Francis Bacon and Deleuze: 'Midsommar' and the beautiful horror of life.

Image via. A24

Film, like painting, illustrates the author’s belief in celluloid just as Bacon’s canvas might. In this essay, I will discuss Francis Bacon, and confirm that abject horror is intact a way to manifest the existence of life and thus being. Midsommar (2019) directed by Ari Aster reveals its gruesome tone to expose the beauty of life, and with this cohesion comes the horror and the deformed. To accompany this thought, I will present cases through the films use of the Hårga ritualistic scream and the ceremonious murder-suicides of foreigners and the elderly. Alongside this, I will also explore the purpose of the deformed and their relevance to doctrine, as well as Bacon’s triptychs to the films murals.

Midsommar (2019) presents the privations of life transformed into beautiful nightmares, a somewhat Nietzschean acceptance of life through horror. The Hårga clan scream at the overwhelming grief instilled in their lives to expose their inner-selves to this same grief, in attempts to unite with the pain they feel- thus watering down the horror into freedom. A result of this is a contrasting sensation wherein “life” is felt. This life is one entranced by pastel flowers, lavish green fields and fluttering whites frocks alongside cruck Swedish architecture. This semi-beautiful paganism also provides extreme body horror through violent rituals, items that I will discuss later in this essay. To rid themselves of their pain, the Hårga woman amass into grotesque deformities huddled together, like tense creatures that cry out for life itself. My focus is not one of the assumed agonies, but the experience of being alive.

The film announces that ‘life screams at death’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 62), especially referenced alongside Bacon’s (1953) Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. This manifestation of the tortured inner-being in painted in its release, as the subconscious attempts to fly outwards the flesh body. Bacon’s Pope is a painting of inner-tragedy felt by the painter and Pope himself, both figures exposing themselves to the world for their instabilities. In this discussion of the exposed, the film presents cultural rites that accept life for all its beauties and terrors.

Dani, the main character, is joined in the united cohesion of the Hårga yelling, bawling and breaking down on the floor in the unity of connective pain. The physical act of them bawling uncontrollably in unison is an uncomfortable sight that serves a purpose. This act is removed from what might be considered as socially acceptable as life is found in the discomfort. The clan shedding their tears to rid themselves of horror, trauma and violence allows for primitive bonds to be made, literally devolving with each sonic. That grief of her parent’s death, her partner’s infidelity and the claustrophobic nightmare of the technicolor village result in the agonising scream. As if those forces had bundled up inside, and pushing and pulling until they made themselves known. This then results in healing, and the beauty of life removed from anxiety, almost like a descent into uplifting madness. Akin to the Pope’s scream, the Hårga scream towards their ‘love of life’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 56) so as not to dismiss the finality of “it”. It is in this very physical act of shouting, as the eyes bubble up and neck veins protrude, where Aster achieves in ‘capturing’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 56) life's intense forces emitting from inside the body.

Literally and metaphorically as the terror of the scream becomes the figure of freedom and life eventually, a new existence is produced. I find this form of being, of life, to be beautiful in the representation of basic urges, the primal need to “let it all out”. Aster achieves performances based on the girl’s physical bodies shifting and contorting to follow Dani as she collapses to the ground. Aster displays the ‘force of that weight’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 57) through Dani’s scream, that scream is inherent to the film as it becomes the first realised moment where Dani feels alive. This contrasts to the perceived terror associated with the scream, now it is a scream of life. Dani experiences personhood through the act of screaming.

Image via. A24

Geyskens (2010, p. 227) describes that ‘hysterical poses and spasms are the most natural of postures’ in that they manifest base expressions of ‘stress, pain or anguish’ (2010, p. 228). These emotions are universally felt so that cohesion of experience allows for both the viewer and Dani to collectively experience the shedding of an old life. In an interview with Francis Giacobetti, Bacon (2003, p. 29) stated that the scream was ‘the most direct symbol of the human condition’. That scream becomes visually cathartic in a weird sense, the audience experiencing the scream through performance (without joining a commune of deranged Swedes). Like Bacon’s screaming and distorted figures, in the surrounding horror and nightmares, there is a sensation of existence and being prescribed in and through their surrounding horrors. The screams in the film and of Bacon, in all their visual horror act like modems for the pain of life and life itself to be expressed.

The film draws inspiration from rudimentary European and early-Swedish cultures that make up the Hårga village. Throughout the film, the villagers enact their ritualistic ceremonies to invoke fertility through the use of body horror in ritual. To specifics, I point towards one of Dani’s culturally ingrate friends strung up in the blood eagle position. He is found with his spine exposed and hands up to the sky, his body now a vessel for the meat as a cycle and representation of life. Take Bacon’s (1946) Painting 1946 as a shot-for-shot reference to this blood eagle torment.

Image via. Francis Bacon

This painting depicts the body like meat hung up in a butchers shop, or man displayed in quasi-crucifixion similar to that of religious ceremonials. In regards to the flesh of man, Sylvester found that Bacon (2016, p. 23) equates man to that of ‘animals’, with this crucifixion being ‘a way behaviour to another’ (2016, p 23). I deduce that he exposes the cruelty of man, assumed from his slight pessimistic view of the world. Whilst we know this is inhumane, I must look at the film through the villager’s lens to understand their world, as flesh (for them) all pertain to a grander purpose, one of ritual. When this foreigner is strung up, this enacts a scheme wherein his body (meat) allows for this once in 90-year ritual to come to fruition, enacted to bring upon new life through the pagan doctrine of villagers. With this hanging flesh amongst other cruel rituals, I must stress that ritual (flesh, in this instance) has a life-bringing purpose if we look beyond the visual terror and lunacy. For another specific, at the age of 72, the villagers commit suicide by jumping off a large cliff to their deaths (ättestupa), resulting in their heads bursting open like watermelons. The viewer perceives it as horrifically inhumane, this ritual showcasing what man can do in his violent splendour. The villagers, however, do not find this sickening or detestable, they applaud it as it holds necessity to the larger scheme of life itself. This ritual is purposely committed to ensuring that when one dies, another lives in the promotion of fertility. This does not come to fruition, but the idea of the ritual has merit. Rituals, liturgies or doctrines prescribe meaning to man’s life and allow him to achieve purposeful existence through ideological articles.

As they fall, they achieve peace knowing their cause is one of righteousness. Their heads have been opened up, pouring out onto the earth to fertilise their tribe so that their people can thrive. Aster, like Bacon, does not shy upon the gruesome images he wants to explore, using their crushed heads the same way Bacon paints figures of ripe flesh and tissue. Aster does not engage in vapid pornography to repel the viewer, but to express the beauty of that image. Those colourful pastels and white summer dresses of the villagers intertwined the blood and carnage serve a purpose. Giacobetti found that Bacon (2003, p. 29) thought of the flesh as ‘beautiful’, those bloodied heads repulsive as they may be but the essence of the

meaty flesh is also what Aster wishes to uphold. Bacon (2003, p. 28) states that ‘violence is part of human nature’, found ‘even within the most beautiful landscape’. Specifically, the gruesome finality of life is expressed as one cycle has ended, another begins.

The final shot displays a deranged smile climbing upon Dani’s face as she watches gruesome ceremonies of burning peoples and slaughterous carnage in the name of ritual. She has become ‘indomitable’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 62) in traversing and beating her stressors with the help of murderous Aryans. Dani is now a ‘Figure of life’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 62) and not one of contempt, pain and anger. There is a mellowness to her, as with the rest of the clan, as they provide her with what could be described as a cleanse from the suffering of reality and acceptance into a new life. Although horrors of rape and murder surround her, we are not disgusted by them as Aster understands these items now equal to the newly purposeful Dani as May Queen of the village. Her smile is one disjoined from the stressors of reality, birthed from forces invisible at the hands of those removed from society themselves.

The film presents the deformed in spirit and in physical, as Aster provides us with the power of the clan, and their unity of doctrine that serves a purpose towards Dani. The Hårga village has prescribed that doctrine to that of a product of inbreeding, who is stated as an oracle from their Gods to enact a proposed ritual. Like Bacon and his deformed, unrecognisable faces, Ruben is a figure of high importance that only pushes the “undesirable” to places of importance, his visual characteristics on display and not hidden from the viewer. Take Bacon’s (1969) Self-Portrait for reference to Ruben, those hard brush-strokes along Bacon’s skin, the contortions highlighting the deformed Bacon on full display. That repulsive image in all its unfiltered quality is exactly what Aster wishes to achieve, both their elephant man like appearance has given importance to express their inner-deformities like their outer-ones. Nothing is concealed from the audience.

Images via. Francis Bacon & A24

Ruben’s character is solely existent to prescribe religious obedience to the village, resulting in life-bringing outcomes to their desire. He prescribes dogma in the form of splotchy, messy paintings smeared in heavy brushstrokes that the elders interpret as doctrine from the Gods. Rueben is a deformed child given purpose, a malignant purpose to spread a doctrine that informs the lives of deranged villagers but a purpose nonetheless. To equate the inane paintings of this child to typical religions, take phenomena wherein believers find Jesus in their sandwiches or assume statues of the Virgin Mary to be crying blood. In a way, the villagers do what we are doing right now: examining art for relatable meaning that informs us. Amongst these paintings exist murals, reminiscent of early folk designs, colonial in their aesthetic with a focus on basic figures conducting their everyday lives, to their rituals and lifestyles, that is.

Slightly separated via implied barriers that disjoin the figures, they are forced to trawl sequences of birth, death and eventual cycle of continuous sensation. These paintings depict romanticised animal cruelty, forced voyeuristic sex, slit wrists and female pubic mutilation. The Hårga lifestyle is not for me to judge, but to examine. These paintings are conceived as ‘snapshots of motion’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 40) wherein figures shift through their canvas, enclosed akin to Bacon’s Pope, here they exist as Aster’s playthings in his figurative dollhouse.

Images via. Tate Modern & A24

To summarise, Midsommar (2019) presents us with a horrific view into the lives of unbalanced Swedes, their sadistic acts only expressions of their life achieved through screaming, ritualistic homicide, doctrine and tapestry that stem back to Bacon.

References:

Midsommar 2019, film, Proton Cinema, Utah/Budapest

Deleuze, G 2004, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. DW Smith, Continuum, E-Book edition, retrieved 2 October 2019, https://d2l.deakin.edu.au/d2l/le/content/784862/viewContent/4563507/View

Bacon, F 1953, Study After Velàzquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Oil on canvas, retrieved 30 September 2019, https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/study-after-velazquezs-portrait-pope-innocent-x

Geyskens, T 2010, ‘Painting as Hysteria- Deleuze on Bacon’, in E Dorfman & JD Vleminck (eds), Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms, Leuven University Press, pp. 215-229, retrieved 1 October 2019, Google Books

Giacobetti, F 2003, ‘Francis Bacon: I painted to be loved’, The Art Newspaper, 14 June, p. 28-29, retrieved 30 September 2019, https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BACON_1992_Interview_with_Francis_Giacobetti_small.pdf

Bacon, F 1946, Painting 1946, Oil and pastel on canvas, retrieved 1 October 2019, https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/painting-1946

Sylvester, D 2016, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, retrieved 2 October 2019, DeakinSync Additional Texts

Bacon, F 1969, Self-Portrait, Oil on canvas, retrieved 3 October 2019, https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/self-portrait-2