Hereditary bothered me; should I watch Midsommar?

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The problem with that is that it's a basically an apples-to-oranges difference between the two situations, because...
WARNING: spoilers below
...Annie's mother died of natural causes at a presumably old age, while Charlie obviously died very young in a sudden, extremely violent accident, one that Annie personally witnessed the aftermath of, and which essentially tore her entire world apart (although again, that's a response that partially ignores what the film already established about Annie's personality earlier), so it strains credulity that she would still have the composure to painstakingly create a model of the latter scenario, while also casually shrugging it off as just a "neutral" portrayal of the accident when her husband is (naturally) alarmed at the sight of it, like some sort of borderline sociopath. It's a response that feels like it was written by someone who's never personally interacted with another human being in their life, which is a bit of a problem when half of the film is coaching itself in the trappings of a relatable drama about a grieving family, you know?
It's really not an apple to oranges thing (though both are fruit and I don't see why those can't be compared)

Given that I'm pretty sure all your pontificating is born out of a single, clearly emotional watch of the film, I'm going to assume that you've forgotten that the other miniatures that she built that involved her mother were of creepy and upsetting situations in her life.

Her mother also didn't so much die "of natural causes" but had to move back in and is implied to have more or less gone insane.

Annie processes this through an art form that allows her to manipulate and control every detail of an event. This is thematically linked to the concepts of determinism and her mother's control over their entire lives from beyond the grave (an inclination for Annie that was perhaps... Hereditary...)

Similarly, she processes Charlie after a period of intense grieving. Artistic expression can be both cathartic and a form of detachment, refocus and meditation. This is clearly shown as Annie's process. She's also shown to hyper focus on her own obsessions and control (it comes up a lot throughout the film).

You're also off-base when you say this is supposed to be a relatable family drama. The entire film goes out of its way to imply the deep rot within the family and how it has poisoned them all psychologically from before the film began and before many of them were born (almost like they inherited it).

I think you'd have had a better experience if you'd watched and asked "why" Aster was doing what he was doing rather than asking yourself "why is this stupid?"

Maybe try a rewatch with an open mind and adjusted expectations will be the kind of meditative catharsis you need for this film.



Her mother also didn't so much die "of natural causes" but had to move back in and is implied to have more or less gone insane.
I always thought she had dementia and DID, but that’s not something people really die from just like that. Nor can you die from ‘going insane’, unless it’s self-harm or an accident of some sort.

I have a similar feeling that it wasn’t quite natural causes, but there’s nothing exactly indicating that, is there?

Correction: yes, we are told Annie’s father starved himself, but there’s no suggestion her mother ever did, I think.



I always thought she had dementia and DID, but that’s not something people really die from just like that. Nor can you die from ‘going insane’, unless it’s self-harm or an accident of someone sort.

I have a similar feeling that it wasn’t quite natural causes, but there’s nothing exactly indicating that, is there?
They're vague about it, but there's the heavy implication that she died in accordance with her plan to transfer Paimon's essence into Charlie (being that she herself had Paimon within her after Annie's brother's suicide, hence the DID diagnosis and "she wasn't even really my mother at the end."

Annie does at one point say her mom was in hospice but doesn't really say "why." Nor do they explain if the decapitation occured pre or post mortem (given that the beheadings seem to release the essence of Paimon).

So no, I don't think she died a natural or normal death. There's very little that supports that even if she died a less overtly shocking death than others in Annie's life.



I get that Stu may have felt emotionally isolated by Hereditary, and I can appreciate him trying to locate where and why the movie has failed him in this way, but I'll never claim to understand these reasons five years into this discussion.


The history of the arts is literally choked to death with artists using their medium to process personal and political trauma. And as others have mentioned, it's impossible to chart how any individual will react to these traumas. I think these miscommunications keep going back to the poisoning that basic narrative and character archetypes create in how we expect people should behave after a lifetime of watching movies. I've even fallen victims to these myself when in my personal life I gave myself a hard time when I did not react the way I thought I should when my grandfather died of fairly tragic circumstances. But what I expected was for myself to behave like I have seen in movies but...that doesn't happen. My grieving process was through compartmentalizing my feelings through storytelling and humor. Because the reality is people don't know what to do with trauma.


Does this betray basic storytelling structures, or undermine the emotional pay offs we expect on screen. Sometimes, yeah. But good. Because if storytelling is going to have any profound impact on us as a culture and as a means to understand ourselves, there has to be infinite avenues of our experiences in this life to articulate. Otherwise, art has failed us.


Does this give every onscreen behavior a pass though? No, we can still scrutinize how anything affects how a movie works or doesn't work for us. And Stu can still feel alienated from Asters film for these reasons if he cant be persuaded otherwise. But I think MKS has sorta laid out much of the case why Hereditary still works thematically, even considering these supposed emotional 'inconsistencies' .



… I've even fallen victims to these myself when in my personal life I gave myself a hard time when I did not react the way I thought I should when my grandfather died of fairly tragic circumstances. But what I expected was for myself to behave like I have seen in movies but...that doesn't happen.
This is so well-put and true. I’ve definitely experienced something similar after a funeral and for months on end.



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.
Pretty much, and while pretty much every movie ever made is a reflection of real life to one degree or another, they're still overall artificial narratives made up of a series of conscious creative decisions on the part of their creators (something that life is obviously the opposite of), creative decisions that are made for one reason or another, and if those reasons aren't valid in the context of the specific film, then they're fair game to criticize.

It's why, while I respect why Agri and others defend some of the aspects of the inconsistent characterizations in Hereditary, since they can just be taken as a reflection of real life responses to loss, I still disagree with it nonetheless, because using that defense is making the assumption that the characterizations are just a reflection of the sometimes unexpected or self-contradictory responses to grief that people show in real life, rather than another reflection of Ari Aster's slapdash overall approach to the film, which has other creative decisions in it that make little to no sense, decisions that had nothing to do with the characters' expressions of grief (like the business with Charlie's sketchbook). And, even if I disregard everything else, while it's still possible that the inconsistency of the characterizations were an intentional decision on Aster's part, I saw no evidence of that being the case in the film, so I'd have to hear some good points for that being the case with the film for me to think about reconsidering my opinion on this aspect of the movie.



A system of cells interlinked
Minor spoilers here, with major spoilers tagged and hidden

Caught the second half of Midsommar again recently. Whatever stylistic aspects I somehow remembered enjoying on my first watch weren't apparent to me this time around, at least in the latter half of the flick. So, with me focusing less of the visual and stylistic aspects of the film, I had a bit more time to attempt to mull over what Aster was going for here, and the whole thing is just sort of a big mess, with a moral play that ranges from murky at best, to absurd and laughable at worst.

I jumped in at just about the point that any normal person who was attending this festival, no matter how much LSD they had ingested, would have grabbed their **** and got right the F out of there. Without the initial ramp up in the early going, I was left with the impression that most of these people were either incredibly stupid, or completely oblivious to their surroundings, somehow unaware of how dangerous their surroundings had become.

WARNING: "Midsommar" spoilers below
Mostly though, I was flummoxed as to what sort of twisted empowerment message the writing was trying to get across at the end of the film. At least I think that is what I was supposed to take away in regards to the relationship between Fran Pugh's character and her boyfriend. I wondered, as I often do lately, that if the genders of the main characters had been revered, how much outrage would have been leveled at a film that:

Showed the girlfriend of a traumatized and emotionally unstable guy, who had attended a festival with him, get drugged and coerced into sex she didn't actually want, then was somehow shown to be the bad person in the situation, only to be put into a bear suit and burned alive at the behest of her pissed off beau. This is a character that had been pretty damned supportive so far, which makes it seem even harsher that at first blush.


I think the conversation surrounding this flick would be quite different. Jeez, reading my spoiler comment above, I wonder how and why I managed to sit through even a portion of this thing again.
__________________
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Minor spoilers here, with major spoilers tagged and hidden

Caught the second half of Midsommar again recently. Whatever stylistic aspects I somehow remembered enjoying on my first watch weren't apparent to me this time around, at least in the latter half of the flick. So, with me focusing less of the visual and stylistic aspects of the film, I had a bit more time to attempt to mull over what Aster was going for here, and the whole thing is just sort of a big mess, with a moral play that ranges from murky at best, to absurd and laughable at worst.

I jumped in at just about the point that any normal person who was attending this festival, no matter how much LSD they had ingested, would have grabbed their **** and got right the F out of there. Without the initial ramp up in the early going, I was left with the impression that most of these people were either incredibly stupid, or completely oblivious to their surroundings, somehow unaware of how dangerous their surroundings had become.

WARNING: "Midsommar" spoilers below
Mostly though, I was flummoxed as to what sort of twisted empowerment message the writing was trying to get across at the end of the film. At least I think that is what I was supposed to take away in regards to the relationship between Fran Pugh's character and her boyfriend. I wondered, as I often do lately, that if the genders of the main characters had been revered, how much outrage would have been leveled at a film that:

Showed the girlfriend of a traumatized and emotionally unstable guy, who had attended a festival with him, get drugged and coerced into sex she didn't actually want, then was somehow shown to be the bad person in the situation, only to be put into a bear suit and burned alive at the behest of her pissed off beau. This is a character that had been pretty damned supportive so far, which makes it seem even harsher that at first blush.


I think the conversation surrounding this flick would be quite different. Jeez, reading my spoiler comment above, I wonder how and why I managed to sit through even a portion of this thing again.

If I remember correctly


WARNING: "SPOILERS" spoilers below
You're not supposed to agree with the final turn Pugh's character takes. In a movie about cultish brainwashing, we have been given a window into the number of emotional reasons why she has been made susceptible to giving up her boyfriend for sacrifice. Maybe even to the point that some in the audience may be superficially cheering for her enacting this disproportionate revenge. But I'm pretty sure those people miss the point. We are instead meant to view her as having become trapped, just like all of the other followers, and what she has just done to her boyfriend is the final switch that has turned her towards this cult, probably now without any hope.



There is a moment just before the boyfriend catches fire, where he is watching the two true believers who volunteered to be sacrificed along with him, where they are calmly watching everything go down in flames...at least until one of them begins to burn and they let out a blood curdling scream. This is a really important moment, and probably the most horrifying of the entire film. It is the moment where reality has finally penetrated their delusions. But it's too late. They are going to die an agonizing death as this revelation sets in. This is basically what Pugh has also signed herself up for. Her vulnerabilites have been preyed upon. Sure, because the audience is never meant to particularly like the boyfriend, there are blackly comic implications in her taking vengeance on him. But this basically implicates the audience to some degree in finding humour or even justice in any of the situation. It's a tragedy for everyone.



As with The Witch, I've just chosen to ignore those who wish to interpret the ending as empowering.



The trick is not minding
As with The Witch, I've just chosen to ignore those who wish to interpret the ending as empowering.
As much as I liked The Witch, and I really did, I don’t get that line of thought from them.


WARNING: "The Witch" spoilers below
considering she makes a literal deal with the Devil, it’s more like she has damned herself rather then empowered



As much as I liked The Witch, and I really did, I don’t get that line of thought from them.
The idea is that she was finally free from the oppressive religious patriarchy. I find it a little odd to consider that worse than
WARNING: spoilers below
being consigned to a life of masturbating with dead baby paste.



The trick is not minding
The idea is that she was finally free from the oppressive religious patriarchy. I find it a little odd to consider that worse than
WARNING: spoilers below
being consigned to a life of masturbating with dead baby paste.
WARNING: "The Witch" spoilers below
Yeah, but she traded one for another who now owns her soul, so to speak. If I understood that ending correctly.



Yes, not really a spoiler, but The Devil is a patriarch as well. And a bit of a pimp.



The trick is not minding
Yes, not really a spoiler, but The Devil is a patriarch as well. And a bit of a pimp.
Well, for any who haven’t watched it, I didn’t want to risk it. Figured it’s better to be cautious.

But yes, I’m in agreement with you.



Yes, not really a spoiler, but The Devil is a patriarch as well. And a bit of a pimp.
Like in the great Petey Wheatstraw, where he gladly set up a demonic orgy for his future son-in-law Rudy Ray Moore. Satan did him a huge solid (that and bringing him back from the dead with magic revenge powers), and yet he still tried to weasel out of the marriage because the daughter was too ugly.