I finished Obsession today and I really enjoyed it, I was surprised and a little annoyed to see a review that was like "oh this is just a bogstandard morality tale" and like. I don't actually agree with that
I was just saying to L, you know those optical illusions where it's a duck or a rabbit?
I think Obsession is like that. Look at it one way and it is that bogstandard tropey thing of "oh, be careful what you wish for! You might not like this woman / a woman loving you so much!"
It's in Supernatural, it's in Buffy, it's very tropey, and yeah, it's often misogynistic
Bc it's so often a man who wishes for a woman who is ~out of his league~, and it's then about how uncomfortable he is with her affection or her expectations, but she is near wholly an object. She is an object of keen desire, first, and then an object of disdain, fear, dread, but always an object
That's the duck - Bear is horrified at how Nikki has become so obsessive, so weird, with these outbursts of startling, screaming violence, possessiveness, and of course the self-harm, and he's trapped in this nightmare born of what he truly wanted, for her to love him, until he kills himself
Here's the rabbit - this is a feminist take on precisely the above story, because the protagonist isn't Bear, it's Nikki.
Firstly, she's awkwardly and stuntedly pursued by this creepy weirdo from work. She's tried to give him an out multiple times, tried to ignore his lilting desperation
She's literally fucking his best friend, who has so little regard for HER that he doesn't even bother to fucking tell Bear to leave Nikki alone
So she gets out of the car and ignores his weird attempts to keep the interaction going… and then suddenly her body isn't her own anymore.
She's taken over by this fucking horrible spectre of herself, Freaky Nikki, and at first she laughs it off, thinks it's just a funny turn, and then realises it's not just that. She's trapped. As this thing pilots her fucking body. As it mutilates and humiliates her. As said Bear rapes her repeatedly
She is screaming and she is screaming and struggling and she can escape for seconds at a time and it never lasts for long enough for her to get out for real, for her to get help, for her to kill herself and make it end
That horrible thing is sleeping and she begs Bear to kill her
And crucially, this horrible creep who has trapped her in this nightmare isn't trying to rescue her. He isn't trying to save her. He is just trying to get her cage into a nicer shape so that other people don't realise she's trapped there.
Because the film makes it clear repeatedly that Bear is basically fine with continuing to rape and hold this woman captive. He wants to "amend" his wish. He wants to keep her and "love" her without letting her escape.
So this man, her rapist, goes to her fuckbuddy, who chooses money
Instead of saving her - and then even as he realises the wish willow thing is real, he runs over to brag about the money instead of acknowledging that she's trapped still.
And by the end of this story Nikki gets a near miss before the curse dies with Bear and she's free
Like that slow pan away from her screaming and crying after what she's been through - raped and held hostage, mutilated and hurt, her body used as a murder weapon for a friend, and knowing that the man she had been fucking basically profited from this whole thing And now it ends
And idk it's a crucial shift in perspective but the difference between Bear as the protagonist and Nikki as protagonist changes the horror: one is a very well-executed play on a classic trope, and the other is a feminist exploration of that trope's devastating implications
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