film knows what is in store. Events in the remote village during the festival will not go well. And they do not. They very much do not. The various murders and atrocities committed throughout the rest of the film are fine as far as they go, within the parameters of the genre. Young idiots in remote and creepy places must die in horrible ways. These are the tropes of horror films, and if one is making a horror film, one must go through with them. It should be noted that the first death scene, in which two elderly members of the village community throw themselves from a cliff onto a sort of bludgeoning stone beneath, ratchets up enough tension and strangeness to be truly affecting. The rest of the deaths, until the very end of the movie, cannot quite keep up that pace. And how could they?
But that is not what is interesting about the film. And there are two extraordinarily interesting things about the second half, which are interrelated. The first is that the village in Sweden is not presented as a place of darkness and gloom. It is presented as a place of shimmering luminescence. Indeed, Ari Aster worked with his cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski to push the bright, technicolor aspect of Sweden in high summer to the very limit. Basically, Pogorzelski shot everything in the Swedish scenes with a large format lens and overexposed every shot. The resulting scenes are so bright as to verge on washed-out. Aster and Pogorzelski also shot many scenes in three-strip Technicolor. The greens in the film, in particular, blast off of the screen like something from the Emerald City.
The scenes shot in the US are, by contrast, mostly on the drab side. The colors are muted. Grays and browns predominate. In fact, you could watch the movie with the sound turned off and track it solely in terms of the way that the colors and brightness slowly intensify from the dark beginning of the film to the explosion of color and brightness at the end. This is a movie in which the descent into darkness (murder, violence, etc.) is given to us visually as an ascent toward sharpness, clarity, color and light.
This contrapuntal structure is related to the movie’s events. The obvious thing to say is that the colors brighten as the drama intensifies. This is certainly true. But the more surprising aspect of the film is that many of the ways of life in this strange village are healthy and vibrant, and full of life. Like Dorothy reaching Oz, the film springs to vibrancy once we reach Sweden. Bad things will happen, but this badness leaves the viewer in a discomfiting state of ambivalence.
The most unsettling aspect of Midsommar is that, through all the madness and murder, Dani gets what she was looking for. She gets care. She gets a structure of support and meaning through which her grief, and her anger and resentment, can be shared and expressed. She dances a dance around this village’s version of the Maypole and becomes the queen of the festival. She is listened to and understood by other members of the village, especially by the young Swedish man who brought this group of Americans to the festival. In one powerful scene, after catching Christian in a ritual sex act (!) with a group of women from the village, Dani huddles with another group of young women in a sort of communal act of screaming and crying. This is what she needed all along. She needed a small village of tightly knit people with specific practices and rituals. She needed help and a determinate structure in which that help could be delivered.
The problem, of course, is that this help comes in the form of a murderous cult, a cult that sustains its rituals and traditions by dipping deeply into the darkest and most violent inner recesses of the human soul. This all comes to a head in a profoundly disturbing scene in which Dani herself becomes fully complicit in the madness. The final shot of the movie is unforgettable. Dani’s face is lit up in a radiant smile as she dances and twirls while Christian is ceremonially killed.
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To say that Midsommar either endorses or condemns the Swedish cult village would be to miss the point. This is, after all, a horror movie. The point is to have wicked fun with a more or less absurd premise. The satisfaction of a horror movie is in the license to push the boundaries of an idea into the extremes of shock and gore.
But a good horror movie, versus one that is merely silly, explores the limits of a feeling or a thought or a tendency that genuinely bothers us. The problem of grief and what to do with it is real. It brings to the surface a serious problem. It points at something empty and unsatisfying in contemporary life, the sense in which our deepest emotional needs go unmet, unrecognized.
The response to this problem of unmet needs in contemporary discourse is often the rather trite claim that we need more and better community, richer spiritual lives. What’s provocative about Midsommar is that it does not allow for this easy positing of remedies. Instead, it presents us with a double bind. On the one hand, empty and meaningless modernity. On the other, richly meaningful communal life shot through with insanity and violence.
It is Ari Aster’s great insight to recognize that the horror film is not a bad genre in which to explore dilemmas for which you have no solution. That’s because all horror films are, in essence, structured like classical tragedy. Like tragedy, horror is all about individuals placed into situations in which they are inevitably going to be destroyed. The strange pleasure of a horror film is in watching the various individuals meet the gruesome ends to which they were preordained. The murderer (or murderers, in this case) are like the relentless agents of Fate.
In the case of Midsommar, the structural antinomy that will crush our hapless victims is the same one that, on a lesser level, every citizen of contemporary globalized civilization feels in some way all the time. On the one hand, it would be nice to have the permission to fall apart now and then. On the other, there is nothing more terrifying than falling apart.
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I’ve attended shiva a number of times (my wife is Jewish). It seems a far more satisfying way to deal with the death of a loved one than anything else I’ve encountered in contemporary life. But shiva is also, by its nature, deeply uncomfortable. Many modern Jews, even the Orthodox, interpret the rules of sitting shiva in accordance with their own ability (or inability) to deal with inconvenience. They might rend a garment symbolically, but not actually tear apart their outer clothes on the day of burial. They might do a few symbolic acts of self-neglect (not shaving, wearing old clothes, etc.) but not push very far into the territory of the unhygienic.
But the essence of sitting shiva is to let oneself fall apart completely, to die to the outer world, to fall with complete trust into the arms of the community. To be utterly overwhelmed and to put away all propriety, all embarrassment in showing oneself in a state of ruin.
Lingering at the edges of the experience of sitting shiva is the possibility of almost total self-surrender, an abandonment of one’s entire being to the emotional forces within, forces over which we have little control. It is, in a sense, to exchange one’s normal being with the being of grief. Somewhere lingering in that space, too, is madness, if we understand madness to be the state in which the ‘normal’ boundaries of the self--subjectivity, ego, what-have-you--can no longer be maintained. The boundary between I and not-I is obliterated.
These are the stakes, then. This is what one is up against when dealing with a phenomenon as powerful as grief. It helps us to understand why Jesus would have uttered the provocative words, “blessed are those who grieve.” Blessed, perhaps, because grief can take you to the very root of human experience, the very teetering edge where the bubbling forces that make up the self also threaten to overwhelm the self. Grief is going to take you right to the source. That’s a place of tremendous power and meaning. It is also a place of nothingness.
The horror movie, handled correctly, has the capacity to reveal something of the desire and simultaneous terror that drive us toward the limits of our being, where violence and madness mix together with hope and transcendence. That is the dangerous fire with which Ari Aster plays in Midsommar. It’s why the movie is far more affecting than one expects. And it’s why, maybe, we’re seeing a renaissance of the horror movie as serious film. That which we most want to see is always hidden in the darkest of places. That which we most want to know is that which would destroy us.
Morgan Meis is a contributor at The New Yorker. He has a PhD in Philosophy and has written for Slate and Harper’s Magazine, among many others. He won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2013.
