Riches to the conjurer Applying Religious Methodologies to Hereditary

Riches to the Conjurer: Applying Religious Methodologies to Hereditary A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation in Religious Studies. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv List of Images and Figures ................................................................................................. vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 4 Mimetic Rivalry and the Crisis of Degree ...................................................................... 4 The Crisis of Degree in Dramatic Action ....................................................................... 6 The Sacred, The Profane, and Religious Contamination .............................................. 11 Reading Space and Time .............................................................................................. 15 Film Analysis .................................................................................................................... 19 The Opening Scene ....................................................................................................... 19 First Contaminations ..................................................................................................... 20 After the Accident ......................................................................................................... 23 Dreams and Apparitions ............................................................................................... 27 The Bright Blessed Day ................................................................................................ 32 The Dark Sacred Night ................................................................................................. 36 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 41 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 45 iii Acknowledgements This project is a tribute to two of my greatest academic, philosophical, and personal influences; one is an older love, while the other is very new. These two pieces are, naturally, the film Hereditary by Ari Aster and the scholarship of Rene Girard. Hereditary has puzzled and surprised me for years with its tragic insights and visceral imagery. I feel extremely fortunate that I have been given a forum to explore this film in an academic context. iv v List of Images and Figures Figure 1: Hereditary's final shot........................................................................................ 40 Figure 2: A map of grid and group from Natural Symbols............................................... 42 vi Hereditary begins with an obituary.1 The context, and following content, of this film is death. Over the course of two hours death overflows its containment in one woman’s coffin to subsume an entire family. Loved ones are lost in anguish, murdered and possessed by a demonic god. There is no redemptive meaning superimposed onto the film’s events. The only victor is violence itself. Introduction Hereditary, directed by Ari Aster, premiered in January of 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival2 and was greeted with widespread critical acclaim.3 Upon theatrical release the film grossed $80 million, making it production company A24’s most lucrative film to date.4 Of course, praise for the film was certainly not an absolute consensus; many reviewers had mixed feelings about the coherence of a film that incorporates both highly realistic drama and supernatural horror. As Richard Newby from the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Hereditary is so upsetting, so shocking and so divisive because it throws audiences into a world where there is no control, and the rules can change from one moment to the next,” (italics mine). 5 The supernatural elements are confounding to a straightforward allegorical interpretation of the drama. Though there is a dearth of academic scholarship on Hereditary, many reviews and short personal essays posit critical interpretations. The bulk of the analytical writing produced on Hereditary thus far 1 Ari Aster, dir. Hereditary, 2018; Amazon Prime Video, 2022, Streaming. 0:00:27. 2 Sean P. Means, “A horror thriller filmed in Utah is among the additions to 2018 Sundance Film Festival lineup,” The Salt Lake Tribune, The Salt Lake Tribune, December 19, 2017. 3 “Hereditary,” Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango, 2022. 4 “Hereditary,” Box Office Mojo – by IMDBPro., IMDB.com, Inc. 5 Richard Newby, “Why ‘Hereditary’ is Dividing Audiences,” The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter LLC, June 10, 2018. attempts to take an allegorical approach. Two of the most common allegories proposed are Hereditary as an allegory for mental illness, and Hereditary as a condemnation (or reinforcement) of patriarchy. However, both lenses fail to yield insights that match the complexity of the film’s imagery and its nihilistic ending. What does Hereditary have to say about mental illness? As one reviewer wrote, “The most viscerally terrifying idea in Hereditary is that no matter what you do or how far you seem to have come, your genetics actually do control your fate.”6 In other words, the mentally ill are doomed. What about patriarchy? Either it is a message that falls flat because the ending sidelines the female protagonist,7 or worse, it is an outright condemnation of female influence.8 Neither of these conclusions offers clarity or nuance. The synthesis of the tragic and the horrific in Hereditary is highly deliberate and loaded. As director Ari Aster himself said, “There was certainly a conscious decision to separate the film into two halves that are also completely inextricable from each other.”9 The tragic and the horrific elements mirror one another, centering around a common theme: violence and, by extension, death. Thus, when thinking about Hereditary, it is imperative that the interpretive framework used does not discount the prominent role of physical violence and death in the film. The methodology of religious scholars offers more pointed insight into how people understand death. Mortality is the stuff of religion. Whether it is the more literal mediation of death through funerary rites, or answers to 6 Emma Dibdin, “Hereditary Taps Into the Unique Horror of Inherited Mental Illness,” Esquire, Hearst Magazine Media, Inc., June 15, 2018. 7 A. O. Scott, “About the Ending of Hereditary: Really?” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, June 15, 2018. 8 Robert Daniels, “‘Hereditary is a Rejection of the Female Form,’” 812 Film Reviews, Wordpress, June 10, 2018. 9 Michael Koresky, “Interview: Ari Aster,” Film Comment, Film at Lincoln Center, May 1, 2018. 2 existential questions of death and suffering (ie. The Problem of Evil in Christianity), religion consistently attempts to contextualize and interpret death. It is not, then, unreasonable to suggest that a religious methodology applied to Hereditary may yield better insight. Enter Rene Girard. Girard’s seminal work, Violence and the Sacred, provides an ontological framework for the genesis of religion and, by extension, culture and art at large. His methodology addresses the eruption and spread of human violence in community and religion’s key role in shaping cultural reactions to death. Girard’s mimetic theory has a broad reach, oscillating between religion and art, between the literal and symbolic. As such, it will provide the foundation for this critical analysis. Additional scholarship by sociologist Emile Durkheim, humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, and anthropologist Mary Douglas will supplement a mimetic reading of the film. 3 Methodology Mimetic Rivalry and the Crisis of Degree Girard posits that most human behaviors are mimetic, that is, imitative.10 The human brain is designed to copy other humans. When constructive, this capability works well. Typically, behavior is replicated when a subject, that is the person in question, imitates a model, a person the subject strives to imitate. However, mimesis can turn ugly when, while imitating a model, the subject desires something possessed or also desired by the model simply because the model desires it. The subconscious drive to emulate the model then turns into bitter rivalry. Conflict over the object, the thing (role, person, item, etc.) desired by both subject and rival, ensues. This is what Girard defines as mimetic rivalry.11 Because within this model human behavior is largely mimetic, violence itself becomes highly contagious.12 If retaliation between either of the two parties ends fatally, someone else now has a death to avenge, and on and on it goes. Girard then asks the question: how did human beings manage to get along? He suggests that religion solves this problem, either preventatively, through ritual sacrifice that provides communal catharsis, or curatively, as with a divinely ordained king who is permitted to administer punishments due to the collective assumption of his divinity. Thus, religion is, as Girard states, “that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative measures against his own violence,” (italics mine).13 Girard posits that 10 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 31, 146. 11 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 145-147. 12 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 28-29. 13 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 23. 4 religion has always been the foundational building block of group cohesion and is therefore the perquisite for all culture, for society and its products. What happens when this fail-safe fails? Girard posits an event or sequence of events he terms the sacrificial crisis: The sacrificial crisis can be defined, therefore, as a crisis of distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their “identity” and their mutual relationships.14 Key to note is the implication that a loss of social distinctions engenders violence. He acknowledges that this may seem strange at first, as most conflicts are framed in terms of the irreconcilable differences of the opposing parties. Also noteworthy, Girard defines a “cultural order” as “a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships.” Each building block in this order, each distinction, then, creates particular social roles/identities entailing specific behavioral parameters and relationships. He calls these roles in social context “degrees:” “Degree,” from the Latin gradus, means a step in a staircase or on a ladder, a nonhorizontal spacing between two entities, and more generally rank, distinction, discrimination, hierarchy, difference. It is also the ‘endless jar’ between justice and injustice, the same empty space once again that prevents any confusion between right and wrong….The distinction between degrees in the plural—such as degrees in schools—and Degree in the singular implies that, in a given culture, degrees or differences have something in common, a family air so to speak; all of them are specifications of a single differential principle, Degree with a capital D, upon the integrity of which the stability of cultural systems and even their existence depend.15 14 15 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49. Rene Girard, A Theater of Envy, (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1991), 162. 5 Put differently, cultural systems depend on this collective occupation of particular social roles to avoid crisis. This then raises the question: Why does a blurring of distinction, of Degree, lead to violence? According to Girard, mimetic conflicts ensue from this blending, or as he terms it “crisis,” of Degree. He claims that if mimetic rivalry is engendered by the mutual pursuit of a shared object of desire, then an overlap of social entitlements and behaviors between degrees creates common ground for rivalry: As long as models and imitators live in separate worlds they cannot become rivals, because they cannot select the same objects [of desire]; as these worlds overlap more and more, they can and therefore do select the same objects, and mimetic rivalry is soon to follow.16 Therefore, a crisis of Degree is a blurring of social roles and permitted behaviors that leads to mimetic rivalry. The sacrificial crisis and the crisis of Degree go hand-in-hand. The crisis of Degree is the smaller infringement of one social role onto another that engenders rivalry, while the sacrificial crisis denotes a loss of distinctions and descent into violence, which religion is incapable of diffusing, on the communal level. In the end, strife at both the individual and communal level reinforce one another; the former leads to the latter, and the latter further perpetuates the former. The Crisis of Degree in Dramatic Action Hereditary’s tragedy begins with a crisis of Degree that takes place before the film’s events. The history of the family is alluded to early on but is only outlined explicitly in one key scene. Annie processes her mother’s death at a grief support group where she describes her life before the death of her mother. This crucial moment begins 16 Girard, A Theater of Envy, 165. 6 in a wide shot from above the entire group circle which then slowly pans in on Annie, looming over her, while she delivers the following monologue: My mom was old, and she wasn’t altogether there in the end. And we were pretty much estranged before that so it wasn’t a huge blow. But I did love her. And she didn’t have an easy life. She had D.I.D. which became extreme at the end and dementia. And my father died when I was a baby because he had psychotic depression and he starved himself, which I’m sure is just as pleasant as it sounds. And then there is my brother. My older brother had schizophrenia, and when he was sixteen he hanged himself in my mother’s bedroom. And of course, his suicide note blamed her, accusing her of putting people inside him. So. That was my mom’s life.17 This monologue is as tragic as it is disturbing,18 and delivered brilliantly by Toni Collette. She vividly sketches turmoil of the family both with her lines and her matter of fact yet deeply pained affect. The camera then cuts to the silent audience, the support group. The onlookers greet this vulnerable admission with total silence. The camera cuts back to Annie; it is notably now angled on the level with her. She goes on to reveal the next chapter of the story: And then she lived in our house at the end, before hospice. We weren’t even talking before that- I mean we were and then we weren’t and then we were. Which is completely manipulative. Until my husband finally enforced a nocontact rule, which lasted until I got pregnant with my daughter. I didn’t let her anywhere near me when I had my first, my son. Which is why I gave her my daughter who she immediately stabbed her hooks into.19 17 Aster, 0:20:20. 18 This monologue seems to justify the allegorical interpretation of the film as speaking to mental illness. Two interpretive facts must therefore be acknowledged: first, in the literal sense within the world of the film these are really supernatural phenomena (possession, magic, etc.) that have been (mis)diagnosed as mental illnesses. On a literal level it seems that Annie’s family members are not actually mentally ill. Second, on the metaphorical level, reading Paimon as a god of violence and suffering that inflicts Annie’s family with mental illness, the family members themselves are never demonized. If anything, an allegorical reading should conclude that the suffering of the mentally ill is taken very seriously. Mental illness here is not caused by moral failure or innate evil; it is a painful demon Annie’s father and brother were forced to reckon with. The former reading will take precedence for this analysis. 19 Aster, 0:21:25. 7 If this narrative is reread with the context that Annie’s mother, Ellen, has devoted herself to the cult of Paimon,20 the history looks more like this: Ellen likely attempted to turn her son, and possibly her husband, into a sacrificial host for the god. All attempts were unsuccessful. She then turned to her daughter, with the hopes of using Annie’s firstborn son as a host. Annie protected her son from her mother’s influence, instead allowing her to establish contact with her next child, her daughter. Annie’s phrasing of her mother “stabbing her hooks” into Charlie is highly evocative; Ellen is trying to catch and reel in her daughter’s children, to claim them. This infringement of social roles clearly constitutes a crisis of Degree. The cultural order of this family, the social framework, is nuclear. Unlike many cultures which give hierarchical preference to elders, the nuclear family is organized by proximity. Mothers and fathers are expected to hold the most direct influence over their children (barring a situation where one or both parents are absent) while the influence of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents is secondary. Literally, the term “extended family” used to describe these relations implies this social distance. By trying to claim first Annie’s son then her daughter, Ellen blurred the roles of mother and grandmother in this social context. She created an overlap where Annie’s children became an object of mutual desire. Since Ellen destroyed all of her male nuclear relations when she was a 20 Why exactly Ellen devoted herself to the cult of Paimon is unclear and seems to be of little interest to Aster. When Annie discovers her mother’s occult books, the page after Paimon’s summoning instructions depicts a man in a crown sitting atop an enormous pile of loot. The image is captioned “Riches to the conjurer.” One can assume, then, that Ellen’s primary motivation for sacrificing her family to Paimon is the anticipation of material gain. There are countless parallel narratives that depict the perpetuation of violence for material gain and condemn it as abjectly evil (think Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, for one). The intricacies of Ellen’s motivations are unimportant; her role in the narrative, made explicit by her fealty to Paimon, is to be an unambiguous agent of violence. 8 mother, when she could no longer have children she attempted to emulate and supersede Annie’s maternal role. With this blurring of familial roles mimetic rivalry is born. Peter was protected by Annie and brought up in the normal cultural order, while Charlie received the brunt of Ellen’s malevolent influence. However, in Annie’s dream sequence midway through the film, Aster reveals that Ellen’s reach extended even beyond Charlie. In the dream Peter pries: PETER: Why are you scared of me? ANNIE: What? (long pause) I never wanted to be your mother. PETER: Why? ANNIE: I was scared. I didn’t feel like a mother. But she pressured me. PETER: Then why did you have me? ANNIE: It wasn’t my fault, I tried to stop it! PETER: How? ANNIE: I tried to have a miscarriage.21 Annie’s protection of Peter was not simply an instantiation of boundaries, but a reclamation of the role imposed on her by her mother. Peter’s conception was ultimately the product of Ellen’s desires and not Annie’s. Peter and Charlie, both the objects of mimetic rivalry, act as inverses of one another. Peter is the product of Ellen’s desire but was then reclaimed by Annie, while Charlie is (presumably)22 the product of Annie’s 21 Aster, 1:11:35. Whether or not Charlie’s conception was another product of Ellen’s pressure or Annie’s choice is uncertain. Given the age gap between Charlie and Peter and Ellen and Annie’s estrangement following Peter’s birth, it is not unreasonable to think that Annie had Charlie willingly. On a symbolic level, Charlie being a girl further reinforces this position; Charlie is not fully the product of Ellen’s desire to have a male child. 22 9 desire to be a mother but was then reclaimed by Ellen. Girard notes the special relationship of figures who occupy reciprocal positions in a mimetic crisis: In a tragedy the reciprocal relationship between the characters is real, but it is the sum of nonreciprocal moments. The antagonists never occupy the same position at the same time, to be sure; but they occupy these positions in succession.…When all differences have been eliminated and the similarity between the two figures has been achieved, we say that the antagonists are doubles.23 Though never explicitly entangled in mimetic rivalry of their own, Peter and Charlie do occupy reciprocal positions in succession, first Peter is Ellen’s then Annie’s, Charlie the reverse. Further, this description could apply equally well to both Annie and Ellen as Peter and Charlie. They each try wrest the maternal role from one another successively. This concept of the doubling is crucial for understanding Hereditary’s symbolic language. Though Annie was first provoked by her mother, her retaliations in the final act of the film still mean that she is playing Ellen’s game. Annie’s reactions against her mother only make the two more similar. This crisis of Degree provides the impetus for the tragic action of the film. Girard writes of tragedy as exemplified in Greek drama: …everybody shares equal responsibility because everybody participates in the destruction of the cultural order. The blows exchanged by enemy brothers may not always land on their mark, but every one of them deals a staggering blow to the institutions of monarchy and religion.24 In the case of Hereditary, the institution at stake is not monarchy or religion, but familial relations. In fact, Aster explicitly draws the audience’s attention to Greek tragedy. In both scenes set in Peter’s classroom the content of the lectures is a discussion of Greek drama; the teacher prompts the students to discuss whether it is the hero’s agency or lack of 23 24 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 158-159. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 71. 10 agency that makes the drama tragic.25 Given the mimetic nature of the conflict between Annie and Ellen, this is clearly a trick question. Any move that any of the characters make to further engage with the crisis will likely perpetuate the crisis itself: As soon as Degree weakens…the mimetic rivalry thus generated accelerates the incipient cultural disintegration that produced it in the first place. The breakdown of traditional institutions destroys their ability to channel desire into the noncompetitive directions that prevent mimetic rivalries.26 In a positive feedback loop, rivalry causes further blurring of boundaries which creates further confusion the social structure; this further creates overlap that can engender mimetic rivalry. This rivalry, unless stopped, can and will turn violent. The question then becomes: how is accelerated disintegration stemming from an initial crisis of Degree played out in Hereditary’s narrative? Further, how is this reflected in the film’s pivot from the tragic to the supernatural? The Sacred, The Profane, and Religious Contamination The methodology of Religious Studies can further help decipher these questions. Mimetic rivalry in the context of contemporary culture is usually confined to feuds absent physical violence; verbal and emotional manipulations are employed instead. However, physical violence can and does develop within society. This, Girard posits, is the basis for the ritual conception of impurity: The cause of ritual impurity is violence. In many cases, this fact seems selfevident. Two men come to blows; blood is spilt; both men are thus rendered impure. Their impurity is contagious, and anyone who remains in their presence risks becoming party to their quarrel. The only sure way to avoid contagion is to flee the scene of violence. …Contamination is a terrible thing, and only those who are already contaminated would willfully expose themselves to it.27 25 Aster, 0:14:30. Girard, A Theater of Envy, 166. 27 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 28. 26 11 Ritual impurity is an expression of the danger of contact with violence. Violence, being imitative, will spread rampant unless halted. However, this impurity can extend far beyond the contagiousness of physical violence: Concepts such as impurity and contagion, because they translate human relations into material terms, provide a sort of camouflage. The peril that overshadows all human relations is presented either in a purely material or in a wholly otherworldly guise. The notion of ritual impurity can degenerate until it is nothing more than a terror-stricken belief in the malevolent results of physical contact (italics mine). 28 Impurity and contagion, though always at base originating from fears of actual violence, can manifest as the impurity of material contact or supernatural phenomena. This makes more sense when one remembers Girard’s definition of religion: “that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative measures against his own violence.” The obscurity in question is the transposition of literal violent contamination onto symbolic forms. Thus, one can synthesize a definition of religious contamination as a contact between violence and the cultural order represented through material or supernatural symbols. This contact, however, is not necessarily mutual or reciprocal. The relationship between violence and the cultural order is perhaps best paralleled by the religious distinction between the sacred and the profane. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim posits that a unifying characteristic of religions worldwide is the division of the world into sacred and profane classes. He writes, “sacred things are those which interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first.”29 In a general sense, the 28 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 28. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Trans. Joseph Ward Swain, (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1947), 40-41. 29 12 sacred are things which are cordoned off but which cannot have prohibitions placed directly upon them. Instead, it is incumbent on the profane domain to instantiate and enforce boundaries around the sacred. It is important to avoid equating Durkheim’s definition of the sacred and profane with definitions of “good” and “bad.” Despite the “holy” and “unholy” connotations of the two terms, both the sacred and profane can be benevolent, malevolent or both simultaneously. Durkheim also notes that the sacred and the profane, though discrete in definition, tend to mingle with one another; the sacred is prone to overflow the bounds which delimit its domain. In other words, the sacred is contaigious: This is why [the sacred] is forbidden to the profane, not only to touch, but even to see or hear that which is sacred, and why these two sorts of life cannot be mixed in their consciousnesses. Precautions are necessary to keep them apart because, though opposing one another, they tend to confuse themselves into one another.…Owing to the contagiousness inherent in all that is sacred, a profane being cannot violate an interdict without having the religious force…extend over him and establish its empire over him (italics mine). 30 Importantly, the relationship between the scared and the profane is asymmetrical. The sacred is prone to spread, to overtake the profane, not the other way around. Given that the profane is the structure which surrounds and delimits the contagious sacred, it is not unreasonable to posit this analogous relationship between the cultural order and violence. Girard himself takes this a step (if not a leap) further, claiming, “The operations of violence and the sacred are ultimately the same process.”31 However, according to Durkheim’s definition, the sacred must not only be isolated but protected. Why would a cultural order protect violence? Girard attributes to the sacred 30 31 Durkheim, 320. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 31. 13 not only the destructive and chaotic outcomes of violence, but subsequent rebirths and generations that are produced thereafter. Just as a decomposed body can provide sustenance for grass, an act of violent unanimity, a “purging,” can give rise to new cultural systems.32 He writes, “The theory of generative violence permits us to define the sacred in simple, concrete terms that emphasize its underlying unity without overlooking its complexity.”33 Thus, if generative violence is the sacred, the extant cultural order ought to be considered the realm of the profane. Religious contaminations, therefore, are the contacts and subsequent interactions between sacred and profane entities. Thinking back to the crisis of Degree, its fundamental mechanism is the contact between social roles that were formerly discrete. This allows objects of desire to overlap and mimetic rivalry to develop. Thus, the imperative to maintain discrete boundaries in social systems is twofold: social differentiation (Degree) prevents rivalry from occurring in the first place while purity differentiations contain violence that has already erupted. Religious contamination can symbolize these dimensions simultaneously; contact between violence and the cultural order can indicate both violence enacted within the cultural order and violence done to the cultural order itself. As mentioned previously, these two contaminations perpetuate each other cyclically. Religious contamination is therefore a sign and representation of a crisis of Degree. With this relationship established, Hereditary’s images symbolize the crisis of Degree between Annie and Ellen. In Hereditary, Ari Aster elaborates and develops this initial tragic crisis of Degree through escalating spatial and temporal religious contaminations in the Graham 32 33 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 76-77. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 258. 14 household. These contaminations gradually become more severe and overt in their movement from mundane symbols to supernatural ones. Reading Space and Time Though Hereditary depicts religious contaminations that operate on many levels, the following discussion will be focused through the lens of space, time, and their artifacts. How then does one “read” space and time? In Space and Place, philosopher and humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan investigates space as understood by people experientially; that is, he examines what spaces means to the people who live in them. He discusses the way in which architecture imparts meaning onto space, concluding that 1) architecture can clarify and “render vivid” the sensation of distinctions (interior and exterior, dark and light, public and private), 2) architecture clarifies social roles and relations and, 3) architecture ‘teaches’ people about the cosmological nature of reality.34 All taken together, architecture turns space into place: “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”35 A place, then, can be defined as delimited space that has acquired meaning through habitation. The places created by architecture, particularly the family home, reveal much about the lives of and interactions between different family members. Tuan writes, “People better know who they are and how to behave when the arena is humanly 34 Yi-fu, Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 102. 35 Tuan, 6. 15 designed rather than nature’s raw stage.”36 Within a house, each differentiated location bears different significance depending on patterns of use: In the home, pieces of furniture such as a desk, an armchair, the kitchen sink, and the swing on the porch are points along a complex path of movement that is followed day after day. These points are places, centers for organizing worlds. …while we readily accept our home as a place, we must make an extra effort to realize that smaller places exist within the home.37 Not only does each place within the house carry specific significance, but each person within the house will interact with each of those spaces differently. Certain rooms “belong” to certain people, as places to sleep, relax, and express themselves. Other rooms are spaces of communal habitation: the dining room, the kitchen, the living room, and the hearth. Hallways are passages between these hubs of activity. By contrast, Tuan observes that the architecture of highly religious communities, those who share a strong symbolic framework, teaches cosmological assumptions easily and universally.38 The meanings of different spaces are shared by all. However, the contemporary secular home fails to perform this function. Tuan observes: “The house is no longer a text encoding the rules of behavior and even a whole worldview that can transmitted down the generations. In place of a cosmos modern society has splintered beliefs and conflicting ideologies.”39 The modern home is a site of compartmentalized worlds which intersect, but do not necessarily communicate. In Hereditary these “conflicting ideologies” of the characters play out in the geography of the house. Time is not discrete from space. Tuan writes, “Historical time and oriented space are aspects of a single experience. Intention creates a spatio-temporal structure of ‘here is 36 Tuan, 102. Tuan, 181-182. 38 Tuan, 112. 39 Tuan, 116. 37 16 now,’ ‘there is then.’”40 Objects and places are imbued with memories and past events. Tuan argues that the curation of one’s past through objects serves to establish one’s identity: To strengthen our sense of self the past needs to be rescued and made accessible. Various devices exist to shore up the crumbling landscapes of our past. …Friends depart but their letters are tangible evidence of their continuing esteem. Relatives die and yet remain present and smiling in the family album.41 The selection of items that reflect a person’s past is not arbitrary, either. People do not passively accumulate lived detritus indiscriminately; “A man is not an archivist of his own life, obliged to preserve documents impartially for a future historian to interpret: he wants a commodious house filled with objects that support his sense of self.”42 Thus, the items a person surrounds herself with is highly indicative of her own sense of self. Moreover, places can also perform this function: “Place is a type of object. Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality.”43 Places are imbued with the past as much as they provide orientation for the future. Tuan also reminds his readers that conceptions of time are not homogenous. He identifies three different types of symbolic, or “mythic,” time: Mythic time is of three principal kinds: cosmogonic, astronomic, and human. Cosmogonic time is the story of origins, including the creation of the universe. Human time is the course of human life. Both are linear and one directional. Astronomic time is experienced as the sun’s daily round and the parade of seasons; its nature is repetition.44 Most people in modern secular culture experience “human time” as the dominant mode. Work is goal oriented; one task leads to the next, and so on. Even vacations are 40 Tuan, 129. Tuan, 187. 42 Tuan, 196. 43 Tuan, 17. 44 Tuan, 131. 41 17 anticipated as fleeting time that one must savor. The family must do something with that free time. Astronomic time, by contrast, is both the cyclical, daily background upon which ordered human time is lived and recurrence of past events. Events of remembrance (holidays, anniversaries, memorials) rupture linear time with their annual return. These two species of time can also be seen in one’s own possessions. Items of utility correspond to linear time; they are a means to an end, easily replaced, not sentimental. Items of remembrance, however, re-evoke memories, past times, and distant places. Treasured and preserved, it is these items that most clearly reveal a person’s sense of self. For this reading of Hereditary, the takeaways are as follows: space can be divided into places which carry cultural meaning for those who occupy them. Places can indicate relationships, social orders, and personal meanings. Time is both linear and cyclical, human and astronomic. Both kinds of time can be read into objects and places. Items and places of remembrance contrast with items and places of utility. The latter looks towards future achievement, while the former cyclically reconjures memories. Items and places thus can be read temporally as well as spatially. 18 Film Analysis The Opening Scene Hereditary’s opening shot begins with a view of the family’s treehouse framed by a window.45 This image alone is already loaded with information. Self-contained, elevated amongst the trees, the treehouse is wholly discrete from what is, presumably, the main house whose window is in frame. The viewer is located within the house, looking out. These spaces, already juxtaposed in the film’s first frames, acquire clear significance as the film progresses; that is, the house will come to represent profane space, the cultural order, while the treehouse will represent the sacred. In this opening shot the audience is firmly located in the world of the profane, the mundane, while catching a glimpse of that which is isolated and protected. The camera then pans around Annie’s workshop as ominous underscoring builds. Her miniatures, scenes from her life, are strewn about the room. Annie’s miniatures are conspicuous and puzzling. Given that one’s items, certainly labors of love like these, reflect one’s identity, the prominence of traumatic moments here is telling. Ellen is the focal point of numerous dioramas that depict images of their mimetic rivalry.46 Analogous to this, Tuan observes of civil architecture: What facets of a city’s past should be preserved? Not the evidences of societal failure, such as old prisons, mental hospitals, and workhouses. These are removed with no regret or second thought on the inviolate nature of history. Art treasures and books are kept. They end up in galleries and libraries.47 45 Aster, 0:00:55. Aster, 0:01:30. 47 Tuan, 196. 46 19 People tend to preserve those objects which preserve a positive sense of self and to demolish those which reflect poorly on their present values. Sites of violence are contaminations impinging on a culture’s sense of itself; if preserved, they serve as a warning: never let this happen again. The scenes in Annie’s miniatures are dispassionate, ambivalent recreations of historical moments, but their presence in her space still contaminate it. They resurrect Ellen, bringing their fraught relationship continually into the present, day after day. The camera then pans in on a model of the house itself. Notably, though the model is a cross section of the entire house, the attic is obscured from view. This choice will gain significance later. The shot starts focusing on Peter’s room. His room is contained within the house but set apart from the others. Peter likewise is contained within the cultural order, but he lives closer to the margins. As the camera pans in the model blurs into reality as Steve rouses Peter for Ellen’s funeral. After inquiring about whether Charlie slept in her room that night, Steve crosses the yard to the treehouse and finds Charlie asleep within.48 This scene ends with a shot of Charlie’s face within the treehouse which snap cuts directly to Ellen’s funeral photo;49 Aster already establishes a direct visual connection between Charlie and Ellen. First Contaminations A few days after the funeral, Annie works on a model in her workshop.50 The camera then cuts to a view of the hallway, looking directly at her room, from within another room, the door ajar. As she leaves her room, she notices the open door and 48 Aster, 0:03:25. Aster, 0:03:50. 50 Aster, 0:16:40. 49 20 investigates. The next shot reveals an austere, bare room with only an old vanity desk and a stripped bed; this was clearly Ellen’s room. The camera fixates on a perfect triangle that has been burned into the floor of the room. Something isn’t right here. The camera cuts back to Annie standing in the doorway, and the implications of this configuration become clear. Annie’s workshop, her domain, is directly juxtaposed against Ellen’s room. The rooms face each other, almost as if in a standoff, evoking the mimetic rivalry between the two women. To make this even more explicit, the vanity on the opposite wall of Ellen’s room hosts a conspicuous mirror. The cut back to Annie reveals a mirror next to the door. Two mirrors, though never shown in the same shot, stare each other down. As mimetic rivals, Annie and Ellen’s relationship is characterized by the crisis of Degree, by their loss of distinction. They are mirrors of one another; they are doubles. Annie then hastily shuts the door. She insists that Steve relock the door for good measure, saying, “I know it’s irrational.”51 Her impulse, though logically irrational, is religiously justified. The open door has allowed the chaotic sacred to bleed into the rest of the house, the ordered profane. Now the wooden partition between the two domains has been restored. Peter hands Steve the phone with a call from the cemetery. Steve’s one question is enough for the audience to comprehend the situation: “What do you mean, desecrated?”52 Grandma’s grave has been breached. Just as with Ellen’s room, the door between the living and the dead has been opened. That night, Peter smokes in his room. The treehouse is visible in the window behind him, its own window dark.53 The camera then takes an exterior POV shot from the 51 Aster, 0:17:40. Aster, 0:18:05. 53 Aster, 0:23:20. 52 21 treehouse. As he blows smoke out a matching breath of fog comes from just off camera. Someone is in the treehouse, watching. Again the domains of the sacred, the treehouse, and the profane, Peter’s room, are set opposite one another. The two breaths mirror each other. However, this time someone is looking back out from the sacred space. The person in the treehouse is not visible, though in the very edge of the frame what could be a patch of white hair is visible. The film cuts to an exterior shot the next day. Only the treehouse is visible amidst the trees. Charlie crafts miniatures out of scraps of trash and found items in her room.54 Unlike her mother’s perfectly lifelike creations, Charlie’s projects are strange and misshapen, discarded objects mashed together to create rough anthropomorphic forms. She audibly clicks her tongue as she works. A glimmer of light catches Charlie’s eye and prompts her to look out the window. She sees something and goes outside to investigate. Intercut with a scene of Peter asking Annie for the car, what will ultimately be a site of tragedy, is Charlie following muddy footprints out to the yard. She sees the figure with short, white hair seated in a ring of fire, an occult ritual. The only character the audience has seen with short white hair is Ellen. Out of the grave, she occupies the space outside of, between, the treehouse and house proper. The sacred is migrating, as is Charlie. Annie rushes outside and scolds Charlie for not wearing shoes. Her only response: “I want Grandma.”55 Charlie, Annie’s daughter but raised and conditioned by Ellen, is a personification of their rivalry. She is the site of the blurred roles between Grandmother and Mother, the mutual object of desire. Though Ellen is dead, Annie has not truly reclaimed her daughter; she still wants Grandma. This inflames Annie. She 54 55 Aster, 0:23:40. Aster, 0:27:05. 22 marches Charlie back into the house and declares, “You’re going to this party with your brother,” but not before making Charlie remove her dirty socks. She must not track the muck from outside into the orderly home. She manages to take one sock off, but the other remains on her foot for the entire scene: a small yet conspicuous asymmetry. Annie’s rigid insistence that Charlie go to her brother’s party seems to be roused by the encounter in the yard; Peter doesn’t want Charlie to go, and neither does she. Annie maintains that Charlie will get to “hang out with other kids.” Annie is trying to reintegrate her daughter into the social order. She has been claimed by Ellen, sequestered in the realm of the sacred, for long enough. It’s time for Charlie to go make some friends. After the Accident Annie’s clumsy attempt to insert Charlie back into the social order is clearly doomed. Charlie is a social contamination at the party, a child in a room full of restless teenagers.56 She has no place in the space, no social orientation to give her protection. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that she is put in mortal danger. The child whom Annie tried desperately to reclaim now lays mutilated and destroyed in the backseat of the family car, killed by the very son who was first the product of Ellen’s desire.57 Charlie is now dead like her grandmother. The contest for her life is over. The night after the funeral, Steve enters his bedroom to find Annie missing.58 From Peter’s window, the audience sees an eerie red light ignite in the treehouse. The camera cuts back to Steve, flipping through Charlie’s notepad. He comes to the last drawing; only blank pages follow. The notepad contains the physical remnants of Charlie’s life and death. A wide 56 Aster, 0:30:15. Aster, 0:32:35 – 0:34:50. 58 Aster, 0:39:45. 57 23 shot reveals that Steve is sitting on Charlie’s bed, in her room. The film then shows Annie, laying in the red glow of two space heaters, asleep in the treehouse. Both parents grieve in Charlie’s former habitats. However, Steve mourns from inside the house, inside the ordered world, while Annie makes an exodus to the treehouse. Steve still remains many steps removed from the chaos of the sacred. Annie, meanwhile, lives in immediate proximity to it. The family’s relationship to the social order is now clearly fragmented. Some nights later, Peter bikes to the front of the house.59 He cannot revisit the car, the site of tragedy. Peter dismounts and notably hesitates before crossing the threshold of the house. Contaminated by violence, Peter struggles to return to the normal order. Likewise, Annie later lies awake in bed next to her husband.60 Steve tries to put a hand on her, but she recoils; Annie decides to sleep in the treehouse. She cannot bear to stay in the house now that her life has been touched by sacred violence. Steve, however, continually attempts to maintain order. He reminds Peter to sign up for an SAT prep course as he comes home from school.61 Peter blows him off and saunters up the stairs, still in his shoes. The outside is tracked right through the house with, unlike before, no protest from Steve. Steve follows Peter upstairs and walks into Annie’s workshop. She is working on a miniature that depicts the grisly scene of Charlie’s death in precise detail. The model telephone pole bisects the frame vertically.62 It is the threshold between past and present, between life and death, between violent and mundane, sacred and profane. The pole separates Annie from Steve in the shot. She is on the side of the model containing 59 Aster, 0:43:25. Aster, 0:47:45. 61 Aster, 0:54:40. 62 Aster, 0:55:00. 60 24 Charlie’s corpse, he opposite. This framing explicitly reflects Annie and Steve’s proximity to the sacred and profane, respectively. Steve protests, horrified: “Jesus Christ, Annie. You’re not planning on letting him see that are you?” Annie retorts, “It’s not about him. …It’s a neutral view of the accident.” The fractured perspectives of the family members make Annie’s insistence that her model of the crash is, “a neutral view of the accident,” morbidly ironic. All she has done is instantiate physically the facts of the tragedy, a scene that Annie was not even present for. But by not claiming and sharing her own point of view, she has simply created a mirror upon which each member of the family can project their own meanings of the accident. It is “neutral” only insofar as the viewer is neutral. Steve’s repulsion from the model indicates that he knows, perhaps only at a subconscious level, that this is an exercise in division. The scene cuts to the family having dinner in the living room. Peter, Annie, and Steve sit opposite one another at a round table; no one is allied, everyone has a different point of view about the accident. Peter compliments Steve on the meal, at which Annie sneers. Peter’s attempt to ingratiate himself to Steve, to the cultural order, is laughable. Peter has blood on his hands. Seeing this, he goads Annie into an argument. He’s trying to get the truth out of her. Annie explodes: Don’t you swear at me, you little shit! Don’t you ever raise your voice at me! I am your mother, you understand? I’ve given everything to you! All I ever do is worry and slave and defend you, and all I get back is that fucking face on your face!...Well, now your sister is dead….And what a waste. It could’ve maybe brought us together or something! If you could have just said “I’m sorry” or faced up to what happened, maybe then we could do something with this! But you can’t take responsibility for anything, so now I can’t accept. And I can’t forgive. Because nobody admits anything they’ve done!63 63 Aster, 0:58:00. 25 This monologue is brilliant because it shows Annie having two confrontations at once: one with Peter and one with the ghost of her mother. “I am your mother,” carries a heavy double meaning. Annie is explicitly trying to assert her role as mother to her son who has transgressed, but inadvertently suggests the assertion of her role in the context of mimetic rivalry; that she, not Ellen, is his mother. “All I ever do is worry and slave and defend you;” Defend Peter against whom or what? The audience never sees Annie shielding Peter in the context of the accident. This line alludes to the deeper family history. Annie is deeply resentful because she defended Peter from her own mother. “It could’ve maybe brought us together or something,” evokes the shattering of the social order, divisions between the characters growing ever wider. The final blow is her condemnation: “But you can’t take responsibility for anything;” not “the accident,” not “what happened,” but anything. Peter cannot take the responsibility for the fact that he was conceived against her will. She now cannot accept or forgive him for killing her daughter, but she could never accept him in the first place for being the product of her crisis of Degree. History has been repeated. Just as Ellen took Charlie away from Annie, Peter, the product of Ellen’s desire, took Charlie away for good. Recalling Girard’s notion of the double, it is clear that Annie now regards Peter as a double of Ellen: “In the collective experience of the monstrous double the differences are not eliminated, but muddied and confused. All the doubles are interchangeable, although their basic similarity is never formally acknowledged.”64 Peter is now the monstrous incarnation of both Ellen’s desire to conceive a male heir and her desire to possess Charlie. A temporal contamination 64 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 161. 26 himself, Peter haunts her with “that fucking face” on his face. Annie cannot confront the sordid mimetic rivalry that produced Peter and Charlie in the first place. “Nobody admits anything they’ve done.” Dreams and Apparitions The night after Joan shows Annie how to perform the séance, she wakes to find ants on her pillow.65 She follows the trail of infestation to Peter’s room. This is the first time the audience has seen Annie physically enter his space. Peter’s face is crawling with ants, which burrow into his eyes, nose, and mouth. This state of decomposition mirrors an earlier shot of Charlie’s decapitated head lying on the roadside.66 Just as Peter and Ellen are doubles and Annie’s mind, Charlie and Peter are becoming less and less differentiated as well. The symbolic use of decomposition here is striking: “Like the violent disintegration of a society, the physiological decomposition of the corpse leads gradually from a very complex system of differentials to undifferentiated dust. The forms of the living revert to formlessness….The rotting corpse becomes, in the words of Bossuet, ‘cet objet qui n’a de nom dans aucune langue.’”67 The boundaries of the social order blur further still. The dream then snaps to Peter sitting up, fully awake and healthy. Annie confesses the fraught history of his conception and her attempts to abort him. Peter was given life at the expense of Annie’s social agency, her own identity. Her insistence that she is “happy it didn’t work”68 is betrayed by the following image: both Annie and Peter, doused in paint thinner, are engulfed in flames. 65 Aster, 1:09:30. Aster, 0:37:35. 67 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 256. French Translation: the object that has no name in any language. 68 Aster, 1:12:20. 66 27 Annie awakens, deeply disturbed. She has had a full confrontation with that which Freud terms the uncanny. He writes, “[The] uncanny element is nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The link with repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as ‘something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open.’”69 Her reunion with “something that was long familiar to the psyche” makes Annie aware of her deep resentment of Peter. She is certainly not fully conscious of the full ramifications of the mimetic crisis but understands enough to recognize her own culpability. This encounter prompts Annie to try to unify the family through collective engagement in the séance that immediately follows. The film cuts to a slow pan up on a model displayed in the house’s entryway: a small, neat little house perched precariously atop the dilapidated remains of a stack of much larger manors.70 This symbolism is very clear. The Graham family unit has been built on the demons in Annie’s past. Though she may try to superficially reunite the family through ritual, figuratively sprucing up the little house on top, the foundations of the social order are rotten. Peter and Steve shuffle into the living room where Annie has set up the séance materials on the dining table. This is the same table that just hours ago was the site of the vicious outpouring of resentment between Annie and Peter, between Annie and Ellen. Steve comments that the house is cold; the window has been left open. The house is porous and permeable to the malevolence that lurks outside. Annie has the 69 70 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Trans. David McLintock, (New York: Penguin Group, 2003), 148. Aster, 1:13:45. 28 three hold hands, a display of mock solidarity. Peter hears something behind him and turns as the camera pans with him.71 He is the only one who does so: Frontal space is primarily visual. It is vivid and much larger than the rear space that we can experience only through nonvisual cues. Frontal space is ‘illuminated’ because it can be seen, back space is ‘dark,’ even when the sun shines, simply because it cannot be seen. …On a temporal plane, frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past (italics mine).72 The camera move is very conspicuous, juxtaposed against still shots and slow zooms. Peter is uniquely vulnerable to the ghosts of the family’s past, both Charlie’s and Ellen’s. The three touch the glass on the table. It glides away from them. Steve tries to get Annie to stop the séance. She swats him away and goes to comfort Peter, who has broken down in tears. Annie has embraced the sacred, Steve rejects it, Peter is ambivalent and distressed. At this moment where the conflict between these splintered orientations collides something breaks behind them.73 They all turn around. They must acknowledge that something from their past has returned to the home. They turn back around and the candle flares violently. The shot cuts to a view of Steve checking below the table. He can’t interpret what he has just seen. The camera slowly pans up to reveal Annie, eyes dead, a low growl emanating from her slack mouth. She blinks and she is transformed. She has been possessed by Charlie. Like in Annie’s dream, this is a temporal contamination manifested physically. Charlie, her consciousness the product of Ellen’s socialization, inhabits Annie’s body. 71 Aster, 1:16:32. Tuan, 40. 73 Aster, 1:18:00. 72 29 In her book Natural Symbols, Anthropologist Mary Douglas notes that different kinds of religious possession states are appear more commonly certain cultural structures. She writes: Raymond Firth has distinguished three kinds of trance states….His series runs from minimum to maximum control by the human group of an invading spirit. First, there is spirit possession in which a human passively loses control to the spirit. The latter is in power.…Then there is spirit mediumship, in which the invading spirit speaks through the possessed person, and the group tries to get occult information and power from it. Third is shamanism. Here the spirit is to a large extent domesticated and made to do the will of the human host.74 She claims that spirit possession correlates with cultures whose social control and shared symbolization is more loosely defined, while cultures with more rigid control only dare entertain shamanism, or eschew possession rites altogether.75 Contemporary American culture would fall into the latter category, meaning any kind of possession is entirely unsanctioned by the culture. It spells trouble. Each of these three possession states is depicted in Hereditary, each correlating with progressively weaker social distinctions. As an introduction to ritual, Joan performs a shamanistic rite; she is totally in control of her body when she summons her grandson, Louie.76 At the Graham house, the encounter escalates to spirit mediumship, where Charlie speaks through Annie, controlling her voice for a short time. Based on the three stages of trance, one can infer, then, that Annie’s next encounter with possession will not be so benign. The next day, Annie works on a diorama of her mother’s funeral.77 Steve calls her to report that her child has had a nervous breakdown in school. In a telling slip, she asks Steve if he means Charlie. Peter and Charlie are less and less differentiated to Annie, 74 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, (London: Routledge, 1996), 79-80. Douglas, 84. 76 Aster, 1:04:05. 77 Aster, 1:21:30. 75 30 even in waking life. Steve lashes out at Annie for distressing Peter with the séance. He declares: “I have a son to protect.” As with Annie in the dinner scene, Steve implicitly addresses two parties: he not only needs to protect Peter from Annie, but from Ellen’s insidious vestiges. Annie starts to talk back, but Steve hangs up. This infuriates her. She calls Steve back and yells: “Do not hang up on me again. I’m not sleepwalking anymore, you understand?” Annie takes Steve’s comment about protecting Peter as a reference to her attempt to immolate her children while sleepwalking.78 In a way, she’s right. Annie’s repressed, uncanny desire to kill her own children seems to stem from her initial resentment towards Ellen. Still furious, Annie tries to continue her work. She cannot do it. She snaps a model chair in half. Full blown destruction ensues. Annie punches and tears at her miniatures, deconstructing the temporal contaminations that have lingered in her space since the opening of the film. Annie cannot, must not, be like her mother. Steve walks in to find Annie sitting on the floor of her workshop in the midst of her carnage.79 Notably, one of the only miniatures still intact is the one depicting the car crash. Steve says nothing. He notices another model still standing: Peter, laying headless in his bed. Peter is, again, made similar to Charlie. The next scene shows Steve getting ready to sleep, this time on the couch. He can no longer share a place with Annie. She, meanwhile, investigates a scratching noise coming from Charlie’s room. Annie finds Charlie’s notebook open on her bed, her pencil drawing pictures on its own.80 The film cuts back to Peter, who sees an apparition of Charlie. Her head tilts, then tumbles off her shoulders to the floor. Suddenly, a pair of female hands emerge from his headboard and 78 Aster, 0:52:55. Aster, 1:24:00. 80 Aster, 1:26:00. 79 31 pull violently on his head.81 Annie’s miniature is coming to life. Peter wakes from this nightmare to find a distressed Annie in his room. She confides that there is something going on and that she is “the only one who can fix this;”82 cut to a shot of the notepad. The images, once varied and whimsical, are now all the same. Page after page reveals a cartoon of a visibly distressed Peter, both eyes crossed out.83 These images extend into what were once blank pages, formerly a sign of Charlie’s death. Now her spirit extends beyond them, cruelly foreshadowing Peter’s ultimate demise. Annie reads this symbol, correctly, as a bad omen. She attempts to burn the notebook in the hearth. As soon as she does, her arm begins to catch on fire. She realizes her attempt to sever herself from past traumas is futile. She cannot separate herself from the contamination of the sacred. The Bright Blessed Day The final day opens with a wide shot of both the house and treehouse. The domains of the sacred and profane stand side by side. The next shot shows Peter leaving his room, noticing his mother’s door cracked open. The film cuts to Annie, lurking in shadow by the door, who watches him leave.84 This image is as ambiguous as it is creepy. Is Annie scared of Peter, or is she protecting him from herself? Either way, it is apparent she cannot let him near her; they might contaminate one another. When Annie’s attempts to contact Joan are of no avail, she rushes home and tears into the boxes of her mother’s possessions, which have been sitting in her workshop since the funeral. The models were not the only temporal contaminations festering in Annie’s space. She begins to rifle 81 Aster, 1:27:40. Aster, 1:28:25. 83 Aster, 1:28:40. 84 Aster, 1:30:25. 82 32 through Ellen’s occult books. She opens one titled Invocations and flips to a bookmarked page. She finds an image of “King Paimon (God of Mischief)” above a highlighted passage which reads: “When successfully invoked, King Paimon will possess the most vulnerable host.”85 If vulnerable refers to proximity to the sacred, then Annie must be the intended target. She slept in the treehouse, lashed out violently at Peter, invited the sacred into the home. However, taking the mimetic rivalry into account, Annie is on equal footing with Ellen. They are doubles. It is Peter, both a teenager not fully integrated into the social order and an object of mimetic rivalry, who is the intended victim. Annie then finds a family photo album. She discovers pictures of Ellen and Joan performing cult rituals together. One image even shows a ritual centered around an image of the Graham family. Joan, who until now Annie had regarded as an external support, was contaminated all along. Fulfilling Ellen’s wishes, Joan tricked Annie into inviting the sacred into her home.86 Annie’s hopes of social rehabilitation are dashed. Joan had always been tainted by her past. Annie finally decides to investigate the one room in the house that has, until now, been obscured from view; she climbs into the attic. A swarm of flies buzz around her as she investigates. Her light catches something tucked away in a corner. It is a charred, decapitated corpse in a white night gown, a candle between its legs.87 She wretches. Turning she notices a symbol painted on the wall in blood. It is the same symbol both Annie and her mother’s cadaver wore on necklaces at the funeral.88 85 Aster, 1:33:25. This fact brings Annie’s culpability for the contaminations of the séance into question. If she did not know what she was doing, is she really at fault? Though Annie did not know the explicit connection between the spells she used and Ellen’s activity in the cult, her goal was to contact Charlie. That contamination was engaged knowingly. She knew better than anyone the influence her mother exerted over her daughter. Annie brought the memory of her mother back into the house, even if it was by proxy through Charlie. The sacred is, after all, highly contagious. 87 Aster, 1:36:40. 88 Aster, 0:04:35. 86 33 This body is Ellen’s. The doubling between her and her granddaughter is now symbolically realized. Her corpse now mirrors Charlie’s. Steve brings Peter home from school, his nose broken from a possession encounter in class.89 After putting Peter to bed, Annie convinces Steve to look at the body in the attic.90 As he does this, she rushes to light a fire in the hearth. They meet in the hallway and Steve confronts Annie, asking why she never called the police. Annie insists, “The police can’t help us.” From Steve’s standpoint, still that of the cultural order, this appeal to protective societal structures makes complete sense. From Annie’s perspective, however, it is too late. The sacred has already consumed the family. It was always going to. Steve has a realization: “You dug up the grave. It was you, wasn’t it?”91 Though Steve is wrong about this factually, his impulse to associate Annie with the escalating crisis is dead on. Girard writes of the sacrificial crisis: “From within the system, only the differences are perceived; from without, the antagonists all seem alike. From inside, sameness is not visible; from outside, differences cannot be seen.”92 For Annie, who exists within the mimetic rivalry, she and her mother are direct opposites; Ellen cursed the family, and Annie is the one trying to stop it. However, from the outside, from the standpoint of the profane, the chaos is all uniform, no matter who was initially responsible. Steve sees only Annie’s erratic behavior and, wisely, links it to the rest of the crisis. His wife has been replaced by a monstrous stranger. Annie believes she knows what comes next. Given that she is inextricably tangled in the crisis, she knows it will consume her. She brings Steve into the living room, pours 89 Aster, 1:38:10. Aster, 1:40:50. 91 Aster, 1:42:55. 92 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 159. 90 34 lighter fluid on Charlie’s notebook and asks him to throw it into the fireplace. She prepares for her self-sacrifice with a tearful goodbye. At the last moment, Steve stops: “I’m not gonna do this with you anymore…. I need to call the police.”93 Annie is devastated. Social structures cannot help the family now. She lunges at Steve and throws Charlie’s notebook into the fire. She deals the final blow. Flames engulfs Steve’s body. She looks on, horrified, as he screams his last. Instead of letting Steve, the last remaining agent of order, talk her down, she decides to retaliate against the sacred. She has agreed to play its game, by its rules. The last vestige of the profane order is destroyed. Annie’s retaliation against the specter of her mother finally closes the gap between them: The differences that seem to separate the antagonists shift ever faster and more abruptly as the crisis grows in intensity. Beyond a certain point the nonreciprocal moments succeed each other with such speed that their actual passage becomes blurred. …Where formerly he had seen his antagonist and himself as incarnations of unique and separate moments in the temporal scheme of things, the subject now perceives two simultaneous projections of the entire time span….The ‘Dionysiac’ state of mind can and…often does erase all manner of differences: familial, cultural, biological, and natural. The entire everyday world is caught up in the whirl, producing a hallucinatory state that is not a synthesis of elements, but a formless and grotesque mixture of things that are normally separate. …A fundamental principle, often overlooked, is that the double and the monster are one and the same being.94 Annie’s jaw goes slack.95 She has entered the final trance state, spiritual possession. Girard writes of possession: “The monstrous double now takes the place of those objects that held the attention of the antagonists at a less advanced stage of the crisis, replacing those things that each had sought to assimilate and destroy, to incarnate and expel. Possession, then, is an extreme form of alienation in which the subject totally absorbs the 93 Aster, 1:46:15. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 159-160. 95 Aster, 1:46:40. 94 35 desires of another.”96 In this final contamination, Annie is at last inhabited by her mother’s desire to possess and destroy her children. Annie, wife and mother, is gone. The Dark Sacred Night The film cuts to a wide shot of both the house and the treehouse, followed by a snap cut to night. The cabal of cultists, at first easily mistaken for rays of moonlight shining through the trees, dot the landscape. They surround the house.97 Peter wakes. He notices a light in the treehouse window. This time it is not the neon-red of space heaters, but the orange glow of candlelight. Something has changed. The camera cuts back to a wide shot of Peter’s bed as he rises. In the upper left corner of the frame, barely visible, is a monstrous Annie. Suspended in midair, she watches her son silently from above.98 Vertical orientation is a prominent motif in the images that follow. Tuan writes, “‘High’ and ‘low,’ the two poles of the vertical axis, are strongly charged words in most languages. Whatever is superior or excellent is elevated, associated with a sense of physical height.”99 Like Ellen’s corpse in the attic, Annie looms over her son. Whereas before Annie walked in the superior shadow of her mother, her body now literally rises to meet Ellen’s. Peter looks out the window again. Behind him, Annie’s white form swims along the ceiling, out Peter’s door. Entirely oblivious, Peter stands up and shuffles into the hallway. In a grotesque pastiche of “hide-and-seek,” Peter walks through the house, looking for signs of life.100 He visits the familiar sites which used to shelter his family: his parents’ room, his sister’s room. They are both dark, both tainted. 96 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 165. Aster, 1:46:50. 98 Aster, 1:47:35. 99 Tuan, 37. 100 Aster, 1:49:00. 97 36 Peter slowly descends into the living room.101 A piano lies in pieces on the floor, foreshadowing the grisly scene to come. He surveys the room. Apart from some overturned chairs, nothing seems amiss. The camera then rests on Steve’s charred corpse. The ruins of the ordinary world lay smoldering before the hearth. As Peter approaches the body, realizing what has happened, the camera slowly pans up to the ceiling.102 Annie lurks in the top left corner of the room, stalking her son. The violent terrors of the past threaten to subsume the once-orderly present. Peter hears a creak behind him and turns around. A naked man stands, silently smiling, in the closet. Peter hears a thud. Suddenly, Annie lunges at him from the opposite corner of the room. He runs upstairs, his monstrous mother in hot pursuit. There is only one place for Peter to go: the attic. He manages to close and lock the door just as Annie reaches it. A loud knocking is heard from the other side. Peter begs her to stop: “Mom, I’m sorry! Okay, I’m sorry!” Too little, too late. An apology cannot undo what he did nor make up for who he is and how he was born. The camera cuts to an exterior shot of the hallway. In a literally inverted image of Annie prone on her bedroom floor mourning Charlie,103 Annie bashes her head into the attic door.104 Instead of Annie grieving her stolen girl, Ellen’s ghost has come to devour her lost son. Peter looks up at the room around him. It has been transformed. Candles litter the attic; a circle of them surround a charred imprint where Ellen’s corpse had lain. On the floor next to it is a school photo of Peter, his eyes burned out. Convinced that this is all a dream, Peter tries to wake himself. He is living out his 101 Aster, 1:50:35. Aster, 1:51:45. 103 Aster, 0:37:45. 104 Aster, 1:53:30. 102 37 mother’s nightmares. Peter hears a sound above. He confronts his mother, suspended in midair, slicing her own neck with a piano wire.105 Girard writes of bodily mutilation: Mutilation symbolizes the working of the crisis in dramatic fashion. Clearly, it must be viewed both as the creation of fearfully deformed beings and as the elimination of all distinguishing characteristics, all the salient features of these beings….In the image of monstrous mutilation the procedures of reciprocal violence are expressed in such a powerfully condensed form that they appear bizarre, indecipherable, and ‘mythic.’106 Annie is undifferentiating herself, making her body like those of her mother and daughter. She stares down her son as she slices, condemning him with each cut. “You did this,” her eyes seem to say, “You started this.” Peter hears a noise in the corner. Lurking in the shadows are three more naked cultists, surveying the scene. The only living people now in the house are complete strangers to him. The house has been completely overtaken by the violent sacred. Peter realizes that this means death. He jumps out the window into the yard below.107 Annie’s head finally thuds to the floor. Annie, Ellen, and Charlie, all headless, are now full doubles. The glint of light seen earlier in Charlie’s room finds Peter’s body and merges with him. He looks up just in time to see the headless corpse of his mother float into the treehouse. Peter stands. He makes Charlie’s signature tongue click.108 The two objects of desire, once discrete inverses of each other, have literally become one. But it is Peter’s body, the product of Ellen pressuring Annie to conceive, that houses Charlie’s consciousness, that which Ellen had claimed while she was still alive. The person onscreen is a monstrosity that is entirely Ellen’s desire and design. 105 Aster, 1:55:40. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 245-246. 107 Aster, 1:56:15. 108 Aster, 1:57:40. 106 38 Slowly Peter’s body makes its way to the treehouse. More cultists stand in the yard, watching. The treehouse entrance comes into view, a portal to the sacred womb.109 Inside the treehouse, several cultists lay prostrate on the floor. As Peter’s body turns, it sees to whom they are bowing. Charlie’s crowned head is mounted atop a mannequin,110 a monstrous doll just like her own creations, just like the body that used to be Peter. Though Charlie’s headless body was buried, her head, her consciousness, Ellen’s influence, remains. Two more figures bow before the idol: the parallel, headless bodies of both Ellen and Annie. The violent sacred has revealed their symmetry. Joan removes the crown from the doll and places it atop Peter’s head. From offscreen, she explains that Peter’s body is now host to Paimon, whom all the cultists worship. They hail their new god as the camera pulls back to the last shot of the film.111 Like the diorama of the house in the opening scene, which represented all that was ordered and profane, the treehouse is isolated in miniature cross-section. Where once there were discrete rooms, now there is only one. Where once the inhabitants were familiar, they are now strange. Mother, Grandmother, Son, and Daughter are posed together in a grotesque mixture of undifferentiated violence. The film ends with the full triumph of the sacred. 109 Aster, 1:58:25. Aster, 1:59:35. 111 Aster, 2:02:48. See Fig. 1. 110 39 Figure 1: Hereditary's final shot. 40 Conclusion Hereditary’s drama begins with a crisis of Degree between mother and daughter. The mother, having pledged unwavering allegiance to the violent sacred, attempts to claim her daughter’s children as her own. In the end she is successful. The cultural order disintegrates before the audience’s eyes as the distinctions between family members blur and intermingle. One transgression snowballs into total oblivion. Like the teacher in Peter’s class, Ari Aster invites his audience to question the origins and outcomes of tragedy. Was this worsening religious contamination inevitable? Rene Girard observes that cultural order, as an efficient mechanism for mimesis, can itself easily propagate chaos once it erupts. He writes, “Order consists of a chain of obedient imitation that facilitates the contagion of disorder when disorder appears….When every step is exampled by the first pace, it can be either the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ imitation that propagates itself down the ladder of Degree….Imitation is ‘good’ when it conforms to the rules of Degree and respects the separateness and distinctiveness of each rank.”112 Notice that Girard places both “good” and “bad” in quotation marks; he is not making a blanket claim about the morality of all hierarchical systems. He is looking at the health of the system, whether it is working properly or not. The terms functional and nonfunctional may be more appropriate. When relationships are being successfully and peacefully mediated by Degree, a crisis of Degree can be catastrophic. This is not to say that the Graham’s nuclear family was a solid and functional structure that ought to have been preserved and maintained, far from it. If anything, Hereditary shows the failure of the nuclear family to protect itself from a single bad 112 Girard, A Theater of Envy, 165. 41 actor. There are no communal safeguards in place, no bonding rituals to engender resiliency, and no robust connections to others outside of the family unit. The Graham family is consistently shown to be isolated and fragmented. This observation is perhaps best reflected in the scholarship by Mary Douglas on the dynamics of social formations. She defines two primary dimensions of social discourse and group behavior: “One is order, classification, the symbolic system. The other is pressure, the experience of having no option but to consent to the overwhelming demands of other people.”113 The former she terms “Grid” and the latter “Group” (See fig. 2). Figure 2: A map of grid and group from Natural Symbols.114 She identifies “Small Group” as the social formation occupying the lower right quadrant of the grid; this formation involves high social pressure, the imperative to capitulate to the will of others, and low shared classifications. She writes of the small group: 113 114 Douglas, 57-58. Douglas, 60. 42 Its members know one another and can count their ranks and prospects of promotion.…Hemmed in and face to face, their destiny is in their own hands and they meet it with intrigue and jealousy. …High classification requires a welldefined category of rejects and anomalous persons. But small group broadens the category of potential rejects to include the whole range of acquaintance, male, female, kinsman and unrelated.115 The Graham family fits this description quite neatly. None of the family members shares an understanding of the accident that kills Charlie at the level of meaning. Anyone and everyone within the group can be, and is, blamed and villainized by someone else. This is low classification; each party has its own narrative. Further, the isolation of their family puts them in a position of immense social pressure. They must keep returning home to each other because they are family. This family in particular seems to have no auxiliary support structure other than itself. Thus, the isolated nuclear family is perhaps one of the least ideal social structures for interpreting and healing from tragedy, exemplified by the tendencies of “small group.” In Hereditary, it is the only structure this family has. Thus, Ellen’s continual perpetuation of the crisis of Degree, even from beyond the grave, is fatal to all. Hereditary is replete with horrific symbols that mirror and extend a founding tragedy. The increasingly violent encroachment of the sacred betrays the pretense of “normal” social relations, the myth of the fully functional secular nuclear family. Girard writes, “If the tragic poet touches upon the violent reciprocity underlying all myths, it is because he perceives these myths in a context of weakening distinctions and growing violence.”116 Hereditary is a product of this context, this contemporary moment. Nuclear social structures, once taken for granted as ideal, fail to ward off violence when it knocks. 115 116 Douglas, 64. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 65. 43 Family demons are no longer exorcised but stuffed in the attic to maintain the pretense of functional relationships. Ironically, keeping these festering corpses hidden only accelerates the disintegration of those same relationships. Aster confronts his audience with horrifying supernatural imagery, with temporal and spatial contaminations, that speak to a deep crisis of meaning in the modern family. A fragmented symbolic lexicon renders violence and death wholly unintelligible in a contemporary social context. Aster warns his audience: “This could be your family.” Hereditary dramatizes the hell that is unleashed when all meaning and social bonds fail. The only victor is violence. 44 Bibliography Aster, Ari, dir. Hereditary. 2018; Amazon Prime Video, 2022. Streaming. Daniels, Robert. “‘Hereditary is a Rejection of the Female Form.’” 812 Film Reviews. Wordpress, June 10, 2018. Accessed March 31, 2022. https://812filmreviews.com/2018/06/10/hereditary-is-a-rejection-of-the-femaleform/ Dibdin, Emma. “Hereditary Taps Into the Unique Horror of Inherited Mental Illness.” Esquire. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc., June 15, 2018. Accessed March 31, 2022. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a21526807/hereditary-moviemental-illness/ Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. London: Routledge, 1996. Durkheim, Emile. Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1947. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. 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