Midsommar X Joker: Are we in the Wicker Man?
Is the answer to the combative nature of capitalism more aggression? Bram E. Gieben on the implications of 'Joker' and 'Midsommar'
First published on Patreon in 2024.
It is well documented that capitalism leaves men estranged, and that this is one cause among many of the rise of far-right populism. Though is the answer to the combative nature of capitalism more aggression?
Through the prism of film (Joker and the folk horror offerings Hereditary and Midsommar) Revol author Bram E. Gieben considers this question, favoring the relinquishment of the individual quest for power over nature that underpins male disaffection.
This grinning incoherence lets it slide neatly into an alt-right world picture; diagnosing civilizational downfall but offering no change, apart from a restoration of personal dignity through violence, from the nihilist thrill of fucking the system right back. It’s a template for a contemporary fascist imaginary which mistakes ordinary alienation and unlaundered narcissism for oppression, whose riot optics mistake raging against the machine for raging that you’re not part of it – that your birthright has been snatched from your grasp.
- Eleanor Penny for Novara Media, on Joker
No film has been so roundly condemned for its nihilism than Todd Philips’ DC Universe Elseworlds riff Joker, an extended pastiche of Frank Miller 1980s Batman tropes and outright steals from 1970s Scorcese that lit up the box office, the awards circuit and internet discourse alike when it hit cinemas in 2019. The film even delivered (or at least perpetuated) its own subcategory of meme: ‘Joker flexing’, in which a young white male posts grim and portentous, pseudo-anarchist quotes alongside an image of (one of the many cinematic) Joker(s). In the time between 1966 and 2019, the character had evolved from the prankish ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ into a symbol of anti-establishment nihilism.
Controversial for its depiction of mental health and gun violence, and the equivalences it drew between the two, the consensus seemed to be that Philips’ style-over-substance approach in Joker served to trivialize the issue of mass shootings and male psychological suffering in a year which saw disillusioned young men once again taking to the streets armed with powerful semi-automatic rifles and bruised, rejected, egos. Perhaps its glorification of angst can be assumed to have inspired violence; maybe its subject’s nihilistic conclusions went too far. Without question however, the tortured, starved physicality and intense emotion of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance burned itself into the psyche of critics and audiences alike.
Many young men recognized themselves in the raw, visceral loneliness of Phoenix’s on screen persona. Was the vilification of the film itself, at the hands of professional critics and hashtag activists alike, just another rejection of the same young men? Perhaps all that can be said is the protagonist’s final line, before he shoots DeNiro’s establishment-stand-in talk show host in the head: “You wouldn’t get it.” The movie Joker spoke to alienated, lonely, angry young men on a deep, symbolic level. Its depiction of a man that most of society “wouldn’t get”, driven to violence by the specters of his own perceived failure and difference, his own emasculation, was bound to strike a powerful chord (and launch a million memes).
The question remains quite why we needed another depiction like this, especially as it repeated, in a diluted form, so many beats from nihilistic classics like Taxi Driver, a film it seemed almost at pains to visually recreate - an aesthetic choice that felt less like homage, and more like the needless romanticization of bleak, brutal filmmaking from another era. Sepia-tinged romanticism is an odd choice for a film describing an outsider; uncanny in its atemporality.
The stark fact remains that for a small but significant proportion of men who watched Joker and empathized with Arthur Fleck, male disaffection, misery, self-hatred and a sense of entitlement might well lead to mass killings, ‘political’ violence in the form of riots, or just plain old everyday stalking, harassment of, and violence towards women. It is a statistical fact. Men are brutalized by patriarchy in the form of social Darwinist hypercapitalism, and men behave violently, often brutalizing women in turn. These are generalities, but it does not take much work to draw their outline.
Far more interesting as a source of political allegory than the Ayn Rand-lite of superhero movies in general is the resurgent genre of ‘folk horror’ recently experiencing a renaissance in the complex, nuanced work of filmmakers such as Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Dave Eggers, Ben Wheatley and others. Of those four, Ari Aster’s two postmodern folk horror films are perhaps the closest to the original aesthetic. Each plays with the tropes of a film that came before it, with the claustrophobic Hereditary mirroring beats from Rosemary’s Baby, and the hallucinatory Midsommar reimagining the 1970s model for folk horror, The Wicker Man. Edward Millar and John Surmley, writing in the Baffler in 2019 describe the genre’s formula:
Unlike most horror, in which an interloping monster is either destroyed (in order to purge a threat to an established order) or otherwise incorporated into that order, folk horror operates by implicating the viewer in the dissolution and destruction of that order… At its core, folk horror is speculative fiction about the failures of the Age of Enlightenment.
While Aster’s films explore the concept of fear of the Other, it is often in the form of a repressed component of the self. Some unacknowledged instinct or deep programming is undone, and this is what causes the horror to be revealed. In Hereditary it is shared trauma that truly ‘haunts’ the family. The void-like embrace of the pagan cult that is revealed at the climax is something craved; a flight from trauma, from a shattered moral world into one of spiritual certainties and solid symbolic frameworks as opposed to the fractured, dream-like reality of the decentred capitalist subject. As Millar and Surmley argue:
The genre presents a return of these things that had to be repressed in the transition towards a rational, individualistic, and ultimately capitalist social order: witchcraft, female empowerment, sexuality, and an organismic, earth-based conception of the universe.
Millar and Surmley's argument pertains to Midsommar, in which the allure of community, ritual and shared belief is finally what tempts our protagonist, Dani, to recognize the shallow, misogynistic manipulations and attitudes of her partner and friends, culminating in their violent ritual sacrifice. The final scene is presented, as is the rest of the film, in blinding perpetual sunlight. If the famous ending of The Wicker Man sees the embodiment of Enlightenment man burned in favor of a fusion of pagan and techno-utopian beliefs, then Midsommar presents its opposite — Dani’s return to primal, pre-capitalist, explicitly communal celebration through cathartic ritual sacrifice is the ultimate transgression against patriarchy, and modernism itself. That we feel catharsis with her as her former boyfriend burns is testament to the strength of Aster’s slow, methodical undermining of capitalist reality within the ergot-powered dreamtime of Hårga, a commune in rural Sweden. It is in many senses the antidote to the ‘grim-dark’ fantasies of films like Joker. Yes, there are primordial male urges that can explode into violence if not addressed, but they need to be ritually banished, rather than channeled. What should the method of their banishment be? This is the most dangerous question Midsommar poses.
In perhaps the most powerful scene, Hårga elders throw themselves from a cliff to die in graphic, painful detail on the rocks below. The different reactions to this most extreme form of ‘difference’ - embodied by a cultural practice beyond the bounds of the ‘civilized’, normative morality of the American observers - are telling. Some of the onlookers are horrified; others try to understand what they have seen psychologically, or anthropologically. Dani is horrified but also captivated - the idea of submission to belief, to ritual, and to the power of life, death and nature, their interconnectedness, is already leading her towards her fate as the crowned queen of this murderous utopia. Combine this with the fact that her male partner’s infidelity, shallowness and dishonesty are punished with a very public, graphically depicted sexual humiliation, and we see the alchemy that Aster has attempted. Midsommar is a revenge film about the feminine, the earthly and the natural. It shows these symbolic systems turning the tables on the masculine, the extractive, and the profit-seeking. Writing in the Guardian, Andrew Michael Hurley understands this in terms of Dani’s connection to community, and nature:
... it’s the appearance of communal unity that seemingly appeals to Dani when she arrives at Hårga for the festival. Strange though the place is, the very fact the community is celebrating something that’s part of a larger natural cycle is evidence of a consistency and stability lacking in her life. There’s a philosophy that underpins everything. Everyone has a role to play. Power is localized and tangible. And so to live in a community where the individual is not only able to grasp that power, but is an inherent part of its potency, is an attractive proposition in an era of relativist truths, fractured democracy, global environmental threats and a society in which the spheres of influence are ineffably remote.
By submitting to ancient rituals and religions embodying femininity and the earth, Dani embraces her true power, and steps out of illusion into the blazing sunlight of ecological truth. The death brought to the outsiders, who represent capitalist and Enlightenment values, is the death of us all, promised by nature’s own inevitable cycles. It’s a de-realisation of the myth that capital can promise life beyond death through great wealth and legacy, or through power and acclaim. It is a fiction about the bloody attrition that sometimes accompanies power and the pursuit of ‘progress’, no matter how supposedly ‘enlightened’.
In The Wicker Man, the fulcrum of that myth is Sergeant Howie’s faltering faith, and his belief in rationalism. Both are tested and found wanting. For Dani, sudden grief, and the callous indifference of her peers, are what push her into a state of radical otherness. It is the community, the tradition, the unbroken and implicitly matriarchal lineage of natural power, that brings her back to a state of happiness and peace. All she has to do is burn her friends. This is not presented as atrocity, but as an act of emancipation. The consequences of that for Dani, and for society, are left to the viewer.
Is Dani trading one kind of power for another, equivalent form of it? Or is the burning at the film’s climax an emancipatory moment similar to the release from grief, and into cultish belief, at the end of Hereditary? Aster is tight-lipped about both, but perhaps it is telling that he says:
Both films are very much about family… both films kind of deal with codependency, in a way, although this film goes deeper into that. In fact, I've described the film as a horror movie about codependency. I guess I hope that people will feel unsettled."
- Quoted in Refinery29, 2019
If these are films about codependency and family, they also ask complex questions about what it means to be dependent on a planet with dwindling resources and vulnerable supply chains. In returning his protagonists to a primeval, nature-oriented, ruthlessly Darwinian ‘state of nature’, Aster invites parallels with the ruinous ecological strategies and extractivist ideological-economic policies we pursue; and beyond that, to the consequences of abandoning them. The seductive call of magic, ritual and faith that could replace them has rarely been depicted with such clear-eyed appreciation for their capacity for horror. Beyond the illusory stability of late capitalism lies the potential for not just atavism but murder and ruin. Both of these things can seem like a solution to the aggrieved, the betrayed, or those in exile.
Where Joker plays into the fundamentally flawed logic of capitalism, seeking to take revenge against society for turning its protagonist into an irrelevance, folk horror accepts individual irrelevance as a condition of nature. At its conclusion, Joker’s riot-choked inner city hellscape feels like the bait in a nostalgia trap of the kind posed by conservatives; a promise to somehow return to an explicitly patriarchal belle epoque by tearing down the system. The violent, redemptive, ecstatic conclusions of folk horror masterpieces from The Wicker Man to its contemporary peers invert this alienation. Ritualized, the violence in these films cannot help but feel cathartic, even transcendent: as the sacrificial victims go up in smoke, so too do the failed pretensions of late capitalism - for better or worse.
I love all these movies.
I like the ‘as above so below’ resonances in Ari Asters work. How family trauma ripples outwards. For instance, in midsummer the intro has the murder-suicide scene of her sister and parents, in the house dead (sacrificed?) via carbon monoxide poisoning. It seems structurally similar to the latter scenes of burning sacrifice in the hut.
The smile on her faith a submitting great relief, the final act after much resistance, letting go