FILM

TRICKY HORROR

the troubling aesthetic of Ari Aster

By Jamie Rose Valera

Every moment is awful

American filmmaker, Ari Aster, gained a tremendous amount of attention after the opening of his horrific drama, Hereditary, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and starred a magnetic Toni Colette as a mother who goes way past traditional notions of parenting. Its 80-million-dollar-plus box office take attested to the fact that Aster had hit upon a nerve in the culture. He went back and hit another nerve with his next film, Midsommar (2019), another drama of family and community gone wrong in ways too numerous to count. Although he seemed to come out of the blue fully formed, Aster has been honing his unique vision of the world for quite some time and specifically in a series of short films that preceded his hits. His MFA thesis at the American Film Institute, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011) shows that Aster’s ideas and cultural preoccupations were already strange, disturbing, and fully thought out before his breakout hits.

The style of The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is what we might call hyper “normal.” The film begins by using the tropes of upper-middle class white America, but uses African-American actors. The film takes place in suburbia, the family seems modest and soft-spoken, and their clothes look like they were purchased straight out of the country club store. This has the effect of disrupting our preconceived notions and clichés of what constitutes black and white life. The absurdity and “out-of-placeness” of grafting a so-called white identity onto a so-called African-American one is an obvious joke. In one such scene we see the family posing for one of those family holiday photo cards and you think this couldn’t be whiter, even though what we’re thinking is neither fair to black nor white people (Figure 1).

(Figure 1.) My God, a sweater vest!

But for God’s sake, the father’s wearing a sweater vest. In our national imagination what self-respecting African-American male would ever wear this? He’d be laughed out of the club, that is the African-American club. But that’s part of Aster’s nefarious project, because we all know that all identities are constructed and limited at the same time. Aster creates a seemingly normal family in an all-too-perfect suburban neighborhood and yet manages to deftly make them seem out-of-place, as if the normal and the strange could cohabit in the same place.

Of course, the normal and the strange colliding is the basis for the whole movie and certainly catches the disturbing nature of the opening scene. Here the father walks in on and catches his young son masturbating. The father is open and laid back about his son’s sexual exploration and what at first seems embarrassing gradually seems normal. It is entirely possible the son and father are close and can talk openly to each other about such matters and that puts us at ease after the initial shock. But after the father leaves the room our sense of ease is quickly disrupted, or destroyed, or obliterated, or choose your mode of destruction, etc. When the camera shifts, we see the photo the son is masturbating to: the father in his late twenties, wearing a bathing suit.

In one deft move, Aster creates a situation that is, shall we say, way too close. The son cannot escape his father’s presence, and vice versa, as they literally live under the same roof and share the same blood. A parent walking in on his or her child during an intimate act is one example of too close. We expect either or both parties to retreat to their separate quarters, embarrassed. And for a moment, in the father’s cool reaction, that happens, but when we see the father in the picture all bets are off. The horror is about proximity and nothing can get as close or as horrific as family, which is really Aster’s calling card. Aster shatters both our distance and safety net in the first three-and-a-half minutes.

Coming back to the family photoshoot, we see the son looking to his father in admiration and the mother deliberately turns his head back to face the camera. She does this twice. She’s almost like a robot acting off preprogrammed commands. She’s correcting his behavior but without any kind of annoyed parental vibe.

(Figure 2.) Something's not quite right here, in many ways

The son’s obsession with his father grows as he grows older, which we later see when he gets married. After the ceremony, the son gropes the father, and we see the father’s discomfort (Figure 2). This establishes that the son is coming onto the father, and not the other way around; their power dynamic is completely reversed. And if that moment is not obvious enough, Aster throws in another scene to drive the notion of the son’s sexual aggressiveness even further.

The mother has a brief conversation with two guests, and one of them remarks on the son’s tuxedo and describes Isaiah as a man who will “break many hearts,'' as if he were the greatest catch in the world. We know this could not be further from the truth and we’re pretty sure the mother thinks or wonders the same thing. So, when she spies on the father and son through a peephole in a fence (which is as big a cliche as it gets for spying, but also somehow perfect and brilliant) our suspicions are confirmed. The son begins to undress the father, rather aggressively, while the father stands there helplessly, vulnerable and defeated. The mother reels back from her initial shock and disgust, and then collects herself as if nothing happened. This is a typical Aster move, to show us the horrific, and yet to somehow let it stay the course; he will later deploy these moves in both Heredity and Midsommer.

The scene changes to the mother and daughter in-law in the kitchen preparing for dinner. The daughter politely asks, “shall I set the table,” to which the mother calmly replies “that’s okay, everything’s under control” and then giggles and hums in a weird way. Here we understand that the mother is playing a role in all this, that she too is part of the horror. She knows what has happened and is happening and later reveals that she suspected it all along, but has kept her silence. Aster effectively uses silence to string along the tension he’s already created for the audience. By holding onto the quietness, we are forced to wait and see how the mother will handle the situation, later.

Be quiet, someone's always watching

But for now, we learn that the father is a published poet. He works away at his computer finishing a manuscript clearly about his son. The final words tell us he feels a sense of guilt and remorse in raising him, probably about the initial opening conversation, and points some of the blame toward himself as the victim. The manuscript ends up being burned at the end of the film after the mother murders their son. We suspected that her silence was a kind of complicity, but not that it would turn homicidal. Her ignoring the father’s (silent) pleas for help symbolically bring murder and silence together. Death and censorship, Aster suggests, effectively bury shame and secrets.

Throughout the film, Aster uses the different power dynamics as a tool to subvert structures of “normality.” And in a grander scheme, Aster questions how these topics of toxic masculinity, black and white body politics, and abuser and victim relations are represented and interpreted. By putting an African-American family in a hyper “normal” white, suburban setting, Aster creates a space that allows him to question cultural stereotypes. The roles of abuser and victim are switched and challenges the general trope of the father being in a position of power over his son. The mother becomes the quiet bystander instead of their son, who ironically becomes the abuser.

The hyper-normality of everything we see works with his use of silence to reel in the audience quickly and effectively without the safety nets of distance and antirealism. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons demonstrates the early stages of the recognizable Ari Aster aesthetic that continues to be perfected in his great work in Hereditary and Midsommar.

©Jamie Rose Valera and the CCA Arts Review