Hallucinatural: MIDSOMMAR

One of the cooler and more noteworthy things about the critical buzz for Ari Aster's highly trippy new horror folk film, MIDSOMMAR (2019), is the widespread recommendation that one should not do psychedelics before seeing it. There have already been a few freak-outs in the theaters showing the film. (I won't link to the reports, because lightweights have no place on this site) but I am fascinated that psychedelics at the movies have become commonplace to the point it's not a question of whether one should trip at the cinema or trip, but a question of which tripped-out druggy horror films are best seen straight. "Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping," notes Fast Company's Joe Berkowitz of Aster's new film, "but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all."

I agree with Joe: Midsommar Delivers the Most Realistically Trippy Drug Scene Ever, for Better and for Worse. It didn't occur to me to go see it tripping, but now I sure wish I did! I'm a fan of that 'never born at all' feeling, isn't that what movies are all about? (3) Between Midsommar, The Beach Bum, Climax, and last year's Mandy, its heartening to see the ways psychedelics have moved from a kind of dirtbag-disreputable guilt-by-association into hipster mainstream respectability. Creating spiritual transformations when the time, dosage and place are all just right; and nonfatal nightmares of self-realization when they aren't, gone are the Judy Blume-style inaccuracies of after school specials like Go Ask Alice. Instead, in a culture where young college students roll joints at diners without having to look over their shoulders for cops, paranoia and knee-jerk condemnation has been replaced with a mainstream hipness to the importance of set and setting.

In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film it was always with a patina of gaudy mummery: naked broads in body paint would frug through a kaleidoscope as bad acid rock jams ate up the minutes. Hallucinations were usually embodied by actors or latex puppets, completely divorced from the context in which they were perhaps originally hallucinated thanks to the impossibility of getting the full scope of expanded consciousness across all the telephone game hands it takes to put script onto screen. (6) Drugs were associated strictly with a certain swath of music (Grateful Dead, Electric Prunes, Ravi Shankar), and mired in an ever-oscillating mix of naive idealism and burnt-out paranoia. Before we could really write down the specifics of our transformative drug hallucination, the hallucination would be gone. The trick of a true hallucination is that it lurks beyond the ability of language or the social order to fully define and circumscribe it. Strangers to psychedelics think hallucinations are along the lines of seeing a white rabbit hopping through the subway, but a seasoned tripper knows it's never so simple. There might be a rabbit there, but he turns into a white handbag if you look at him too long, either that or he just pops up out of the crowd for a split second, then is gone again, so you're never sure he was there. A hallucination never stays in one place or time long enough to really 'capture' it. But we all--writers and artists--sure have to try. A lot of us prefer to stay home alone rather than going out clubbing, so we can spend the night trying to record our visuals via painting, or ranting into a microphone, or scribbling poetry - but that carries its own risks. With one to bring you off the ledge one could think oneself into a bad trip pretty fast. Thus the bulk of drug-taking imagery in cinema has always been--until recently--of a Lowest Common Denominator kind of vibe, both naive and skeevy, a bunch of easily-influenced kids shimmying to a guitar solo like lemmings to a cliffside chimera OR like Warren freaking out in the gallery, 

With Midsommar and its tale of a gang of backpacking master's degree students joining a friend at his family's remote Northern Swedish very psychedelically-astute commune for the titular holiday (up where the sun never sets), we finally move past those breakwaters. Gone are the banal psychedelic cliches we're used to. Instead, thanks to CGI and director Ari Aster's modicum of restraint comes the imagery of psychedelics as they actually are, i.e. anchored to the expansion and contraction of the breath and the nature of seeing and hearing via the human nervous system. (Is one 'hallucinating' when they become aware that the entire planet 'breathes' in ever expanding/contracting waves of energy?).

As the backpacking guests at the weird Swedish commune take mushrooms and then drink some unknown herbal tea, we have to pay attention to the details of the frame to see the way the deep black interiors of the flowers in the lead girl Dani's hair widens and contracts just like a tripping pupil, or the way the tendrils of the vines wrap around her May Queen throne stretch to accommodate and encourage her ever-more tarot-style royal movements. The sacred space and time generated by ritual circular movement is made palpable in the flow of energy up the bark of trees, or between people entraining their breath and movements to the music guiding them in an endless May Pole dance during which she can suddenly speak and understand fluent Swedish. Or are she and her last surviving dancer talking with words at all, or just ESP-ing?

Ever quick to invent new phrases, I dub this new trend 'hallucinaturalism' - i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as a black light lava lamp excuse for gaudy excess but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body.

The Ingestibles

“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"Who is to say what is real and what is not? 'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind." - Terence McKenna

Am I myself getting of ahead? Surely the plot should be pretty familiar to you if you've ever gone to visit a rural commune with a friend of a friend, for either a weekend camping/party at some friend's parents' farm, or a remotely located rock festival with a tent area. Such areas make the perfect tripping zones: no cops, no cars, no drawer-searching rehab-calling parents, and--unless there's a pen with a bull stamping around in it or a sudden influx of speed freak bikers- no real danger unless you accidentally get run over by someone backing out of their parking spot, or you OD. 

But even so, one can find one's mellow being harshed by one's buzzkill girlfriend, the type who invites herself along, and then makes frowny faces every time you want to do whiskey funnels, or shrooms, or acid, or whatever (she doesn't want you to do them without her, but she doesn't want to do them yet... and it's always "yet" for her). Our main backpacker heroine is a kind of damaged co-dependent bi-polar buzzkill Dani (Florence Pugh). She's tagging along on the trip up north with her passive-douche boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), the kind of guy who's too cowardly to break up with her (it's so close to the triple suicide of her sister and parents he's worried about seeming callous). He also can't figure out how to not invite her along as he in turn invites himself along with his anthropology masters degree buddies to the solstice midsummer celebration at the agrarian commune of their Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Bolmgren). They're expecting a kind of cross between Burning Man and an Amish barn raising party. Well, they get all that and more too, in the clear light of day, forever (the lack of a setting sun or nightfall is one of the film's most uncanny elements).

Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's avant garde string-heavy score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets just right the paranoid long-bowing bottom-dropping coccyx- tingling drones; the Lygeti-esque solar wind socking; the encounter group breath work flowing through the barn door cracks to just the perfect level of strange. On the downside, the cast lacks a force like Toni Collette to center things; and it doesn't really add up to much beyond the sum of its parts; and if --at 2 1/2 hours--it still feels like so much of the film is missing; it's got the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema, and maybe the best druggy ceremonial group sex scene ever. 

Encompassing all that is interesting, beguiling and terrifying about such 'communes' --the collapse of privacy, the loss of independent thought, the way 'breathing method' panting seems here a seamless part of conception, and the lack of abjectification within the ranks (no one sits it out) --Midsommar leaves us reeling in a kind of dream daze that the rest of the film takes and--if not runs with--certainly walks in imperceptibly slight slow-motion ceremonial steps right into the fire and flowers.

Dani's moaning and screaming at last finds its entrainment absolvement
MIDSUMMER NIGHT MOAN 

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature." -Albert Hofmann

There's a feeling of being totally unmoored from one's place in the world very common today--when constant texting for validation from peers isn't enough to fill the 'god-sized hole' (as we call it in AA) and our leaning on a current sex partner or best friend to somehow make up that vast chasm of disconnect is a sure way to sink like a stone. For a lot of us, especially if we're not on SSRI meds, or not working anymore, the despair and isolation are so great that thoughts of suicide, on repeat, like a stuttering record, are our only salve. Dude, if even Ativan doesn't work (we see a bottle in Dani's cabinet - man, I'm so jealous), you know you're fucked. And if your pair-bond doesn't fill the hole, then what? You can join AA or some other group - but that's kind of a cult, and can be one if you wind up at the wrong meeting and let some weirdo sponsor you because you're too passive to say no. Or you can meditate... on drugs.. chant your way clear of the orbit around that damned hole. 

Accepting that one can never fill the gaping black hole at the core of the self is the only way to escape its gravitational pull. 

Paranoia and a feeling of secure group belonging, a kind of tribal security, are--one would think--opposites with a huge grey area in between. It's that grey area where most of us exist, never quite committing to the rapture of the group mind via becoming one of a tribe (a "worker among workers" as they say in AA) nor spinning off into complete isolation (wherein you paint your windows black and don't answer the door or phone anymore, and spend your nights screaming into a pillow as hands come out of the walls and just being able to put on your shoes and go outside for a six-pack seems like some impossible dream).

On psychedelics, one isn't necessarily free of one's issues, they're just magnified. But with the right group---a primal scream therapy group at your therapist's office every other week for example--you can magnify your woes to such a large degree they disappear from the horizon.

If you have taken drugs like psilocybin, LSD or ecstasy at a big hippy commune or outdoor music festival or pagan commune or weekend party on some sprawling farm, you may have been, dancing away, surrounded by happy hair-twirling hippies high as hell, and suddenly--out of the blue-- gotten paranoid. You think you might be sacrificed to some ancient god during the height of the ecstatic rave orgy and even if you could escape the parking lot, you have no idea where the nearest cop is, or if he's in on it, or even how to dial a phone in your current state. Every girl seems to be hitting on you through her ecstatic breathing. Tendrils of pink azure longing tap your chakras and fill you with her scent and wiles, but not in a good way - in a Monarch 7 Eyes Wide Shut kind of way. Every guy you know seems to trying to lure you someplace remote so they can hit you up for shrooms -- their neediness and jonesing like daggers in reverse. Only your reflection in the mirror reminds you that you're even you, and how far over the rainbow you are. A few shots of Jaeger and a deep breath, a song you like, a chance to go onstage and sing "Sweet Jane" and maybe you're okay again. The trees wiggle indiscriminately.

CULTS Are for KIDS

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims...” 

― Joseph Campbell

"Without a gang, you're an orphan!" - Riff - West Side Story

Whether via hot coal walks or bad acid trip paranoia, initiation ordeals leave us tightly united to the group without the need for a common enemy. Rather than bonding through collectively hating on some outcast-- which is like the cheap knock-off Elmer's of social binding--it is through this initiation one finds acceptance (which when it goes too far and frat dicks get ahold of it becomes 'hazing'). (2)

AA gets it (I mean Ari Aster, though it goes both ways) Between this and Hereditary he's proving himself the champion auteur of the New Dysfunction - one where drugs are so numerous the zone between one's shrink and her litany of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds and the herbalist with the plastic baggy or the 'tea' - cease to exist. There's no 'normal' to start out with anymore, only degrees of dysfunctional isolation and co-dependence. In neither film do we ever hear from anyone like a policeman, a narrator, a court appointed grief counsellor, a psychiatrist. As in films like The Shining- the socially conditioned polarities of right and wrong, linear time and the concept of future obligation cease. Like psychedelics themselves, the 'snap' of cabin fever frees us from the kind of rote empathy that locks us into the social order. Madness moves us beyond such things - life and death and the degrees of 'goodness' are lost in the presence of a kind of Hanging Rock/Quetzalcoatl sun god green man archaic pre-Christian hunger for human sacrifice. We become like Jack Torrance, or James Mason in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, hankering to sacrifice his son like Abraham because he won't learn math, the in-denial mom refusing to so much as call a family friend for aid since father knows best.

Maybe you've seen 2000 Manics (left), The Cabin in the Woods or the Wicker Man (either version), and shuddered with the realization that in an alternate pre-Christian reality, macabre human sacrifice could become as routine and accepted as, say, fireworks on the 4th of July, or the lighting of a Lincoln Center Xmas tree. The scene at left is terrifying because we see the ease with which such a tableaux can fit easily into the apple pie and potato sack race shenanigans of a town centennial. As with Hereditary, Aster brings to the horror genre reflections of our own subconscious paranoia -that there's a secret society right there in plain sight, as banal as an old photo album of your grandma's showing a bunch of old ladies showing off their arts and crafts talismans, or a group of blonde farmers all dressed in white with big loving smiles and flowers in their hair--their actions too ancient, to rooted in archaic magics to be called evil in the pejorative sense. There is Machiavellian lip-smacking, no sordid rapey undercurrent. Everything is ritualized and slow according to the natural world, with which the commune is deeply in tune. They move in accordance of the breath, and the understanding that screams of the dying can be drowned out with group screaming in sympathy, that the most harrowing howls of pain and anguish can be matched and calmed through the entrainment of the support group and that all such negative emotions can be dissolved into the group like salt in the sea.

Between Chris Hemsworth's seductive cult freak in Bad Times at the El Royale and Tarantino's new Manson film, as well as new TV docs signifies the enduring appeal of the archetype of the holy madman is back, tapping into the aging millennial's desperate need for a blood-and-flesh tribe, a version of the fantasy of belonging they found in Twilight, Harry Potter, and so forth and the dozen other 'magical school' franchises glutting the market. They crave a world where they feel included, loved, protected, in a hermetic magical zone, able to face danger and the threats of life knowing a strong group of cool and capably friends have their back.

You or I might get this through being in a band in college, or belonging to a street gang, the military, or even sports team, but for the drowning psychotic the god-sized hole of desperate feeling of orphanhood is too much to navigate the give-and-take of a clique. For such people, being swooped up in the rescue gear of the cult-building mystic is a true godsend (ala Phoenix's character in The Master), the fragile ecosystem of social mores instilled in them by a failed family unit and educational system gets washed away with this shining all-inclusive paradigm. The ocean of support and 'being held' they receive more than makes up for things like the total loss of independence, personal property, and connection to the outside world.

Why it's so seductive in Midsommar's case is that we're not dealing with the usual Hammer Films gathering of British extras in robes cavorting and waving around goblets and bunches of grapes while Charles Grey glowers behind an altar - we're dealing with drug effects we may already be familiar with. Psychedelics' abilities to bond a social group and/or weird one out along the same line, is something we already know. At their best, they induce a harmony with nature, though a nature that is inscrutable in its demands - the sun and light of love they feel goes hand in hand with a clear-eyed and unflinching view of death, and a view of sex and mind-altering drugs completely free of all Christianity's and conservative parental hysteria's restrictions and taboos. We can't help but feel the attraction, the druggy pull of inclusion and oneness when, say, tripping really hard out in a park on a sunny warm day.

Coming out of the theater into the summer evening or late afternoon, walking home from the Alamo in the soggy summer heat, we may be grateful we're safe in the city, and sober, more or less, and happy more or less, in our world of pair-bond-cohabitation, our online communities ever a click away, aware finally that pursuit of balance not happiness is the key to... happiness. And that air conditioning, vaping, CBD gummies, anti-depressants, ant-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, herbal teas and Coke Zero, taken continually, makes everything all right, but not so all right we fall into mania and therefore, inevitably, a massive crash. If, like me, you spent the first 30 years of your life on a treadmill running from all-consuming massive depression, you know what heaven is - being able to stop.... running. The question then becomes... then what? What do we do now that we don't need to do anything?

GOATS

"And goats have kids / like people have kids / like me / and you!"
- 70s Sesame Street song ("What Kids are Called")

"Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?" - Joseph Campbell (full)

One thing I kept thinking about on the walk home was, what are these folks lives going to be like in the winter? Just as the days are endless in midnight sun Sweden, the freezing winters are eternal darkness. I couldn't help but feel the eerie echo of their Viking ancestors, imagining roaring fires and furs and elaborate homemade woolen wear. I thought too of the goats. Not that we see many of them, but enough. What is up with goats, in general? Wither their strange supernatural power? Their susceptibility to supernatural forces both coming and going is more than passing strange. My mom is currently reincarnated as a goat at the Carl Sandburg House goat farm in Flatrock NC, where she volunteered for years. If you see a goat named Nancy, tell her her son is glad she's found peace in a nice and supportive trip.

But why are goats such able vessels for human and daemonic spirits? Is it because we attributed this power to them, based on Pan, satyrs, the frolicking horned one, etc? From Hunchback of Notre Dame (where a little black goat is actually tried and accused of witchcraft to the recent The Witch) to my own part in the big Goatman scare in the Maryland woods in the early-80s. Which came first, the power we ascribe to the goats or the power they already have? Why is group of goats called a tribe or a trip?

Or does this shit go far deeper. If you don't think goats are supernatural you've never seen one standing out on a tree limb like a high wire act (above) when you know there's just no way that's even possible?

Sorry this ends so randomly. So does the film though; if it's not more than the sum of it's parts, its parts are still good. Maybe that's what tripping is like too. You may find nirvana, the pieces of your life coming together in a perfect mandala jigsaw puzzle you'd normally spend lifetimes completing, but with nothing else to do, one can't help but break it all up so you're not bored for the next 50 years.
Or you find the Hell of self-conscious empty needy anguish, the 'alone even in a herd of friends' despair, so amplified to become untenable, so that crawling into a lit fireplace seems the only available recourse. Either way, it's over then too. You can declare you're 'done' with psychedelics, that you've 'passed' the acid test like the man forced Ken Kesey to say after he got busted. Or you can try to minister to the onslaught of needy mouths as they sense someone with 'the answer' and a free tab, like a flock of hungry seagulls around a lone guy throwing breadcrumbs into the wind (ala Javier Bardem in Mother) or you can barricade yourself from the beaks and mouths and hole up with a lover or two and a bunch of recording equipment and art supplies like Turner in Performance. Or you can join a commune, experience the oneness, and maybe it's not a cult after all (no messiah figure). Either way, someone has to do the dishes, and it's not going to be me.

Shout out to Ryan for the req!
=========

PS - second viewing thoughts (1/13/20) on Prime: (Note: contains Spoilers) 

This second time I was more aware of the key central relationship of passive aggressive bullshit from the boyfriend and the relative hunched-over postures of the non-members. It wasn't Florence Pugh's character at all, it was the boyfriend. He was just a pussy with no guts to break up with her NOR to commit fully, so he hangs in the doorway like a little shithead, thinking he's somehow doing the right thing. The whole movie is a kind of rape-revenge movie only there's no rape, just a boyfriend doing the kind of shit we expect from sophomores or juniors, not grad students. I wince, as I was that boy more than a few times, my girlfriends would sense my wariness and spend weekends trying to convince me to stick around. Looking back I see how I mistook squeamishness and fear of the unknown for somehow being 'a good guy.' It was actually shrooms that gave me the guts to break up with at least three girlfriends, despite one being super hot, one getting super violent, and one being super enabling and sweet-natured. Damn, it feels good to be able to judge this guy as totally deserving of his eventual burning, his symbolic casting out as the demon in the bear skin. 

Ask not whom the devil drives to his first day of school... He honks for thee. 

RECOMMENDATIONS / Further FOLK HORROR:

A cool movie with a similar plot arc, believe it or not, is 1978's THE LEGACY!

CinemArchetype 15: Human Sacrifice 
Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Summersisle: THE WICKER MAN (201o)
Genealogy of Flies: Lords of Salem, House of the Devil (+my own Salem ancestry)
All the Missed Mystics: Nicolas Roeg's GLASTONBURY FAYRE (1972)
Bitches' Sabbath: WITCHING AND BITCHING
Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST (2009)
Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST
Sever me Member: EX-MACHINA, THE CREEPING FLESH
Why don't we just Go Ask Alice? 
Alice 2.2 - The Looking Glass Dolls
The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA 
The Man in the Grey Flannel Darkness: BIGGER THAN LIFE

and David Del Valle's Lovecraft/Satan piece from back in Acidemic #6: Sympathy for the Devil:
Give my My Skin: BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and the Devil Films of the 70s (2009)

NOTES
1. yes I practice meditation daily with a light-sound machine, I recommend it 

6. My recent DT hallucination of Veronica Lake swimming in ice below the tiles in the ER waiting room, beckoning me to jump in, would no doubt by the time they made it into a movie, be represented by a real actress dressed as Lake standing, dripping in the middle of the room, pointing at me and making a drowning noise, in other words completely divorced from the floor waxer brush prints from which my brain's pareidolia center and my recent drunk viewing of Sullivan's Travels worked with my heated brain to conjure Lake dancing in icy water below the floor. I was there at 4 AM and the floor had just been waxed. Would that image last through CGI effects team interpretation, presuming the animator has no experience with such mental states? Consider how much better films like Altered States, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Naked Lunch might have been with a more vivid and alert recreation of drug hallucinations rather than this kind of broad cartoon literality? Nothing against those films per se, especially Naked Lunch. I imagine Aster doing them all very different - i.e. with this CGI breathing subtlety. 

Gimme Cockaigne: MELANCHOLIA (2011)

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." –Don Quixote

When true doomsday comes, perhaps the manic depressives and bi-polars amongst us will at last have an opportunity to shine in calm perfection while walking through slow motion rain. That seems to be the message of Lars Von Trier's latest, MELANCHOLIA (2011). Until then, alas, the ordinary madness of our civilization and all its unconscious munching, adherence to unexamined cultural mores, and slow death momentum, will have to be endured. Lars, I feel ya. But Jeeze. There are pills for that now!

MELANCHOLIA makes me nervous because I don't want to lose one of the best auteurs of our post-art house age and the film has the earmarks of a cinematic suicide note, a message from someone planning to be dead by the time you read it. His whole post-Dogme 95 life is flashing before our eyes and on some level he's reached the frontier from which no traveler returns. In order to keep going into the wilderness, for Lars is an explorer first and foremost, the film ceases to rim a frontier, but rather settles in and lets the frontier fall right upon it. It's a film about endurance, and the inability of some to handle normalcy vs. others to handle apocalypses. And Lars' star Kirsten Dunst, no longer the vampire child of Lestat, or the willowy cheerleader, has never seemed more Nordic. It's as if she's spent her life scowling through meaningless sex and animal fat-enriched meals solely to get to this part, solely to face this one vanishing point.

For in MELANCHOLIA, Von Trier dives headfirst into the same abyss that Terence Malick only wades up to his knees for THE TREE OF LIFE.  There is no real comparison between the two other than their release dates, and ponderous linking of 2001-style classical music-scored outer space vistas. It's fun to compare them anyway: MELANCHOLIA, the tale of a woman's post-wedding depression coming to life in the form of a world-destroying planet, is the suicide note before to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice after. TREE mourns my soon-deceased father but MELANCHOLIA mourns for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet.

My girl and I saw the film this past Saturday night at the charmingly dilapidated Brooklyn Heights Cinema with its blaring, distorted speakers rumbling the seats with Wagner's aria to Tristan und Isolde as Kristen Dunst and company writhed in Bill Viola-style (see above) slowness. It was so loud I had to cover my ears. But rather than be the one to complain to the ticket taker, I tried my best to accept it. And then suddenly the music stopped. I missed it.

The 1st chapter of Lars' film is a long and expensive wedding for our melancholy heroine Justine (Dunst) over the course of which she flits with ecstasy before dissolving into a deep depression, winding up in the bathtub upstairs, refusing to come out. The sight of a distant star unnerves her. Soon she's telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgard), losing her groom John (Alexander Skarsgard, insufferable as ever), sleeping with a kid on the 18th green, pissing off her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister's rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), infuriating the wedding planner (a great Udo Kier) and drawing gasps from everyone but her loving drunk of a father (John Hurt) and psychotic mother (Charlotte Rampling), who makes the toast "I think marriage is a crock of shit."

Handheld Dogme verite style used to film weddings by now almost quaint: Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Vinterberg's THE CELEBRATION, Baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, have already been there. But unlike those affairs, LVT's is a picture of a cold planet bathed in warmth but unable to feel warm, and if you can survive the whiplash handheld camera nausea in these scenes, you can move on to the next course. The bride, however, won't be there as she's upstairs, nearly catatonic with ennui.

After some portions of the reception are over, Justine ducks into the library and  changes the open art books on display from abstract geometrical shapes (put there no doubt by John as they reflect his dull patriarchal-modernist tastes) to archaic pictures of female suffering and/or death and peasant post-wedding debauchery.  There's: "Land of Cockaine" and "Hunters in the Snow" by Bruegel; "Ophelia" by J.W. Waterhouse; and "After the Hunt" by Bogarde. As in DOGVILLE and ANTICHRIST, this book swap seems a full rejection of the flat, dull left-brained scientific rationalism championed by an insufferable materialist know-it-all in favor of a return to the mythic unconscious where every day is your last so you better get connected back to your Jungian roots, and hammered, before the whole tree of life goes up in flames.

John rejects such Dionysian nonsense outright, but his own left-brained thinking falls apart at every turn. Unable to to deal with the loss of his empirical toe-hold, deluding and denuding-- as DaFoe did in ANTICHRIST--via smug dismissal of Gainsbourg's intellectually eroticized 'feminine hysteria,' and the neglect of their co-owned horses. Dunst's depression is never fully explained so we naturally look for clues and there are plenty if you hate the fact that all that rich razzle dazzle, the 'very expensive' fairy tale wedding is the closest the dead patriarch of order and logic dares come in the direction of ritual, of 'myth' (outside of forbidden Masonic rites, etc). In going for high class in a materialist bourgeois competitive manner, this stuffy wedding becomes a control freak's dream and an awake aesthete's overload nightmare, where the more money spent the less fun it's possible to have. It's Bruegel land of plenty fairy tale overrun with linear edicts.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" ("The Land of Cockaigne"), 1567. Oil on panel.

Cockaigne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful... Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth (Wiki)

Justine prefers dearth

In Lars' film, a ceremony that should be mythically enriched with archetypal energy (a wedding) is stifled by the trivialities which the wedding planner (a marvelous Udo Kier) and the host couple (i.e. John) cling to, insisting on guesses from guests as to how many pebbles are in the foyer vase, for example, and not taking "I don't wanna guess" for an answer. John's outrage over Justine not coming down to cut the cake relates to her boss's slimy demands for a tag line (his weird head games resonate meta as the producers of MELANCHOLIA were no doubt hoping a tag line to this film would occur to Lars, as the image the boss shows her/us, the image that needs the tag, is like a Vogue cover premonition of mythic poses Justine herself will assume later in the film).

While we struggle to not get nauseous from whiplash shaky-cam, the heavy breathing Dogme sound keeps the wedding unbearably intimate: we hear every cut of the meat and every clang of cutlery on the china plates; every breath and wheeze from the gathered throng is amplified like we're tripping our faces off and boiling over in claustrophobic anxiety; trapped in this crowded dining room with all these acting actors talking over each other all at once like real people do in groups, it's as if the secret joy of the movies--avoiding having to talk to people and act civil--is corrupted, the meat and small talk tumbling out of the screen like the guts out of a rotten pumpkin.

At first we don't know why Justine is losing her grip, but we feel it's something to do with the oppressive worry of her sister ("Don't ruin this!") her brother-in-law John ("this cost a fortune") and the insane ravings of her mom. The wedding is a public de-pantsing of artistic success, wherein the best riches and opulence can be is thrown up as buffer against the onslaught of Lars'/Justine's depression, and it all crumbles like fairy dust.

It is only in Justine's subsequent sad melt-down and later ecstasy over the approaching doomsday that she blossoms. The planet is her true groom and its destruction her true union.

Seeing how each person in their group prepares for the end, I was reminded of my own strange exaltation on the day of 9/11, the acrid smell of the burning buildings in my nose as I went racing up deserted 2nd Avenue at midnight, brain thrilling that it might the world might end any moment. Any building might blow up at any time! I was alive for the first time in years, I was FREE of all my conceptions of self and the world around me. New York City was a ghost town at that hour. Not a car or soul on the street but me. Yet, I managed to grab the only train running, a single C-train that suddenly arrived at Brooklyn Heights as I went racing down the stairs, and to find one cab when I got off at 78th street (?) and me and the the cab driver were like the post-apocalypse, like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! HEY!

I knew my exaltation was not 'proper' but also, later, learned I was not alone in feeling it, especially at the uptown AA meetings I attended in the weeks that followed. We had a lot of firemen and cops up there at those meetings and we felt their pain and grief at losing--roughly--half their number in a single day, but we, the non-responder/survivors, were strangely calm, more serene than we'd been in some time. We went to the movies never sure if the city would be there when we got out, thus comedies took on special import (ROCK STAR, ZOOLANDER, coming to mind).

In this apocalyptic moment, we AA people were at peace. Our constant existential dread, so useless in normal life, was suddenly the norm. Now that the world was blind, our impoverished vision made us royalty.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

                 –Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

 

John however, will have no such apocalyptic acceptance, and in the period after the wedding he belittles and dominates Claire in a vain effort to allay her anxiety about the approaching planet. In his bland pretense he resembles past Von Trier male characters of past films like Dogville and Antichrist, authority figure wannabes who do their best to dominate the women in the room but come off sad and impotent, wanting in the shadow of some dead patriarchal ideal that dominates both genders.

In TREE OF LIFE we saw the dawn of the earth, and the first vague gestures of compassion, leading up to some beach-side dream jazz heaven cast party. That's the kind of soiree Claire wants to have as the planet looms, a Cockaigne-style acceptance of the end through drink and song and togetherness. From her new husband's picture of an apple orchard he's bought for her, to 'rest' in, to the pebbles in the jar Udo Kier wants everyone to guess the number of--everything but the strange request to 'build caves' from the son, to return to Werner Herzog's CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, perhaps, and to the mythic inner reality of Jungian archetypes of which we are the shadows on the Platonic walls-- is, in Justine's eyes, contemptible. 

Von Trier shows that all the money in the bourgeois world of wealth and rationalism won't allay or abet this impending cloud, only Justine's resolutely transcendental delusion is some kind of salvation. Hers is the peace of the twisted. She is a herald, one of the women and men who have writhed backwards through time due to years of enduring the stale, hollow pleasures of Cockaigne. Like Jack in the 1920s New Years eve picture at the end of THE SHINING, Justine moves backwards into the representations of the past until she's as indestructible as the planet Melancholia itself. I hope Lars doesn't mean to follow her quite yet, though at this point he's running out of language, image, and time. Every new film shows a little less sand in the hourglass and MELANCHOLIA shows the hourglass itself breaking into slow motion splinters. Soon he will have nothing left but sand, unless... 

May I suggest an Effexor + Wellbutrin + Neurontin cocktail, sir? It works wonders! Cockaigne is for suckers, as Bruegel and Lacan well knew. When life gives you only lemon orchards as far as the eye can see, no amount of lemonade-making can allay the soul-curling sourness. One must burn and run, even if there's nowhere to go but deeper into the ash crevasse.

POST-SCRIPT (12/7/12): As Justine gets out of the limo to head into the reception, she spots the incoming planet--still just a dot in the sky but she recognizes it--and five days after seeing the film it dawned on me that even so far away she recognizes it as our onrushing doom and her deliverance. So fuck it, she tells off her boss and dumps her groom. But isn't that what depression is all about? She doesn't bother to share her realization though, knowing perhaps that in the house of a coddling smugly bourgeois materialist like John it's useless to bring it up. Considering this, the film suddenly comes into sharper focus for me, so thought I'd add it! 

Special Thanks to Jennifer Boyer,

Die Vikaren (THE SUBSTITUTE) und die Nordic Land sind sehr schon!

Summer in Manhattan I like to turn up the AC, weep for the environment, and escape into Nordic horror cinema, which is currently undergoing a major burst of (dark, what else?) energy thanks probably to the surprise art house success of Sweden's GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, below).

Strangely enough, no one in the overpaid brain trusts of Hollywood marketing seemed smart enough to sink their talons into the whole Nordic cold/blonde/snow/stillness rubric as a romantic selling point for these films. What are they, racist? Anyone with a crayon can connect the dots between RIGHT ONE and the TWILIGHT series, and stuff like 30 DAYS OF NIGHT and THE SUBSTITUTE miss big dollars by not stressing the Nordic / Scandinavian connection to TWILIGHT and RIGHT ONE (Yes, RIGHT ONE came out technically after the SUBSTITUTE, but that's what re-releasing is for).

Consider 30 DAYS OF NIGHT's graphic novel ink splatter poster (left): it looks like drug-deal-gone-bad with Ice T, rap soundtrack, and probably a gaggle of bad CGI vampires and bright red digital blood splatter. In reality it's balls-to-the-wall awesome, with enough dark, moody, grim stillness to earn it a spot right in between Carpenter's THE THING remake, Kathryn Bigelow's NEAR DARK, and any 80s-90s film where the sheriff of a small northern town is a young buck all alone save for his wizened but still hot ex-girlfriend deputy... This time, it's Alaska, and the literal 30 Days of Night have sent most of the population to other areas for the month, leaving the place wide open for invasion by Swedish Goth vampires.

 

Like the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the countries just outside the Arctic Circle--Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Tibet--are all way up North, where it's cooool! In this way TWILIGHT has more in common with LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and THE SUBSTITUTE than it does with other American movies. Consider these factors:

1. Cold, dark, underpopulated - good place to film in stark contrast, since the light is constant and diffused - gives everything a doomed, foreboding quality.
2. Polar Bears adrift on ice cap islands = suicidal ideation on a global scale
3. Sarah Palin, the Younger, Hotter Mrs. Iselin
4. All the girls (and guys) in Scandinavia are hot, blonde, single, and wowed by an American accent. (according to America)
5. Beautiful children with stunningly above average intelligence and quiet speaking voices.
6. Long nights of depression but for once you have a legit reason
7. Turtlenecks, wood-burning stoves, promiscuity
8. A lulu of an excuse to drink continually (it's never the morning after)
9. The idea of endless nights freeing you from the day/night duality, the tedium of the endless cycle of night and day.
10. Connection to real alien grays, eugenics, Nazis, genocide and Aryan reptillian insanity (See: Uma Thurman is from Venus) 
11. Lots of blonde hair... and the evil that implies
12. Black Metal
13. Vancouver, City where it's cheaper and easier to shoot 'on location' in NYC
14. Pale skin - vampires in the land of the midnight sun wont die of skin cancer like everyone else, lack of sun damage preserves eternal youth.
15. Bibi Andersson - she looks just like my mom (when I was the age of the kid in the morgue in PERSONA) yet is terribly, terribly sexy, forcing me at least, into a delirious Hitchcockian fugue state every time I see her.
16. In short, cinema.

In shorter still, a disruption of the fantasmatic, or a break between the real and the vividly painted. The Nordic fantasia short circuits our normal sense of light and dark - the ever-grayness of these regions makes them like a timeless dream. We can't even admit to ourselves how sick we are of night and day, day and night and day, over and over, here in the non-Pacific Northwest states, but we are, let's face it, or we wouldn't be hiding out in the eternal cold darkness of the movies.

The Scandinavians rock because the guys are all asleep or mysoginists and their chicks are way hot, educated, cool and see Americans as sexy the way we see, say, the Italians (again, according to our simulacratic mental fantasias). We're practically a Mediterranean country compared to them!  It seems in these films there's nothing in all of Scandinavia to do except drink, kill your tormentors , watch TV, have sex, and wander around in the dark in a drunken fog like Max Von Sydow in PASSION OF ANNA (1963, below).  Even if you don't get a beautiful blonde, or you do and she leaves, you can still drink and pass out in the snow or get bit by a vampire or animal mutilator. Oh slow death by alcoholic and hematological causes, where is thy sting?

Even if little to none of the items on that list turn out to be true, who cares? This is a Nordic land of our collective imagination, born of our need to escape from the hamster wheel of 9-5 living into the cold, calming comfort of the eternal night.

So that's the fantasia, mine anyway; I listen a lot to Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy in Sweden, savoring the "empty whiskey bottles / and records scattered on the floor" and dream my way up to Sweden or Denmark for a soul-searching vacation, falling in love with a sweet wondrous blonde-haired beauty I meet at the coffee bar; it turns out he or she lives in a cool pad and asks me to move in; everyone speaks English and they all appreciate my tortured depth; I fall into a hip alt-rock crowd; my art's not "too dark" for them, nothing is too dark for them!  I just quietly disappear into the fields of white, gray, and black, like that kid in INTO THE WILD, which "coincidentally" also co-starred Kristen Stewart (below, left).

Am I the only one who's got this Nordiclust? Not if the TWILIGHT sales figures are a judge, because I'd say the Pacific Northwest-teen horror tradition counts, too, and Alaska. It's the last American frontier, the last world frontier, a place where the rats of humanity can still escape and live like... kangaroos, or kings, or at the very least colorful truckers and waitresses that get killed before the opening credits.

 When you rent the teen-friendly and highly recommended Danish horror/sci fi film, SUBSTITUTE (2007), on DVD you also get endless trailers that all look pretty good, from an obviously Nordic-looking series called the Ghost House Underground. If you're wondering which films are actually in English or just dubbed/subtitled, keep your eyes peeled on the lips. In the foreign language trailers you will never see anyone actually speak. Everyone talks offscreen, except maybe to say "hey, man" (the way we say "gesundheit"). When you go to actually watch these films, make sure to see them in their real language with subtitles rather than the English language dubs, which kind of defeat the purpose, especially when there's great acting like that of Paprika Steen, who also starred in Dogme 95 hits like THE IDIOTS and THE CELEBRATION, here as a crazy kind of Aryan Nordic alien uberfrau who tries to turn her 6th grade class into a mini master-race (below).

The typically doltish releasing companies behind THE SUBSTITUTE also failed to pick up on how this is a LET THE RIGHT ONE IN waiting to happen. Even better, a LET THE RIGHT ONE VS. THE TWILIGHT GENERATION  (our lead lad broods Edwardianly, as if to announce the future American benchmark teen look--one of privileged grief and numb disinterest) + some of the sensible-ages-and-up ready fun of THE FACULTY, a 1999 Rodriguez film that's still my favorite of his oeuvre, and maybe a little PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and THE FORGOTTEN (below) thrown in for good measure.

I mean, seriously, look at all these SUBSTITUTES already out there! Can you even guess which one I'm reviewing in this post?

Love that Mark Wahlberg vs. Amanda Donohoe frowning contest! So, yeah, it's the last one, but how would you know it's cool, cold and full of fine stuff based on that cliche-ridden poster?

Since Alaska is a northern cousin of the Nordics, there's a strong whiff of Sarah Palin teaching THE CLASS here in THE SUBSTITUTE, and if the marketers were smart, they would have played up that angle. Like Palin, Paprika's alien-monster teacher plays heartstrings like a lute and drives whole nations to cataclysm, but there's also some of Colonel Krebs (Lotte Lenya) in that she's not as hot as you'd expect given the Skinemax-ish title, but kind of ravaged around the gills, especially compared to Sonia Richter (all the way atop and below) who plays the single cop mom to the cute new girl student in class. There she is at left, reminding me of a girl I loved in college. Man, she was flaky.

It's too bad THE SUBSTITUTE doesn't focus solely on the classroom scenes with Paprika, which are magnificent to watch as she switches from deep emotional manipulation to heartless, laughing cold-hearted Nazism on a dime (imagine She-Wolf Ilsa crossed with the Bibi Anderson from WILD STRAWBERRIES doing THE CHILDREN'S STORY). She's still good in lots of those "o why won't our parents believe us?"-style angst moments, but it's the classroom scenes that are golden: Ulla isn't afraid to run a gym class like a Treblinka death run, and she spouts brutal philosophies that would win the applause of James Mason in BIGGER THAN LIFE! Those Danes don't miss a trick and it's nice to see all the old dogme faces (the single dad looking to love again is played by Ulrich Thomsen, also from THE CELEBRATION).

Ah the war. How sweet that we need no longer miss the sound of howitzers, or the threat of angelic blonde faces in Hitler Youth neckerchiefs, running their SS daggers down our backs like warm September rain. It's all still here, or rather up there, along the shining Blu-ray way... they're all blondly waiting to gobble us up, and seldom before has death seemed so coldly inviting, at least for an hour or two out of the stifling humidity of summer and into the cold, windy climes of the cinema, where death is life and love is two cold fangs in your warm, hot neck, like blood stream air conditioning.