Greatest Movies of All Time

[Gadianton]

How so?

Have you seen it?

I think I see why you say it is about Mormonism, but I would love for you to explain that.

I'm sure you could come up with a better Mormon interpretation than I can, but I get it, you have to pretend that it's a stretch to see it because otherwise it will look like you're making fun of Mormonism.

Unfortunately, I'm not known for my memory, and I wouldn't be able to do the topic justice without seeing it again.

From what I remember (spoiler alert), it starts with one or two "Mormon" youth who are attractive and have good social skills, and they invite their friends to "come to this thing". Evasive about what the thing is, and then it's this impressive setting and the whole point is to totalize investigators into the system. Well, that's where it starts.

[Kishkumen]

I'm sure you could come up with a better Mormon interpretation than I can, but I get it, you have to pretend that it's a stretch to see it because otherwise it will look like you're making fun of Mormonism.

Unfortunately, I'm not known for my memory, and I wouldn't be able to do the topic justice without seeing it again.

From what I remember (spoiler alert), it starts with one or two "Mormon" youth who are attractive and have good social skills, and they invite their friends to "come to this thing". Evasive about what the thing is, and then it's this impressive setting and the whole point is to totalize investigators into the system. Well, that's where it starts.

Of course, everyone will respond differently to the film. My recollection is that the story really centered on a young woman who was in deep emotional trouble because she was the sole survivor her sister's successful suicide that also killed the parents. Then, her boyfriend was on the edge of dumping her, when she worked her way into his research trip to Scandinavia where a traditional society that used entheogens ended up being deadly to the looky-lou students who were there for their own selfish reasons (I will write a killer anthro diss based on this stuff, etc.). The damaged girl, however, becomes the Midsommar Queen, or some such, and totally integrates into the society authentically. The others end up being sacrificial victims, or something very close to it.

The creepiest aspect of all of this, at least to me, is that you are left with the sublime but disturbing feeling that the girl was the one who got it right. She saw that this was an authentic community, and she joined it. The difficult question it leaves one with is this: if this is the price of real community, who is really ready to join it? If the other alternative is isolation, cynicism, selfishness, and even self-destruction, who can afford not to seek it? Naturally, being a fun movie, it doesn't show you any real choices between those extremes.

Mormonism sells itself as the authentic traditional community, but it is, in the end, lacking the very thing it promises. The ward no longer offers authentic community. Transient, ever-changing modern society, coupled with corporate engineering at the core of the organization, has hollowed the whole thing out. And, at the same time, you have to doubt any one of us were ready to sacrifice what was required for the authentic community that existed in the past, saddled with all of its minuses (abusive and manipulative leadership, etc.).

By the way, I don't "have to" do anything here. Making fun of Mormonism is our whistling past the graveyard. We can all do it for our own peace of mind, but I question the longterm value of it for anything more than reaffirming our separation from it. But maybe that's enough for those who choose to be separated.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

This person saw the same as Gad did:

https://amoretmortem.wordpress.com/2019 ... midsommar/

At the first meal the American and British outsiders share with the inhabitants of Hälsingland, the communal outdoor dining tables are artfully arranged to form the Elder Futhark rune of Othala, which signifies family and kin, blood bonds, the ancestral homestead. In other words, these sinister Swedes are the Pagan version of American Mormons—child brides, statutory rape, the works. So now we have the morally repugnant association of incest with their homespun brand of Paganism…and we haven’t even gotten to the ritual murders yet!

[Kishkumen]

This person saw the same as Gad did:

https://amoretmortem.wordpress.com/2019 ... midsommar/

At the first meal the American and British outsiders share with the inhabitants of Hälsingland, the communal outdoor dining tables are artfully arranged to form the Elder Futhark rune of Othala, which signifies family and kin, blood bonds, the ancestral homestead. In other words, these sinister Swedes are the Pagan version of American Mormons—child brides, statutory rape, the works. So now we have the morally repugnant association of incest with their homespun brand of Paganism…and we haven’t even gotten to the ritual murders yet!

Wow. Totally different take on the movie from my own. I am tempted to say that this person just didn't get it, but maybe it comes down to taste. I will not refrain from being catty about the person's obvious lack of Latinity, as proven by the embarrassing title of the blog which joins a nominative and an accusative with a coordinating conjunction.

[Kishkumen]

Yet the viewer cannot help but draw the conclusion from the outset that the entire village is comprised of one large, inbred/incestuously entangled (and consequently, screwed up) literal family.

Case in point on flawed interpretation: clearly the whole visit is part of a regular recruiting of outsiders to add to the gene pool.

Derp.

[honorentheos]

I don't know. It did a pretty good job of showing how damaged folks can be vulnerable to cult tactics. I don't think authentic is a useful term here. Authentically what? A community that demands absolution of the self into a group to the point emotional reactions of victims and key participants are mimicked by the community as an integral part of sacrificial rituals ranging from suicide, body disfigurement, sex, and animal/human sacrifice?

I stand by my comments upthread.

Midsommar stood out to me for Florence Pugh's acting and the movie's novelty. It's kinda fun to have a horror film made in Blue Willow. Is it the best folk horror film in my opinion? Again, I resist the superlative. It's appeal is the lack of metaphysical forces that give the malevolence of communal abandonment of self a realism that is a great feature of the genre. But I also enjoy when there turns out to be deeper horrors that resist modernity in the genre, too. The VVitch is an example of that branch of folk horror I think is a great movie. I think both play off of that key aspect of folk horror: modernity is fragile and barely covering over things old, powerful, and waiting. Venturing past it's borders leaves the person who is accustomed and beholden to law, technology, and individualism exposed as their power disappears outside of the collective illusion holding it together. Midsommar did that well.

I do not think the connection to Mormonism holds beyond the idea of collectivism and ritual where the individual self is not even secondary to the community. If that's ones experience with such things it makes sense it would be the touchstone one finds there. But that's about it, in my opinion.

[Kishkumen]

I don't know. It did a pretty good job of showing how damaged folks can be vulnerable to cult tactics. I don't think authentic is a useful term here. Authentically what? A community that demands absolution of the self into a group to the point emotional reactions of victims and key participants are mimicked by the community as an integral part of sacrificial rituals ranging from suicide, body disfigurement, sex, and animal/human sacrifice?

I stand by my comments upthread.

Midsommar stood out to me for Florence Pugh's acting and the movie's novelty. It's kinda fun to have a horror film made in Blue Willow. Is it the best folk horror film in my opinion? Again, I resist the superlative. It's appeal is the lack of metaphysical forces that give the malevolence of communal abandonment of self a realism that is a great feature of the genre. But I also enjoy when there turns out to be deeper horrors that resist modernity in the genre, too. The VVitch is an example of that branch of folk horror I think is a great movie. I think both play off of that key aspect of folk horror: modernity is fragile and barely covering over things old, powerful, and waiting. Venturing past it's borders leaves the person who is accustomed and beholden to law, technology, and individualism exposed as their power disappears outside of the collective illusion holding it together. Midsommar did that well.

I do not think the connection to Mormonism holds beyond the idea of collectivism and ritual where the individual self is not even secondary to the community. If that's ones experience with such things it makes sense it would be the touchstone one finds there. But that's about it, in my opinion.

Those are good thoughts. I stand by authentic community. I thought Witch was pretty boring on the whole. I like Midsommar a heckuva lot more. Your take on folk horror as a genre is solid. Where I differ with you on Mormonism and Midsommar is that Pugh's character is like a golden investigator. So many of mine had suffered trauma and were looking for something to escape the hell they had found themselves in. Mormonism promised to give them what they had been missing. Unfortunately, the LDS Church does not live up to its promises.

[honorentheos]

I read a book on the psychology of cults around the time I was working my way out of the Mormon church that proved instrumental in my contextualizing the experiences I had which I still qualify as, "spiritual". The book explored numerous peoples experiences in numerous groups and includes interviews with both adherents and disaffected. The almost exact overlap of others experiences, swapping out nouns being about the most one needed to do to make a Moonies experience or a person in AA basically be my own was initially shocking as I had been raised to see Mormonism as somehow unique, including what one experienced as one sought whatever it is to be found in seeking therein.

It is what it is. I don't think the movie portrays a specific parallel with Mormonism, just that Mormonism is what is familiar of this kind of thing to folks who participate here.

[honorentheos]

The creepiest aspect of all of this, at least to me, is that you are left with the sublime but disturbing feeling that the girl was the one who got it right. She saw that this was an authentic community, and she joined it. The difficult question it leaves one with is this: if this is the price of real community, who is really ready to join it? If the other alternative is isolation, cynicism, selfishness, and even self-destruction, who can afford not to seek it? Naturally, being a fun movie, it doesn't show you any real choices between those extremes.

Setting the Mormonism parallel question aside and getting back to the topic of film, I think this is really what defines folk horror as a genre. (Authentic being maybe an extra adjective to suggest what most of us might today call a community is only a shadow of what that means "in our bones" as our tribal, eusocial biology urges us to seek meaningful belonging.)

Hereditary kinda papers over this with the focus being on the core family and painting the demon cult as patently evil, but it's still at the center of that Ari Aster film, too. Wickerman is the classic example of people reaching backwards into a pagan past with community Identity superceding that of the individual revealing a new type of horror to those raised on Western ideas about individualism.

I believe the genre is decidedly modern in origin because it couldn't have existed before modernism had emerged first, followed by folks finding it difficult to live without the mores and norms of community leading to culture wars, anomie, and whatever it is we are doing these days as a society.

ETA: I do think it is not meant to show the protagonist from Midsommar "got it right", so much as she found something to hold to there even as she emoted, lashed out, and ended the film in a cruel joy watching the remains of the hut collapse on the representation of her past in a parallel to the fire in which her sister and parents perished. But it is no less a suicide as her sisters was. She is just as dead as her boyfriend she sent to die, now existing as a member of a new whole which will one day ask of her to again do something horrible. There is no "her" left to reject that demand or reconsider it. What is left ends the film as the May Queen, but tomorrow will be another community member, and perhaps a volunteer in the next cycle of sacrifice.

[Gadianton]

Your mind is far better than mine, Reverend, and I've definitely misremembered some things about the movie. Unfortunately, Amazon has taken down the free version, otherwise I would have watched the first 20 minutes again to get my bearings for the conversation.

As I suspected, yours is the superior Mormon interpretation. Yes, the only choices seem to be "thrive or die". At least superficially.

At first blush, Mormonism can't be the Harga (I had to look it up), they can't be authentic community like that, at least in our time because Mormonism is a virtual community within the greater context of American society, economy, and law. Maybe Brigham Young's SLC would be a closer comparison as an equivalent insular community. But even then, Mormonism was corrupted by capitalism.

With a few adjustments, the Harga represent everything Mormonism aspires to in theory and has touched on at times in practice. Mormons were supposed to live the law of consecration, and that would have brought them closer to the ideal.

I agree the Harga are an example of authentic community, but I don't think authentic community is everything it's cracked up to be. The two great parallels that stood out in my mind watching the movie was 1) Mormonism 2) Insects. The weirdness of the Harga rules reminded me of documentaries I've seen on insect communities where they do all kinds of crazy things -- a particular bug might be worshipped by its peers who then turn around and eat it. Perhaps the girl got lucky, and enjoyed a fortuitous fusing of her vain American ideals and the community ideals, at least for the duration of the film.

The crazy rules are a function of evolution -- how does a community persist for thousands of years in balance with its habitat? When the older couple fell over the cliff in a ritual, that was the dark side of "authentic community". The internal interpretation is God-knows-what, the external interpretation is keeping the population numbers in line with resources. All of the bizarre rules ultimately play a part in community sustainability, an anthropologist would connect those dots, but the community members aren't explicitly aware of why they do what they do in terms of physical sustainability any more than ants are.

A strong connection to Mormonism in its ideal is the role for proselytes. The insularity of the Harga would at first glance make them more like the Amish, if comparing American religions, but the Sentinelese (who killed that dumbass missionary) would be the paradigm of an insular community in the modern world that has survived for thousands of years. But the Harga welcomes outsiders, and know how to integrate with outsiders; they are perfectly prepared to integrate outsiders and have a high level of expertise in doing so. That aspect is almost a contradiction. Authentic community implies a unique language game. With insects, we have no way to relate -- this is the ideal for those doing postmodern interpretations -- their language games are totally untranslatable into our understanding of reality. And so it's stretch to have the boyfriend so fluent in both worlds.

And so while they are isolated, the Harga must also be some kind of a virtualized community parasitic on the outside in order to explain everything from speaking English to the boyfriend integrating on the outside, to converts integrating, and so really what we're looking at here with Mormonism (perhaps in a more isolated form) and the Harga are prime examples of what it means to be a cult.