In this post, I will be comparing clips from two very different (but equally wonderful) films in order to illustrate the use of visual culture to evoke different responses from the viewer.
Midsommar (2019)
Midsommar is one of my favorite horror movies, if not my favorite.
When I was younger, I spent every Thursday at Blockbuster with my friends picking out a horror movie to watch that night. Eventually, we had watched every promising-looking horror movie that Blockbuster had to offer. In the time that I spent consuming (mostly awful) horror movies, I developed a snobbery in regards to the genre, born out of my boredom with the same overused tropes and halfhearted writing. In my opinion, a good horror movie does not rely on jumpscares and gross monsters to scare its audience, but instead utilizes a variety of clever methods understanding the conscious and subconscious human psyche to give the viewer a sense of isolation, vulnerability, change, and foreign dread that lasts well beyond the end of the movie. In a good horror movie, it isn’t just the slasher, monster, or ghost that is scary, but the whole environment, even allies of the protagonist or the protagonist’s own mind. For this reason I’ve been beyond delighted with the rise of A24 and Ari Aster’s fresh, intelligent take on the genre. Although I know that the opinions regarding Midsommar can vary widely, I would argue that it’s the perfect example of good horror. Warning- spoilers up ahead.
While most horror movies use dark shots and grimy, decrepit sets to evoke an unpleasant aesthetic, most of Midsommar takes place in broad daylight, under a blue, sunny sky, in a beautiful pastoral village. That is, most of Midsommar. In the very beginning of the film, the protagonist, Dani, loses her entire family in a tragic turn of events. She had predicted it may happen, but her boyfriend of four years insists (in more or less words) that she’s just being crazy. Struggling with this massive loss, breach of trust, and guilt, Dani becomes depressed. As you can see briefly in the trailer, Dani’s hometown is now bathed in blue darkness. Every shot, even the one’s she’s not in, is dark and desaturated, with little to no musical accompaniment. In regards to mise en scène, the sets are cluttered with homey items like laptops, notes, paintings, and books, but most are cast into darkness and ignored by the characters, as if they hold little value now, or only serve to illustrate Dani ignoring her previous life. She wears only her pajamas or gray sweatpants and we can even see the roots of her naturally dark hair growing in. Her only ally is her boyfriend, Christian, and his friends, and when she’s not there, they talk about how annoying and emotional she is. These scenes are in stark contrast to the ones Dani’s part of- they’re bright and upbeat, louder, more comedic. When Dani is in public- stepping into these brighter scenes- she’s often shown running away to go cry or throw up, with the camera spinning around her. As a whole, it gives the viewer a sense of ostracism. The only relationships Dani has are shallow and meaningless, and no one seems to want to understand how she’s feeling. The world she’s living in is dark and bland and she’s ill at ease trying to leave it behind. She’s powerless, unimportant.
But after the characters journey to Hälsingland, Dani steps into a bright, sunny world of color. The villagers wear flowers and white, crisp clean robes. Buildings are painted bright yellow and beautiful handmade tapestries hang from the walls. The Hårga are essentially one large family, and every member of the cult is cared for by the others. Dani, in her emotional vulnerability, is in the perfect place to be their next victim. The beautiful atmosphere lulls the viewer, like Dani, into a false sense of security and trust. But even after the Hårga’s shocking practices are revealed, the bright, cheerful aesthetic stays, giving us a disturbing sense of being trapped, as if we know something but can’t do anything about it- or maybe because we choose to accept. We come to realize that the brightness doesn’t represent morality, but rather a sense of belonging.
It’s worth mentioning the incredible filmmaking in the scenes in which the characters take psychedelics (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily). The world spins, the focus shakes, flowers open their mouths and breathe. The most pivotal scene is the one in which the female cult members, hand in hand, decked out in flower wreaths and white robes, begin dancing around the maypole. The rhythm picks up faster and faster, until it’s dizzying like a sensory overload. Harsh, cruel violin music plays. Although Dani and her peers are laughing and enjoying themselves, reality visually and audibly starts to fragment. We see Christian beginning to have a panic attack as he watches.
As for a visual metaphor, in this scene the woman that has been chosen to have Christian impregnate her is wearing red lipstick and a red-patterned robe (not to mention being the only member of the cult with red hair).
She is the only one wearing red lipstick, she is the only one wearing makeup at all, and this is the only time we see her with it on. It feels like a mark, some kind of brand she must wear to designate her as the member who has been chosen to carry this task out. During and after the (incredibly disturbing) sex scene, in which Christian is incapacitated with psychedelic drugs, it becomes even more clear that this woman, and the red lipstick, is not meant to appear seductive or pleasant, which is what we would have assumed originally. The fact that Dani herself is (until this point) only shown wearing sweatpants and no makeup makes us further analyze the red color as a metaphor for the strange and disturbing views that the cult has regarding sex and romance and how it, as well as everything else, so easily misleads the characters, who mistake it for something familiar. Dani herself may have mistook her long romance with Christian as something it wasn’t, too.
It is this disturbing sex scene that ultimately leads to Christian’s death at the hands of…. Dani. Wearing her crown and robe of flowers, which breathe and thrash under the influence of the psychedelics, Dani stares him down with no remorse or pity. Her regal outfit represents her ascent from one who lost everything, who was neglected and powerless, to May Queen. She is the most powerful member of the cult now. All of the other members imitate her every move and sound, and follow her orders.
I feel like the reason a lot of people dislike Midsommar is because they mistake the ending as some kind of violent feminist statement or endorsement of Dani’s evil actions. But I believe that Dani’s robe and crown hold the answer to the true themes. She was powerless, and now she’s powerful. She was controlled by the trauma that death held over her and now she is the one who controls death. She has removed the only person who made her doubt herself, and the only one she was trying so hard not to lose, so she’s now removed the fear of loss from her life. Protagonists don’t have to be good people. The dark and desaturated color palette and aesthetic transitioning to a bright and colorful one represent Dani coming into power.
Office Space (1999)
Though both are perfect for the topic we’re discussing today, Midsommar was a good example of aesthetics and color composition, while Office Space is a better example of visual metaphor. And I’m sure you can already guess which objects hold the most significance as visual metaphors in Office Space:
Milton consistently promises to quit if his desk is moved one more time, but allows himself to be moved down into the grimy, pitch black basement and miss his paycheck for several pay periods before he decides he has had enough. However, none of this is as important to Milton as his red Swingline stapler. It’s a prop that is so important that it was actually spraypainted red to stand out against the drab gray and whites of the cubicle jungle (another good example of both mise en scène and color composition). Swingline didn’t actually produce red staplers until a couple of years later when requests for them from fans of the movie skyrocketed. Oh, if only that brand advertising had been intentional.
Throughout this scene we see the important stapler prominently displayed on a stack of paper, Milton’s prize possession. One of the only things we can hear from Bill Lumbergh’s unintelligible conversation is “took a stapler off my desk”- zoom in on the mouth here to indicate how important it is- which implies that Lumbergh thinks the stapler is his. Milton’s hand hovers over the stapler protectively, but he reaches out like a towering monster and rips it from Milton’s grip anyway. Milton threatens to burn the building to the ground, which he does, but not before asking a few more times to get his stapler back over the course of the movie. In fact, the very last time we see the building intact is when Milton enters Lumbergh’s office without permission, muttering “I’m just going to have to take the stapler back myself, because it’s my stapler and I told him it’s my stapler, it’s mine, the Swingline, that I’ve been using for a long time….”
While Peter, Michael, and Samir completely failed in their plot to get revenge on Initech by stealing money from the company with their virus (hilariously named VIRUS_CDEF), Milton’s solution is simple. He said he would burn it down and he did, and it’s all because of the stapler. Milton represents what any of the protagonists would’ve become if they stayed in that soul-crushing office the rest of their lives: an invisible, inaudible husk of a person slowly losing their grasp on sanity. The Swingline is his sanity, the one thing keeping him afloat.
Before we get into talking about the printer, I want to mention my favorite example of mise en scène in the film:
“Is This Good for the COMPANY?” in the same dull grays and blues that all of the employees wear dehumanizes them even further. As they stand there being introduced to the corporate shills who will decide whether they get to keep their jobs, they’re reminded to think of themselves only in terms of their production value. It’s almost subtle enough to be infuriatingly believable.
Throughout the movie, the use of gangsta rap while watching pale, miserable nerds sit at computers in a drab office environment is not only hilarious but indicative of that feeling of the deep, unhinged anger they’re experiencing. Even nowadays, nothing makes a person want to lose it more than printer issues. In the movie, though, the printer is almost personified, it’s someone that they all hate passionately. During the printer destruction scene, chips, wires, and plastic “spray” out at the camera like blood, intentionally meant to look like gore for comedic effect. Peter and Samir hold Michael back after he beats the printer violently with his bare fists. He drags the cord behind him like a spine, and they throw it along with their “weapons” in the trunk, leaving the scene of the crime behind them.
While the stapler is a symbol of hope and sanity, the printer is the evil in the world. An unfeeling, corporate machine. It represents what they hate about their work even more than Bill Lumbergh does. Even Peter admits that Lumbergh isn’t really the problem anyway- he realizes throughout the course of the movie that he’s not the kind of person who likes office work and that’s okay.