I saw Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, in a full movie theater on a Friday night. The audience flinched and laughed together, but I don’t think they all had the same reaction I had to certain parts, including the scene of Bear (the boyfriend) and Nikki (the girlfriend) having sex.
It’s Crowded in There
It comes after the restaurant scene in which Nikki gets angry when Bear questions her saying that her dad had cancer. Suddenly, we’re back in Bear’s bedroom where we see Bear pumping away at Nikki who lies there unmoving. Her face is turned towards the camera and it’s blank. Not only does she not look sexually engaged, she doesn’t even look like she’s in the room.
The soundtrack at that moment is telling. It’s scary music. Bear’s going at it and Nikki is lying there while the sound of doom swells, cutting abruptly when the scene ends. Sex as horrifying? Why would that be?
Inde Navarrette plays Nikki
Some might say it’s because Nikki is the scary girlfriend, but what I saw was a woman experiencing sex as many of us have: okay, okay, let’s get this over with. But later I heard a conversation that made the moment much worse: the suggestion was that the scene shows the real Nikki, the Nikki who’s not in love with Bear but whose body has been taken over by an entity that is obsessed with him. She’s trapped and has realized she’s helpless.
The even more disturbing scene is when Nikki begs Bear to kill her so she can stop inhabiting a body she has no control over.
They Take What They Want
It’s an idea many of us first saw in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. That movie’s metaphor for the white appropriation of Black bodies has old white people getting their minds transplanted into the bodies of young Black men and women. When Chris talks to Georgina, Walter and Logan — Black members of his girlfriend’s household and neighborhood — they behave in bizarre ways that only come clear when we understand that the transplants aren’t complete: the original Black inhabitants of those bodies are still in there, helplessly co-opted by the stronger white presence.
When the girlfriend’s mother hypnotizes Chris, he becomes paralyzed. She tells him to go into “the sunken place,” which distances him not only from the sitting room he’s in, but from his body. “The sunken place” is clearly where Georgina, Walter and Logan live, captive inhabitants of their own bodies that are now under the control of others.
Peele so effectively wields the metaphor that he leads an unsuspecting audience on a roller coaster ride that feels like good fun until we realize it’s a critique of racism. I wish Barker had been able to do a tenth as good a job in Obsession.
Dragging a Good Metaphor through the Willow
Bear is one of the most disappointing protagonists I’ve seen in a horror movie. Barker could have filled out the character so we could at least try to understand his terror of expressing himself, but instead Bear is a one-dimensional, baby-man-coward. His fear of telling Nikki he likes her baffled me. Nikki is moving away and he might never see her again. There’s nothing to lose even if she doesn’t like him back. The worst that can happen is that she rejects him and maybe he suffers some ridicule from his best friend.
She asks him point blank “Do you like me?” and he stammers out that he sees them as good friends. What’s his problem? Do young men really act like that?
It looks to me like he realizes he’s a hopeless loser and snaps the wishing willow not out of longing for Nikki but out of disgust over his lack of courage. Thus begins Bear’s nightmare: yet another flick about the fear of a woman ruining a man’s life.
What Barker could have done was give Nikki equal time. Halfway through, the movie could have gone back to the moment Bear made his childish wish and show the horror of Nikki realizing she was no longer in control of her body. From that point of view, the moments we see the real Nikki would be heroic. They would be moments when she manages to reach out of her prison and try to take back volition.
Just as horrifying as being forced to participate in sex (also known as rape), would be her brief exchange with Bear when he realizes the real Nikki is begging him to kill her. Instead of feeling sympathy (and guilt because he did this), he actually gets his feelings hurt! He asks her what’s so awful about being in a relationship with him. Are we supposed to hate the Bear character? Because I did.
Missed Opportunity
Get Out set a high bar when it turned its sunken place into a metaphor for racism, but Barker could have at least taken a shot at using it to critique sexism and the exploitation of women’s bodies. Instead, he participated in the tradition of horror movies showing skin for the sake of showing skin. I mean what was that shot of Sarah’s corpse in a porno pose?? If that was supposed to be ironic, or satirical of horror movies, it failed.
I’m not saying Obsession was a bad movie or even a movie to avoid. It was a fun ride. But it was a rich and missed opportunity to make a nuanced horror movie that shows the horrors of heterosexual dating for women. I wait for a filmmaker to fill in that empty space. I think we’ve had enough comedies and horror movies about crazy girlfriends. Let’s show the much more common physical dangers of dating faced by women who date men.
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