Matthew Hayes Profile picture
Jul 4, 2019 9 tweets 2 min read Read on X
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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More from @_matthewhayes_

Jun 11, 2021
I leave LA in eight days to begin a new chapter in the library world. I wanted to share a few thoughts on finishing my PhD in Buddhist Studies and why I consider this new job an extension of—rather than a departure from—my own work on Japanese Buddhism: 🧵 1/20
Broadly, one of the primary concerns in my research has been access to religious knowledge. In my study of a medieval kōshiki delivered during the Edo period, I’ve attempted to show how the complementarity of liturgical forms (kōshiki, wasan, raimon) widened the scope 2/20
of comprehension across monastic and lay audiences that occupied the same ritual spaces. While my dissertation is preliminary to a larger project, it is clear that the divides between lay and monastic modes of ritual participation are more enjoined than is often recognized. 3/20
Read 20 tweets
Jul 30, 2020
Just arrived! Missing vol. 1 but I’m very grateful to have this.

In sets, especially, dictionaries tend to travel down scholarly lineages much more than individual books, and I’d like to acknowledge the life and work of the donor, below: Image
E. Dale Saunders (1919–1995) was an American scholar of Romance languages and literature, Japanese Buddhism, classical Japanese literature, and East Asian civilization.

Saunders obtained an A.B. degree from Western Reserve University in 1941 and an M.A. in Romance Philology
from Harvard in 1942. He continued his studies in Japanese after joining the U.S. Naval Reserve, later earning an M.A. from Harvard in 1948 and an Doctorat de l'Université de Paris in 1953.
Saunders was a teaching fellow in Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard in 1942 and
Read 10 tweets
Jul 24, 2020
I have a meager following so I’d appreciate a signal boost if you can help.

Any interest in a network (model TBD) for scholars working specifically between and across East Asian Buddhist and literary/vernacular cultures? (More below)
Buddhist Studies and EA literary folks are often in close research orbit of one another, especially in conference work and special issues of journals. I know of a few individuals who’d be interested in a more formal forum for exchanging ideas and seeking advice across these areas
but I thought I’d see what people think here. I know there are groups, listservs, and consortia for everything nowadays, but I don’t see much meaningfully organized in this area. Of course, if scholars can easily meet these types of needs elsewhere, and in a single place, then
Read 4 tweets
Jan 26, 2020
So I (finally) watched The Lighthouse last night and I’m still reeling. Below is probably one of the most stirring monologues delivered in recent memory for me (Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake):
“Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead, Winslow! Hark! Hark, Triton. Hark! Bellow, bid our father, the sea king, rise from the depths, full foul in his fury, black waves teeming with salt-foam, to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs
till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge, and brine, and can scream no more. Only when, he, crowned in cockle shells, with slithering tentacled tail, and steaming beard, takes up his fell, be-finnèd arm, his coral-tined trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest,
Read 5 tweets
Jul 23, 2019
The Buddha and his Buick (1930s): ImageImageImageImage
ImageImageImageImage
ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
Jul 10, 2019
Really into these late-30s, sciencey maxims on Jodo shinshu faith: Image
Image
Image
Read 6 tweets

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