Midsommar and the Normalization of Violence

If I were to try to contextualize Ari Aster’s latest masterpiece, Midsommar, in such a way that would encourage the viewer to grapple with the true horror of the film, I would only need one word.

The word is rape.

I’ve been scouring reviews and YouTube explainers since seeing the film trying to find it. It never appears. Instead, I find references to either a bizarre sex scene or a mating ritual, both descriptions failing, from opposite viewpoints, to deal with what actually happens.

So what happens?

Christian, the boyfriend of the main character Dani, is ritualistically drugged and raped by members of an insular society in order to keep the bloodlines varied. That is what happens to him. It is explicit. It is done without shame, from the perspective both of the characters perpetrating it as well as Aster’s directorial eye. Aster shows Christian rejecting the drugs at first, the woman plying him with them blatantly saying they will “break down his defenses and open him to influence,” and going so far as to have an elder woman kneel behind him and shove him to keep him going when he is in distress. And yet I have not found a single instance where someone describes it as rape. And the truly depressing thing is that I understand why.

When I left the film for the first time, I called the scene an act of rape, and quickly stopped short to see if that was the right word. It felt extreme. Because rape is not supposed to look like that.

But none of the horrors in Midsommar look like they’re supposed to look. Horror is supposed to lurk in the shadows, ashamed and isolated and predatory. It is not supposed to dance around in broad daylight, joyful and celebratory and so normalized by tradition that the most grotesque displays seem only quaint and curious. And that reversal of expectations is so effective at disarming viewers that they don’t recognize what is in full view. It’s terrifying.

I have seen the film twice so far. That first time, it was with a full audience of mostly college-aged white dudes expecting a standard horror flick, complete with jump scares and elements of the supernatural. In their discomfort at being shown this film instead, a film that pushes the concept of the banality of evil to its limits with its disciplined devotion to naturalism, they began to laugh. Laughing at discomfort is a common response, and being surrounded with people who all vocalize that response normalizes it and so they continued to laugh. They sustained it for longer periods throughout the film, until they laughed their way through a minutes-long, explicit rape scene, punctuating that laughter at the precise moment the elderly woman shoved Christian like a breed stallion. It was chilling.

It was especially chilling because a lot of these kids probably recognized themselves in Christian, who is both victim and villain in the two overlapping plot lines of the film. They laughed in sympathy with his relationship issues, and with his bro-y friends reinforcing his bro-y attitudes and assumptions about masculinity. Christian is the ultimate mediocre white dude who has managed to fail up his entire life, an experience that has left him woefully unprepared for managing even standard real-life hardships, let alone the extreme trauma of Dani’s circumstances.

While he is an easily-recognizable trope, the portrayal here is far from simplistic. There is something pathetically beautiful in watching Jack Reynor’s performance. In every scene where Christian is on the verge of being confronted with his failures, he gives these sad, searching looks that imply a painful level of imposter syndrome. We get the sense that he knows, deep down, he is inadequate, and that he will not survive being found out. But if he makes the right evasive maneuvers, he will continue to be given the benefit of the doubt and so stumble on into success. He is a coward, and the world is designed to reward the cowardice of people that look and act like him.

His consistent cowardice, especially in the face of Dani’s dire need, makes him one of the least sympathetic characters I’ve ever seen on film. As a viewer, I hate him with a truly violent passion. But that hatred can blind you, and in fact blinded me momentarily, from his victimhood. And that is a horrifying thing to recognize in oneself.

Hearing a cacophony of laughter at his degradation and humiliation made that horror palpably clear. What’s more, trying to figure out where and when I could possibly watch this film in the theater and not be surrounded by people laughing filled me with abject terror. Where in this country, if not the world, can I go where the image of a dude-bro encountering a room full of non-sensationalized nude women with flabby skin and sagging breasts, holding hands behind the supple virgin offered up on a bed of flowers feels like a threat, not a joke?

Ari Aster has said that he wrote Midsommar during a breakup, and people seem to have latched onto that reading because, well, it’s there. It’s not wrong to say this film is a metaphor for the dissolution of a relationship. But in that reading, Christian “cheats” on Dani in that scene. He “has sex” with another woman. If you’re going to call that scene what it is — rape — you’re going to need another villain, namely, the Horgas.

Ari Aster also said that Midsommar was partly inspired by the rise of white supremacy in Sweden. Not as many people have latched onto this reading. First, because it’s not as obvious. Unless you’re the type to make note of the title of the book on the coffee table during the planning scene (The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark), you could easily miss the connection entirely. The Horgas don’t seem to be white supremacists. They don’t ever indicate any racial hatred for Josh or Connie or Simon. Instead, what unfolds is a banal process of normalizing violence.

The first act of violence is the Ättestupa, the ritual suicide of the elders. We’re introduced to the Horgas through the lens of anthropology, and through that lens, Christian has a point — we stick our elderly in nursing homes, which probably seems barbaric to the Horgas. Where does respect for other cultural practices end and the normalizing of violence begin? I think a mallet to the head is a fair place to start. Because the ritual demands the male to jump feet-first and suffer, broken, at the base of the cliff until the “family” puts him out of his misery.

So how do you make people forget the violence? How do you make people feel better about what they just witnessed? You honor it. You treat it with reverence. You dress it up in rites, you treat the bodies with care, you spread the ashes around your sacred tree. It’s so effective that when Mark ignorantly pisses on the ashes, you feel as offended as the Horga man who charges at him. How dare he desecrate their remains — as if that is somehow worse than prescribing them such a horrific death in the first place.

And once you cross that threshold, it is hard to go back. Is this film about Americans going abroad, violating cultural norms they arrogantly refuse to recognize, and paying the price? Or is it about a nefarious cult normalizing violent ideologies such that their victims don’t recognize the danger they are in until it’s too late? Even for the Horgas themselves — as we watch one gasp for life on the ground, and another scream in agony while burning alive, it is hard to imagine their final thoughts being ones that accept their fate.

One of the main reasons the malevolence of the Horga’s designs gets pushed to the background is that we experience Dani’s story so viscerally that the quiet and pastoral beauty of the Horga commune feels like a relief. As a viewer, you are thrust into Dani’s trauma with intense closeups, claustrophobia-inducing scoring, and editing that constantly leaves you gasping for air alongside her. Seeing her laugh and smile with sincerity is so desperately what you want for her that you don’t care how she gets there. It wasn’t until the final shot, lingering on Florence Pugh’s exquisitely anguished pout as it slowly lifts into genuine delight, did I realize that the film I had been watching was about indoctrination.

And that is how indoctrination works. The very real pain that Dani feels, instead of being denied or stifled, is embraced and even indulged — not, as one critique would have it, in some healthy expression of empathy, but as a powerful weapon to be honed and directed toward whatever the ideology demands. Viewing the film as solely about her relationship or about her overcoming trauma makes that final sequence cathartic and almost beautiful. But it is disquieting to say the least to square that sensation with the awareness that, being welcomed into the “family” means that she too will lure in outsiders for slaughter, will participate in the rape of other men or women, and, if all goes well, will end her life by diving off a cliff at age 72.

Going into the May Queen dance competition, I kept repeating in undertones “you don’t want to be May Queen, you don’t want to be May Queen” like Dani was about to go check out a suspicious noise in a slasher film. But as the camera held on her face in those final moments, I knew it was worse than that. She did want to be May Queen. And a part of me was honestly happy for her. The audience certainly was. The other part of me stepped out of the theater into the night, eyes bulging in terror as their laughter still rang in my ears.