‘“Do you feel held?”: Gender, Community, and Affective Design in Midsommar’

ABSTRACT

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• horror
• affect
• gender
• design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This emphasis on disruption of gender norms also appears in 1973’s Wicker Man, where Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) dons a long black wig and a dress for the May Day procession and ritual. When Sgt. Howie researches the practice in the local library, he reads that this character is known as ‘the man-woman, the sinister teaser, played by the community leader or priest.’

2. It’s important to note here that much of the critical analysis of Midsommar has focused on exactly this – the all-white idyll that rests upon a foundation of violence, especially towards people of colour (three of the five interlopers who die are BIPOC). See Ward and Albin (2020), as well as Wolfe (2021).

3. I use the term ‘abject’ here deliberately, as Julia Kristeva’s definition of the concept emphasises the response we (or a character) might have to the undeniable material condition of death, as well as the disruption between subject and object (the corpse is subject become object) that beholding such elements of horror causes. The moment of the ättestupa, when each of the Hårga, voluntarily witness the fate that each of them, barring an earlier death, will experience, is the very definition of Kristeva’s notion of the abject. See Kristeva, J. (1982). Trans. Leon S. Roudiez Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.

4. Although the 2006 version of The Wicker Man, directed by Neil LaBute and starring Nicolas Cage, dispenses with many of the elements that made the 1973 film successful, and instead relies upon Cage’s scene-chewing for most of its charm, Cage does wear a bear skin in the film’s last scene, a choice that Aster might (might) be referencing here.