Looking at Midsommar Through a Cultural Lense

Culture is a communication theory that the movie Midsommar explores extensively. In the first few minutes of this horror film, we are introduced to the main characters which are Dani, her boyfriend Christian, and his friend group. Dani and Christian are having relationship issues early on in the plot, but before Christian can sit down with Dani to talk about taking a break, her sister kills herself and her parents. Christian decides it would not be right to break up with her while she deals with this immense grief. A few months pass by and the group of friends including Dani and Christian all decide to go to Sweden to observe a festival that occurs once every 90 years. Whenever they get to the village of Harga, they join the village for dinner the following evening and learn a lot about the culture and the rituals that take place for the midsommar festival. The following days the friend group becomes increasingly disturbed at the cult practices of the pagan village. Not only were these rituals outlandish and disturbing, there were rituals surrounding death and the cult-like following of their way of life was very disturbing to the main characters.

One of the members of the friend group that traveled to Sweden, Pelle, had family in Harga which is why they travel there in the first place. Whenever they were in Harga, Pelle did not see the issues that the rest of his friend group were seeing because his perspective of their culture was different. As the plot progresses on, Dani starts to notice her boyfriend getting more distant because he had forgotten her birthday when they first got there. Dani began to notice that Pelle was being a good friend to her, and she enjoyed his company more than her own boyfriend’s. However, this whole subplot with her boyfriend comes to a climax whenever Christian gets drugged by a girl in the village who wants him to marry her. They have a very oddly ritualistic love session with many girls surrounding and watching. Despite this scene in itself being very uncomfortable, Dani walks in on it and becomes distraught much like she had been previously whenever she was reminded of her family earlier on in the movie. As the rituals take place and the movie progresses, her friend group slowly whittles down and starts mysteriously disappearing. However, this is not the case because the viewers know that they are being killed off for multiple different reasons, but they are all related to them straying away from the group and doing something that goes against the cultures and rituals of the festival.

In the end, Dani wins the May Queen dance off, which makes her decide to stay in Harga. By the end of the movie, her entire friend group is dead other than Pelle, and she does not seem as unhappy about it as one would have thought. All of the main characters at the end of the movie, dead or alive, are placed into a large wooden temple that Dani then watches as it is set ablaze. She is asked to choose one person to put into the temple to die along with all of the other people and she chooses Christian after witnessing him cheat on her not long before. As she watches the temple burn and hears the villagers scream in agony as a part of the ritual which was mimicking the people inside, she appears to breakdown. However, right in the closing few seconds of the film, she begins to eerily form a smile.

Looking at organizations through a cultural perspective illustrates the type of atmosphere that a company has. Culture itself can be used as a metaphor for life. Looking at metaphors through a cultural lense, they can, “[clarify] what is unknown or confusing by equating it with an image that’s more familiar or vivid,” (240). Within an organization, “culture is not just another piece of the puzzle; it is the puzzle… culture is not something an organization has; a culture is something that an organization is,” (238). This culture can be observed from the outside looking in, but doing so is much different than actually going in and experiencing that culture for yourself. Within each culture, there are rituals that are defined as, “texts that articulate multiple aspects of cultural life, often marking rites of passage or life transitions,” (243). These rituals define how people within a culture will behave, and provide them with life experiences that are pivotal in their growth as a person. The way individuals express themselves outwardly throughout life is described as face, which is, “the projected image of one’s self in a relational situation,” (436). One’s face can illustrate his or her cultural background. Two specific cultures that I want to utilize in this particular analysis is individualistic and collectivist cultures.

The distinction between individualism and collectivism can be made by comparing the cultures of Japan and the United States. Individualistic cultures are defined as, “people [who] look out for themselves and their immediate families; I-identity; a low-context culture,” (437). The United States’ culture more closely aligns with this definition because there are no restrictions and people tend to work for themselves. This mentality is seen as selfish in some countries, but in the United States we call it freedom. This contrasts collectivist cultures, which are defined as, “people [that] identify with a larger group that is responsible for providing care in exchange for group loyalty; we-identity; a high-context culture,” (437). The Japanese culture is used to be compared with this definition because they assume that each person’s decision affects the entirety of the group. People in that culture do not tend to question the group, and they work together towards a common goal. These two cultures do not typically coexist, but whenever a person tries to transition to the other culture, there are challenges and there is some getting used to that both sides have to navigate.

Whenever someone enters a situation where their cultural background is not a shared experience, such as someone taking a vacation to another country for instance, they are a part of a co-culture that is in the minority in that particular period of time. In the United States, co-cultural groups are defined as, “marginalized groups such as women, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, people with physical disabilities, the LGBTQ community, the very old and very young, and religious minorities,” (449). These groups can take many different approaches towards coexisting with the established dominant culture that they are a part of. The dominant culture in the United States, for instance, is, “the empowered group of relatively welloff, white, European American, nondisabled, heterosexual men,” (449). The dominant culture tends to force the co-culture groups to coexist with them in a way that maintains the peace so that they are able to work together, live together, and get along together. There are many different ways to do this, but the preferred method of integrating together is assimilation, which is defined as, “the co cultural process of fitting into the dominant culture while shedding the speech and nonverbal markers of the co-cultural group,” (451). This may not necessarily be the desired approach for the co-cultural group, but it is the path of least resistance so that both parties can coexist with minimal conflict.

In Midsommar, the friend group including Dani and her boyfriend Christian immediately notice the differences in the village of Harga versus what they are used to in the United States. They transition from an individualistic to a collectivist culture throughout the movie. The village is a collectivist culture because it is self-sustaining and the people all live and work for each other to survive. The village’s rituals are also very disturbing in the eyes of the main characters besides Pelle because he had grown up in Harga then wanted to bring his friends back to his hometown. As the movie progresses, Dani becomes more and more integrated into the culture. She assimilates with their culture by wearing what the village girls wear, and by participating in the rituals. The longer that she stays, the more she assimilates into the culture of Harga.

She first assimilates by means of nonassertive assimilation when she remains silent and does not express how she feels towards the very first ritual that went against her morals. This method of nonassertive assimilation is known as censoring self, and it is utilized whenever someone chooses to not make their disgust known. Dani is met with shock and is extremely disturbed by the ritual because it involves elderly people quite literally killing themselves in front of the village. In their culture, a complete life cycle is exactly 72 years, so a couple of elders who have reached that age jump off of a cliff in front of the entire village. This obviously was highly disturbing to the friend group that was visiting what they thought was a quaint little Swedish village. However, once Dani gets over the initial shock of the brutality of that first ritual, we see her slowly shift into both assertive and aggressive methods of assimilation. For instance, she begins mirroring the cultural practices of the village by joining the village girls in the dancing around the May Pole ritual in order for them to determine the May Queen. After being crowned May Queen, she continues to mirror the culture of Harga by joining them in the meal, wearing the attire, and by disregarding her friends by the end of the movie.

Whenever Dani finds Christian cheating on her with a girl in the village, she becomes distraught and is consoled by a small group of girls. They imitate her emotions which calms her down in a way. Her seeing her boyfriend cheating on her was the last straw for her mental health. After seeing that, she cut all ties with her co-culture, and showed more signs of aggressive assimilation. She basically disassociated with her past and her experiences. Since her family had died and her boyfriend had cheated on her, she had nothing left in her mind. In order to solidify this change in her life, she is given the choice to kill a random man in the village or her boyfriend and she chooses Christian. This was her last connection to her past life because the rest of her friend group had been killed somehow along the way, so her killing the last person she knew from her past life was the final nail in the coffin. This practice is also known as strategic distancing under the aggressive assimilation definition. She was stressing her individuality in a way, but she was also assimilating into the collectivist culture of Harga.

The individualistic culture that the friend group knows is challenged when they visit the village and witness the behaviors that occur during the midsommar festival. Christian’s friends in particular are socially unaware in some instances and are not sensitive towards the collectivistic culture that is established in the village. For instance, one of his friends, Mark, goes to the bathroom and accidentally pees on a tree that the village had spread their ancestor’s ashes on. His attitude towards the angered villagers is very callous and he brushes it off because in his mind he did not know so he assumed they would understand. However, the villagers were furious because he had defiled a sacred object that the villagers thought to be very special. Therefore, they take Mark when the rest of the friend group is not looking and kill him. To the village, he was ignorant and they wanted him to pay for his wrongdoing. The culture difference was shown in this particular scene, and the friend group was then shown that there was a lot more to the culture of Harga than they realized.

The disconnect in cultures between the village of Harga and the group of friends from the United States ultimately ends poorly for the friends. They came expecting a very passive and peaceful village, but they ended up seeing a village deeply rooted in its culture, which was much more violent than they realized. They were not prepared to become a co-culture group, and their reactions to each ritual showed how disconnected they were from the collectivistic culture of Harga.