"Remember: the time you feel
lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony" Why do we smile at the end of Midsommar? The movie follows a grief-stricken and lonely young woman named Dani as she goes from being horrified by the Hargas' violent traditions to actively taking part in them as we the audience cheer her on. It's a fairy tale where at some point the big bad wolf convinces Little Red Riding Hood and us that happily-ever-after can be found in his teeth. I've heard people call this movie a dark fairy
tale, folk horror and an operatic breakup movie but this is also a story about indoctrination.
The slow surrender of individual identity to the crushing embrace of the collective. So why were so many people empowered by it? That warm feeling the ending gives us makes me think that not only have the Hargas successfully brainwashed Dani, but writer/director Ari Aster has
successfully brainwashed many of us. Welcome to Acolytes of Horror, where we examine the horrors of life through the horrors of film, and tonight I'm scared of Midsommar and
brainwashing. A lot of fans and critics talk about the end of this movie as if it's a
victory for Dani. The film's final act is about the release Dani finds in not diminishing herself. Gone is the woman who has decided to conceal her emotions for the sake of sparing others. Digging deeper, this is a story about the importance of empathy, shared emotion, and finding family in the most unexpected places. Dani may have lost her biological family but she's gained the
understanding that a family can be chosen. That smile symbolized finding joy again after so much pain. Even if that joy was brought about by something awful, it feels like a new beginning
for Dani. She's freed from her bad relationship, free from her guilt, and free from her isolation. While Harga may not be an ethical place, it is the right place for Dani to finally find peace.
(Overlapping Critic Chaos) "So... I think this might be a happy ending. And I'm curious what your response is to that." "Um.. well... um... it is... I don't know." To be fair if you
look at the story structure of this thing, her boyfriend Christian is the main
antagonist and Danny does defeat him. He spends the entire movie gaslighting her
into apologizing every time she's upset that he's ignoring her ,and at the end she finds
a new family and gets to stand up for her own feelings. She burns Christian and her own
emotional isolation to the ground. Also, by the end of this movie Dani is cut off from
both society and reality at the mercy of a group of people who killed everyone she came with.
It's implied that they might let her join them, but it's perfectly plausible to assume
that they might still kill her. And yet, she smiles and we smile. It's an uplifting feeling at the time, because of a series of brainwashing techniques that predatory groups like the Harga have honed to perfection for decades. Cults hide their horror in the daylight and use worship
and ritual as a form of psychic bombardment, and I think it's really interesting that not only do the Harga use those same techniques on Dani, but the movie uses those techniques on us. And that's what this video is about, but before we get to that, Dani's journey begins the same place every brainwashing story does: loneliness. Dani cries a lot in this movie. She's barely
begun to process the horrific murder-suicide that killed her entire family in a
single night. Even a mention of the word "family" is enough to make her fall
to pieces. "You guys are like my family. You're like my real actual family." Dani cries
a lot, and she always cries alone. She's always running to a private place where nobody else has to see her feelings, which Christian encourages. "Just take some time for yourself, okay?"
Depression has a way of keeping you alone, which has a way of keeping you depressed. When you're depressed, your body feels heavy. The air itself has this crushing weight. So it's a
comment on how lonely Dani must be - or maybe how strong she is - that she's still trying
to go out to parties and Swedish summer trips. She's doing the number one thing that they say you should do when dealing with trauma: Don't isolate yourself. The problem is Christian seems to be the only person she has left and he isolates her at every turn. "Where are you going?" "I was just gonna go out to that party for 45 minutes, you just keep sleeping." "Oh, no, I'll come with you." "You sure you've had enough sleep?" He's completely checked out of this relationship, but some combination of pity and apathy keep him from breaking up with her. Every time Dani picks up on this, he makes her feel like she's being crazy. When she finds out that Christian is planning on taking a trip to Sweden in a few weeks, and he's told her nothing about it, Dani so quickly cedes the moral high ground of "Why didn't you tell me?" to achieve a much smaller, sadder goal: She just wants him to finish the conversation. "Maybe I should just go-" "What? No, I'm just trying to
understand-" Christian does win this fight, but he's digging his own grave here. Not just because he's pushing Dani away, but because he's teaching her to ignore her own feelings and fears. Later on, he'll be the one telling her not to judge the Hargas after witnessing the grisly attestupa
ceremony. "That was really, really shocking. I'm trying to keep an open mind, though." When the Hargas brainwash Dani into going along with the ritualized human sacrifice of Christian, they're really just finishing what he started. Her brain is absolutely melting with loneliness, which makes her a classic target for brainwashing. Real-world cults are filled with lonely people desperate for belonging. Harvard professor of psychiatry Dr. John G Clark jr. writes "Cult
recruiters frequent bus stations, airports, campuses, libraries, rallies. Anywhere that
unattached persons are likely to be passing through." Because loneliness makes us malleable. It makes us reach outside of ourselves to find anywhere that we might belong. Cults are so
persuasive because they find these lonely people and they say "Hey, come join our family, and you'll never feel lonely again." "He's my good friend and I like him, but Dani, do you
feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you? I think about this moment between Pelle
and Dani a lot. Pelle is one of the biggest reasons that the Hargas win over so many of
us in the audience. At the end of this movie, even on my third viewing, knowing what I know HE knows, I can't help but love the guy. Christian doesn't make eye contact with Dani, Pelle
stares at her as if she's the only person in the world. Conversations with Christian are
terse and evasive; Pelle asks Dani questions and seems genuinely interested in having deeper conversations. Christian represses, Pelle wants her to open up. And after sitting through just
one hour at this point of Danny's nightmare of isolation, all this talk of finally feeling held
is already starting to sound like a happy ending. Audiences in 2019 might have been especially vulnerable to this suggestion. This might be the loneliest generation in modern history.
Technology has made isolation much easier, which can make meaningful social connection feel a lot harder. And that was BEFORE we were all under quarantine. Let's interrogate this scene
a little bit more critically. This conversation happens right after Dani has witnessed a grisly ritualized suicide. She's seen people's faces and legs literally explode, so she's ready to
pack up and get the hell out of there. Suddenly, Pelle shows up to calm her down and tell her that her feelings are... wrong. When she tries to talk about the violence she just witnessed Pelle pivots the conversation back around to her loneliness. "Okay okay, but I'm not an anthropologist and I don't understand any of this I just-" "I know I know and I was the most excited for you to come. Because I lost my parents too." "What? No no, Pelle that's not what I'm talking about it. I know what it's like because I do I really really do. Yet my difference is I never got the chance to feel lost because I had a family." It's easy to just melt into the warmth of Pelle's concern here, but in this moment is he being a good friend or a good salesman? "What poetry that it's now the hottest and brightest summer on record." "Is it tomorrow?" "I mean, from yesterday's
perspective." There's an old children's story where the Sun and the Wind make a bet to see who can make a passing traveller shed his coat the fastest. The harder the wind blows,
the tighter the traveller clutches his coat, but when the Sun shines he takes it off
willingly. It's hardwired right into our bodies: The cold and the dark is dangerous,
the sun is safe. Yet at the same time, we know we're watching a horror movie. We're suspicious of the Harga from the beginning, but everything is so beautiful and the Harga are so nice that the effort of staying scared of them for two and a half hours starts to wear on us. "Welcome welcome!" Movies like The Wicker Man or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have experimented with daylight horror before, but Midsommar is the master of brightness. The color white is just everywhere. Everyone wears white, it's always daytime, the attestupa scene is color corrected to be so blindingly bright that it's barely one step removed from a scene out of THX 1138. It makes the Harga feel pure and heavenly, but it's a blinding white. Like looking directly into the sun. As the Hargas' savagery against Christian and his friends intensifies, so too does their kindness
to Dani. When the Hargas' plot is revealed, when we realize that they're killing the guy we hate
and welcoming the girl we most empathize with, there's this profound relief we get from just
letting go and drifting along the current of sunshine. Once she's chosen as May Queen, Dani
becomes the center of attention and Christian's the one who is ignored. They lift her up. They
smile and laugh at her like she's a new baby. A woman who escaped a doomsday cult called the Worldwide Church of God wrote afterwards that "The indoctrination process was the best part of being in a group new people were invited to dinner, quizzed intensely about their past, offered home-cooked meals and support around the home, had their dance card filled with happy social
events -- love bombed. Niceness let the barriers down. It also stopped the appropriate boundaries from being in place whenever members felt uncomfortable, but that seemed a small
price to pay to fit in. In a dog-eat-dog world, who doesn't want to be part of an intoxicatingly nice community? "What's that?" "That's not for us." THIS intoxicatingly nice community never
does anything to hurt Dani. The finishing blow that finally sends Dani into their loving embrace only comes when she DISOBEYS them. Never mind how the Harga drugged and coerced Christian into
taking part in this orgy to begin with. Never mind that they surely had to know how much noise they were making when Dani's chariot rolls past. Don't think about how exhaustively choreographed this moment must have been. How much planning had to have gone into it. It's hard to think about
things like that about such nice people on such a bright hot day. What matters is that Dani has finally found a place where she can feel held, right? A place where she can cry
right out in the open, under the sun. Brainwashing is really just a matter of mental
exhaustion, so you can't brainwash somebody with kindness alone. That's why cults constantly
keep their members stressed and tired. More and more of their time and money are demanded. Sometimes they are physically or sexually abused, and if you ask any questions, "Oh, maybe you
aren't as pure as the rest of us. Maybe we should kick you out." That's why doomsday
preachers are always thinking up new dates for the apocalypse. It's why alt right figureheads are always trying to scare the hell out of their listeners. We can't make healthy decisions
for ourselves when we're scared and confused all the time. The brain literally can't handle
it. I love the way this movie uses our fear of the Harga to make us more familiar with them. The more it jostles us, the more obsessively we watch them. Ari Aster gives us plenty of time to dread and puzzle over every bad omen. His camera floats rather than shocks. The jump-scare can make you raise your guard for one surprising moment, but instead he calmly sprinkles in these ominous warnings that make you raise your guard through the whole movie even when nothing bloody is
happening. My favorite example of this is the first appearance of the deformed Oracle. The camera cuts to him in the middle of an otherwise normal scene, lingers on him for a while, and then cuts back away, not to be mentioned again for the rest of the scene. At this point in the movie we have no idea who this is or even where he is in relation to everybody else. On its own he isn't the scariest thing in the world, but he's jammed into this less threatening moment, so now my fear of the Oracle trickles into the rest of this otherwise harmless scene. It's like one of those nightmares where you know something bad is in the next room, but you watch your hand slowly twist the doorknob anyway. Fatigue becomes surrender, which really mimics the way a lot of cults and
other predatory groups treat their members. They're under constant threat of being kicked out of the community for the most trivial of reasons, They're worked impossibly long hours and kept in these long, group-intensive chanting and other rituals -- anything to give them a more immediate task to worry about so their brain doesn't have the stamina left to worry or question their
leaders' motives. All they have strength left to do is to just collapse into the arms of their
community even as that community slowly squeezes the breath out of their lungs. I'm reminded of one of the key insights from Daniel Kahneman's seminal psychology book Thinking Fast and Slow, which asserts that when faced with a difficult question we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. "So we're just going to ignore the bear?" "It's a bear."
Ohhhh thanks. Instead of answering Simon's actual question, "Why is there a bear here?" Ingmar
answers an easier question for him: "What is that?" "It's a bear." All these stressful moments amount to little questions being planted in the audience's brain. Questions which start getting answers all in a row, right as Danny starts giving into the Harga. Immediately after she hits her
breaking point the movie gives us answers on what happened to Simon, Connie, Mark, and Josh -- one right after the other. It's a narrative reward for wrestling with this anxiety for so long, giving
us this jackpot of dopamine right before Dani's big final smile. By relieving this stress right at
the climax, the movie lets us ignore the difficult question of "What's going to happen to Dani?"
to focus instead on an easier question: "What happened to everyone else?" It's a question we're more than happy to go along with. Especially after the hour-long, psychedelic finale where all of
the stressful imagery ramps up to a fever pitch. I haven't explicitly referred to the Harga as a
cult, but I have been comparing them to cults a lot, and maybe that hasn't been entirely fair. I
mean the differences between a cult and a religion and even some corporate environments can be so slight that most religious scholars don't even use the word cult. They actually have this nerdy little joke that goes "Cult + Time = Religion." I bring this up because the thing that gets
Dani to open up to the Harga isn't just the hallucinogens. She tries shrooms earlier in the film and runs away. Dani changes because the Harga invite her to worship with them. I think many of us hear the word worship and we think of a stuffy Baptist Chapel sparsely attended by old people mumbling the lyrics of some ancient hymnal at the sleepiest possible tempo, but
worship can be a pulse-pounding experience. I'll never forget going to the CIY or Christ
in youth conference in high school. It was a week-long summer convention where a bunch of high school youth groups got together from a bunch of different churches for some non-stop God time. It's a packed schedule of worship, sermons, games, and devotionals. Every evening always ended in this gigantic auditorium packed with thousands of teens and pastors. Bros with electric guitars lead worship that blasted out of giant speakers, only stopping long enough for a sermon or two. Every service ended with an altar call and every night swarms of crying teenagers would run to the front for God to save them. By the end of the week, it was a full-on stampede. Everyone
ran out there. I ran up there. Because I felt so connected, you know? I was never more positive that God was tangibly real - like I could touch him real - then when I was being absorbed in this larger celebration. What's weird about that was, I'd already been saved before. Growing up I must have been saved over a dozen times, almost always at the end of one of these week-long trips. Just being in the emotion of that moment of worship, feeling the purity of that spiritual experience after hearing all these sermons about sin and salvation and doing all these group activities
from 6:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m for five days in a row... I just surrendered, you know? Just like
Danny at the end of this movie, it felt great. It was a catharsis. It just didn't last very
long. You could always tell in my church when it was the Sunday morning after CIY, because the youth section was full of upraised hands and loud, confident singing, and then the next week -
just seven days later - everyone was sleepy and on their phones again. And that's why people in cults are so keen to separate their targets from the rest of the world while they pack their schedules so full of all these intense group-centered activities. And I don't mean to say that church is bad or that the people who run CIY are death cults. I made a lot of great friends
at CIY. Because when you worship with someone, you attach yourself to them. And that's the whole point I guess I'm trying to make here. Worship is an act of vulnerability not just to God, but
to everyone you're worshiping with. So far more important than any labels of "church" or "cult"
is whether that vulnerability is respected or exploited. The power of ritual on the human mind
is undeniable. People call Midsommar a movie about an evil cult but the Harga seemed to be free to go out into the world. There's no central figure manipulating everyone for his own private personal gain. The power dynamics actually appear to be tranquil. This isn't a cult it's just a culture.
And the evils of a culture are a lot harder to talk about because they don't always look like
evil. The Harga aren't monsters twisted by rage or bloodlust like we're used to seeing in horror movies. They're happy. They're nice. They just kill because killing is how they worship. It makes me wonder what kind of fears are rotting at the core of all the smiles and rituals in MY life. How is my culture exploiting my loneliness? How is my culture kind to me? How does my culture stress me out? What does it want me to worship and what kind of difficult questions does it want me to ignore? At the end of the movie, Dani isn't crying alone anymore. She's crying out in public. And there's something lovely about that, but you know... she's not fixed. She's still crying. When I see
her lurching around, engulfed in flowers, she looks like a monster. Beautiful, but completely consumed. This is a moment of legitimate healing, don't get me wrong. Dangerous communities like the Harga can help people process their feelings, that's part of their whole appeal, but they turn
them into something else in the process. These girls aren't really feeling Dani or Christian's
pain, they're just performing it. This genuinely therapeutic catharsis has been manufactured by people who now own her life. When you're broken, how do you want to be put back together? Stronger or weaker? Sometimes you need to cry with someone, but it's okay to cry alone too. Sometimes that's what you need most of all. Because if you just go from one codependent relationship to another, you'll be too tired to ask any questions when they say "Take from the yew tree, feel no pain." Maybe they'll be telling you the truth, maybe it'll be fine. Or maybe you'll find out you've been lied to... at the very worst possible moment hey wow thank you so much for watching
my entire video I love this movie I love talking about this movie and there's going to
be a lot more horror deep dives in the future so if you like what you saw and you want to
see more this is the first of many so be sure to subscribe you know this is really just
a passion project of mine I'm so you know any encouragement you might want to throw my way in the comments or on Twitter are just so inspiring and so motivating you really have no idea how big of an impact a few kind words can have on a small creator like me and if you
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link in the video's description... MMM! That would be amazing. I'm debating on covering either
The Lighthouse or Annihilation next time so be on the lookout for that and until then
remember: the monsters on the screen aren't nearly as wild as the monster behind your eyes, so let the wild rumpus begin. See you next time
I just watched Midsommar the other. Such a fucked up weird movie!