"Midsommar" — RNC2020 — Blackberry Lemon Spritz
No change, I can't change, I can't change, I can't change...but I'm here in my mold.
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Now Showing: Midsommar (2019)
The long days and short nights of summer — so, so short in the far north — generate a kind of giddy craziness in people cooped up inside for too long. In America’s big cities, this manifests and people pouring into parks and onto stoops, grilling on fire escapes and flocking to beaches. You know, summer fun. Every culture around the world has some sort of celebration of hot weather and summer harvests, whether its the Fourth of July backyard BBQ with fireworks and sweet corn in New Jersey or Dragon Boat racing across the water of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor. In the world of director Ari Aster’s Midsommar, a Nordic summer festival is superficially similar, consisting of the outdoor consumption of meat pies, dancing in white frocks, and some harvest rituals with live music. What’s not to love about celebrating the summer on a Swedish commune that practices an ancient form of paganism? A lot, it turns out.
Despite being about a summer fertility rite, the film opens during deep winter in the United States. Dani, played with brilliance and ardor by Florence Pugh, discovers that her deranged sister has committed a double-murder suicide, taking her parents with her. Wracked with grief, Dani leans heavily on her boyfriend Christian (Jack Raynor), a mediocre doctoral candidate in anthropology who was on the brink of breaking up with her. A few months later, after some social awkwardness, Dani hitches herself to a boys trip by Christian and some other grad students to their friend’s Swedish village for a week of Midsommar activities. At first it’s quaint, and then it turns weird and weirder still. Then gruesome.
There are lot of layers to the story. On one level, Midsommar is about Dani’s attempt to reconcile with what happened to her family as she is embraced bit-by-bit by the extended family that makes up the village. On another level, the film poses the question of what it would look like if a modern utopian community continued to live by ancient Norse laws and religious rites. And on a third level, it is about the dissolution of an imperfect relationship between two people who never really loved each other, despite being bound by guilt, expectation and genuine care. Dani eventually becomes a key player in an ancient village ritual and is forced to make a final decision about the state of her relationship.
Midsommar ultimately feels like a mythological tale. It is about a system of existence that feels primeval, and the production design and obsessive visual care that Aster takes with everything from the placement of wildflowers in a field to folk art on the walls of a barn make the village and the summer festival feel like something that has always existed. Even before the characters arrive in Sweden, a well-placed Ikea light fixture primes the audience to expect superficial, disposable simplicity. The aesthetic of the film is stark, simple, bright, Nordic and ultimately terrifying. There are lots of flowers and zero Swedish meatballs in this world. Aster doesn’t rely on shadows and jump scares — the bread and butter of most horror films — and instead opts for harsh, revealing eternal daylight to illuminate existential horror.
The end result is an utterly unique, striking and gripping horror film. There is a feeling of inevitability present at every moment in the movie, and it feels at times like a terrible fable with no moral. There is evil present in its world, but not necessarily villains (although there are certainly people who mean the protagonists ill). While definitely not for the faint of heart, Midsommar is a horror film that will linger for days and haunt your waking hours.
Midsommar is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Summer’s top horror film? Try RNC2020
Plenty of ink has been spilled on the Republication National Convention, so I’ll keep this short:
The rhetoric was deranged.
Nikki Haley looked like she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
Mike Pence appeared to trying to pull off the too-long, cheapo red Trump tie. He was not successful. It’s a bad look on everyone.
There were enough Hatch Act violations to shut down a poultry farm.
I still have no clue what “Be Best” actually is or whether it has accomplished anything, but given that Melania immigrated to the U.S. to be in the fashion industry and marry rich, not give speeches on national TV, she perhaps deserves a pass on this one.
All in all, #RNC2020 was scary, but in a predictable sort of way. Like the fourth installment in a slasher franchise. If that’s your thing, you probably enjoyed it. For everyone else? Not worth the time.
Care for a Drink?
As the summer draws to a close, there are still lots of fresh berries at the farmer’s market. If you happen across blackberries, why not try this refreshingly tart take on a fizzy gin drink.
Reading List:
Howlin’ Wolf was Blues royalty. His rivalry with Muddy Waters is the stuff of legend, and his 1970 London Sessions with Eric Clapton (among others, including Ringo Starr) is considered by many to be one of the best albums of the 20th century. And now Classic Rock magazine has put together an oral history of how that album came to be.
McSweeney’s does it again with “Nihilist Dad Jokes, Part 3”. It’s chilling and hilarious.
Pangolins are endangered, poached, and possibly responsible for giving COVID-19 to humans. The New Yorker investigates.