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.

In the film Godzilla vs. Kong, we see a rivalry between two ancient beings that humans attempt to meddle with. At the beginning of the movie, Godzilla attacks a factory on the coast seemingly at random. What the audience finds out later on in the movie is that the facility he attacks actually is the site where the CEO of Apex Cybernetics is trying to build a robotic version of Godzilla so that he will be able to subdue the creature and maintain human control of the planet. His means of powering the Mechagodzilla comes from using the severed head of an old creature and utilizing neural connections to the head to control it telepathically. His ignorance and underestimation of the old creature’s head and his own creation would ultimately be his downfall.

Being ignorant is another way of saying that someone is avoiding dissonance. Cognitive dissonance can be described as, “the distressing mental state caused by inconsistency between a person’s two beliefs or a belief and an action,” (194). People can avoid cognitive dissonance in different ways. One way that I will be mostly looking at for this particular example is selective exposure, which is, “the tendency people have to avoid information that would create cognitive dissonance because it’s incompatible with their current beliefs,” (196). Our desire to avoid this dissonance can be viewed as, “basic as the need for safety or the need to satisfy hunger,” (194). We choose to avoid conflict and we surround ourselves with things that do not challenge our beliefs.

The CEO of Apex Cybernetics, Walter Simmons, is in the process of constructing the Mechagodzilla because he feels that humanity is the dominant race and that they should be in control of their own fate. However, his own creation becomes his downfall because right after he activates the robot and sets it loose, it overwhelms the mind of his colleague that is controlling it and becomes its own entity. Walter had not thought about the possibility of him making the Mechagodzilla so intelligent and weaponized that it would be able to break free of its captors. He surrounded himself with scientists that were being “yes” men for his project rather than pointing out the flaws in his work. This could be seen as selective exposure because he did not want to take no for an answer. Walter avoided any dissonance that came with creating a creature so powerful that it would subdue Godzilla and King Kong. Once a few people and a whistleblower find out about his creation, they go and try to get Walter to stop because they knew how dangerous his endeavor was. Another example of selective exposure is when a few employees of Apex Cybernetics are tasked with moving King Kong to Antarctica and they are having to transport him across the ocean. They were not fully aware of the gravity of the situation, so whenever King Kong began rocking the boat and causing problems, they were genuinely unsure of what to do and they were surprised he was acting this way. They had only listened to their bosses and all they were doing was trying to transport the giant creature as quickly and efficiently as possible without thinking about how it would feel or if it would retaliate. This theme spans across the entire film, and it ultimately climaxes when all three beings face off at the end.

Spiderman: Far From Home takes place across Europe because it follows Peter Parker and his classmates on a field trip. Their field trip is a two week long trip that traverses across Europe. While in Venice, Italy, a monster appears that Peter Parker defeats as Spiderman in order to keep his classmates safe even though they do not know that he is Spiderman. Peter Parker is confronted by Nick Fury, who is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and he asks Peter to join them in order to fight the monster who they predicted would appear next in Prague. However, Peter declines the invitation and returns to the class trip, which forces Nick Fury to secretly alter the school trip so that they are somehow given a free hotel in Prague so that Peter is able to help without leaving his classmates. Throughout the movie, there are many instances where his classmates and Peter are using their phones to livestream their field trip, and they use the internet for multiple different reasons.

The media dictates what the public thinks about. It acts as a “mediator between ‘the world outside and the pictures in our heads,'” (369). However, we as humans are not passive beings that wait around for the media to tell us what to think about. Not all people are in need of orientation, but the ones that are usually allow it to motivate them. The need for orientation, “…is so important – if we don’t have it, we won’t turn to media in the first place, and none of the three levels of agenda-setting will occur,” (375). Agenda-setting itself is defined as, “the media agenda [shaping] the public agenda,” (368).

During one scene where Peter Parker is riding on the bus through the Alps on the way to Prague with his classmates, he is shown looking at an article about the top ten most romantic places in Prague. He was doing this because he planned on asking a girl in his class named MJ to be his girlfriend while in Prague. He was in need of orientation, so he sought out the information from the media available to him on the internet. However, not only did he seek out the information, but he allowed it to dictate where he took MJ to ask her to be his girlfriend. The media shaped his agenda. Another instance of the media shaping the public agenda in Spiderman: Far From Home is whenever Peter first put his suit on in Venice, Italy. He had to make sure that one of his classmates were not livestreaming near him whenever he suited up into Spiderman. Peter knew that if he was caught on camera, his public image would be changed because the world would have seen him changing into his suit on social media. If a news source would have written an article about him being Spiderman, the public agenda would have shifted into making Peter Parker a celebrity. Peter made sure to take precautions such as creating an alias whenever he left his classmates, and making sure that his friend that did know aided him in covering up where he had been.

The movie Avengers: Endgame demonstrated a very defeated cast of characters in the wake of the previous Avengers movie. The main antagonist, Thanos, had killed off half of every living being in the entire universe with literally the snap of a finger. The Avengers had banded together to take on him and his army at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, but they were unsuccessful. The plot of Endgame opens with the heroes trying to find Thanos and undo the action he had performed. Whenever the heroes finally get a hold of him early on in the film, they find a very defeated villain who had destroyed the infinity stones, which were his main source of power. They were the reason he was able to destroy half of all life that existed. They sought out the conflict of facing him down a second time, only to find him living a hermit-like life far away from any other civilized life in the universe. Later on in the movie they find out that they have a means of traveling through time, so they go back in time in order to gather all of the infinity stones before Thanos is able to. Sacrifices were made along the way, and they are able to come up with a plan to locate each of the stones to undo Thanos’ actions. However, Thanos’ past-self catches onto the Avengers’ plan, and he and the heroes finally have a giant final showdown where all of the previously deceased heroes from the past movie came back to take on Thanos and his army.

Conflict is a prominent factor in face-negotiation theory. Face, in face-negotiation theory, is described as, “… an extension of self-concept… the projected image of one’s self in a relational situation” (438). When it comes to conflict, there are five distinct responses which are, “avoiding (withdrawing), obliging (accommodating), compromising (bargaining), dominating (competing), and integrating (problem solving)” (439). Each of these responses depends on the faces of those involved in conflict. Those who are more independent are, “more self-face oriented, so this concept of self is prevalent within individualistic cultures,” whereas those who are more interdependent, “self value we-identity and emphasize relational connectedness, and are therefore closely aligned with collectivist [cultures]” (441).

Whenever the Avengers first attack Thanos in his hut out in the middle of nowhere in the universe, his initial response is not to fight, but to accept his fate because he knew there was nothing they could do to change the outcome of his actions. His reaction to their initiation of conflict was obliging, because he gave into their attack. In fact, Thor, one of the leaders within the Avengers, beheads him without a valid reason because he does not resist. The Avengers in this scenario were utilizing the dominating conflict approach because they wanted their way and were willing to use force to get it. They were surprised to see him completely compliant to their attack. Later on in the movie, two of the main characters are attempting to acquire the soul stone, which is one of the infinity stones they required in order to restore the lives of half of the universe. Hawkeye and the Black Widow find themselves realizing that one of them will have to sacrifice themselves in order to acquire the soul stone. Both of them come from very different backgrounds. The Black Widow comes from a very individualistic background because she was a trained spy who had been taught to never get attached to anything so that she would be able to be a field agent with nothing to lose. Her initial reaction is to sacrifice herself because she believes that she had nothing to lose by doing so. She runs in head first without compromise. Hawkeye comes from a more collectivist culture because even though he is an American, he has a family with two young daughters which he wants to protect. His initial reaction is also to sacrifice himself because he wants his family to be able to live in a universe that would be safe for his family. He also runs in without compromise. The two bicker and fight each other physically because each of them are willing to make the sacrifice without consulting the other. Their conflict was an example of what happens when two people approach conflict in a similar way despite being from different cultural backgrounds.

In the film Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers is the main character who has lost all memory of her past life. She is abducted by people from a different planet and has no knowledge of her past life back on Earth. The people who abducted her from Earth were called the Kree, and they had turned her into a soldier. At the beginning of the movie, she escapes from these aliens called Skrulls who had kidnapped her while she was on a mission. When she escapes, she ends up back on Earth with no prior knowledge that she had grown up and lived a normal life on Earth up until she was abducted. The Skrulls in the movie are able to take on the image and voice of any being they touch, so their strategy to get a hold of Carol Danvers while on Earth was to pretend to be humans. The gif below is an example of how the alien took the form of a person that would not seem to be an evil alien capable of abducting someone. Carol Danvers soon after finds Nick Fury, who is a special agent with S.H.I.E.L.D., and he is able to figure out her story and he is able to help Carol find out who she was before she was taken from Earth.

When a person knows someone well, they are able to share with them more intimate details about their lives. People tend to share information in multiple layers, like an onion. Another term for this is their personality structure, which is the, “onion-like layers of beliefs and feelings about self, others, and the world; deeper layers are more vulnerable, protected, and central to self-image” (94). As we get to know someone, we socially penetrate ourselves further into their personality. Social penetration is, “the process of developing deeper intimacy with another person through mutual self-disclosure and other forms of vulnerability” (94). This process is not something that happens overnight. Getting to know another person on a more intimate level, whether the relationship be plutonic or more romantic, takes a lot of time. There are social norms that exist that say that we get into the inner layers of a person’s personality as we get to know them better. In other words, you do not share your darkest secret or your biggest fear with someone you had met an hour before. This pace is known as the “law of reciprocity,” which is, “a paced and orderly process in which openness in one person leads to openness in the other” (96).

Captain Marvel, or Carol Danvers, is tasked with evading these Skrulls that continue to take the forms of random humans early on in the movie. When she meets up with Nick Fury, they both go to his agency’s headquarters to figure out more information about who she is. The Skrulls end up taking the shapes of other agents and also the director of the agency. However, they are able to figure out that they are not themselves because of their memories. They are limited to the looks of people, so whenever they are asked personal questions about the person they are imitating, their cover is blown. Their inability to replicate the person’s relationship with either Carol or Nick demonstrates how the social penetration theory and the law of reciprocity work. They were not able to replicate that process, and they were left in an awkward position when asked about past events that the two characters had previously shared. Also, the development of Carol’s relationship with her previous best friend before she had lost her memory was another example of how the personality structure works. Carol had basically no recollection of her best friend Monica, who had developed a very close relationship with Carol, and she was shocked when she showed up at her house towards the back half of the movie. Carol seemed uncomfortable at first whenever Monica was treating her like she had known her for their entire lives because Carol did not remember. Although Carol warms up to her as the movie goes on, it took time for them to redevelop that relationship. This demonstrates the law of reciprocity because Carol was not immediately running up to her and hugging her like her best friend because to her Monica was basically a stranger. Many other social issues are demonstrated during the film. This movie demonstrated plenty of relationship issues because of Carol’s memory loss, and the theory of social penetration was highlighted throughout the dialogue.

The Star Wars franchise has one of the largest fan bases out of any other movie franchise. Star Wars fans are very loyal, but they also have very high expectations when it comes to new content being released. That being said, the most recent trilogy that has been released with Disney at the helm has received mixed reviews. The most recent movie to come out was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. This was a very ambitious movie because not only did it wrap up the sequel trilogy, but it also ended the story of the Skywalker family, which the movies had been centered around since the very first one was released in 1977.  All of this being said, the filmmakers were tasked with coming up with a satisfying ending to the saga, and in order to do this they would have to communicate their message well utilizing nostalgia to tap into the audience’s emotions.

This brings us to the communication itself. Communication can be broadly defined as, “the relational process process of creating and interpreting messages that elicit a response” (6).  Communication has many features that can be used to aid in understanding how it happens. The main feature of communication is the understanding that messages are sent and received. These messages can take many forms, such as, “talking and listening, reading and writing, performing and witnessing, or, more generally, doing anything that involves ‘messages’ in any medium or situation” (6). Within communication, there are many different principles that can be studied as well. The resonance principle of communication, which applies to this particular movie, says that, “successful persuasive messages evoke past experiences that create resonance between the message content and a person’s thoughts or feelings” (14).

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had a lot of messages that covered many different aspects of communication. One message that was not able to be received by the heroes happens early on in the movie. The protagonists find this dagger that has writing on the side that tells them where they need to go to continue their quest. However, their translating droid, C-3PO, is unable to receive the message because it is written in a language that his coding forbids from translating. So, in order to get the message from the dagger, they wipe his memory so that he can translate it. He then successfully delivers the message to the heroes and they continue on with their quest. Another group of messages that occurs during the climax of the movie changes the entire mood of the movie. The main character, Rey, is knocked down by the main villain and all seems lost. However, while she lays in defeat, voices start speaking to her. If a person went into the theater and had never seen a Star Wars movie before this one in particular, they would have been very confused during this scene. The filmmakers were tapping into the nostalgia that fans feel whenever watching Star Wars, and it was a pivotal moment in the movie. The voices were characters from not only previous movies but even TV shows. Fans that had seen all of these other movies and TV shows were on the edges of their seat, and they felt excitement because all of their favorite characters were telling Rey to get up and to fight. This directly correlates with the resonance principle of communication, because as soon as these voices started speaking, every seasoned Star Wars fan instantly recognized them. This aided in filmmakers persuading the audience that it was, in fact, the climax of the movie, and an emotional one at that. Another instance where the resonance principle of communication was utilized was when Chewbacca, a beloved character from the original trilogy, was perceived to be dead. He is kidnapped by the antagonist in the movie, Kylo Ren, and his soldiers, The First Order. Whenever they fly away, the audience believes that Chewbacca is in the ship, and Kylo Ren and Rey have a tug-of-war with the force. This is a suspenseful moment in the movie, but Rey accidentally uses too much of her powers and blows up the ship. This, again, creates resonance within the audiences between the message content and their emotions. The emotions are short lived because two minutes later in the movie Chewbacca is revealed to be alive because he was on an entirely different ship. This movie used communication in various different ways, and many different messages are demonstrated throughout the film. The resonance that was employed heavily throughout the film was not a message that was received well with all audiences, but it did make for a nostalgic movie that wrapped up the Skywalker saga all while attempting to please the Star Wars fanbase.