Midsommar and Raw have obvious surface similarities; they both broadly fit into the genre of horror, they both have female leads and they are both, in my view, near the top of the decade’s best films list. As is often the case in horror films both movies contain a subtext of sexual freedom, but more importantly there lies at the centre of both films the theme of ‘agency’.
The opening pre-credit sequence of Midsommar perfectly demonstrates Dani Arbor’s, played superbly by Florence Pugh, lack of agency. She is at the whim of both her sister and her boyfriend. We discover immediately upon meeting said boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), that he is contemplating breaking up with her. She remains at his mercy. Similarly, she remains at her sister’s mercy and in this case her sister is not merciful, killing herself and their parents. We hear Dani’s anguished screams echo through Christian’s phone, screams that will be mirrored later in the story. Justine (Garance Marillier) experiences no such trauma at the opening of Raw, her trauma will come later. But we do get the impression that she had little choice in attending the Veterinary School that her parents, who also attended the school, are driving her to. Her sister, Alexia or Alex (Ella Rumpf), was meant to pick her up. She did not. Again, at the whim of a sister, though in far less deadly circumstances this time. Her agency is clearly lacking on her first night at her new college; she asked to room with a girl, they gave her a gay man instead, Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella), and then she is forced to partake in hazing rituals, again through no choice of her own. The opening fifteen minutes of both films establishes both protagonist’s lack of agency, they are both at the whim of others.
To have agency, or to be an agent of one’s own life, is to make a decision for oneself. It is to set a course and stick to it. Dani does not do so until very late in the film, Justine does so earlier. In a scene of grooming gone wrong, the tip of Alex’s finger is cut off by a wayward pair of scissors in bloody fashion and Alex faints. Having now tasted meat, forced through hazing by her own sister, Justine’s desires overwhelm her. She stares at the bloody tip of her sister’s finger, almost in a trance. She is clearly caught in that moment of indecision, when you are about to do something you know you should be ashamed to even consider but you want to do it anyway. And then the originally vegetarian Justine starts to eat a part of her own sister. Although, Alex herself is not as surprised as one would expect at this turn of events, for she herself is also a cannibal. Justine’s desire for meat has grown ever since she was first forced to eat raw rabbit kidney, and the progression makes sense. It will make even more sense later. But this decision is the first that we can truly say is hers. Ignoring every social convention, every shred of modern liberal morality, she takes what she desires in animalistic fashion.
Contrastingly, Dani does not do so until the very end of the movie. Her decision to go with her boyfriend and his friends, who all but Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) either tolerate her, or like Mark (Will Poulter) actively dislike her, seems half-hearted at best. The audience knows that the group is down to just Christian and Dani, though they themselves must surely suspect something of the pagan cult they are surrounded by. Dani has been drugged up on ‘shrooms’ and pressured by the girls of the commune to join in the dancing competition for May Queen, not that Dani knows that is the point of the competition. The dance is clearly fixed, she wins and is crowned May Queen. She even reacts positively to the other girls declaring her as part of the family, as their sister. This is in contrast to the start of their stay in Hälsingland, when, again high, Mark says of the rest of them, presumably not including Dani, “you guys are like my family”, this sets Dani on a particularly bad trip. But now she welcomes the title, perhaps she has found her real family. But when told she must ride in a carriage to perform a ceremony for a good harvest she asks; “Can Christian come?” She is still reliant on him; she still wants him by her side even though it is clear for all to see that their relationship no longer exists. It is not until the ultimate betrayal, a sexual betrayal that Dani finally gains her agency. She finally leaves Christian behind.
Before venturing on into that murky topic of sex, Christian’s name must be noted. His name is literally Christian, as in ‘to be a Christian’. He could not be a more obvious representation of what Dani is leaving behind at the end of the film. In joining this pagan society, she is rejecting all of the Christian norms that she was brought up with. Though many university educated women of her age in ‘Western nations’ may well be agnostic or atheistic, almost everyone in such nations think in an entirely Christian manner; to feel sympathy for the weak, to give to the poor, to sacrifice for others and so on. Humanism is, and this is far from an original point, merely Christianity but often without the God. So, when Dani does finally leave Christian, she is of course leaving him and quite literally burning their relationship but she is doing more than that, she is leaving everything of her past self, the past self that had her clinging on to a broken relationship and destructively paranoid about her sister. With Christian all vestiges of her upbringing in a milieu of Christianity also go. And all that is left is the pagan.
Sex is a trope in horror. The trope is simply that sex leads to death. This has recently been played with in both Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods in which “the whore” must die first and “the virgin” last, or David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in which a curse is passed on through sexual intercourse. If one ever finds themselves in a horror film, do not split up and do not have sex. To borrow somewhat from Camille Paglia, specifically her 1990 book Sexual Personae, Hälsingland seems much like William Wordsworth’s Rousseauist poetry. Nature is awe inspiring and vast but ultimately pleasant; with rolling green hills and leafy forests. In contrast to this lies the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which nature is vengeful, violent, cold, callous and sadistic. Hälsingland turns from a Wordsworthian dream into a Coleridgean nightmare. And at the centre of it, lies sex. Paglia says of Wordsworth; “[he] wants nature without sex.”1 But as the film reaches its climax, sex causes the final twist. The subject of inbreeding amongst the community is brought up by the anthropology students of the group Christian and Josh (William Jackson Harper) and an Elder of the community informs them that “outsiders are invited in” to freshen up the bloodline as it were. And in the film, Maja (Isabelle Grill) a young girl of the commune, has recently been granted permission to “mate” and her eyes are very much set on Christian. As I have already mentioned Mark so subtly tells Christian that he ought to find a girl “who actually likes sex”. Incidentally, Mark is lured to his death by a woman offering exactly that. And it is the decision that Christian makes, to first drink something he is told will “lower his defences”, and then to follow through and acquiesce to Maja’s desires that lead certainly to his own fate. Christian and Maja “mate” on the floor of a large wooden hall, surrounded by naked old women, chanting along with them. Ari Aster has so far ended all of his feature films with a lot of naked old women on screen. The women touch themselves, desperately attempting to relive the time when they could seduce a man in a relationship to bed with them. Maja encourages Christian to finish, he is even aided by an elderly woman pushing his backside, and then when he does, Maja rocks backwards, exclaiming loudly; “I can feel the baby”. This is nature at its most chthonian. Outside is brilliantly lit in the midnight sun of midsummer in Sweden, but inside that wooden building it is like a dark cavern. Once Christian has fulfilled his biological use, he runs naked from the room, attempting to cover himself as he does so. His naked running was supposedly Reynor’s own idea, a way of subverting the horror cliché of a scantily clad woman running from some sort of terror. This is the female vampire at its most obvious; “That woman can drain and paralyze is part of the latent vampirism in female physiology.”2 Once he has helped to ‘freshen up’ the genetic pool his use is over and he can be discarded. Though his use for Maja and the commune is purely biological, Dani upon witnessing this betrayal lets out a cry of anguish, this as I have already hinted at, is a mirror to when Christian comforts the crying Dani after her sister’s double murder-suicide. Dani screams and shakes, the truth of their relationship now revealed, through the keyhole, much like in Sartre’s famous ‘Keyhole example’; Dani goes from subject to object in an instant. Her newfound “sisters” cry and yell with her in a weird orgy of cathartic release, clearly mirroring the sexual release of Christian surrounded by the chanting older women. Unfortunately for Wordsworth and unfortunately for Dani you cannot have nature without sex. And the sadism of nature, the cold biology of it, will always reappear. Particularly in a horror film.
Equally, the sex in Raw is as dark, as vampiric in fact. The virginal Justine develops sexually as her cannibalistic desires grow. Having tasted the phallic shaped, naturally, tip of her sister’s finger, Justine dances seductively before her mirror, blue dress on (borrowed from her sister), lipstick bright red, listening to the incredibly sexually explicit lyrics of Plus putes que toutes les putes (‘Whorier than other whores ‘or ‘bitchier than other bitches’ depending on the translation) by Orties; looking like the archetypal “Whore of Babylon”. She seduces her gay roommate Adrien who indulges her odd sexual desires, he spends the entire encounter attempting to not get bitten. And at her own release Justine looks dead into the camera and bites into her own flesh. With blood gushing from her arm she looks satiated, her desires have been met. For the next section of the film we follow the now sexually vibrant Justine as she drunkenly makes out with random people of either gender and then sits at the side of the party, lustfully watching the hedonism before her, as a predator would its prey, or a vampire their next victim. But Justine’s new found confidence is completely destroyed when, whilst intoxicated, Alex takes her to the morgue, wherein, before tens of onlookers, she dangles the arm of a dead body before Justine before moving it out the way as the feral animal that is her sister attempts to bite it. Society enforces its morality upon Justine. She now feels the shame that she managed to ignore when contemplating whether to feast upon her sister’s digit. We think order may be restored, but not quite. Alex kills Adrien and feasts upon much of his leg, as if jealous that her sister got a new toy and she did not. Justine, though filled with rage, decides not to kill her sister. It is a decision, a moment of agency, even amidst a maelstrom of violent feelings. Justine, now strongly coated in societal shame, has learnt to deal with such violent temptations. Alex never did. Alex’s sexual freedom, that we witness a bit of and hear some more of, we can assume also emerged as her desires did. This is reflected in their father’s own story. Their mother and he were best friends through their teenage years and he could not understand why she did not want to be with him, until they were first together and she tore off a chunk of his lip. Two things are important about this; firstly, the three cannibals in the film are all women and secondly that again the cannibalistic and sexual desires are wrapped into one, almost as if they are the same. There is the famous Freudian notion that a child believes their father to be hurting their mother when they are having sex, the pleasured cries of the mother are indistinguishable to the child from a cry of pain. Similarly, here, sex and pain are connected, sexual release seems only possible for the three women in question upon biting their partner’s flesh. The fact that Justine bites her own flesh as simulation when with Adrien, suggests why she is our hero. She, as her father puts it, finds her own solution. And that is why at the end of the film Alex is the one in prison and not Justine. Justine has mediated between her own chthonian and vampiric desires and the morality of the society she finds herself in. And that is how, much like in a Shakespeare play, order is restored. In As You Like It for example, Rosalind and co return from the Forest back to the City at the end of the play. Likewise, Justine returns from a place of pure Dionysian desire to a certain level of Apollonian control, to use such a dichotomy. Whereas in Midsommar, Dani remains with the cult in Hälsingland, her new family, satisfied that revenge has been served. Order is not restored, in that the outside world remains outside and Dani seemingly remains in nature. In Midsommar the forces of horror win out. Dionysus has the last laugh.
Both films are fundamentally about the façades that our characters live under until drugs or trauma or both reveal their true natures. They emerge as women with agency, as if their animus takes over in their desperation, except they both remain distinctly feminine. Justine’s inner desires are awakened, partially through her hazing, but then fully after her sister’s digital accident. Dani’s emerge slower than Justine’s, perhaps due to the severity of her own trauma, or perhaps due to the lack of an overt sexuality in the way of Justine or even Maja, but it still comes in the form of rage. The androgyny in Midsommar is also relevant, though the genders clearly have assigned roles “based on traits they show as children”, the dress for both men and women is basically the same. In fact, an Elder refers to his robes as “androgynous”. When Dani is seated at the head of the table as May Queen, only Christian is not wearing such dress, his overt American ‘masculinity’ is offensively obvious. And then he is used by the femme fatale figure of Maja in the archetypal way that has existed in literature for millennia. His masculinity is used for its purpose and then it becomes a problem and he is quickly removed. When at the end everyone in the commune screams along with those burning alive, they do so as one, the shrieks of men indistinguishable from those of the women. They are seemingly as one. Dani’s own femineity seems to be purged in this moment, having allowed her animus its revenge her striking sadistic smile into the camera for the film’s final shot reeks of a male serial killer, of Psycho’s Norman Bates. Many serial killers, both in fiction and in reality, are playing out their relationships with their own mother. In a sense they too have a hint of androgyny. If both of their façade’s crumble during the film, Justine’s is reassembled and repurposed by the end, whereas Dani’s is not. Justine’s solution is assimilation and control, Dani’s is cathartic revenge. Justine could have gone the same way as Dani if she had killed Alex when she had the chance, but she did not. And this is the central difference between the two films. One concludes with order, the other remains in flux. But both films are, undoubtedly, brilliant.
Bibliography
- Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae, Yale University, 1990, pg. 300
- Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae, Yale University, 1990, pg. 339
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