From Lieberman calling Karen Frank's girlfriend to which Frank says nothing to contradict him to Lieberman's "Sarah's my wife. Sarah's my family." to which Frank responds, "So is Karen." to Frank hallucinating Karen wearing his late wife's hoodie.
Frank immediately correcting david when he refers to Sarah as his "gf" but silence when he does it with karen. "Sarah is my wife, she's my family" "Listen to me so is karen"
IM GNAWING AT THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE THEY MAKE ME SICK I LOVE THEM
I love that this movie left so much up to interpretation and there are so many ways to read everything, but these were my thoughts.
Spoilers and CW for animal death, human death, and abusive relationship tactics under the cut.
I think all the stuff with the cat was 100% wish!Nicki. There are two possible readings I have for it, but they both stem from the same cause, which is that wish!Nicki knows that Bear loved his cat and misses her (although tangent: I think Bear probably loved his cat as much as he loved Nicki, that is to say, he loved the idea of having something that loved and was dependent on him, the cat not so much.) So what does wish!Nicki do with this information.
Option 1: Wish!Nicki is jealous of the cat and Bear's love for it, and her actions are a way to get back at Bear and/or the cat. Similar to the reason she kills Sarah. If you interpret Nicki as being in control with the cat stuff, it could be a similar response.
However I interpreted it as option 2: Wish!Nicki is trying to comfort Bear the only way she knows how. Wish!Nicki seems to not be able to understand what love really is, but there are multiple references to her mentioning love as being "inside" of someone. There's the monolgue she has at the party where she reads the piece she'd been working on, there's also a quick shot of Wish!Nicki and Bear laughing over an AI-generated image of her wearing a sweater that reads something about "loving you so much I'd wear a sweater of your skin" (paraphrasing, but it was along those lines. Also, there are 2 references to AI in this film which adds another layer to it, of it not just being about incels but the rise of AI girlfriends, but I digress.) I think this is Wish!Nicki's genuine attempt to comfort Bear, but she just doesn't know how. Wish!Nicki doesn't know what true, healthy love looks like because the person who wished her into existence ALSO doesn't know that.
There were SO MANY LAYERS to this movie, I could write about them for hours, genuinely.
Going off option 2, I saw someone on Twitter say something along the lines of “wish!Nikki isn’t a person, she’s a brand new being that has no idea how to be a person, other than the fact that she has to love Bear more than anything else”. Essentially saying this is a being that’s pretty much a newborn with all types of interaction and socialization, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t know the proper way to comfort someone without it being warped in this disturbing way because she just. Can’t. Understand. The rest of option 2 I agree with and would just be reiterating
Yes, absolutely. For a lot of the movie, Wish!Nicki is essentially AB testing Bear in a lot of their interactions through the movie. She's obsessed with Bear, she wants him to be with her always, so how does she do that? She tries one thing, that doesn't work, she goes down another route. She goes from violent and angry to baby-like and docile on a whim, whatever she finds gets the reaction she wants. Whether this is because Wish!Nicki in incapable of real love or just doesn't know what it is because she's too new and young, its hard to say. I feel like there's evidence for both options. It adds to the AI-girlfriend angle for me a bit as well, because AI bots that are designed for "companionship" basically do the same thing, although to less extreme degrees, because they don't feel love, they're LLMs designed to make a person feel special or cared for so they will keep giving money to a company and letting them harvest their data.
This movie handles its abstraction perfectly. It says so much about so many things and really lets the viewer draw their own conclusions.
if i think too hard about nikki’s experience in Obsession i feel physically ill. imagine one second you’re just walking up to your house after a night out, and then the next, you’re looking out of your own body, but you’re not longer in control. you’re a prisoner to a terrible, unnatural version of yourself that only exists because of a choice someone else made. when you scream, nobody listens. when you claw your way out for long enough to explain that this isn’t you, nobody listens. when you beg the man who trapped you in this situation to put and end to it, to set your free, he just. doesn’t. listen. and then when you do finally regain control, all your friends are dead, and you are covered in their blood. because of a choice someone else made
oh and another thing that devastates me about Obsession is how much nikki is judged and blamed by those around her. sarah and ian repeatedly telling bear that he shouldn’t have to deal with her, that she’s not his responsibility, that they’re worried she’s taking advantage of him. as if they aren’t also her friends, as if they shouldn’t know her well enough to notice something is off. there’s no concern for why nikki is behaving the way she is, there’s just distain towards it. she starts acting out of character and so it must all be intentional. but bear doesn’t get questioned. bear isn’t gossiped about. nikki loses all her agency and autonomy, and all she gets for it is judgment
i absolutely love how nikki is nearly always bathed in shadow (whether it’s fully in the dark or with a single light behind her with her as the faceless darkness). she’s quite literally become a shadow of her former self. no autonomy, no personal thoughts or emotions, just a carved image of what bear desired.
nikki breaks my heart so bad because in the brief moments we see her before the wish kicks in, she's so cool and funny, clearly kindhearted, very driven about her future (telling bear about how she was going to quit her job to focus on her writing), and also very sure of herself as a person. ive seen people describe this movie as "mean-spirited" and I think thats so apt because it was a 2 hour long tragedy of the torture of this innocent girl, taking away everything she's ever had, including her own sense of self, putting her through unimaginable horrors, and leaving her with nothing except the three dead bodies of her friends, with the one who she trusted most being the one who did this to her. nothing for her to look for hope in, because she has nothing before her except a lifetime in prison or in an institution. it would be one thing if the movie ended on a note like weapons, where everything was over and there would hopefully be recovery somewhere down the line, but here, not only was the evil not committed by a random stranger but her closest friend, but she doesn't get any chance at recovery either. so goddamn tragic. on that note, if anyone can come up with some sort of fix-it for nikki please link it to me because I will be crying about this girl forever.
ellievsbear
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
titsay
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
