[Week 8] The unknown spirit and the aesthetic of goriness
Ari Aster might be the type of director that I like. His film Hereditary(2018) and Midsommar (2019) both give me thrill at some point. I personally prefer the story of Midsommar better than Hereditary due to the less pressure of the story developing and the more aseptically more beautiful bloody scene. However, since the film Hereditary can create such a extreme unpleasant watching experience, it means this film has something special on it since it could create strong emotion to the audience. The suspension of the plot creates in the film and all the unexpected and suspicious moves the characters take are all being revealed in the end. I am not a fan of the cult culture theme film, but it is definitely considerable to dig into the cult people's mind to see what they are thinking when they make their moves.
The blurriness of human's inner thought and the existence of a higher dimension spiritual life are shown in Ari Aster's films. Hereditary is about invisible hyperphysical spiritual but also about people's "false" believes. As Carol mentions in the reading several times, there are many theories and saying shows how invasive female body and mind are in certain moments, when we sneeze, our bodies are open and the spirit can go through our body and invade our soul. However, what am I thinking is why all these "theories" cannot be considered as "imagination” and "coincidence illusion"? Just use my personal experience as example, right after I finish watching Hereditary, I went to sleep and felt the space around me so different than the day before I watch the film. I can hear more suspicious sounds and my imagination is over controlling my mind by showing me unpleasant image. All of these feeling are indicated by the film that I watch which give me a significant feeling and emotional changing, which get to a point that I don't even know what am I afraid of.
About the aesthetic part of Ari Aster's film, I just don't understand how can he makes all the gory scenes so clear, neat but gross at the same time. The way he always boldly showing a close-up of the most significant bloody scene in his film just hit my point well. The value of seeing people's face being smashed is so considerable that in what way we tend to enjoy seeing the most familiar thing in our life being thoroughly ruined. Maybe it just like the zombie and uncanny theory we read in the beginning of the term, when the line between the most familiar things and the unusual situation of body part being blurred, we have the tendency to observe the contradictory condition of the scene more than usual.
The blurriness of human's inner thought and the existence of a higher dimension spiritual life are shown in Ari Aster's films. Hereditary is about invisible hyperphysical spiritual but also about people's "false" believes. As Carol mentions in the reading several times, there are many theories and saying shows how invasive female body and mind are in certain moments, when we sneeze, our bodies are open and the spirit can go through our body and invade our soul. However, what am I thinking is why all these "theories" cannot be considered as "imagination” and "coincidence illusion"? Just use my personal experience as example, right after I finish watching Hereditary, I went to sleep and felt the space around me so different than the day before I watch the film. I can hear more suspicious sounds and my imagination is over controlling my mind by showing me unpleasant image. All of these feeling are indicated by the film that I watch which give me a significant feeling and emotional changing, which get to a point that I don't even know what am I afraid of.
About the aesthetic part of Ari Aster's film, I just don't understand how can he makes all the gory scenes so clear, neat but gross at the same time. The way he always boldly showing a close-up of the most significant bloody scene in his film just hit my point well. The value of seeing people's face being smashed is so considerable that in what way we tend to enjoy seeing the most familiar thing in our life being thoroughly ruined. Maybe it just like the zombie and uncanny theory we read in the beginning of the term, when the line between the most familiar things and the unusual situation of body part being blurred, we have the tendency to observe the contradictory condition of the scene more than usual.
Btw, the looks of this girl in Hereditary itself is already unpleasant enough for me to keep watching the film. Her facial expression is already a whole horror film mood there.
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