Hereditary bothered me; should I watch Midsommar?

The character processes trauma through her art because she can control every detail and does so throughout the entire film. It is thematically and characteristically consistent, no matter how much you insist every myopic point you try to make about this film is an incompetence of Aster's.

I'm starting to feel like Stu would be better off taking the crumbsroom and Rockatansky routes of making jokes about what they're known for disliking rather than criticizing them to death every time they're brought up.

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No! We must be convinced that EVERY. SINGLE. ELEMENT. IS. BROKEN.

Like that time Collette contorts her face in horror. She makes her left eye slightly smaller than the right. But in another scene, she does the opposite! She can't even consistently contort her face due to Aster's transparent ineptitude in directing!

Sure, that works as well.

Btw, sorry if it seemed like I was making a dig at you; really, I was just getting a kick out of the conversation. Nothing personal intended

Okay, new topic. What are your thoughts on the small portion of this screenshot which I highlighted in yellow at the top. Like, not the scene or the characters, but that specific section of the ceiling. Make sure your answers are at least 500 words.

I get the feeling that you were meaning to respond to this post instead, but anyway, I think that aspect of Annie characterization is inconsistent because it contradicts what the film already established about her, when she

I know; no problem-o, bro!That circle is distracting; shame on you, Ari Aster, shame on you!

I asked for 500 words!

Ahhhhh, you refer to the 'ceiling' - you're pointing to the ceiling as the limit of Aster's hopes and determination - to express to us that he wants us to look beyond the ceiling, but not see beyond it, as it's a blank slate. Beige. If Aster was to have loftier ambitions, he'd have painted it red. Or orange. But he's confiding to us that we have to first appreciate the rug. I'm really surprised you left the rug out of it actually.

People often turn to their art in times of crisis and tragedy. This only doesn't make sense if you lack a fundamental understanding of how people, especially artists, process their emotions, including grief/trauma.

This is a confusing response because the bit you quoted is specifically about her inconsistent responses to grief, and in no way questions the idea you're describing here, that I can see.

Stu is saying that it's inconsistent for her to turn back to her art after her response to Charlie's death, implying she only did so for her mother because she wasn't actually sad.

Both traumas impacted her differently emotionally but it is not an inconsistency for an artist to process either experience through their art. It's extremely common.

That's fine, but the other post simply defends the idea of using art to process grief (and says Stu doesn't understand people if they don't understand this), and I don't think he suggested otherwise. He just suggested that the character should respond consistently on that front.

You can, of course, also say (as you have just now) that it's also fine for a character to grieve one way in one case and another way in another, that just wasn't really present in the other post, which made it sound like Stu was questioning the art-as-grief-therapy idea.

I gather some previous interactions might be coloring all this, too.

This is very much the case. About 15 years worth.

To the argument at hand, even though it's just about the merits of the film and its characters and not really about the OP stuff (which is maybe already "finished" being answered anyway): it does occur to me that the complexity of actual people can be used to handwave away a lot of storytelling laziness. People, in reality, do everything. They sometimes act in crazy, inconsistent ways that we should not generally accept in characters, in the same way we should not accept pointless filler scenes of people going about their day even though we all do that, too.

I'm not arguing that there's a problem here, since I don't remember that aspect of the film well enough to say. But I don't think people being complicated in reality is an inherent defense of what characters do.

Reminds me of that old Tom Clancy quote: "the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." I think there's a similar distinction between characters and real people, albeit a subtle one, since pointing out that something is basic human nature (and not just a thing that happens sometimes) actually is a pretty good defense of something a character does.

Aster hasnt found his peak, and if he willfully just focuses on despair and hopelessness he never will. The talent is there, he does more than scare the viewer, he gets in your head, shakes your sense of reality (just like the characters) and makes you swear never to watch his films again......but you wonder, and watch another like a morbid accident you shouldnt look at on the side of the road, you look and feel dirty that you did because it was actually as grotesque as you knew it would be. The lengths we all go thru to find something fresh and different.


Some of Stephen Kings best stuff isnt horror. His horror novels scared you in the same vein, made you identify with the characters, create a comfortable familiarity, and then rock their world. Even King wasnt this pitiless though with his horror. Shawshank Redemption, Lean On Me and if there are others in forgetting have nothing to do with horror, and are not mainstream recycled drivel. If Aster can capture the viewers so deeply he could bring this freshness to other genres. If not then eventually it will be the next watered down product. Grow or be stagnant. Look what happened to John Carpenter.

Well, you're agreeing with something I'm not actually saying. I don't have any issues with the characterizations in and of themselves, certainly not the performances. And I think Byrne's father is understandably exhausted by the events, and the only odd incongruity might be but that's also kinda funny in a none too intentional way.


No, the specific kind of inconsistency that I'm referring to is between the film's themes of trauma and guilt and the nature of the film's horror. I mentioned Babadook and Don't Look Now because both of these films similarly involve respective themes of the guilt of a single-mother and her special needs child and the trauma and guilt over losing a child. TONGO mentioned King, so I'll add Pet Sematary to the latter. In each of these cases, the trauma informs the horror, each of their horrific manifestations are directly connected to the trauma in question and the psychology of coping (or not) with it. I don't see such a connection in Hereditary, so, as effective as Aster is in conveying the trauma and guilt of his characters, these emotions have nothing really to do with the themes of trauma and guilt are largely discarded, whereas in the other examples I mentioned, these themes are directly significant to their climaxes.


Similar to my contrast between Wicker Man and Midsommer, where the former's occult archetypes and philosophy are ingrained in the plot and character development of the film, while in the latter, its pseudo-occultism is never really coherent beyond some very basic designs, none of which have anything to do with the process of grief. So, for me, it seems that Aster uses these themes more as a means to his plot ends (which in turn seem to be rather random and arbitrary occultish totems) than as themes with which the horror reflects and resonates.

The problem with that is that it's a basically an apples-to-oranges difference between the two situations, because...

But she is also in ongoing shock about both, as we see when Joan first accosts her by the car. By the time she makes a model, she has become desensitised to the horror of the deaths, which is quite common when several traumas at once snowball on a person.

Oh, I just love statements such as this. Anyone who has interacted with other people and who has an ounce of maturity knows that people react to traumas differently, especially the kinds of extreme traumas Hereditary explores. There’s no one-size-fits-all “reaction’ to these things.

A real mother I know, more or less around Annie’s age, reacted to her child’s death in an accident by laughing. She laughed through the news being delivered and for pretty much the entire week afterwards, including the funeral. Was not a pretty sign, but it reminds one that whatever preconceptions we have about ‘human reactions’ to trauma are ****ing ridiculous.