“You don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind.”
— Jonathan Bowden
When people think of midsommar, they largely think about people smashing the heads of elders with a sledge hammer, and people getting drugged, killed and/or raped in a terrifying rural cult full of nice-looking Swedish people dressed in white. I have spent considerable time reassuring non-Scandinavians that Sweden and midsommar is not creepy.
This is not because they think Midsommar, the film, is a documentary or based on a true story. They know it isn’t. It is usually not because they don’t know midsommar is a real tradition in Sweden. They know. If you ask them “Do you really think that’s what it’s actually like?” They’ll say no. However, if you ask them “Do you want to go?” you’ll also get a no.
Film is an incredibly impactful medium. It assaults your most important senses with very strong emotional impressions. Many people judge a film mainly by how strong of an emotional reaction it was able to trigger in them. So naturally, many films today seem created specifically just to evoke emotions. More crying, fear, tension, et cetera, equals more good. The film art we have ended up with as a result is refined emotional rape on disc. It will force emotions into you. A “good” film will be as impactful as humanly possible. The brain is not built for this. It doesn’t actually have any way to distinguish between the impression of a film, and the impression of a real experience. Both will shape you. Consciously and subconsciously.
After that film, when people see the midsommarstång or a white girl in a white dress with flowers in her hair, they get a sting in their chest, and a rush of negative emotions. This is important, because your conscious thoughts around things matter far less than the emotions they cause in you. Your conscious thoughts are mostly the foam of rationalizations on top of a river of intuitive and aesthetic decisions.
Taking something as beautiful, pure and holy as the Swedish tradition of midsommar, and corrupting it this way is spiritual vandalism. Curse those who do it. I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about how “good” (read: emotionally impactful) the film is, if it corrupts and twists people’s intuition around what is good, and what is creepy. We should not give funding and power to people who see something beautiful, good and pure, and think: “This would be great to corrupt and undermine on film”, instead of “This is great, more people should see how great this is”.
Midsommar isn’t the only film to do this, either. There are plenty of films that take something pure and good only to corrupt and destroy it for emotional effect. You could look at the same directors earlier film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, where he takes the beautiful and sadly rare image of the black family with a father in the home, and connects it with rape and incest. “When you see a well-dressed black family, think incest!”
This is evil.
Conversely, this power of film can also be used for good. It can be used to uplift and lionize the good of the world. Lord of the Rings does this. Yes, it is full of gross and negative things, but they are portrayed by characters that are correctly and truthfully dark. Their opposition, correctly, are a beautiful and glorious band of brothers and friends. True heroes.
Such art shapes and hones your aesthetic and moral intuition in a good way, rather than corrupting it. It doesn’t make enemies out of friends, and friends out of enemies. It doesn’t portray the orc horde and poisonous spiders as the good ones, and the human sword-wielders as the evil ones. It doesn’t undermine the image of family with incest, or the image of brotherhood with closeted homosexuality. It doesn’t impose lies on your subconscious.
This is a key aspect to whether something is truly good. If it damages you and your moral intuition, it is not good. Doesn’t matter how “impactful” it is, how many views it got, nor how many tickets it sold. What corrupts and destroys is evil, not good. If it adds beauty to the world, if it hones your moral and aesthetic judgement correctly; only then can it be good.
Films can obviously still fail along the normal technical lines, such as being badly paced, having awkward dialogue, a bad sound mix, and so on. Among those criteria, however, should be if the film is or is not bad on a spiritual level. Does it corrupt and undermine the good, and the human, or does it lionize it?