I spent Sunday afternoon rewatching Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, one of my comfort watches. After all, we’re a week out from this election, and these are some discomfiting times. Something different comes to the fore for me with every viewing—the tragic, unspoken love story between Susie and Sara, or Madame Blanc’s impossibly cool and manipulative seduction, or the thrill and sacrifice of meeting your destiny. It’s just a rich and endlessly rewarding text for me. So I curled up under my fuzzy blanket, and wondered what would leap out at me this time around.

As it would happen, the thing leapt out at me quite early, and not with any of my typical favourite characters. Instead, it was with Dr. Jozef Klemperer. Klemperer is the psychologist whose client, Patricia, tells him that her dance company is actually a coven that demanded terrible payment for what they gave her (“perfect balance, perfect sleep,” which sounds truly dreamy, to be honest). As Patricia unravels in his office full of books and soothing brown tones, a haven of reasonability against the German Autumn happening outside, Klemperer writes in his notebook, “Her delusion has deepened into panic. She feels her constructed mythology is confirmed.” And that scribbled note strummed my nervous system in a way that it hadn’t before. This man’s job is to listen with empathy, but the furthest his empathy could take him was to think this girl delusional.

But the witches are real. Patricia is already doomed; and so, in his way, is Klemperer. Over the course of the movie, we learn that Klemperer lost his wife Anke in the Holocaust. Even worse, we learn that Anke had been sounding the alarm to him about the Nazis, and her own vulnerability as a Jewish woman living in Berlin, for years. But her husband thought that her fears were unfounded. That she had all the right papers. That they would be safe. So Anke was arrested, and murdered mere weeks later in an utterly notorious Nazi death camp. She paid for his certainty with her life. And he paid for it with his everlasting guilt.

Klemperer sends the police to the Markos Dance Company after Patricia goes missing, belatedly appealing to The Proper Channels. These police officers get bewitched almost instantly. We see some of the witches teasing the officers’ catatonic bodies, even using a giant hook to play with their genitals, cackling witchily all the while. But when Klemperer goes to follow up with them, the officers have no memory of the incident. in fact, they tell him that they didn’t see “anything worth remembering.” And this once reasonable man is made to feel completely unreasonable for suggesting that these women could be lying, let alone that they could be witches. The police cannot conceive of themselves being fooled, whether through spells or through subterfuge, so they make Klemperer’s concerns ridiculous.

Evil thrives in offending reason. Reasonable people cannot, or will not, conceive of how bad things can get, or how smoothly it can get that way. Which all feels horrifyingly relatable at this particular moment.

Things do get very bad for almost everyone in this movie, after a smooth and slow build. As she drags him to his doom, one of the witches screams at Klemperer, “What reason is there to pity you? You had five years to get your wife out of Berlin before arrests began. When women tell you the truth, you don’t pity them. You tell them they have delusions!” By the time he started believing, it was too late for Anke. It was too late for Patricia. He failed, and he was failed, and doom came for everyone.

On Sunday night, hours after I finished my rewatch, Donald Trump held an unapologetically white nationalist rally in Madison Square Garden to get his followers revved up for this final week of his presidential campaign. But, of course, that’s not all he wants his followers revved up for. His running mate has been putting a less jaundiced face on it, and media coverage has been dutifully sane-washing it, but Trump is very plainly grooming his followers to commit violence. If he wins, it will be state-sanctioned violence, since all of his policy solutions are “mass deportation” or “eliminating my political enemies.” If he loses, it may not be state-sanctioned, but it will still be violence. Like, people are currently setting fire to ballot boxes. Listening to what the man says and seeing what his followers do should make it undeniably clear.

But there are still so many loud, powerful people who cannot or will not accept it. Who physically recoil when they hear you call Trump a fascist, because it’s too histrionic a label for them. They urged us to be reasonable in 2016, and they’re urging us to do the same now, eight years later. They are trying to take refuge in the reasonable, because the evil that Trump champions seems as ridiculous as the people who take that evil seriously. And somehow, it seems more ridiculous to them than the idea that there’s a good billionaire out there who will save journalism from the ones currently demolishing it. Or the idea that there’s One Weird Trick that will make other reasonable voters realize they can’t continue to support Trump. And at the same time, his little mouthpieces believe that they’re winning by cozying up to the strongman in the room, ignoring or actually not knowing that they’re as much a joke to him as the catatonic police were to the Markos witches. They cannot believe that they’re being used or lied to.

The risk of taking danger too seriously is largely reputational—not wanting to appear foolish or weak. The risk of not taking danger seriously enough is legitimately material. It’s the ability to move freely through the world. It’s one’s humanity not being subject to the whims of the state. It’s lives.

Sitting politicians spoke at this rally, as did flailing tv personalities, racist podcast hosts, and DEI hires. Their colleagues will calmly assure us that Trump’s insistence on rooting out “the enemy from within” isn’t as dangerous as people calling this language fascistic; or that Stephen Miller saying that “America is for Americans and Americans only” is simply politically charged, while college students protesting America’s role in genocide is “violence.” They will stay reasonable, and diagnose the rest of us with “delusion descend[ing] into panic.”

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