Be warned: Spoilers ahead!
In 1999, Cornell Professor (now emeritus) Dominick Lacapra coined the phrase “empathic unsettlement.” It was drawn from psychoanalytic theory (Cornell loves psychoanalysis) and the crowd went wild. That is, the crowd of academics interested in literary theory and psychoanalysis.
In short, empathic unsettlement is about listening without appropriating. Listening and refusing closure. Listening and just being uncomfortable. Listening and not making it purely about the self.
How well do you think you do that? I mean, it’s a fair question. How often do you listen to something that makes you uncomfortable without doing any of the following: shutting down, crying, turning away, making it about yourself, offering solutions. It’s just human nature.
But when we are listening—actively, empathically, uncomfortably, we are in a way, recognizing the other and accepting their experience as different. We are accepting difference. (Check out Amandine Gay’s documentary, Ouvrir La Voix, it’s so good). The adjective empathic is so important here, because it defines the mode in which we listen. This is not detached unsettlement.
About Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). I should preface with the fact that only twice in my life have I watched a movie one day, and immediately again the next day, because I liked it so much. The first was Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009)—exceptional movie—and the second was Midsommar. The subject matter of the two films is in some ways pretty similar, so that might say something about my interests.
I found Midsommar exhilarating. For the first time in so long, I saw reflected in a movie so many of my thoughts. But most importantly, the notion that I carry with me that sometimes you can listen too hard. That, paradoxically, you can over-listen. About how insidious that can be. What I mean by that is the audience can, and usually does, perhaps inadvertently, most of the time, stifle a victim’s voice—at the precise moment when a victim needs to speak.
In Midsommar, our main character, Dani is recovering from her sister’s murder of her parents and subsequent suicide. Family unit—gone, disappeared. How do they die? Her sister (who belongs to the unit) fills their house with carbon monoxide. Something from the outside is brought into the unit, the family home, and destroys them.
Dani is in a shitty relationship with her boyfriend—again something that is supposed to be a steady and safe unit—but he secretly wants out. After her parents and sister die, he feels he is forced to stay with her because she has nothing else. He’s a jerk, his friends are jerks.
Home, it turns out is for Dani nothing but danger, uncertainty, loneliness. So off she goes with her boyfriend and his friends to Sweden (they don’t want her to go), to visit a friend’s community and for some of the group to do some research. From the very familiar to the very unfamiliar.
But, out of the darkness that was home, seems to come the light.
When the group arrives, they encounter a community in this idyllic space, where sun shines nearly all the time (this division of night and day is new to them), plants seem to take on a life of their own (unclear if drugs or reality), people all sleep together in an open-concept building (no sense of privacy), and everyone wears mostly the same colors. The entire community is predicated on sameness.
This is not Dani’s community. Except Dani doesn’t have any community, really. She is alone. She is an orphan. She is rejected by her boyfriend. This community doesn’t even speak her language, a foreign people, a foreign place, yet at the end of the movie, Dani chooses this strange community over whatever the hell else she has back at home.
The way that this community builds community, that is, the way they separate themselves from the outside and forge the bonds that they do (like how a cult does, always by othering) is though death. Toward the beginning of their time there, a ritual takes place where a couple mills themselves by jumping off a cliff. They have simply reached that age and now it is time for them to die. And as the movie goes on, the bodies of this group of visitors piles up. Kill what is on the outside to form a stronger and more whole inside.
What leads Dani down the path of opting to save a stranger’s life over her boyfriend’s life at the end of the movie is really when she sees him having sex with a woman from the community. This is what seals the deal for her.
One of the most mesmerizing and chilling scenes of the movie is not the gruesome depictions of death, but a scene of girls crying together. It’s true, it’s hard to forget. Watch below and keep the concept of empathic unsettlement on the mind.
The way the girls who approach quickly grab Dani and lead her away sets the tone for what’s about to come. Her free will evaporates, in a way. There’s a sympathetic reading, of course, that they care for her and want her to feel better, and don’t want her to have such a public display of emotion (“solving” her situation), or the less sympathetic: control. Because bear in mind that the people in this community have actually orchestrated this situation—so those who come to “protect” Dani are also to blame.
The camera work when the girls take her away is interesting. The girls form a pack and move forward, the camera dollys backward, and back into the cabin where Dani just witnessed her boyfriend cheating. The camera separates itself from her, the lens and eye through which we as viewers watch, and we hear sex groans, which mirrors the wailing that we then hear from within the other cabin, as Dani experiences a panic attack and cries. Complete catharsis.
The girls are dressed the same, they crowd her, almost smother her, and then begin to act out what she is feeling, falling into a synchronized crying. Together, they form a shield around Dani, and this becomes the center of change for our main character, who slowly drifts to the “dark side” starting at this point of betrayal.
The scene is chilling. What the girls are portraying as feelings, we know, aren’t real. But it looks so real. And meanwhile at its center is Dani, who is truly feeling these emotions. We can’t help but sense that Dani finds this community around her helpful. Her breathing steadies.
Dani has always been on the outside. No ability to act upon her world. A victim, a bystander to it, exerting little control. Here in this Swedish community, she is crowned flower queen, sits at the head of table, makes ultimate decisions over the life and death of others. This feeling that the girls experience with her leads her to feeling powerful—finally, not alone in the world.
All of this at surface-level would seem to contradict the notion of empathic unsettlement. Isn’t this over abundance of empathy and feeling that leads her to feel less alone and much more powerful? And isn’t that a good thing?
But taking a step back from her perspective, we have entered a world where right and wrong collapse. Where killing others is as routine as what’s for supper. A community that lives by their own laws but who without a doubt torture and maim people, all in the name of strengthening the bonds of their community. I can’t say that this isnt what real countries and peoples have done across the world since the beginning of time. But it makes it no less right and here we see it on a small scale. What community can do.
This feeling of belongingness is very powerful. Indeed, it is intoxicating for Dani. So intoxicating that having her boyfriend killed poses little issue for her. This belongingness is born out of this degradation of boundaries between herself and the community members, because she is not alone, she is stronger. And look who she becomes! I mean you can hardly blame her, but isn’t it something?
Dani was never given the space to think and articulate to herself what seeing her boyfriend having sex with another girl felt like. Her breath, what allows her to live, was for the taking by the girls that surround her. Her scream—impossible to distinguish from the other screams. Alls well that ends well for Dani, but not so much everyone else who came with her (however horrible they might have been). This total identification that occurs in the pivotal wailing scene gives Dani a false sense of power and agency, leading her to make decisions that doubtlessly the community is pleased with—falling right into their hands, just as she did witnessing her boyfriend cheating on her.
Dani is now disappeared—she is a member of the cult, and the closing scene, she smiles, really for the first time of the movie. The closing scene is much like a repetition of the wailing scene, the people watching the bodies burn in the building are screaming, howling, yelling, almost it seems replicating what the people burning alive might be feeling. This is a cult that does not only insist on the erasure of difference (a hallmark of a cult), but complete oneness at the level of sensation. For Dani, this is magic.
And that is probably the scariest thing of all in this scary movie.
Thanks for sharing! I would definitely like to watch it now. Have not heard of it before :)
I also found the crying/wailing scene incredibly powerful. I love this analysis. I think I'll watch it again. I remember feeling really uncomfortable at the end of the film, and it's because the audience is on Dani's side... But look at what sort of side it is! But as you say, you can hardly blame her. Icky.