Reflections on culpability in Ari Aster's Hereditary
I'm a bit late to the Hereditary (2018) discussion, but it's such a fascinating film. Why not talk about it anyway?
I'm a complete Philistine when it comes to thinking and writing about film, so I hesitate to criticize professional reviewers who saw Hereditary and came away with certain conclusions. I won't be reviewing whatever's been said on social media, and will freely admit to lazily avoiding most of that discussion.
All that being said: I feel like most people missed the point. Yes, it is a deeply unsettling film; and as a cinematic horror experience, it is an absolute masterpiece. Yes, as the title implies and the text of the film makes very clear, it is a film about a traumatized family that deals with their trauma poorly. And yes, the whole cast has done incredible work as actors.
For those of us who are intimately familiar with certain kinds of family, friends, and romantic partners, the central character of Annie Graham (skillfully played by Toni Collette) is all too familiar, and representative of a kind of tragedy and a feeling of 'everyday horror' where supernatural elements are maybe superfluous.
When it comes to genre fiction, oftentimes we wonder about categories and whether or not someone like Annie is a victim, a mere protagonist, or a villain protagonist. Or maybe the question itself is irrelevant. But I want to draw your attention to the culpability of Annie, and what that means for the film as if the text were read literally.
Spoilers ahead.
Let's say that Annie Graham is absolutely the victim of a decades-long scheme hatched by her cultist mother and her fellow-travellers, and all supernatural elements that appeared in the film literally occurred. Is she then a victim of circumstances beyond her control? She certainly felt like she was helpless, and we as the audience are invited or forced to experience that helplessness and fear along with her. The classic horror trope of being disbelieved by her husband at the critical moment would have come off as quaintly clichéd in the hands of a less skilled director, cast and crew.
But the reality for Annie, reading the movie literally, is that she could have avoided her fate (and the tragedies that befell the rest of her family) at many points. The most important moment in the movie is when she orders her 13-year-old daughter, Charlie (who is has a severe nut allergy and is strongly hinted as having ASD; played by Milly Shapiro) to accompany her 16-year-old son to a rich classmate's house party. The son, Peter (played by Alex Wolff) is obviously going to a party full of drink and drugs, though he lies about it. My reading of it is that Annie is not that stupid, and of course knows exactly the kind of place Peter is going to.
Annie orders Charlie to go with him, even though Charlie insists repeatedly that she does not want to. She then orders Peter to take her, even though he repeatedly insists that he doesn't want to. There is no clear reason why Annie even wants Charlie out of the house at this moment, other than that she would find it vaguely annoying that Charlie is around at all.
Why? Charlie is the “golden child.” Peter is fairly obviously the “scapegoat.” Even for someone like Annie, this is an unusual and unnecessary step to take. Is mild annoyance sufficient reason? It should be obvious that sending a 13-year-old girl to a party with significantly older teenagers is risky. If Charlie were left to her own devices, she would just make strange little crafts in her bedroom, mirroring her mother's own artistic work in miniatures. Do we, as the audience, buy that Annie was just concerned that Charlie was too socially isolated, and that yes indeed the party would be good for her?
The infamous scene of Charlie's death transpires, thus allowing the cult's scheme to go ahead at all. As soon as the most acute period of grief as pased, Annie places absolute blame on Peter. At dinner, Peter compliments his father's cooking, while Annie pokes at her plate without eating anything (as if a petulant child). Annie makes art for a living, and is seemingly bankrolled by her husband Steve (played by Gabriel Byrne). And Annie gets heated up, in response to a gentle attempt by her son to check in with her: “You okay, mom?”
She becomes angry. She monologues, working herself up to a screaming match of only one screamer. There are many interesting features of this monologue, but I'll focus on one thing. As she becomes increasingly enraged, she exclaims, “[...] and all I get back is that fucking face on your face!” Not that look, or that smirk on your face. That face on your face. A passing admission that Peter had done absolutely nothing wrong, while blaming him entirely for his sister's death for the crime of existing.
When Peter has finally had enough of her callous comments at the dinner table, he makes his rejoinder: why did she send Charlie with him to the party?
The mere suggestion that Annie could be held responsible for an unwise decision that lead to such a horrible outcome leads to an expression of absolute, gut-wrenching hatred on her face. Those of us familiar with these kinds of blow-ups know this expression well, a haunting expression suitable for real-life horror. She barges away, unable to say anything more.
Throughout the film, she sneaks around, Gollum-like, trying to avoid being seen. This is a subtle thing, but Annie appears to purposefully wait until everyone else is out of the house before she meets with Joan (played by Ann Dowd). When she is asked where she's been, she lies, again for no apparent reason.
Later in the movie, she neglects to call 911 when she discovers the one thing you should definitely call 911 about: a headless corpse in her attic (Steve criticizes her for this). When Annie sees that casting Charlie's sketchbook into the fire will burn up whoever tried to destroy it, she tries to cajole her unwilling husband to burn it instead. Steve is duly immolated for his troubles, someone who throughout the film acted passively, always trying to play peacemaker that invariably lets the more aggressive party off the hook. Even though he knows that doing what Annie asks is unreasonable, he thinks to himself that if he just plays along, his wife can be placated, and she can finally stop with the nonsense. It is the final supplication he gets to perform in his entire life.
Far be it for me to insinuate anything about Ari Aster's family. But his depiction of these types of behaviours is viscerally familiar to anyone who experienced this for themselves. Another film of his, Beau Is Afraid (2023), is far more surreal, and yet altogether familiar in the same way.
Hereditary appears, to me at least, to be primarily a reflection on intergenerational trauma. Of course the mother orchestrated the whole thing. Of course the trauma is hereditary. And to some extent, we see Annie's misery and we empathize, we relate to her slowly dawning horror as she realizes the extent to which her own mother orchestrated this nightmare. One can only imagine what happened in the past, with Annie's childhood and what must have been an agonizing relationship with her mother. But what of her own sins?
Without Charlie's death, initiated by a needless order to make her children do things they don't want to do, there is no possibility for the cult to enact its complicated ritual. By constantly lying to her husband and children, there is no chance to be a family unit that faces adversity together. At the end of the day, it is Annie who kills her husband, in the spur-of-the-moment appearing to be a desperate attempt to gain control and 'fix' a situation, and thereby destroy him with fire. Was it only (yet) another accident?
I suppose there are two ways to read this film. Perhaps there is this complicated, twisted culpability, in which there are both the sins of the parents and the grandparents and perhaps even further back, a choiceless affair that implicates everyone and dooms everyone equally. And the other interpretation might be: man, my mom sure is an asshole! Oh well!
