One of the cooler and more noteworthy things about the critical buzz for the highly trippy new horror folk film MIDSOMMAR is the notion that one should not do psychedelics before seeing it. There have already been a few freak-outs in the theaters showing the film. (I won't link to the reports, because lightweights have no place on this site) but I am fascinated that psychedelics at the movies has become such a commonplace thing now that it's not a question of whether one should trip at the cinema or trip at all, but a question of which tripped-out druggy horror films are best seen straight. "Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping," notes Fast Company's Joe Berkowitz of Aster's new film, "but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all."
I agree with Joe: Midsommar Delivers the Most Realistically Trippy Drug Scene Ever, for Better and for Worse. It didn't occur to me to go see it tripping, but now I sure wish I did! I'm a fan of that 'never born at all' feeling - isn't that what movies are all about? (3) Between this and Climax, and last year's Mandy, and shows like Euphoria, its heartening to see the ways psychedelics have moved from this kind of dirtbag-disreputable guilt-by-association into a kind of hipster mainstream respectability, done in hopeful moderation when the time is just right and nonfatal nightmares of self realization when the time isn't. They can be informative without being didactic. Gone are the Judy Blume-style inaccuracies of after school specials like Go Ask Alice, replaced with a knowingness about the pros and cons of the trip.
In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film, it was always with a patina of dirtbag mummery: naked broads in body paint frugging through a kaleidoscope via a hyperactive zoom lens. Hallucinations were usually embodied by actors or latex puppets, completely divorced from the context in which they were perhaps originally hallucinated - the impossibility of getting the full scope of expanded consciousness across all the telephone game hands it takes to put into practice. (6) Drugs were associated strictly with a certain swath of music, and mired in an ever-oscillating mix naive idealism and burnt-out paranoia. For before we could really delve into the nature of a drug hallucination, it would be gone. A lot of us preferred to stay home alone, tripping and trying to record our visuals via painting, or ranting into a microphone, or scribbling poetry - but that too was dangerous, with no one to bring you off the ledge one could think oneself into a bad trip pretty fast. Thus the bulk of drug-taking imagery in cinema has always been--until recently--of a Lowest Common Denominator kind of vibe, both naive and skeevy, a bunch of easily-influenced kids shimmying to a guitar solo like lemmings to a cliffside chimera.
With Midsommar we finally move past those breakwaters - gone are the banal psychedelic imagery we're used to on film, and now -- forever, hopefully, thanks to CGI and director Ari Aster's modicum of restraint comes the imagery of psychedelics as they actually are. Anchored to the expansion and contraction of the breath (is one 'hallucinating' when they become aware that the entire planet 'breathes' in ever expanding/contracting waves of energy?).
As the backpacking guests at the weird Swedish commune take mushrooms and then drink some unknown herbal tea, we have to pay attention to see the way the deep black interiors of the flowers in Dani's hair widens and contracts just like a tripping pupil, or the way the tendrils of the vines wrapped around her May Queen throne stretch to accommodate and encourage her ever-more tarot-style royal movements. The sacred space and time generated by ritual circular movement is made palpable in the flow of energy up the bark of trees, or the flow of energy between people entraining their breath and movements to the music guiding them in an endless May Pole dance.
Ever quick to invent new phrases, I dub this new trend, so indelibly volleyed first by Ari Aster in his new little horror semi-gem, Midsommar, 'hallucinaturalism' - i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as kind of totally separate from the world around them, but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body.
EDIBLES
Am I myself getting of ahead? Surely the plot should be pretty familiar to you if you've ever gone to visit a rural commune with a friend of a friend for either a weekend camping/party or rock festival (we had the 'Barn Bash' at our guitarist's family farm, among other events). Such areas make the perfect tripping zone - no cops, no cars, no drawer-searching rehab-calling parents, unless there's a pen with a bull stamping around in it, no real danger. But even so, one can find one's mellow being harshed by one's buzzkill old lady, the type who invites herself along and then makes frowny faces every time you want to do funnels, or shrooms, or whatever (she doesn't want you to do them without her, but she doesn't want to do them yet... and it's always yet). Our main backpacker heroine is a kind of damaged co-dependent bi-polar buzzkill Dani (Florence Pugh), tagging along with her passive-douche boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), the kind of guy who's too cowardly to break up with her so close to the triple suicide of her sister and parents, or figure out how to not invite her as he tags along with his anthropology masters degree buddies on a summer vacation to the solstice midsummer celebration at the agrarian commune of their Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Bolmgren) who seems pretty normal. They're expecting a kind of cross between Burning Man and an Amish barn raising party. Well, they get all that and more too, in the clear light of day, forever (the lack of a setting sun or nightfall is one of the film's most uncanny elements).“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” ― Joseph Campbell
Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets the paranoid drones just right and the strange chanting diegetic songs are just the perfect level of strange. Though it lacks the core of great acting we get from Toni Collette, leading to a kind of gaping hole in the middle of the narrative, that's OK. And it's OK that it doesn't really add up to much beyond the sum of its parts - and that at 2 1/2 hours it still feels like so much of the film is missing.
Still, it's got enough great moments and, again the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema, and maybe the best druggy sex scene ever. It's right up there and it encompasses all that is interesting, beguiling and terrifying about such 'communes' - the collapse of privacy, of independent thought and of a kind of binding that obscures the commonality.
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| Dani's moaning and screaming at last finds its entrainment absolving MIDSUMMER NIGHT MOAN “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell |
There's a feeling of being totally unmoored from one's place in the world very common today--when constant texting for validation from peers isn't enough to fill the 'god-sized hole' (as we say in AA) and our leaning on a current sex partner or best friend to somehow make up that vast chasm of disconnect is a sure way to swamp our craft, so to speak. For a lot of us, especially if we're not on meds, or they're not working anymore, the despair of isolation is so great that thoughts of suicide, on repeat, like a stuttering record, are our only salve. Dude, if even Ativan doesn't work (we see a bottle in Dani's cabinet - and if you know Ativan you're bound to get jealous), you know you're fucked. And if your pair-bond doesn't fill the hole, then what? You can join AA or some other group - that's kind of a cult, and can be totally a cult if you wind up at the wrong meeting and let some weirdo sponsor you because you're too passive to say no. Or you can meditate... on drugs.. chant you're way clear of the orbit around that damned hole. Accepting that the gaping emptiness at the core of the self can never be filled is the only way to escape its gravitational pull. It's Lacanian!
On psychedelics one isn't necessarily free of one's issues, they're just magnified. But with the right group--a primal scream therapy group at your therapist's office every other week for example--you can magnify your woes to such a large degree they disappear from the horizon.
CULTS Are for KIDS
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell
"Without a gang, you're an orphan!" - Riff West Side Story
Whether hot coal walks or bad acid trip paranoia, initiation ordeals leave us tightly united to the group without the need for a common enemy. Rather than bonding through collectively hating on some outcast, which is like the cheap knock-off Elmer's of social binding, it is through this initiation (which when it goes too far and frat dicks get ahold of it becomes 'hazing'). (2)
AA gets it (I mean Ari Aster, though it goes both ways) Between this and Hereditary he's proving himself the champion auteur of the New Dysfunction - one where drugs are so numerous the zone between one's shrink and her litany of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds, and the herbalist with the plastic baggy or the 'tea' - cease to exist. There's no 'normal' to start out from anymore and if you're not 'in' the group you're soon to be devoured by them. There's no 'normal' to start out with anymore - no common 'normal' that connects the social order - only degrees of dysfunctional isolation and co-dependence. In neither film do we ever hear from anyone like a policeman, a narrator, a court appointed grief counsellor, a psychiatrist. As in films like The Shining- the socially conditioned polarities of right and wrong, linear time and the concept of future obligation cease. Like psychedelics themselves, the 'snap' of cabin fever frees us from the kind of rote empathy that locks us into the social order like an archon trick. We're beyond such things - life and death and the degrees of 'goodness' are lost in the presence of a kind of Hanging Rock/Quetzalcoatl sun god green man archaic pre-Christian hunger for human sacrifice.
Maybe you've seen 2000 Manics (left), or the Wicker Man (either version), the real terror of it isn't anything bogeyman related but the idea that such macabre human sacrifice could become as routine and accepted as, say, fireworks on the 4th of July, or the lighting of a Lincoln Center Xmas tree. The scene at left is terrifying because we see the ease with which such a tableaux can fit easily into the apple pie and potato sack race shenanigans of a town centennial. As with Hereditary, Aster brings to the horror genre reflections of our own subconscious paranoia -that there's a secret society right there in plain sight, as banal as an old photo album of your grandma's showing a bunch of old ladies showing off their arts and crafts talismans, or a group of blonde farmers all dressed in white with big loving smiles and flowers in their hair--their actions too ancient, to rooted in archaic magics to be called evil in the pejorative sense. In both Aster's films, there is no sense of Machiavellian lip-smacking, there's no sordid rapey underscore in the process which 'spoiler' etiquette prevents me from detailing. Everything is ritualized and slow according to the nature of the being, of the breath, and the understanding that screams of the dying can be drowned out with group screaming in sympathy, that the most harrowing howls of pain and anguish can be matched and calmed through the entrainment of the support group and that all such negative emotions can be dissolved into the group like salt in the sea.Between Chris Hemsworth's seductive cult freak in Bad Times at the El Royale and Tarantino's new Manson film, as well as new TV docs signifies the enduring appeal of the archetype of the holy madman is back, tapping into the aging millennial's desperate need for a blood-and-flesh tribe, a version of the fantasy of belonging they found in Twilight, Harry Potter, and so forth and the dozen other 'magical school' franchises glutting the market. They crave a world where they feel included, loved, protected, in a hermetic magical zone, able to face danger and the threats of life knowing a strong group as at their back. We might get this, as I did, through being in a band in college, or a street gang, the military, or maybe a sports team or something, but for the drowning psychotic the god-sized hole of desperate feeling of orphanhood is too much to navigate the give-and-take of a clique. For such people, being swooped up in the rescue gear of the cult-building mystic is a true godsend, the fragile ecosystem of social mores instilled in them by a failed family unit and educational system gets washed away with this shining all-inclusive paradigm. The ocean of support and 'being held' they receive more than making up for things like the total loss of independence, personal property, and connection to the outside world.
Why it's so seductive in Midsommar's case is that we're not dealing with usual Hammer Films gathering of British extras in robes cavorting and waving around goblets and bunches of grapes while Charles Grey glowers behind an altar - we're dealing with drug effects we may already be familiar with --their abilities to bond a social group and/or weird one out along the same line--and harmony with nature, though a nature that is inscrutable in its demands - the sun and light of love they feel goes hand in hand with a clear-eyed and unflinching view of death, and a view of sex and mind-altering drugs completely free of all Christianity's and conservative parental hysteria's restrictions and taboos. We can't help but feel the attraction, the druggy pull of inclusion and oneness. Coming out of the theater into the warm summer evening or late afternoon, walking home from the Alamo in the soggy summer heat, we may be grateful we're safe in the city, and sober, more or less, and happy more or less, in our world of pair-bond-cohabitation, our online communities ever a click away, aware finally that pursuit of balance not happiness is they to... happiness. And that air conditioning, vaping, CBD gummies, anti-depressants, ant-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, herbal teas and Coke Zero, taken continually, makes everything all right, but not so all right we fall into mania and therefore, inevitably, a massive crash. If, like me, you spent the first 30 years of your life on a treadmill running from all-consuming massive depression, you know what heaven is - being able to stop. The question then becomes... then what? What do we do now that we don't need to do anything?
GOATS
"And Goats have kids, like people have kids, like me and you!"
- 70s Sesame Street song ("What Kids are Called")
But why are goats such able vessels for human and daemonic spirits? Is it because we attributed it to them, based on Pan, satyrs, the frolicking horned one, etc? From Hunchback of Notre Dame (where a little black goat is actually tried and accused of witchcraft to the recent The Witch.) Which came first, the power we ascribe of the power they already have?
Or does this shit go far deeper. If you don't think goats are supernatural you've never seen one standing out on a tree limb like a high wire act (above) when you know there's just no way that's even possible?
Sorry this ends so randomly. So does the film though; if it's not more than the sum of it's parts, its parts are still good. Maybe that's what tripping is like too. You may find nirvana, the pieces of your life coming together in a perfect mandala jigsaw puzzle you'd normally spend lifetimes c ompleting, but with nothing else to do, one can't help but break it all up so you're not bored for the next 50 years. Or you find the Hell of self-conscious empty needy anguish, the alone even in a herd of friends despair, so amplified crawling into a lit fireplace seems the only available recourse. Either way, it's over then too. You can declare you're 'done' with psychedelics, that you've 'passed' the acid test like the forced Ken Kesey to say after he got busted with a joint, the 'man' making him turn his back on LSD. Or you can try to minister to the onslaught of needy mouths as they sense someone with 'the answer' and a free tab, like a flock of hungry seagulls around a lone guy throwing breadcrumbs into the wind. Or you can barricade yourself from the beaks and hole up with a lover or two and a bunch of recording equipment and art supplies like Turner in Performance. Or you can join a commune, experience the oneness, and maybe it's not a cult after all (no messiah figure). Either way, someone has to do the dishes, and it's not going to be me.
Shout out to Ryan for the req!
RECOMMENDATIONS:
A cool movie with a similar plot arc, believe it or not, is 1978's THE LEGACY!
CinemArchetype 15: Human Sacrifice
NOTES
1. yes I practice meditation daily with a light-sound machine, I recommend it
2. Part of this may be in the initial outcast mode. In our grade school I remember noticing that the new kid was always ganged up on until a newer kid arrived. At that point the less-new kid was considered to have (my anthropological guess) earned their place in the group for having not wilted under the teasing. Now they too could join in our collective unification against the newest kid, and so on. I paid for this when I moved in sixth grade, and found myself instead of at the top of in grade school, the bottom in middle-school (6-9), halfway through their term, and with teaches determined to believe I needed to catch up rather than was already more knowledgable than their entire graduate class at Yale.
3. I have a long-standing theory that my love of lesbians in movies stems from this wish, the death drive in its purest form, for the lesbian lovers sidestep the reproductive sidpa bardo and watching as a man you are not filled with the weird admiration/jealousy/resentment you'd get if there was a man in the shot. With no 'place' in the mise ens cene, either as an unborn child or father, we're free to try for a bardo that's not as slippery with reincarnative tunnels back down into 3D space time.
6. My recent DT hallucination of Veronica Lake swimming in ice below the tiles in the ER waiting room, beckoning me to jump in, would no doubt by the time they made it into a movie, be represented by a real actress dressed as Lake standing, dripping in the middle of the room, pointing at me and making a drowning noise, in other words completely divorced from the floor waxer brush prints from which my brain's paredolia center and my recent drunk viewing of Sullivan's Travels worked with my heated brain to conjure Lake dancing in icy water below the floor. I was there at 4 AM and the floor had just been waxed. Would that image last through CGI effects team interpretation, presuming the animator has no experience with such mental states? Consider how much better films like Altered States, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Naked Lunch might have been with a more vivid and alert recreation of drug hallucinations rather than this kind of broad cartoon literality? Nothing against those films per se, especially Naked Lunch.
6. My recent DT hallucination of Veronica Lake swimming in ice below the tiles in the ER waiting room, beckoning me to jump in, would no doubt by the time they made it into a movie, be represented by a real actress dressed as Lake standing, dripping in the middle of the room, pointing at me and making a drowning noise, in other words completely divorced from the floor waxer brush prints from which my brain's paredolia center and my recent drunk viewing of Sullivan's Travels worked with my heated brain to conjure Lake dancing in icy water below the floor. I was there at 4 AM and the floor had just been waxed. Would that image last through CGI effects team interpretation, presuming the animator has no experience with such mental states? Consider how much better films like Altered States, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Naked Lunch might have been with a more vivid and alert recreation of drug hallucinations rather than this kind of broad cartoon literality? Nothing against those films per se, especially Naked Lunch.