Midsommar, a movie where Dani jumps from one dysfunctional family to another. I can’t judge her though. There are so many times when I said no more, or never again. Yet, I find myself making the same mistakes over and over again. There are other people who may have had the same experiences. Maybe they keep dating the same guy, befriending the wrong gal, and routinely get burned by employees and frenemies at their workplace. Many people fail to realize that they’ve been sucked into the cult of toxicity. And they are essentially repeating the same patterns until they learn a certain lesson about life, or even about themselves. However, this lesson can be hard, if your head is stuck in the clouds, and you rely on fantasies and illusions to get you through a tough time. I’ll explain how and why in this video, so please stay tuned.
Midsommar as a movie got a lot of slack. Critics and movie goers complained that it wasn’t scary enough, it wasn’t dark enough.
For those who are used to watching slasher movies, Midsommar can be very disappointing. Yet, I feel that Midsommar along with the Love Witch and the Last Night in Soho fall into the beautiful horror category. This is a genre where mainly a female protagonist gets pulled into a twisted little fantasy. Like the Wizard of Oz, or the Black reimagining simply called The Wiz. In The Wiz a woman is pulled into a fantasy world to gain the skills or learn lessons that can help her deal with her own reality. Dorothy in was stuck, no man, no friends, and she never even left the town she was born in. She was whisked away into a magical world of Oz. Her goal was to find the wizard who had enough magic to help her get back home. On her journey she befriends the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion. With their friendship she defeats Evilyn, only to find out that the wizard is a shell. He is a charlatan who needs Dorothy more than she needs him. Dorothy learns that she always had the ability to get back home, yet she put all of her hope into the dream world, into a fantasy, into a charlatan. She idolized a man who couldn’t help himself, much less Dorothy. She sings and ends up back home. The end. However, beautiful horror takes on a more terrifying twist to the happy ending. The female protagonist never finds her way back home, and thus stays lost in the fantasy world forever.
We’ve seen this theme playing out in The Love Witch, where Elaine strives to look beautiful on the outside to hide the ugliness on the inside.
She is lost in the fantasy of love spells and magic. When confronted with reality, and forced to make the choice of being with a man who could truly love her. She kills him and chooses to live in the fantasy world instead. Sunset Boulevard is famous for the female protagonist living in the past, where she was beautiful, admired, and successful. She never leaves this fantasy world, even after she kills her lover in cold blood. We’ve seen this theme play out in movies time and time again. And we never really understand how it relates to real life. In truth many of us are living in a fantasy world, sucked into the cult of toxicity, and we really don’t know how to escape from it. We put others first, abandoning our own needs. We allow others to treat us badly. And we become afraid to speak up, because we are fearful that we are going to lose the little bit of love that we have. Naturally, this was the case for Dani, in Midsommar.
Dani and her boyfriend Christian are on a brink of a breakup.
Christian is stringing Dani along, because he doesn’t want to lose her quite yet. He puts almost no effort into the relationship, and it seems like Christian being with Dani is more like a chore. Dani, suffering from grief and guilt, after her whole family was killed, leans on Christian. She buries her feelings, because she doesn’t want to be a Debbie Downer in front Christian and his friends. She stills wants to be the pretty upbeat girlfriend that Christian fell in love with. And much like Norma, Dorothy, and Elaine she slips into this fantasy world. Only her fantasy world is different. Dani has a bad trip. She sees images of her sister, her mother, and is forced to confront her fear of abandonment. She reaches her breaking point when she sees Christian, getting it on with another woman. Dani had it. She explodes, all the grief, guilt, loneliness, and neglect spurting out of her as she is held and supported by her new sisters. This is when Dani realizes that she needed support all long. She needed love and community. And she suppressed her own needs to please others. She then realizes that she no longer needs Christian. Dani now had a new family, who would support her in her grief, and give her the sense of belonging that she so craved. The only problem with this community is that they kill people. They skin people alive, bludgeon people to death, and even burn them alive. Not a community that I would want to join. But Dani was ready to adopt the ways of the Harga community and put up with all of their BS. In much the same way she adopting to Christian’s life and put up with his. She would do it, so long as some of her needs were being met.
And that my friends is what the cult of toxicity is. It sucks you into a fantasy world, where you lose yourself.
You are on a perpetual trip that you never come down from. As a result of this, you never face reality. And because you live in a fantasy, you can never see people for who and what they truly are. Yeah, Pella tricked his friends into going to the Hargo Community. He knew that they were going to be sacrificed, but he’s still a good guy. Yes, the leaders in the community new that Dani and Christain were a couple, yet they thought it was a great ideal to orchestrate a love affair between him and Maja. The Hargo community kills their elders, and puts hair into meat pies, but they are good people. They love me. This is what happens when you live in a fantasy. You go from one bad situation to another, not fully realizing how you got there. Then, you get so caught up into the fantasy world, that it becomes too difficult for you to come out of it. The solution? Face reality. It’s very hard, especially if you have to do it alone. However, you can’t risk getting lost into the fantasy and being forever stuck in the cult of toxicity.
