001: Psychedelic, Ecological Horror
Midsommar / Without Name / Annihilation. (3,293 words, 13 minutes)
There’s a scene towards the end of Without Name, an Irish eco-horror that we’ll get to in more detail later, where the main guy really goes all in on some mushrooms. Several different types, all charmingly and manically locally foraged, brewed up together and thrown back. The film goes wild along with him. The cinematography up until this point has been effective and precise, and now escalates and splinters. A strobe light scene is visual mania, pure psychedelic panic attack. When he comes out of the trip, he’s changed. He seems lodged in the landscape. Through the psychedelics, he has moved past his initial horror, has resolved a form of grief and land-estrangement within him and has become something else: tree spirit, ecological being, man and place fused together.
The world we live in is delicate and failing. To be aware of climate breakdown is to have a foundational part of your identity being constantly gnawed away at. You are told your actions actively harm things you care about. On some level, you know the future of your community and where you live is now in doubt. On some level, you know the future of everything is in doubt. This internal aspect of climate breakdown is probably still one of its least discussed. Back in ’95, the American academic Theodore Roszak wrote that “Ecology needs psychology, psychology needs ecology. The context for defining sanity in our time has reached planetary magnitude.” Unless drastic, immediate action is taken on the climate, the coming time will be traumatic. For people all over the world, the current time is traumatic. I’m using the word trauma intentionally and delicately here, aware of its resonances to people. As a society we are now being reminded that, like our post-mushroom friend lodged in the woodland, we are ecological, that we are organisms that exist in relation to the life and physical material that surrounds us.
‘The American desert woodrat eats cacti and is prey to the Western diamond-back rattlesnake. Their ears are nearly the length of their hind feet and they like to live in areas with plenty of sagebrush scrub and rocky crevices.’
Midsommar, Ari Aster’s 2019 follow-up to Hereditary, is a film that revolves around trauma. So much of its photography is built around close ups of Dani, played with a brilliant sensitivity by Florence Pugh, very literally centring her grief and experience. After losing her family the previous winter, Dani goes to a nine-day Swedish midsummer celebration with her boyfriend and his group of anthropologist grad-student pals. The ceremony is held by the Hårga, a neo-pagan commune that Pelle, one of the pals, is from. To get to the commune you hike deep into the woods, through bird-song and a constant, golden sunlight. Once there, everything is light and flowers. The path is studded with yellow petals. Trees are covered in pink blossoms. This profusion of growth is visually laced through the film’s costumes and photography and reaches a crescendo in Dani’s dress at the film’s end.
While very obviously flawed, the Hårga are a model of truly communal living. Younger people sleep in one large, shared space with no internal walls, like a hive. They have a profoundly non-nuclear familial structure; the children raised by everyone and everybody greeted as brother and sister. It feels like an ecological, amorphous society, sustained by internal coherence and opposition to external influences and, once you are inside, constantly available warmth and support.
This warmth and strength of interpersonal connections is created beautifully through the film’s use of and co-ordination of touch, the work of choreographer Anna Vnuk. There is such grace in how the commune members embrace each other, the symmetry between their movements, the way their bodies mirror and interlock. When they dance, sit down, stand up, there is a coherent union of movement. They pick up their cutlery before a meal like a wave, one person organically following on from the previous, swallows moving in a murmuration. They are a unified contrast to contemporary Western society. Where they are interlinked, we seem disparate, our people increasingly lonely, our governance built around individualism.
This difference is crystallised in the film’s scenes of screaming. When Dani first receives news of the loss of her family, her boyfriend holds her as she screams. The embrace is forced, his face uncomfortable. It is a moment of profound asymmetry. In stark contrast to this solitary grief, later in the film and again screaming, Dani is joined in her pain by the other women around her age. They match her breathing, escalating with her until it becomes raw, torn-up wailing. The scene is a brilliantly structured physical and audial articulation of shared grieving. There is a beauty in the sharing of pain, in the comfort of being held as you are collapsing. The film’s close is a riot of this communal trauma. The Hårga convulse, all full-body howling. The actors’ commitment to it is superb. It is a bizarre, powerful moment.
In their social structure they resemble the Wood Wide Web, the trendy name for the fungal networks that connect the plant life of woodlands together. These underground structures allow the trees to, among many other things, transfer nutrients to other trees and plants who are in need. It is a form of co-existence that seems caring, social, that is woven together through mycelial links and joined by the same earth. With the Hårga, this structural network goes beyond sharing resources and extends to the sharing of suffering. The individual trauma is spread out among the community; each shared scream taking on some of the pain, each moment of touch letting you know you are not alone. It contains in it some idea of grief as a resource and a burden, a substance that is not meant to be private but here courses through and ties together the group.
It is through psychedelics that Dani is woven into this form of ecological community. They leave her disorientated and confused, and seemingly happy. In this state of disorientation, she joins with the Hårga. The psychotropics have her oscillating between joy and grief, leaving her flower-clad and woven into the commune. The leaves on her chair move with her movements, people scream and breathe as she screams and breathes. Everything here interacts with something else; every thing is responsive. It is one floral joining, individuals interlaced together with roots deep in the earth.
We are told the ‘spring water with special properties’ that they throw back with a trademark hoo-hah ‘breaks down your defences and opens you for the influence’, and this is a crucial part of the role of psychotropics here. They are a shock-bath of feeling, substances that are able to re-establish a sense of awe and try to wash away your cynicism. To fix any of this, you have to feel it. The question then is how you cope. Society is, to different degrees, built out of repression. Dani tries her best to bury her grief when in the company of her boyfriend and his friends, crying alone in toilets, laying static in bed. The transformation of this into the communal screaming is radical. This is the core of the film - trauma and belonging, the acceptance of other people’s pain, the feeling of being held.
I’m not suggesting we start to live like the Hårga. Aster makes sure to stress the dark side of their society. The group is maintained by its tribalism, setting itself in opposition to the outside world, all of them alabaster white and maintaining their social coherence through records of bloodlines. These ideas will be given more space in a separate essay. But Aster has deliberately created the Hårga so that they are complex, so that there are ideas in this depiction of shared trauma that we could take forward. How should we shape our society to create the space for this shared grief, this coming, communal trauma. When should I scream with you. Where should I draw the line between my pain and yours.
‘The American desert woodrat breeds in spring and summer. Their litters can contain up to five children. Their eyes are closed for the first ten days of their lives, and they lay, blind in a dark desert, listening to their parent reinforce their home.’
If Midsommar is a process of personal reconciliation within a community, Without Name is the struggle of an individual to re-connect with the earth. Described on the poster as a ‘A psychotropic faery story’, Lorcan Finnegan’s 2017 film follows Eric, a land surveyor from Dublin, to an isolated stretch of land that is due to be developed by some property building types. He drives from a modern, clean home, all cold exterior and clinical lines, to a battered old house set deep in a wooded valley, with its paint peeling and the wind rustling through it.
The stretch of land he has come to survey is mostly covered in a thick, mist-washed woodland. The technical accomplishments of the film are obvious as these woods bend and echo. Piers McGrail’s cinematography is eloquent, allowing the creation of a sinister, psychotropic atmosphere with fairly little dialogue. There is a gorgeous use of the woodland and the landscape itself. The sound design is constructed so that there is a just-there echo in the woods but makes great use of the natural sounds of the space – wind through canopy, creaking trunks – alongside moments of tranquil calm, all fitted to Gavin O’Brien and Neil O’Connor’s score. Real changes in the light (due to the amount of moving cloud cover over the valley) are used to transform scenes from bright daylight to an ominous, darkening space. A loving attention is paid to the natural textures of the woodland with brilliant still shots of lichen on tree trunks and slow clips of water and earth.
By day it is a space of vibrant greens. In the night, beams of white light drape over tree trunks. This film is explicitly, deeply psychedelic. We learn that the previous owner of the dilapidated cottage thought that the trees could talk, that the branches against the sky were like a sign language in this ‘vibrating world’. Unsurprisingly, he is depicted as a great advocate of mushrooms, ‘the earth’s own language guide’. This is contrasted to Eric’s role as a surveyor, his assistant talking about how “we just cut everything up into saleable little slabs, that’s what we do, we just measure the land, put boundaries around it.” This is the core tension of the film – how you perceive and relate to the landscape. It is a theme shaped by the real tension in Ireland over the protection of the environment, specifically discussions around the sale of harvesting rights in national forest areas to make up funds after the post-2008 recession (in the film, Eric’s told how the land was bought for ‘a song’ at the ‘tail end of the boom’) and the construction of pipelines, as Finnegan recounts in this discussion. Forms of these arguments are being played out wherever there is both publicly owned land and people looking for profit, from the Boundary Waters in Minnesota to arguments here in England over the right to roam. They draw from the same core tension, between seeing the landscape as something that is for the communal good and is worthy in its own right, to seeing it as a resource site, a dormant set of assets.
To map is to know, is to attempt to control. It is a way of codifying your dominance over an area. Eric begins the film as a vital part of the initial stages of the market, ready to map, to translate the place into numbers and charts and prime the land for sale. He is an important functionary of the capitalist view of land, one built upon enclosure and resource extraction, that the film shows the landscape fundamentally rejecting. This man never really comes back from the strobe light psychedelia trip discussed earlier. He starts to try to listen to the trees, to hear the secrets of the woodland rather than measure it. The strobe lighting is intense. It feels like the film is tearing itself open. As the visual coherence disintegrates and we struggle to make sense of what we’re seeing, our perception deteriorates with his. It is a triple fracturing of character, film and viewer. As the strobe lights finally, thankfully, fade away, he is left trapped in the woodland, spiritually lodged in the place he came to chart and analyse.
The mushrooms and these twisting, echoing woods render him completely non-productive, completely non-distinct. His family come to look for him and fail. He is completely cut off from any human ties. He is ethereal, dissolved in root network and lichen growth. Sent to divide the land into ‘slabs’, he becomes ecological.
‘The home of the American desert woodrat is an impressive construction. They can be elaborate, with up to six entrances and eight internal rooms, with separate spaces for food storage and nests. Sometimes, they will plant themselves in the burrows of other animals, such as the ground squirrel, and fortify the entrance with deep barricades of desert-dry sticks and cactus joints. These middens are sometimes occupied for generations, other times lying dormant for years until they are returned to again and once more house these quiet, closed eyes.’
Annihilation (2018) plays on fears which are buried deep, foundational terrors around the disintegration of self and the invasion of your body. Here, a mysterious form that is being called ‘the shimmer’ has crashed into a lighthouse on the Florida coast (actually filmed in the tropical Holkham, Norfolk). It has spread out from its landing point by the sea and has formed a translucent, rainbow-hued dome over this stretch of coast. It seems to gently pour down to the ground, a fluid, fluxing lens over the landscape.
As far as I know, everybody is sober in the film, but it is perhaps the most purely psychedelic out of the three discussed here. Within the shimmer, everything is refracted and intermingling. Radio waves are scrambled. The Florida sun has become a constant rainbow haze. Camera flare is a regular feature, deliberately and precisely created to spread unnatural pools of colour across the shots. It really is beautiful. Flowers grow in the shape of people, anatomically structured due to refracted human Hox genes (a subset of genes that determine correct body shape, that make your arms go where your arms go). Twinned deer prance with pink petal blossom antlers. Trees of ice grow and burn on the beach. Flowers are everywhere, twisting around anything they can lay a petal to, several species melded into the same plant, ‘stuck in a continuous mutation’. We are repeatedly shown cells psychedelically splitting and mutating, everything unified in change.
The film is a visual exaggeration of what Elvia Wilk, in this brilliant piece, This Compost: The Erotics of Rot, calls ‘our incredibly porous bodies and our mutated ecologies’. Wilk writes on how
“We are the makers of one another, and also the makers and the products of trillions of other species – we gestate and are gestated by them. We co-create the atmosphere, and we can learn to act like it.”
We are immersed in the earth, our lives constant cycles of consumption and excretion. This immersion is not just a question of being surrounded by objects; with every living moment we mentally and physically interact with the world. This process is ongoing and constant. What is traditionally seen as the coherent individual, your own personal self, is stitched together in opposition to and cooperation with your material and cultural surroundings. Our identities are ecological products, formed and moulded day by day.
Annihilation takes these ideas of ecological bodies and minds to the extreme. Like everything else here, the characters are gradually refracted, body and mind. Their genes wash with those of the flora and fauna of this space, each leaving traces of themselves on the other, gentle tides moving over soft sand. The shimmer enacts the complete disintegration of the self, of the individual – the core fundamental structure of your life and your society. This is the annihilation of the title - “bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until no part remain.” You will no longer be distinct; you will be dissolved over the earth and the earth will be dissolved within you. The characters are understandably panicked by this. Knives open stomachs to show moving, snake-like intestines and a half-dead bear has human screams caught in its throat. It’s heavy stuff. The dissolution of the self would likely be a pretty traumatic experience. Watching yourself being unwound on every level, from cell to mind.
The exception in all of this is Josie, one of the scientists who are sent into the shimmer, played by Tessa Thompson. Leaves and plant matter have started to grow from her arm, fusing her with the green flora of this tropical coast. Her personal life has carried trauma in it and she chooses to fall into this plant/human life instead. It’s commented earlier on how this ‘dream-like’ space involves a loss of memory and Josie just chooses to fade into it, to let her body become plant, to reduce herself down to matter and energy and exist in a mutating, ecological web. No sentience, no explicit, isolated being, just rolling genes and floral growth. It is a complete refutation of what Wilk recognises as the commonly held purpose of life, ‘capital production and biological reproduction’. Any desire to self-sustain and persevere, to craft a future, just becomes aimless, beautifully mutating creation.
‘The home of the American desert woodrat is effectively impregnable to most predators. But it cannot protect the woodrats or their young from the parasitic botfly. The botfly eggs burrow down into the skin of the woodrat, drawn in by the heat of its body. Biding their time in the warm flesh, they wait and grow. When the time comes, they will eat their way out, microscopically gnawing until they are released. Weakened, but still alive, the woodrat will continue its humble revolutions of building and breeding, as the young botflies swim through the sagebrush-scented desert air.’
These three films show processes of joining, where individuals learn (traumatically) to live as part of wider networks. Dani finds community, Eric fuses with the woods, in Annihilation everything joins with everything. In each, it is framed both as a form of release and as a form of terror. The boundaries of their identity are psychedelically unwound and then re-formed in new, different shapes.
It is highly unlikely that you will ever fuse with flowers and become plant like Josie does. But we can at least attempt to feel ecologically, to act with an awareness of how our perception is just one viewing point in a sprawling web of relations. In Without Name, before he gets stuck into the mushrooms, Eric is told that it is healthy to ‘shed the ego every now and again, melt back into the world’, but the psychedelic shedding of the ego is a temporary measure. Those boundaries you use to define yourself will in some form snap back into place.
To move from the current dominant cultural mindset to an ecological way of thinking involves a more substantial kind of unwinding. To look again at where you end and where the world starts. To recognise that though the flowers around you might not be taking on your DNA, the bees that pollinate them are being killed in your name. That though plants might not be growing from your arm, the woodlands of this world are in your mind, and their loss is in you.
info:
Midsommar is currently on Amazon Prime. Without Name was on Shudder but seems to have been taken off, but is available to rent/buy through Amazon. Annihilation is on Netflix.
The main influence on my thinking for this was definitely Joseph Dodds’ Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. I’d really recommend it if you can get your hands on a copy. The complexity theory and chaos theory stuff is pretty wild.
Also - go read the Elvia Wilk piece. It’s very, very good.