Just got out of #midsommar and I have some spoiler-free thoughts on the academic elements of the film [THREAD]:
1) I was surprised that the antagonists are all PhD students in anthropology doing research abroad. Academics (almost always STEM) are usually cast as either too aloof or too "smart" to be swept up in emotional crises. Here, they're critical, investigative, even territorial about
their research topics, and yet also reactive in ways that feel very natural.
2) This ethnographic motif actually works for the film's pacing. These people witness some very, um, different "cultural" perspectives, and while Aster could have played this up as purely divisive
at the start of the second act, the imperative to research and "cultural objectivity" drives the antagonists closer to the protagonists despite their growing discomfort. This imperative feels genuine.
3) This same imperative to cultural acceptance also forces the viewer in. Like both the female lead and the PhD students, I constantly asked myself "What is happening?" "What does that mean?" The viewer is meant to assume the role of an ethnographer here and, likewise, meant to
push past any early discomfort in the name of cultural acceptance.
4) Ritual performance, which is really the star here, is the perfect device to make demands like this on both the viewer and the antagonists. Like with rituals even in our own cultures, we are not always privy
to their motive, process, symbol and goals. And yet rituals pervade and order our lives all the time. In the film, ritual is meant to be both inscrutable and invitational, and this uncertainty as to how, if at all, to participate, undercuts that otherwise
objective and investigative rigor on display in the first act.
6) There is precisely one POC in this film who is first cast as the most rigorous academic among them. Later, he's forced to share the fruits of that rigor with the white male lead. I found this odd.
So, if you're into underrepresented academic disciplines in film, or the new (generally successful) wave of the trauma-as-horror genre, check it out!
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