Re: Hereditary. I think it was very well made, and very scary...but I disliked it on a deeper level. The term I went with was "despair porn."*Just kind of wallowing in misery for its own sake
I felt it had a great grasp of relationships, pretty atypical. There was also an article I read not long after it first came out that suggested it was one of several films to demonise creative women. It made a point about Annie’s installations kind of programming the events. I’m definitely not sold on the feminist spin, but I do think it does a great job at showing how everyone (and everything) in the family prevents Annie from working. It’s something that definitely strikes a chord with creative people, not just women - and what I personally liked is that unlike Sinister or plenty of other films that use the preventing creator from creating trope, it doesn’t provide an answer like Sinister does along the lines that if Annie stops creating, all will be fine.
So I think it tried to do something very different when it comes to that side of human psychology, and did pretty well. It feels like I’m going off on a tangent, but I’m not exactly, because I think the point I’m getting to is that this sense of absolute despair is deliberate. It’s something that creative people, especially women, feel when they acknowledge deep in themselves that family (cults, if we’re talking Hereditary) and other commitments will prevent them from attending to their vocation, and there’s nothing to be done about it. You feel totally overpowered by the kind of life ‘admin’ that always comes into play when someone dies and there are arrangements to be made.
I don’t think any other film, even The Shining, tapped into that, because Jack sabotages himself and nothing actually prevents him from working except his own inner demons & alcohol. Whereas Annie is totally trapped in a family she didn’t even want (including kids). I think it’s a very specific kind of despair of the people who feel their family ‘happened to them’, instead of being a choice, to misquote Walter White.
Last edited by AgrippinaX; 10-23-20 at 06:06 PM.