“I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and a few of the podcasts I listened to are - one was on Filmspotting, and it was a discussion of Midsommar… Midsummer… and *laughs* it was very enjoyable because it was just the three of them basically just ripping on it for like, half an hour. And, two of them kind of moderately disliked it and the other one really hated it. So that was fun. But, um… a lot of what I’ve been thinking about is how things are portrayed in the film, and what they actually are, so - and how people receive them, right? So there’s this kind of theme of family and losing your family and rejoining another family, but because it’s a horror film, it’s not that simple, right? So, a lot of - quite a weird amount of people have kind of received the ending, or seen the ending as like, a happy ending or a positive thing, that Dani has removed herself from the negative people in her life like Mark, who’s a dick, and Christian, who was going to break up with her anyway, and she’s kind of been welcomed in by this family who accepts her and understands her and empathises with her position - like there’s a scene where Pele’s like “I understand what you’ve been through, I lost my parents as well” and stuff. But I think - and then it was also interesting listening to the other perspective of people who hated it saying it’s not her choosing - she hasn’t chosen this family, she’s been preyed upon in her most vulnerable state, to be basically enlisted into this cult. And then she’ll, you know, bring more people if she goes and does stuff she’ll meet people and bring them in and then they’ll - you know, it’ll go on forever, right? But… and there was a few bits that I just wanted to re… like, revisit, and one of them was the idea that Christian cheats on Dani in that really weird sex ritual thing where there’s all the women in the wooden thing. And she sees that as him cheating on her, but she only has a vision of him through a keyhole, so she can’t possibly get all the information that she needs, and she’s in a pretty weird state, like she’s tripping, and he’s not there, and she sees him in this wooden… structure, um, with him naked and a load of naked women having sex with this woman, right? And this woman who’s been pursuing him the whole time, like making eyes at him and shit. So… she sees that, and thinks “oh god, he’s cheating on me, he’s having sex… he’s having like an orgy or something, and so, I’m really mad, this is over”. However, we saw… we the audience see what happens just before the sex ritual happens, so there’s no way that we should receive the information that she’s seeing in the same way because she has no context and we have a lot of context. We know that he’s been being pursued by this girl for a while: she put a love rune under his bed and she’s got like, her menstrual blood in his drink and she put a pubic hair in his pie, right? And then we also know that he’s been approached and coerced into having sex with her and drugged, which is rape, although some people think it isn’t. So, there’s no feasible way that we should take that, or I didn’t… or on reflection that I couldn’t take it as him cheating on her because he was raped. He was literally - he was drugged and forced to have sex with this girl. So, that’s just one thing that I thought of, and I think people who don’t see it as rape and who do see it as him cheating on her are… it’s kind of got a lot to do with the idea that sexual assault and rape only happens to women, by men, and that men can’t be raped or sexually assaulted, much less by women. So, I think because it’s such a leap for a lot of people to see that happening to a man, it’s possibly more likely that they’d see it as cheating, but it’s… not. And I don’t know if Ari Aster meant it to be as big cheating on her, or not, I’m not sure. But that’s just my two cents. The next thing was, there were a lot of people talking about empathy, and Dani experiencing people having empathy for her, and obviously there’s that really weird, horrible disturbing scene where she’s crying after seeing Christian in the wooden thing, and she’s crying, and all the girls are sort of running in a huddle with her? So she’s crying, and there’s one woman in particular who’s like holding onto her head, and they’re all sort of in a heap, screaming, and it’s pretty disturbing, but people were like… I mean I’ve seen some people going as far as like “yes, women supporting women, this is what we need” which is just — NO! But also like, people not going as far saying “this is her experiencing empathy and people understanding how she feels and being… seen”, right? And, obviously that is important, being seen and feeling like you’re being seen is like… the best thing ever if you haven’t felt seen before. But - and obviously that’s from her standpoint - she feels like she is being empathised with from these other women but copying what someone’s doing isn’t empathy, it’s just copying. Like, if you were… I can’t think of any examples, but just because she’s crying and they’re crying, that’s not empathy they’re just mirroring her. And that feels like empathy but it’s not because they haven’t had the same experiences as her in the moment and - obviously we don’t get any of the Hårga people’s backstories. We don’t know anything about them apart from that they’re the Hårga people. We don’t know if they have experienced these things, we don’t know if they haven’t, but if they haven’t and they’re just crying with her then that’s not empathy because they don’t know how she feels. So, for people saying that she’s… you know, feels accepted and all that sort of thing, it’s not that because they’re just copying her. And… and then we also have the thing of chosen family, but she’s not chosen the family, she’s being preyed upon, and… basically groomed, because, I don’t know… Pele knows what’s happened to her, what’s happened to her family, and he invited her. But she’s been preyed upon gradually, you know, winning May Queen, and she tarts wearing normal clothes that she came in and then she has a little apron, and then she’s wearing a robe and then she’s wearing the dress with the flowers and then she ends up a heap of just flowers. And… so that’s not her choosing her family, that’s them deciding that she’s gonna join the cult, because they know that she’s vulnerable and they know that she needs to feel like part of something. So its not… it’s about chosen family but it’s fucked up. Because she didn’t choose them she was brought in. And everyone she knew was killed until she didn’t know anybody, and then her boyfriend was drugged and raped, and so she thought she didn’t have him anymore, and then she chooses that he dies. And people see it as a happy ending. And I don’t get it. Um, also with empathy I think it was on the Filmspotting podcast they talked about how when the yellow wooden building is burning at the end, and all the Hårga people are screaming, you can hear the people inside who are burning, and all the hard people outside are screaming in the same way - they’re screaming as if they’re in pain but they’re not, so it’s like they all experience the same thing but only a few people actually experience it, and then everyone else pretends to experience it to feel like they’re all one. So one thing happens to one person and everyone else pretends its happening to them as well, or they feel like its happening to them as well, but its not. So its a sort of second-hand emotion that you’re not actually feeling, because it’s, like… if one person… if something happens to one person then it happens to everybody but it actually only happens to one person. And everyone else feels like it happens to them be cause they react to it in the same way the person does, but they don’t know how they feel, they’re just… screaming. I don’t know.”
