Midsommar and Covid Rooms
Reflections on collective trauma and how we move forward
Despite being easily startled, not loving jump scares but thriving on the adrenaline rush left in their wake, and being deeply affected by psychological thrillers, horror has become - and maybe always has been- my favorite film genre. I love a twisty psych thriller - when I watched the Butterfly Effect, I thought about it for weeks.
I’ve recently become low key obsessed with the filmmaking genius of Ari Aster, widely regarded as a horror master, and after (admittedly inexplicably) watching Hereditary (excellent film, very disturbing, not likely to watch again), I decided to watch Midsommar. I’d heard it was good, but it was one of those that stuck with you.
Midsommar is a stunning film. Visually, intellectually, metaphorically, viscerally, emotionally, psychologically, symbolically - any way you turn it, stunning.
It is Aster-style disturbing, but I’d watch it again.
What most drew me into the film, gripped me and has yet to let go, was the portrayal of community -particularly communal approaches to grief, and the portrayal of the deep reaches of grief itself.
Reeling from profound loss, the main character travels with her (if you can call him that) boyfriend and his friend group for an cultural immersion trip to a commune one of their classmates hails from. They are all studying anthropology. What unfolds throughout the film is a series of lesson in cultic behaviors, assigning value to cultural practices one has never experienced nor has expert knowledge about, the undercurrents of grief that move with each of us as we navigate life, and communal lament. It felt like an important watch.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Midsommar and embodied grief, after a visit with a resident at a facility that had a recent COVID outbreak. COVID these days feels like a time far gone for some, as proximate as a next breath for others, and I think that whether it’s long past or close memory, we haven’t done a good job collectively of mourning that time, acknowledging the existential dread we were all walking around with, tending the losses that emerged in the pandemic’s wake.
As I prepared to go into her room, I went through the familiar motions - mask, sanitize - no gown or gloves this time, but my bones and muscles recognized the familiar movements, and my brain joined them later in a weird combination of energy and exhaustion that is hard to explain. Entering COVID rooms in my work as a chaplain, especially before the vaccine was difficult on a plethora of levels. Those visits were more emotionally impactful because the stakes were higher. The impacts lasted until I got home where I would say “ I was in COVID rooms today,” which meant any hugging or normal greeting behaviors that once existed outside of the space of universal precautions and paranoia would be put on hold until I had put all my clothes in the laundry, taken a shower and put on fresh, non-COVID-room clothes.
I didn’t take enough time to move meaningfully away from that time, just moved across the country to start a new job.
I wonder if, collectively, we all have jumped into the next thing without adequate time to mourn what has been, damage that has been done, fears carried, dreads hanging over us, for years and years from the inception of a nation built on genocide and slave labor, through years of oppression, bloodshed, and dehumanization done in pursuit of “greatness, etc…” on and on through Orangina’s first term, a pandemic that led to a collective disappearing of 2020 to at least 2022, and now to the point that nothing Captain Cheeto does is surprising to the people who’ve been paying attention, and the act of processing not only the existence of a concentration camp but the glee with which it was build and has been received by some is too much. I think it’s too much because in capitalist America, you muscle through and just hope to survive.
I hope we can get to a point where true lament for our history of atrocities is possible, a point where liberation of all is the goal because as the saying goes, until all of us are free, not one of us is free.
I think the trauma of the pandemic as an undercurrent in our lives is being compounded by the acts of the current administration. I think the way forward is a path straight through it. A path of mirrors that invites us, nay, requires us to look at the reflection that has been created, grieve, and mobilize for liberation. That’s our way forward.
