midsommar, medievalism, white supremacy and fantasies of 'us and them'

what happens when we view midsommar as a conversion narrative, or a failed conversion narrative, or almost a conversion narrative?

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Content note — this essay contains discussion of racist violence.

I rewatched Midsommar this week. I’ve always loved the film but my relationship with it accrued new layers while I was whittling down my PhD application. One of my first ideas for my research project was to investigate Midsommar’s relationship with the nordic sagas who lend it some of its aesthetic and most of its horror. It was one of the chapter ideas that came together most clearly in my mind, and that enthusiasm carried me through the first five or so drafts of the application. Then I realised how much of an outlier it was among the rest of what I wanted to do, and that cutting that chapter idea would mean I was writing the medievalist soils of just the British Isles, creating a neater and more cohesive project.

So I never did any very detailed research on Midsommar and medievalism. I still hope I will one day, so I’d better not exhaust all that good material here on substack. I’ve got a shortlist of sagas I’d like to close read against, and a vague hope I can still read Old Norse, and a set of questions about what it means to fall from a great height and smash on the ground so hard your blood mixes in with it. Hopefully that analysis will be coming to a medieval studies conference near you at some point in the future.

But the other topic I’m fascinated by in the film, the one I can’t resist the urge to write about here, is how the Hårga’s ideas of medievalism and ethnicity intertwine to create a fantasy world that depends on inclusion and exclusion. There can be no ‘us’ without an ‘us vs them’. There has been a lot of discussion of the movie’s whiteness, both the constant bleaching glaring sunlight and the community’s overwhelming monocultural paleness. The Hårga are invariably white-skinned and mostly have blonde or pale grey-white hair. They wear white. Their ‘oracle’, the purposely-inbred intellectually disabled child who is the avatar of their religious beliefs, is the purest, most ‘unclouded’, and palest white of all of them. In some key shots towards the end of the film, as the audience is realising Christian the dodgy boyfriend can’t possibly get out of this situation alive, he stands out as an obvious outsider among the Hårga as a dark-haired white man wearing grey. So what does race and racism do here, and what do they do in a medieval and medievalist context? What happens if we view this as a conversion narrative?