Midsommar:: Cults, Conformity, and Obedience Midsommar Anjali Mehta
Told against the backdrop of a trip to a secluded Swedish town, Ari Aster’s film Midsommar is a twisted tale of grief, belonging, and community centered around a tragically orphaned woman’s pain and desire for acceptance. A group of anthropology students visit a remote commune in Hälsingland, which quickly turns sinister as each student is murdered in gruesome, ritualistic killings (Andersson & Knudsen, 2019). Midsommar is a film centered around a cult (i..e, a group with a shared commitment to an extreme ideology; Aster, 2019), known as the Hårga. The main character, Dani, finds a surrogate family and an empathic community within the Hårga. While the Hårga is a fictional cult, real cults exist worldwide, and their practices are not dissimilar to those of the Hårga. Cults exercise extreme social influence on individuals by systematically exploiting their basic human tendencies (e.g., making vulnerable people feel loved), in order to induce thought reform and behavior change, which can corrupt even the most ordinary of individuals (Hassan, 2000). Through the lens of a horror film, Midsommar terrifyingly depicts the rituals as a product of cults’ extreme social influence and psychological manipulation. The Cult Experience: Susceptibility In order for cults to carry out their plans and spread their beliefs, they must recruit new members. Midsommar highlights how the basic human need of belonging can make ordinary people susceptible to cults. Due to a horrific incident resulting in the death of her entire family, Dani is launched into a state of despair driving her to seek comfort. Emotionally vulnerable, trapped in a codependent relationship with her partner without a reliable support system, Dani is susceptible to falling prey to the illusion of family. Given the uniquely vulnerable position Dani is in, which the Hårga honed in on to exert their influence, Dani is especially susceptible to the fall into the arms of somebody who could provide empathy and community (Curtis & Curtis, 1993). In addition to her vulnerability, another major factor making Dani a person of interest to the Hårga is her gender (Rousselet et al., 2017). Women seem to be at the center of the Hårga’s mission and rituals. The May Queen, for example, is perhaps the most honorable position and is given specifically to a woman. The May Queen ritual is an annual rite for fertility to welcome the new harvesting season, as The May Queen symbolizes rebirth, the new season, and the beginning of the new cycle. In this highly respected position, the essence of the Hårga and its cult community is continued via the May Queen, who is taken to bless the harvest and animals for the continuation of the Hårga life cycle and the cult itself. Given that cults rely on
reproduction as a means of growing their population, women in the Hårga are symbols of sex, fertility, and continuation (Boeri, 2002). In Midsommar, reproduction is an emphasized practice that has its own rituals and its own method of practice, which is typical cult behavior, as they tend to be gendered and controlling (Boeri, 2002). For example, a female cult member, Maja, uses a “love spell” and performs a typical Hårga mating ritual with one of the male archeology students to impregnate herself and continue to populate the cult society. Real-life cults, such as the Children of God, forbid birth control, while others, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, marry young girls to older men to have children (Stein, 2016). Cults will often “groom” their women and prepare them for sexual intercourse with their leaders (Boeri, 2002). In a cult, such as in the Hårga, women lose their bodily autonomy and are often used just as a method of maintaining fidelity. The Cult Experience: Maintaining Membership Cults influence thoughts and behaviors as a way of manipulating people to remain in cults. Human behavior can be influenced in two ways: informational social influence (i.e., when people look to others for information on how to behave acceptably) and normative social influence (i.e., when people get along with others for the sake of social approval; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). This type of social influence is a function of private acceptance of (i.e., a change in opinion) and public conformity (i.e., a change in behavior without a mental acceptance) to a group’s norms and beliefs (Cath, 2009). Specifically, since group norms of the Hårga deviate from widely accepted societal norms, when members are together their behavior is influenced via informational social influence, and they become more likely to act according to the Hårga’s group norms through successful deindividuation (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Contributing to both conformity and obedience is the concept of deindividuation (i.e., the loss of personal responsibility); thus, deindividuation reinforces a person’s adherence to group behavior, as their behaviors are affected by social influence (Postmes & Spears, 1998). In other words, when individuals no longer feel like individual entities but like a small part of a larger group, they feel less accountable and, thus, increasingly adhere to local group norms. When an individual is “following orders” of the cult, the individual does not feel responsible to carry the blame. It becomes easier to do unpleasant things when people no longer need to take full responsibility (Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1982). Even though horrific acts were carried out by individual members throughout the film, they did not feel the blame individually; this is typical in the deindividuation practices of Reviews | 11
