Archetypes: Midsommar and Fairy Tales

(artwork from John Austen’s illustrations for Hamlet, 1922)

Spoilers for Midsommar ahead!

Ari Aster, director and writer of Midsommar, said he thought of Midsommar as a “macabre fairy tale” instead of a horror movie. Dani is an oppressed maiden like Cinderella or Snow White, and her oppressors (her indifferent lover and his friends) suffer the fates you find in the German versions of fairy tales. The movie’s ending bears a resemblance to the ending of the Grimm version of “Snow White,” where the “godless” stepmother is tricked into attending Snow White’s marriage feast and becomes the entertainment. She is given a pair of iron shoes that have been heated in the fire, and she is forced to dance until she dies. 

As Dani is embraced by the strange Swedish community that practices human sacrifice, she is able to participate in a ceremony that involves setting fire to her boyfriend (and eight other people), and in her triumph at the end, she gives a mad smile. Is this what we imagine Snow White did at the end of her story as she watched her step-mother endure agony until death? If so, maybe the trials of the fairy tale caused Snow White to lose her innocence and her sense of humanity. This harsh retribution might push her to become someone else’s evil stepmother one day, causing the cycle to repeat and birth a new fairy tale. In the maiden-mother-crone archetypal progression, the maiden must pass through trials to lose her innocence before she becomes a powerful crone (whether a good witch or a bad witch).   

Snow White’s stepmother does try to murder her, of course, whereas Dani’s boyfriend is just cold and empty. But how could innocent maidens like Snow White and Dani enjoy seeing anyone tortured to death? I think most of us (at least at times) see ourselves as innocents, while those who hurt us are pure monsters. The punishments in “Snow White” and Midsommar are dramatic enough to make us feel the satisfaction of seeing someone we hate suffer.

Ari Aster also says the film is like a fairy tale because the main character has lost her family, and as he says, “Orphaning your main character is the oldest fairy tale move in the book, and that was important for where the film goes.” It’s important to strip the fairy tale maiden from her family because this sets her on a solitary adventure that tests the strength of her goodness. Most fairy tales about women want to teach us that purity and goodness always triumph. 

Dani is a character who is very easy to like. She’s caring and kind and worries about people, like her suicidal sister. And yet her life seems hopeless. She has a lame boyfriend (named Christian, which is a subject for another reflection) who rarely supports her and doesn’t even seem to like her. Her dark family situation makes her feel guilty for burdening her boyfriend, so she’s always apologizing to him. She shows many signs of codependency. She’s a grad student in psychology, and you wonder if she chose this field because she’s still trying to save her sister. When her sister sends her a strange email saying that everything is black and she’s taking her parents with her, Dani calls her boyfriend Christian for advice. He tells her she should ignore it, that the sister does these things to manipulate Dani. It’s clear that Dani struggles with anxiety, and she turns to Christian for support he can’t really offer. Then she discovers her sister’s email was no bluff…she’s killed herself and her parents with carbon monoxide poisoning. 

In fairy tales, heroic maidens are similarly isolated after being orphaned. They are stuck in a tower or with a loveless family or (perhaps most mercifully) in a long sleep. They wait for someone to rescue them, and their only real job is to take the help that’s offered them by animals and good witches and princes, AND to maintain their goodness. When Dani’s situation is bad (it’s obvious her boyfriend doesn’t care about her, she is grieving alone, and no one is helping her in her grief), she accepts everything and tries to be cheerful. She doesn’t want to burden anyone. The only real help she is offered comes from the twisted Swedish community, and it’s hard to blame her for delighting in the opportunity to receive communal love and empathy, for wanting to be part of a family. 

The movie tricks us in this way. We recognize Dani as a good person who cares for others but doesn’t receive care in return, and she’s our heroine (and it’s easy to like Florence Pugh). Her boyfriend is very unlikeable, and it’s hard to be devastated when he goes up in flames. This is much like the punishment of the evil stepmother in “Snow White.” It’s ghastly if you think about someone being sentenced to die by dancing on hot iron shoes. The fairy tale teaches us to hate the evil stepmother so much that the ending is cathartic, but who really deserves to be tortured to death? 

Another sinister twist is the other outsiders who are brought to be sacrificed by the community. Conspicuously, three out of four of these victims aren’t white (and the one white guy committed the crime of urinating on a sacred tree!). Dani’s ultimate sense of triumph over the cruel circumstances of her life has been achieved through participating in a white supremacist society. Maybe she doesn’t notice, since the other girls in the community laugh when she laughs and cry when she cries. She finds a new family, but they are clearly evil. 

This feels too true to life in a sense. Dani’s final smile under her flower crown feels like girlboss empowerment, but it comes at the cost of other people’s lives and means silent complicity with a culture of white supremacy. Is that what it means to become a princess (and in Dani’s case, the May Queen)? 

The fairy tale dream is of attaining a special status that makes up for your years of horror and misery, but being a princess has its drawbacks. If you’re the princess, you put yourself above other people in your life. Other people’s suffering can’t be allowed to dampen your high spirits. And being a princess is cold comfort, even if everything goes according to plan. Success doesn’t erase trauma like we always hope it will. The movie doesn’t necessarily show us that, but I think it’s implied. We don’t know what will happen to Dani in the future, whether she’ll stay with the community for life or come to feel horrified about what she’s done. We’re left to wonder. A fairy tale might say they lived happily ever after, but how? Who really lives THAT happily?

I’ve met older people who were true idealists who always held onto their innocence, and when they told me their life stories, they left out the depressing details of their lives to make them seem like fairy tales. They wanted me to believe that the good can always prosper. They were trying to protect me. 

A fairy tale is a beautiful dream. You can fictionally assign your enemies to be tortured while being nice to them in real life. Maybe fairy tales are revenge fantasies, and maybe these fantasies help us behave normally in life while having an outlet in our minds. 

But how do these fantasies shape our souls and the soul of our society? That’s the question we’re left with at the end of Midsommar, and if we allow ourselves to answer this question, it means we can’t pretend to be innocent anymore.