Disclaimer: contains Midsommar spoiler.
Midsommar is a beautiful film. It’s set well and some of the scenes (e.g. the surreal group emotional processing and sex scene) are quite creative.
But of course, everyone dies at the end.
A lot of acclaimed films are like this. Especially those loved by the film world.
Pulp Fiction. No Country For Old Men. American Psycho. They all excel in their own ways. But they don’t go anywhere.
The writers are clearly aware of important psychological and spiritual themes. But don’t explore them to any satisfying extent. All the movies end empty with a lack of emotional resolution. Just violence. The idea is of course: that’s life. We live these hard questions, go insane, make a big mess, and nothing is resolved. To wrap it up with a big bow is simply naive.
I’m tired of it. I prefer Disney’s movies (see Disney’s Moana, Nicholas of Cusa, and Self-Determination). Maybe I’m naive, but I honestly believe children’s movies are “realer” than violent nihlism.
Nihilistic movies are written by nihilistic people to connect to other nihilistic people.
But I’m interested in this question: where does the violence come from? The movies I named are all quite violent. It seems violence and nihilism go hand in hand (e.g. serial killers, Camus’s Stranger).
Why? The standard take is that people lash out in their existential angst. But I think we can go a bit deeper.
Here’s my take. If one does not strive for higher ideals, the greatest rush in life is violence. That’s why the UFC pulls in a million viewers per fight. That’s why St. Augustine’s ultra-pious friend became addicted to gladiator fights. That’s why Plato says that the purposeless libertine tastes blood and becomes a tyrannical wolf.
It’s not that they’re lashing out at the fact that there’s no God. It’s just that when kids are bored to the brink of death they stir things up. Plato’s liberal is upset because he’s poor and idle. The Roman Colosseum craved violence for entertainment-- they weren’t lashing out. In Sebastian Junger’s War, he depicts the toughest soldiers as people who desperately needed the rush, who couldn’t sit with the mundanity of day-to-day life.
If the path up is unclear we quickly fall down. Violent nihilism isn’t deep, moving, intelligent, or honest. It’s spiritually lazy. The result of a search that found no end but more stimulation, more confusion, and more post-modern meaninglessness.