The Heart's Revenge on the Brain

Just watched the horror movie "Hereditary" produced by A24. 

***Spoiler Alert***

The plot is quite simple, but the execution is so perfect that it gives me afterthoughts more than any other horror movies I've seen these years. It's about a family whose grandma just passed away recently, with a psychiatrist father, a miniature artist mother, a 16yo son and a 13yo daughter. The daughter died from an accident, in which the son should be partly blamed. The mother went to a bereavement support group and made acquaintance with a woman Joan who afterwards talked her into performing a séance to call back the dead daughter, which she did successfully. With strange things happening in the house, the mother was convinced that Joan set things up to harm her son, and when she tried to protect the son, she caused the father burned to death and lost herself too. The final scene ended with the son waking up only to find his father dead and his mother chasing him into the attic. Seeing the mother cutting off her own head, the son, horrified, jumped out and dropped dead, controlled by a light, went up to a small tree house, and was hailed the demon king Paimon by a bunch of naked believers.

One thing that troubles me is the image of beheaded women (the daughter, the mother, the grandma) especially at the final scene when the latter two bowing their headless bodies to the demon king. I find it highly annoying to consider a headless person -- isn't the personality, the individual, together with his/her head at least? If the headless body can represent the person, where should we place the head, the brain, among the whole person?

This, I think, is the main theme of the movie. I call it "the heart's revenge on the brain" because the movie is precisely about how we moderners think, rationally, that the brain is where the self or the ego lies, whereas actually our rational thinking is totally powerless when faced with irrational phenomena like a self-moving glass on the table or an auto-writing notebook, and that's when the heart replaces the brain to be the true representative of our being. The mother was most cynical towards Joan's pitch of the séance, just as we all do, but when she actually felt the moving glass and the auto-writing chalk on the chalkboard, the rational self gave up pretty easily.

The psychiatrist father is apparently an embodiment of the modern rationality. Even till the end he didn't give up his rationality, didn't believe in the mother's judgment of the situation, which is truer than the father's, and by his non-belief he didn't stop himself from being burned death anyway. The father's insensitiveness towards the situation is typical enough. We tend to rationalize things to a point where there will be no surprises in our lives at all. Everything is already explained away. There's no wonder anymore. But the heart longs for wonder nontheless. And so the heart starts to revenge.

This theme can be seen from another angle. In the end the demon worshippers called the son by the daughter's name "Charlie", indicating that it was the daughter, the female, who owned the male body now. The rational male body possessed by the irrational female soul. Headless women conquered head-ful men. And in the end we are all willing to bow to the male-body-female-soul demon king, to diss the trinity of the outdated Christianity (the promise of unity between body and soul), and to destroy the all too rational world with an inexplicable (therefore evil) power. What can be more accurate, of all the visions of the contemporary world?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Family education is not that important

(translated from my Chinese blog) This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world. The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 11 continues the discussion of external factors hindering genius individuals from the previous section, shifting from professional education (unqualified philologists) to family education. It's no surprise that Nietzsche views the importance of family education very lowly; ultimately, there are too few cases where families can provide the life possibilities for geniuses. Let it be considered how differently a science is propagated from the way in which any special talent in a family is transmitted. The bodily transmission of an individual science is something very rare. Do the sons of philologists easily become philologists? Dubito. Thus there is no such accumulation of philological c...
Read more

The value of life depends to a great extent on pure hazard

(translated from my Chinese blog) This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world. "We Philologists" Section 1. Starting from the two main themes of classical linguistics and education, Nietzsche discusses how the specialization of education leads to premature decisions that result in foolish choices in life. He also explores the dilemma of choosing a career: it’s impossible for a person to know what kind of career they should pursue while actually engaging in that career at the same time. As a result, life becomes something determined purely by chance. To what a great extent men are ruled by pure hazard, and how little reason itself enters into the question, is sufficiently shown by observing how few people have any real capacity for their professions and callings, and how many square pegs there are in round holes: happ...
Read more

Can Writing be fun?

 My dear friend suggested, after reading my last post, that writing can have more than one purpose, and what I was arguing, namely writing as a form of thinking, was merely one of the many purposes for writing. For instance, writing can be for remembering; writing can also be for fun. Now I would like to leave the remembering part for the next post. For now, let's talk about fun. Can writing be fun? Yes. But what kind of fun is that? To answer this question, there are basically two approaches, both of which lead to the same conclusion. I will start with the easy approach: the supply side of the fun. Now, what are the things that are mostly considered fun? Entertainments. Movies. Music. Video games. Hanging out with friends. Partying. Sightseeing. Travelling. TikTok. Youtube. Netflix. These things can be placed into an imaginary spectrum, with one side being totally brainless, and the other side requiring some sort of effort. Let's take music for example. Listening to music can ...
Read more