In this paper, I will contrast the fictional Harga community in Ari Aster’s film “Midsommar” (2019) with Hegel’s idealized religious community and the process of self-realization which Hegel’s idealized community relies on. I argue instead that the Harga community is not unlike the Hegelian “The Lord and the Bondsman” dialectic and also resembles Hegel’s metaphor of the “Beautiful Soul”.
Both of these metaphors rely on the recreation of a singular consciousness through a process of mimicry, which avoids the healthy dialectic which Hegel saw as leading to a spiritual awakening of the community. I will describe The Harga in “Midsommar” as a metaphor for this same process. This metaphor represents a dangerous tendency in modern society, that of a hysterical obsession with purity that only offers escape through its circularity with violence directed at the other.
In Ari Aster’s 2019 film “Midsommar”, a couple travel with some friends to visit a Swedish religious sect in the wilderness. The couple, Dani and Christian are hanging onto their relationship by a thread. Dani has tragically experienced the murder/suicide of her entire family and Christian, who had been thinking of dumping her, feels pressured to stay with her. Because of this, she joins his group of friends, several anthropology students who have been invited by another student Pelle to document the Harga, a sect that he was born into. This sect is celebrating Midsommar, a festival which turns out to be an event where elderly community members are euthanized, and 4 community members are sacrificed along with 4 outsiders. Dani is ultimately chosen to be the May queen (for uncertain purpose) and witnesses Christian being burned alive along with several community members and friends in a structure designed for that purpose.
Initially we might see the Harga community as a good metaphor for the idealized religious community described by Hegel in “The Phenomenology of the Spirit”. The Harga seem to breathe, live and work in the word of their God. But as we’ve probably seen a horror film before, we are suspicious that this seeming perfection is merely appearance.
Perhaps, we can begin to see what is wrong with the Harga when we remember the basis of Hegel’s religious community is in our process of self-realization. While Hegel’s religious community may sound like a fundamentalist religious community where worship is at the heart of all activities, the basis of this worship is not in a zealous rebuke of outside influence or a focus on purity but a worship of each of our selves as different and varied as they are. (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 397)
Hegel’s process of self-realization takes place in a dialectic and seems to offer an alternative to the rationalist model of the isolated thinker puzzling out whether or not he in fact exists. Initially our consciousness is defined by whatever object it is focused on, our consciousness ties in this object with our ideal of it, the object in turn imprints on our ideal and in this way we can verify our truth. The problem is that due to the process of desire the object is consumed and disappears. Also as the object cannot offer us a critical assessment or response of our projection, the truth that emerges ends up being something like a mirror of our suppositions. (Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 109)
For us to realize ourselves, we must encounter another self-consciousness. We attempt to project ourselves onto this self-consciousness and at first, we succeed. We believe the other to be the same as us and absorb them into our consciousness. But then we realize that this other is its own being with its own thoughts and desires. In fact, the other is negating our consciousness and projecting itself onto ourselves. This doubled movement is at the heart of our realization of the personhood of the other and through them, the realization of ourselves. (Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 109-110)
Hegel’s religious community is in fact this process writ large. It is also enlivened further with a kind of joyous speech. Each individual speaks their truth to the other and the other responds in kind. Through this dialogue, each individual receives self-realization, and they achieve closeness with the spirit that moves through their understanding of one other. This shared consciousness is moral conscience, and it is expressed most purely through the group. (Hegel, Phenomenology, p.397)
The Harga by contrast is a religious group caught in a circular obsession with purity. They live in deliberate isolation from the outside world and only invite outsiders in order to keep their bloodline from devolving into the incestual. After interbreeding occurs, these outsiders are eliminated with the exception of Dani who it is implied has been converted into the puritanical beliefs of the group.
Tellingly, incest is a key facet of the Harga community. Through selective inbreeding, the Harga create a severely disabled person whom they believe to be closer to nature. This person then creates the “living book” from which they draw their theology.
Realistically, this comes close to a eugenicist understanding of disability, but for Aster, the metaphorical nature of this creation of disability clearly has allegorical force. The seemingly pure nature theology that the group follows is in fact the result of a closed system of inbreeding. Incest is not only an unfortunate part of the isolation from the outside world, it in fact a core tenet of belief. The text of their religion is written through genetic isolation ultimately leading to circularity and sterility.
Aster references this sterility in his art direction, making the activities of the commune look like an expensive gap commercial. Despite the Swedish countryside being one of the most beautiful in the world, the surroundings of the group look banal, as if their festival took place in a rented park structure, we only occasionally see trees, the majority of the surroundings take place on manicured lawns.
We can see how the Harga actually are closer to a less utopian and more troubled account of Hegel’s metaphysics, “The Beautiful Soul.”
657. Here, then, we see self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, for which all externality has vanished-withdrawn into this contemplation of ‘I”=’I”,in which this ‘I’ is the whole of essentiality and existence.
(Hegel, Phenomenology, p.398. )
This version of conscience is for Hegel consciousness in its “poorest form” (Hegel, Phenomenology, p.399) In the consciousness’s obsession with its own purity, it has rejected any outside influence and thus it is stuck in its own cycle of self-regard. However this self-regard is not the self-worship that we would reach in the true process of self-realization because the consciousness is acutely aware of its own lack.
It lacks the power to externalize itself ,the power to make itself into a thing and to endure (mere) being…..the hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore with a sense of emptiness.
(Hegel,Phenomenology, p.400)
In Hegel, the beautiful soul arises when conscience is untethered from the community as a whole. This unhappy consciousness becomes obsessed with what they see as the hypocrisy of the others around them which is in fact just a recognition of their own hypocrisy and inability to live up to an impossible ideal. Through confronting a member of the idealized consciousness, the member admits the truth of what the unhappy consciousness alleges and through this confession draws the unhappy consciousness back into the community as a whole. Through mutual confession they realize their shared humanity and their lived divinity as part of society, not separate from it. (Hegel, Phenomenology, p.401-405)
But what if the “hollow object” could be conceptualized not as a lack? What if the false process of mimicry could be reproduced indefinitely? We could imagine a way where rather than a recognition of one’s own fallibility, the unhappy consciousness could instead stay in the moment of accusal indefinitely.
But why would we choose unconsciously or consciously to remain in this deprived state? Because of the profound fear that communities such as the Harga are created by. This fear is the fear that most societies are created around, the fear of difference and the other.
The United States, despite offering an ideal of acceptance to foreigners and a libertarian freedom of the individual, has mostly acted in hostility or hatred to people it defined as an other. The traditional mode of acceptance, “the melting pot” did not allow cultural difference to exist. Even our present-day society’s ideals of allowing difference to exist come from a hostile rubric of tolerance and even this poor doctrine is vehemently opposed by a rising chorus of bad faith nationalist actors.
As a transwoman, I am concerned with this hatred and fear of the other not only because transwomen have traditionally been viewed as a dangerous and frightening other but because a system which refuses the healthy acceptance of difference becomes caught in a cycle of sterile mimicry which can only find an outlet in violence.
We can see that in the Harga they have created several solutions to the problem of their own sterility.
Mimicry makes a play of the recognition of the other. The Harga’s process of mimicry appears to create a dialectic but it merely subjugates the outside influence to its own falsity. We see this over and over again in “Midsommer”. When the two elder members of the community commit suicide, one of them fails to die and instead painfully fractures his leg, we hear him screaming in agony before the appointed community member kills with the blow of a large hammer. Tellingly, the members of the community respond to his cries of agony not with distress but with a pitch perfect imitation of them.
Anything that is radically different from the community must be put back into the circular relationship of the community's false sense of self. Rather than seeing the old man in distress and questioning whether their rite of euthanasia is humane, the group enters instead in an empty dialogue with the man’s suffering, creating a false movement between the two where they merely confirm themselves in him. This is similar to the dialectic that Hegel talks about in Lord and Bondsman.
In the Lord and the Bondsman dialectic described by Hegel, Hegel describes the false dialectic created by two unequal forms of consciousness. The movement of self-realization is recreated in a false way through the interaction of the Lord and the Bondsmen. The Lord puts forward his desires and needs to the bondsman and the bondsman affirms these desires and fulfills his needs not out of his own desire but rather out of fear because his existence is dependent on the Lord. (Hegel, Phenomenology,p.115-119)
The Lord and Bondsman dialectic is one of mimicry and through this approximation the process of self-certainty is subverted to provide something which fulfills the lord temporarily. Ultimately this in Hegel’s view this will lead to Bondsman developing his own consciousness, a stoicism out of which he is forced to confront and destroy the image of his oppressor. (Hegel, Phenomenology,p.119)
This metaphor doesn’t fully work in the case of the Harga but we can see several ways which it does. Firstly when the outsiders first arrive in their community, they act very much as bondsmen to fulfill the desires of the tourists. One of the men, Mark, is interested in hooking up with a Swedish girl and the Harga provides one. Christian as well, who is seeking something outside of his relationship with Dani and finds it in a preordained relationship with a young Harga woman. The more scholarly Josh is provided with an audience inside the temple where the more arcane secrets of the community are revealed to him.
Most importantly Dani, who has lacked any real closeness with anyone on the trip, is welcomed into the traditional sisterhood of the Harga women. She is offered the thing she has been lacking in the movie, empathy with the profound grief she suffers with from the death of her family.
We have seen in Dani’s relationship with Christian another version of the Lord and the Bondsman, but a version where the Bondsman has all the power. Dani knows that Christian does not truly love her but she is dependent on him because she desperately needs support in her moment of grief. Christian pretends to give Dani the emotional support she needs and acts as a confirmation to her realization of her own despair. But as she is aware that the support is empty she ends up instead confirming his power over her.
I find it interesting that Hegel talks about stoicism as something that the Bondsman develops in light of Christian’s unemotional attitude. We can see Christian’s stoicism as reflective of when Hegel talks about stoicism without a focus on servitude quickly becoming tedious. Christian masculinity is centered in a lack of emotion but it lacks any real meaning. It is a stoicism but it is the modern day stoicism born out of a business motivational seminar rather than true suffering.
When she witnesses Christian’s infidelity to her, she has a moment of the kind of wrenching grief that we might experience at the end of a relationship. However in contrast to how we saw Christian merely tolerating her emotional state, we see her being surrounded by the women of the Harga who imitate her sobs and cries of distress perfectly. The circle is closed, and Dani is brought into the Harga, the one outsider who has accepted their puritanical belief system because of the way they supported her in her crisis. Whether or not the Harga women are sincere in their empathy is beside the point, the point is that their society does not allow a recognition of individual difference.
The problem of using the Lord/ Bondsman dialectic for the Harga is that the relation between oppressor and oppressed is never clear as it is in Hegel. At the beginning of the film, we could see the Harga as the isolated community imposed upon by entitled tourists but as the film goes on we realize that the Harga have always had ill intentions towards their visitors. So while the Harga are in a sense the bondsman to the outsiders, they quickly remove the mask and reveal themselves to be the lord.
This could be part of Aster’s point as the film was made not only in response to his own breakup, but it is clear that the film is meant as a critique of White supremacy and the sterility of our accepted ideology. While the Harga appear to be an other being explored by the American tourists, they actually reflect the society that the tourists are a part of. So the colonizers are ultimately subjugated to their own colonial power like a Governor being recalled by the British East India Company.
Emile Durkheim’s theory of deviance was that acts of deviance and repudiation of them leads to a sharpening of the moral bonds of a society.(Emile Durkheim, Wikipedia, November 13, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim) Kai Ericson used this theory to explain the mass hysteria that arose in early puritan America where deviance had to be found among people of similar views in order to punish that deviance and then strengthen the community. (Kai Ericson, Wikipedia, edited September 24, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_T._Erikson) We can also imagine that the Harga might have similar events punishment by finding community members who are less dedicated to their vision of a religious community. These punishments would strengthen their community.
This is the real instrumentality of the Midsomer festival. Many festive occasions are in fact ways to strengthen and offer a release valve to the rules of society. The Midsommar festival celebrated by the Harga not only does that, it also opens up the society to the outside and then enacts a punishment of the outside world. In this way, the Harga can be strengthened in their resolve to be separated from the outside world. The dialect is allowed to reintroduce difference and then is stifled once more, so the mimicry of a dialectic can again take shape. The Harga are able to stave off the possibility of their purity being contaminated perhaps indefinitely.
Hegel makes us realize that an encounter with the other is a vital part of self-realization both for the individual and society. What happens when we are able to close ourselves off from the threatening world of the other? Two things happen, a focus on ideological purity and a fixation of hatred on that other.
I am concerned that the rise of social media echo chambers for specific interests and especially political rigidity create the same sort of false dialectic that we see in the Harga. A social network acts as a kind of bondsman, providing us with what we want to hear. What we do hear from the opposition is already processed through our own point of view so it seems outrageous, foolish and inhuman.
I am concerned about lapsing into “both sides-ism” here so I want to give my clear opinion thatI think the obsession with purity is particularly dangerous right now in the American right-wing. However I am also concerned that the left-wing is not immune to the same kind of sterile obsession with ideological purity and hatred for the other. And I wonder if my sense of the right-wing being worst might be in some sense part of my ideological positioning. However, the left does not have the problem of being infiltrated by overtly racist, nationalist actors. This zealous guarding of purity goes hand in hand with dehumanizing rhetoric about marginalized people along with people they disagree with politically. In fact, one might say that among the most zealous followers of this sort of politic, the main concern, along with maintaining purity, is an obsessive focus and wish to destroy the other.
This is how the “hollow object” can maintain itself by making a faith out of rebuking the other. This ritualistic hatred eventually can lead to acts of violence. As a trans person, I watched in horror the last election as the far-right attacked the rights of trans people by comparing them to child predators. This rhetoric was hateful and dehumanizing. What made it particularly disturbing is that it displaced trans people’s self-actualization and made it seem an act of violent sexuality. This displacement was intended to justify an act of violence which may still be forthcoming. This violence may have been paused due to the failure of this hostile rhetoric to help the republican party get elected, but the fact that this rhetoric exists is disturbing enough and shows the danger of the efforts to ensure purity of these groups.
The divine communication of Hegel seems a transcendent and exhilarating fantasy to me and I don’t know how we can get closer to it. But I do think that art such as “Midsommer” are attempting to show us the dangerous sterile ground our present day politics of White supremacy stands on. “The Phenomenology of the Spirit” might show us a way to try and break out of the circular dialectic that we are wedded to. But this will involve a real risk and ideological leap as we attempt to understand and speak to the other.