Freire in Midsommar (2019): performative critical consciousness as social ritual
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the horror film Midsommar through the lens of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed , centered on the concept of critical consciousness and its modern renditions as digital or even performative activism. Midsommar extends upon familiar narratives like The Lottery to present a blurring of the binary between those who only appear critically-conscious and their adversaries. The stark contrast between a murderous religious cult, the Hårga, and a group of graduate students in anthropology fades throughout the film as the director meticulously presents ritual among the former group in relation to gaslighting among the latter. The emphasis on gore which almost borders on exploitative serves to emphasize not just the perils of compromised critical-consciousness, but also how individuals can choose to exploit social justice towards personal gain. Midsommar breaks through the digital divide to illustrate that even in the film's "screenless society", those who only claim to be critically-conscious likewise observe with stillness through an invisible barrier between the self and the victimized other. The beautifully lethal ceremonies observed by the film's antagonists ultimately reminds us of our own dissemination and simultaneous dilution of critical consciousness towards performative activism as our parallel dogma. Received: 13 April 2023 Accepted: 21 August 2023 Published: 06 September 2023
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".