Film Club: Samuel Kronen / Hereditary (2018)
The essayist talks about race, black conservatism, suffering and Ari Aster's debut film.
Welcome to the Lack of Taste Film Club, where we talk to non-cinephiles and non-professional cinephiles about themselves and the movies they love. You will find a different flavour to Film Club entries going forward. Instead of discussing the chosen movie, we want to get to know the guest more. A general Q&A will come first, and the film comes second.
In this edition, we’re talking with Samuel Kronen, an essayist who has been published in Areo, Quillette and City Journal, among other publications. Mainly specialising in racial relations in America, Samuel’s essays have received praise from Glenn Loury to Eli Steele, the son of Shelby Steele, who is one of black conservatism’s most prominent public figures that Samuel profiled him, along with Thomas Sowell and author Ralph Ellison. That’s quit effusive praise. He also writes about the chronic illness that he had since the beginning of his adulthood. We talk about that as well. Samuel is also an ‘aspiring cinephile,’ so we’re also going to talk about Ari Aster’s debut film Hereditary.
This is the public version of our conversation, with the full conversation available for subscribers. If you would like to read that, please become one of them.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and why you are interested in writing about certain issues like race and suffering?
When I was around eighteen I developed a neuro-immune disease (MECFS) and pretty much everything I’ve done creatively since has stemmed from this ongoing crisis and the need to find some type of relief from it. So it’s quite selfish. My concern with suffering stems from my own pain and trying to process it in a human way, which I fail at most of the time. I had to miss out on going to university because of the illness, and at a certain point I began journaling as a form of catharsis and as something to do — asking myself loaded philosophical questions and trying to answer them in the best way I could. Writing, for me, emerged out of various inner tensions and conflicts that I felt an urgency to resolve. Writing has been my way of trying to accept my situation.
I have to say I’m moving away from writing about race, as the issue seems totally hopeless to me. I got into it as a hobby horse a few years ago and was blown away by the quantity and quality of the pushback. I got interested in the issue basically because the story of race in America seemed intuitively wrong to me and out of touch with my American experience. But, if I’m being honest, part of the appeal was that race is one of the most morally intense issues in America and that excited me a little. My interest emerged I think, out of a yearning to understand myself as an American, and was only somewhat related to my health issues. If anything, my suffering gave me a sense of immunity from being called privileged or whatever, though obviously, that didn’t work out. Writing about race as a white person is very stigmatizing. I can’t tell you how many Tinder dates I’ve missed out on, as a tiny example. I don’t regret writing about race and still hold most of the same views but I’ve said most of what I have to say about it and find myself getting stuck in the same places when I try to write about it. If I ever do write indirectly about the issue now, I write about what I think is interesting in human life and American culture without using race to get there.
A common theme in your profiles, from Thomas Sowell to Shelby Steele - is that they are unorthodox people who happen to be African-Americans. Some people like to refer to them as Black Conservatism, which has an array of figures from Sowell to Candace Owens (I'm aware of her flaws, just putting it out there that she is the most famous of the current bunch), but I look at it as Black contrarianism, which is also a pretty reductive term, but it's often perceived about in the public eye. Do you think that it's fair to connect their ideas with their skin colour when they are the odd ones out in this heavy conversation?
Well, in the United States at least, I think black conservatism has come to mean more than what it says. I don’t think it’s tied to any coherent vision of conservatism and it increasingly has less to do with being black. Shelby Steele has this great essay called The Loneliness of the “Black Conservative” where he goes into this. I think the term speaks to the whole iconography of race in America, where the meanings of words are twisted and hidden. What I love about the people you mention, beyond the value of their work itself, is that they went their own way, in spite of the insanely high cost of doing so. Because of them, it seems, there is less of a cost for others doing the same today. Race in America is all about stigma. Black conservatism has acted as a derogatory term implying ‘race traitor’. Terms like ‘racist’ or ‘Uncle Tom’ are just ways of stigmatizing people and shutting them down. Because of our grim racial history, there is a price to being publicly honest about race, and I can almost guarantee that anyone who stands up and says what they really think about this stuff will pay that price. What’s interesting to me is this whole collective psychology around race that we so rarely interrogate. I respect people who are members of groups that could easily cash in their racial-moral-victimhood points but choose not to out of some deeper allegiance, whether to themselves, humanity or the country. That, to me, is the meaning of black conservatism, though we should probably find another term, as it’s both racially and politically inflected to an unhelpful extent.
Tell me a bit about your chronic illness and why should people, particularly when the heterodox sphere and those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web have become more sceptical of the medical establishment, become more aware of this.
It’s hell, what can I say? MECFS is one of those mysterious chronic conditions that haven’t been quite figured out. In my case, it stemmed from a virus but was likely spurred on by some deeper immune issue. I’d list the symptoms but they are many, mostly having to do with immune and neurological issues. Very limited energy. Migraines. Haven’t eaten a full meal in years due to stomach issues, etc. I am very sad about it. Still, I have no doubt that at some point in the future, the disease will be far better understood and may lead to major changes in medicine that will ultimately help more people. It’s a little historic. So many of us know someone who knows someone who has some unexplainable weird thing and can hardly do anything at all. The research is catching up. It’s a tragically overlooked disease considering how evil it is.
In terms of the heterodox space being more sceptical of modern medicine, I suppose it depends on what we’re talking about. It seems to me that the problem with American healthcare is less ideological than practical. There are just millions of people in America who don’t have access to the healthcare they need or it is otherwise a bureaucratic nightmare to acquire, and that seems to me to be more important than any culture war-inflected issue. In the case of my condition at large, it is really about the human reaction to things we don’t understand. I think some people in the IDW space, many of whom lean libertarian or conservative, might buy into the idea that MECFS and related conditions are psychosomatic, which basically means the chain of causation runs from mind to body. It’s a complicated issue to untangle, but I’m quite convinced otherwise and my experience and many others I’ve met suggest as much, and I’d invite anyone who feels this way to spend some time hearing from people who treat, specialize in or have this or related diseases before they draw any conclusion. I think If people were more concerned with human suffering in all of its forms and less dismissive of things they didn’t understand, that would be good.
What is your favourite essay that you've written and are there any plans for what you will be doing in the future?
Honestly, I’m not super satisfied with anything I’ve written up to this point. I know that that’s the cliche suffering artist thing to say, but it’s really just low self-esteem. The essays I’ve enjoyed writing the most are probably the ones that were either the most personal, most challenging or most research-intensive. Any essay where I talk about my condition (namely my two most recent in Quillette) is usually pretty cathartic. I had this recent essay in City Journal about American Identity that I enjoyed researching — looking at obscure 20th-century American cultural historians and stuff like that. What I’d really like to do, though, is write films. I wrote my first screenplay last year, though the project naturally fell through, at least for the time being. I think I’m better with dialogue and describing scenes than I am with these essays. For me, the story is the ultimate, and I have a lot of personal stuff that can only really be processed and expressed through the story. I’d use the word “fiction,” but to me, everything you write, even in narrative form, has to be somewhat personal and real or it isn’t going to be good. Beyond that, I’m starting a substack newsletter this year on humanism, suffering and extracting light from the darkness that could culminate in a larger nonfiction memoir piece.
Before we go into your pick, do you read about film and is there anyone that you follow?
There’s plenty of great film writing out there if you look for it, but I can’t think of anyone who has directly influenced me. I’ve learned more about movies from video essays on YouTube than from the movie section of The New York Times. I think video is a better medium for film analysis because you can show exactly what you’re talking about and the visual component is so central to the film. Acolytes of Horror, Thomas Flight, and Karsten Runquist are some good film channels on YouTube. I think the best way to learn about movies is to enjoy movies, and on top of that, if you can, read screenplays and film writing and try to learn about the art on a human level.
How does the film really fit with your philosophy on cinema?
I was kind of a latecomer to both essay writing and film writing. I think I enjoyed movies about the same as anyone else growing up. I don’t have a story about how I saw a movie as a kid and had an artistic awakening. But after getting sick, watching a great movie was both an escape and a way back into life. The art of filmmaking epitomizes and reflects what it means to be human, I think. Movies are not like real life but reflect the interior human vision of life, how we feel and see things. So it’s about us. I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily watch everything, but I’ll get obsessed with one movie or one filmmaker and watch them an ungodly amount of times and then that would be my way into another film or filmmaker. I’ve probably seen Dallas Buyers Club at least fifty times. Fight Club, I’ve seen maybe a hundred times. Hereditary certainly fits into the idea that film reflects life while offering flight from it. It just gives me a certain feeling, at once conveying some of the darkness and suffering of human life and relationships while offering the possibility of transcendent relief and release.
How does the film’s approach to grief connect with of suffering that you often so write about?
For me it’s quite relieving to forget about my troubles and watch this family experience the most horrifying nightmare, only to leave you with a feeling of cosmic awe at the end. The film is very much about suffering, as Aster has said. It is a dark story that gradually builds into catharsis. I think much of the reason we like certain things are unconscious. But, again, it’s a relief for me. Life is a nightmare. So anything that reflects that but also gives you a bigger feeling is cathartic. At first, I was actually scared to see the film, bringing me back to memories of seeing The Ring way too young. The movie isn’t scary, though, or the horror is more psychological. Beyond the horror aspect, the emotions are very real. “I was scared. I didn't feel like a mother,” says Annie at one point. That’s a very real feeling, and then he inserts the supernatural around these feelings to make that feel kind of real, too. So, yes, my love for film is connected to my interest in understanding human suffering, and it is a great device for dealing with the horror and tragedy of life. Hereditary somehow manages to both humanize and dehumanize suffering in a tragicomic fashion, quite literally in the film on both fronts. I think you can illuminate the stuff that is human through the stuff that is scary and difficult and strange and this film does that well.
Ari Aster established himself with a distinct visual style in Hereditary that I felt was only limited within the first act, primarily where the camera zooms into the miniature dollhouse, which reminds me a bit of a sinister Wes Anderson. Having also seen Midsommar, it looks like Aster has emphasized that style even further, but it also has its limits because much of it doesn't achieve the desired effect of being scary. Would you agree?
It is like a sinister Wes Anderson. Aster’s aesthetic is a big part of the appeal for me. He talks a lot about artifice and the things he found scary as a kid were kitsch and camp, so it makes sense that he put that in his horror stories. I think that artificial feelings can be very scary when juxtaposed with real pain. It’s a balance. Aster is not basically a horror filmmaker, he’s a genre filmmaker. Just check out the trailer for his next film, Beau is Afraid. It has elements of horror but also comedy and romance. Aster says that genre is about catharsis, and horror is just one means to achieve that. So, no, I don’t think the artifice of his films makes them less scary. Have you seen his short, The Strange Thing About The Johnsons? It’s terrifying, in a way. I guess people appreciate different kinds of horror. I like Aster’s movies and Hereditary in particular because the horror leaves you feeling kind of good somehow. I can’t explain it exactly, but that’s a huge part of the appeal for me: Achieving catharsis through darkness and suffering, which I’d like to do in my own life and work.
Rewatching this, I felt that the aspect of Charlie stood out to me more, because she had a connection with Annie's mother. Before her birth, they didn't have a healthy relationship, thus Charlie wouldn't treat give Annie the same treatment. There's something interesting about the relationship because while Charlie is detached, she isn't entirely checked out of herself. Her demise, caused by her nut allergy, feels less contrived than I expected. What do you think?
Charlie is one of the characters I identify with the most, which is kind of hilarious because she’s a 12-year-old demon child. She makes the film for me, her little ticks and weirdnesses. She is humanized, in a way, more through what she does than what she says. We don’t see enough of the relationship between her and Annie beyond a one-sided conversation and a general sense of disconnect, but even in that one conversation much is revealed and a whole history could be drawn from it their relationship. For me, the film is ultimately about the inertia of human relationships and how things build up when we aren’t honest with those we love.
Upon my rewatch, not much of my experience has changed. The performances, particularly from Toni Collette, are really good, but the direction and writing leave a lot to be desired. How many times have you seen this film and what have you overall learned from watching Hereditary compared to another horror?
I suppose it depends on what you desire. I’ve seen it too many times to say. I know some people are super annoyed with the whole “elevated” horror thing, but you know what, so many great films had weird receptions and backlashes at first that are now classics. I like horror movies that deal with real human stuff, but in an insane and surrealistic way. That’s the fun of the genre. I’m currently outlining my own horror screenplay and, unsurprisingly, it’s very much up Aster’s alley in terms of building the supernatural element around the deeper human relational stuff. Again, life is a horror. Human beings are dark. Culture is, in many ways, evil. So I think horror filmmakers, not that I’m any authority, should dive right into that stuff and use it to bring out a big special feeling about life and the universe and humanity that is the essence of art. We need to feel that big stuff, but it has to be real and grounded and reality is dark. It’s a hard thing to capture in horror. I think Hereditary accomplishes that and that’s why people love it and why they love Aster and why he’s going to keep making great films that will be remembered while the dissenters go on about why these movies aren’t true horror or whatever.