Hail Paimon!

Hereditary reconsidered and a message to Bad Religion fans

It finally happened. I succumbed to a sponsored ad on Instagram and made an impulsive purchase. Shockingly, I have regrets. 

The item in question is a fancy hardcover book from A24, the film company that makes idiosyncratic movies like Midsommar, The Lighthouse, and Uncut Gems. 

The book that caught my attention was the deluxe screenplay for Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I didn’t like Hereditary when I saw it, but after seeing Midsommar, Aster’s follow-up, I wanted to watch it again. 

The book also has an intro by Bong Joon Ho, an essay by Leslie Jamison, 24 full-bleed frames from the film, and a shot list written by Aster himself. So I bought the book and it arrived surprisingly quickly and each night last week I read 20 or 30 pages of the screenplay and re-watched the corresponding section of the film. Now I have some thoughts. 

If you wish to see Hereditary but haven’t you should do so now. It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime. This is your spoiler warning. 

Here’s why I didn’t like Hereditary the first time I saw it:

1. I’d been tricked by the trailers and previews into thinking the movie is about Charlie the daughter. So when she gets decapitated a third of the way through the movie (page 49 of a 140-page script) I was more than a little taken aback. That’s on me. But what bothered me even more…

2. … is the extremely cavalier way this traumatic event is handled by the family. After Charlie’s gruesome death I didn’t expect Charlie’s brother, Peter, who caused the accident to go up to his room without telling anyone about it and pretend like it didn’t happen. I didn’t expect Charlie’s dad, Steve (played by Gabriel Byrne), to be so calm about the incident. I didn’t expect for the family to simply move on. Although the heart-wrenching scene where Charlie’s mother, Annie (played by Toni Collette), weeps for her daughter is moving and powerful, the way she goes back to work and defends making a miniature of Charlie’s death “a neutral view of the accident” left me cold. Again, this is my issue, but it’s not a matter of the characters behaving in a way I don’t like, but the way grief itself has been trivialized—miniaturized, if you will.

I’m very suspicious of art that presents death the way many American families do to small children when there’s a death in the family. They act like nothing’s wrong and shuffle through a sanitized experience. The sudden death of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a family, and I didn’t buy Aster’s depiction of these events in his film. It did not ring true for me, which made it harder for me to buy into the supernatural events that follow Charlie’s death. I make no apologies for this; it’s possible my life experience is different than yours. Hereditary is not the only film that’s bothered me for this reason.

3. Midway through the movie I was rather confused about who or what was causing so many problems for the Graham family. A ghost? A malevolent spirit? And if so to whom does this spirit belong? Annie’s mother? Her daughter Charlie? Someone or something else? What’s up with the clicking sound that Charlie makes that continues after her death? And what about that weird light that pesters Peter? And the ghosts in the corner? What are we to make of all the strange words and symbols? And why are there so many goddam heads? And why is Annie literally crawling the walls? It all felt rather diffuse to me. 

4. After following Charlie’s story, and the séance, and Peter’s unraveling, I was not at all prepared for the Paimon cult party at the end. Who the fuck is Paimon? Where did all these people come from? Why are they naked? It all felt rather slapdash to me and I left the theater extremely disappointed.

Fast forward to the following year when Midsommar came out and I left the theater with a very different feeling. I was buzzing with adrenalin as I tried to process the immensity of what I’d just seen. You know that feeling you get when you see something that’s not quite right? A car that’s going to fast, for example, and you get a tingly feeling that slows everything down as the car that just sped by you crashes into another vehicle and spins off the road? Midsommar is like 120 minutes of that. 

Midsommar is about a cult and the film is extremely invested in its symbols and iconography. The cult’s belief system is painstakingly laid out, and while not all of it is revealed and some of it is intentionally misleading, it’s clear to any viewer of Midsommar that the filmmaker has spent a lot of time thinking about it and is meticulous in its presentation. (This impression was confirmed when I read the screenplay the very next day.) That more than anything made me want to revisit Hereditary.

I’m really glad I read the script and re-watched Hereditary in tandem because I picked up on all kinds of things that I had missed before, namely those creepy cultists are present from the very beginning.

The first thing I noticed is that the film starts where it ends: with Peter. Steve comes into Peter’s room to wake him up for the funeral, which is kind of weird since both Peter and Charlie are asleep while Steve and Annie are dressed. Annie is already in the car. 

From the very beginning of the film, the screenplay is very clear about the necklace that Annie wears and how it matches the one Annie’s mother wears in the coffin. The symbols, Aster tells us, are sigils, which are used in ritual magick. 

I don’t know much about sigils but I learned in David Gray’s memoir about Bauhaus that sigils are, like so much of magick, a kind of wish fulfillment. If want your enemy to come to harm, you create a sigil that expresses this desire. (Not that you’d want to do that.)

I’ve read that sigils are to be kept secret. They lose their power if they are discovered. But in Hereditary they’re everywhere. Not only do Leigh and her daughter wear them around their neck, but also in the screenplay Aster calls attention to the sigil that has been carved into the telephone pole that Peter smashes into. 

Re-watching the first section of the film, I picked up on something at the funeral that’s not called out in the screenplay, namely this creepy cultist:

So right from the jump it’s clear that someone put this sigil around Leigh’s neck and that someone carved it into the telephone pole. There’s a conspiracy afoot and Annie is involved, but how? 

Annie goes to a meeting for people dealing with grief, which is maybe the only normal thing she does during the whole movie, even though she clumsily lies to her husband the therapist about it. At the meeting she spills some horrible details about her family. Her mother has dissociative identity disorder (perhaps), her father starved himself to death (poisoned by Leigh?) and her brother hanged himself because he thought his mother was “putting people inside of him.” Well, not only was he probably right, but this is exactly what Annie does: she creates re-enactments of family drama and puts miniature people inside of them. 

So maybe Annie is on to her mother if only on a subconscious level. (Her sleepwalking, by the way, suggests that her subconscious knows exactly what is happening and is actively trying to thwart her mother’s scheme by killing Peter and herself.) In the movie, we’re concerned for Annie’s sanity. Her mother’s death has triggered all kinds of trauma. But in the screenplay the threat is much more palpable. We’re concerned for the safety of Annie and her family. 

There are scenes in the film when we are given a glimpse of something quick and ephemeral. But the screenplay eliminates all doubt as to what we are seeing. While Peter smokes pot at his bedroom window someone watches from outside the house. When Charlie goes outside she walks into the woods and this is what she sees:

“A ring of BURNING TORCHES has been set up. Within this ring, an OLD WOMAN’S INANIMATE BODY (dead?) stands erect – tied to a pole with her arms strapped to outstretched planks.” 

Clumsy writing aside (arms can be outstretched, but planks of wood?) this is clearly the corpse of Annie’s mother Leigh. Even though it’s daytime, the torches have been lit, possibly to keep away bugs and drive away the smell. In the film it’s couched in Charlie’s trancelike vision: what the fuck is that? That can’t be what we think it is, can it?

It can and the implications are more horrible than any nightmare. 

It’s also helpful to know that in the screenplay we learn much earlier than we do in the film that Leigh’s gravesite has been desecrated. The cultists, having dug up Leigh’s body, are watching the house and waiting for an opportunity to go inside and leave Leigh’s headless body in the attic as a sacrifice.  

Why are they doing this? 

Leigh has been trying to summon a demon for some time. Her son caught on and killed himself. Annie kept her mother away from her grandson Peter but “gave her” Charlie. Charlie, however, won’t do. The demon Leigh wants to summon covets a male body. (We find this out toward the end of both the movie and the screenplay.) The demon’s name is Paimon and although it’s never stated his summoning requires three heads. 

Throughout the movie, the cultists work behind the scenes to take advantage of Annie’s family while their guard is down after Leigh’s death. (Digging up the corpse, staging the body.) They orchestrate a second sacrifice with the killing of Charlie and then they move in on Annie when she is most vulnerable. 

Leigh’s best friend Joan is the ringleader of all this and cruelly manipulates Annie into summoning the demon. In the movie, this unraveling happens rather quickly, but in the screenplay there are many more references to something stinking up the house and the flies that seem to be emanating from the attic, that leads to the film’s shocking conclusion.

While my understanding and appreciation of Hereditary was enlarged and enriched by reading the screenplay and re-watching the film, I’m not happy with the book. The extras offer very little. Ho’s introduction is just four paragraphs long. Jamison’s less than 15 and is more autobiographical than analytical. Frankly, I was hoping for more.

The frames, however, are an epic fail because you’d literally have crack the binding open to see the entire image. Not once or twice, but every time. This is what happens when people with little experience designing books proof something on screen.

Someone lost their job over this. 

Ultimately, I feel pretty foolish for having shelled out so much money for a book I’ll probably never open again. Next time I see a book I want on Instagram, I’ll do my homework first. 

Do What You Want Update

It’s been a little more than a week since Do What You Want came out and so far it’s been an incredible experience. I did three virtual events with the members of Bad Religion and it was great to see their faces and hang out with them again. (If you missed out you can watch the best of these events here.) 

I also got to spend some time with the tour manager, Rick Marino, and Christina White, who handles all the publicity, media, branding, etc. They both do an incredible amount of work behind the scenes and are great people. I mean of course they are. 

Also, my vertigo is much better now. (Thanks for your concern.)

For publication week, I put my personal projects aside and simply enjoyed the experience, which was very easy to do because Bad Religion fans are the best. 

When I was hired to write the book that would become Do What You Want, I had a lot of nostalgia for the role Bad Religion played in my life when I was a young man, and I appreciated what the band had accomplished in its career, but I wouldn’t say I was a hardcore fan. I have a friend who recalls the time I was annoyed with him at a party many years ago because I wanted to listen to something—anything—other than Bad Religion.  

But over the course of researching and writing this book, something funny happened: I became a fan. I don’t know when it happened but during the recording of Age of Unreason I was sitting at the console between Brett and Brian while he was playing some guitar solos that were so haunting and achingly beautiful I could feel the molecules in my body rearranging. I had the strangest urge to reach out and touch Brian’s guitar, which would not have been good. I was in the moment, a moment that was being memorialized for all time, and I was not quite myself. Perhaps that’s strange behavior for a journalist, but not for a fan. 

The last few days I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Bad Religion fans from all over the planet. I’ve received the kindest notes and comments. Some of you are already on their second reading of the book. A friend even sent me some Bad Religion fan art. To be perfectly honest, this might be the most entertaining week I’ve spent online. I’m immensely grateful for all of it.

This book wasn’t written for critics. There was no mandate. There were no special agendas or axes to grind. This book was written for the fans. The super fan who sees Bad Religion multiple times a year and the soccer mom who hasn’t seen the band in a decade but knows all the words to her favorite songs. The goal was to share the story of Bad Religion in a way that every fan could appreciate no matter how old they were or where in the world they lived.

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered, bought, or requested Do What You Want from your local library. I appreciate all the messages of congratulations and support. Please know I’m trying to respond to every one.

I’m not a musician. I don’t make records or perform in front of thousands of fans. But I have written several books and the experience of sharing Do What You Want with you has been the most enjoyable by far. You truly are the best fans in the world. 

Thank you.