hello perhaps you have read this since it is your area of study but i would recommend the lonely city by olivia laing, it's a memoir about living alone in new york and each chapter focuses on a different artist and the loneliness in their work
hiii!! ive been meaning to read it, i'm gonna check it out and see if it might help :D thank you <3
a double-analysis of movies with doubles; a coupling of stories about separation.
Forty years apart, Possession (dir. Andrzej Żuławski) and Skinamarink (dir. Kyle Edward Ball) tell stories about the horrors of home life. Like mirror images of one another, both films utilize similar motifs and themes to describe the slow disintegration of a family unit, Possession by focusing on the parents, and Skinamarink as told by children. Paired together, this slow-burning ache of a double-feature will light your skin up in a cold fire and take you back to a place of child-like helplessness and surrender.
Art doesn't change anything but people, but people go out and change the world. Art is nonthreatening, but the person who is given ideas by art is one of the most threatening figures we know. And that is why art that is about communication and relationships is so strong; through depictions of the bonds that are possible between people, a special bond is formed between the work and the viewer. This is the heart of the power that lies in films like Possession and Skinamarink, and this is also the weakness. Because film is not only - or not always - art. The general audience does not walk into a movie with the same awareness that they carry into a museum. But art, like relationships, demands full attention. It demands you to be carried away, to be lost. Possession and Skinamarink are art films, and they necessarily ask for your full surrender, your suspension of self. Art is a lover we get lost in. Art gives us ideas. Nothing could be scarier or sharper than that.
Let's get into it.
Possession tells the story of a couple in the process of separation. After returning home from a long job, main character Mark finds his home life irrevocably changed. His wife, Anna, is like a different person. There's somebody else, and she wants a divorce. Their young son, Bob, is caught in the center, oft-neglected, barely on screen, though the knowledge of his presence permeates the film - Mark and Anna's responsibility for him and his uncertain future adding a distinct tension to their relationship that prevents them from ever separating fully. A family of expats in the backdrop of divided Berlin, Mark and Anna live a divided existence, both together and apart, striving to get closer as they each try to get away.
Skinamarink is the feature debut from low-budget filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball (check out his Nightmares series on Youtube). Ostensibly a found-footage style analog horror from the perspective of children, Skinamarink takes place in a home already divided; opening with a phone call between father and mother, where it is implied only the father still lives in the house. Following a sleepwalking accident, the children awake to discover their father is missing, and other things are gone from their house too. The doors and windows to outside are the first to disappear, and others are soon to follow.
Like Bob in Possession, Kevin and Kaylee are rarely given screentime in Skinamarink, but the film is drenched in their presence. All three children are quite young, old enough to walk and talk but too little to be left alone. They are reliant on adults to move through the world, and in the absence of parental figures to guide them they float in a sort-of nonexistence, blithely accepting what comes. This is what makes Skinamarink in particular so terrifying. I'm delighted that I had the opportunity to see this in a theater, because this type of fear cannot be fully experienced unless we are dwarfed by the screen. Its cinematography, filled with bizarre close-ups, handheld camerawork, and distant ambient shots of floors and ceilings, places us in the position of children, where even a house is huge - big enough to be the whole world. The effect forces us into passivity; like children, we are helpless. We are forced to surrender to whatever happens, and it is the lack of control, more than anything, that scares us. Kevin and Kaylee, like many children of divorce (myself included) are forced to navigate this trauma by themselves, and they are wholly unprepared for the task, with little understanding of what's happening to them. All they truly understand is they are alone.
I'm reminded of a similar scene in Possession, when Mark returns home for the first time after leaving Anna, to find Bob alone in the apartment, covered in food. "You've been alone for a while, haven't you?" he says, and Bob nods. Bob is too young to know just how grievous his mother's error, but in his face we see it: his relief that his father is back, the fear that he may have been abandoned. This is one of the only scenes in which Bob is prominently featured. Though he is often discussed, Bob is an obstacle in Mark and Anna's relationship more than he is a person. Their child is a symbol of the part of their relationship that refuses to die: their connection to each other that they are desperate to nurture just as strongly as they long to escape.
That both films take place in enclosed spaces is no accident. The house, the apartment, the prominent placement of the Berlin wall - all are representatives of the boundary of the body and human connection. They show us how something that once brought us safety and belonging can just as easily become a prison. This, too, is a statement on helplessness, and the loss of control over our lives.
Perhaps most interestingly, both films also feature supernatural elements. These are framed as natural progressions of the story, and not directly pointed out as other. In Possession, it is eventually revealed that Anna's lover is not who we first think it to be, but is instead a grotesque creature not entirely human. In the climax of the film, the creature leaves the boundary of the apartment where Anna hides it, and enters the world as Mark. Wearing Mark's face, the creature is a double. He is Anna's creation - the perfect Mark. Anna has her own double in this film, too. Bob's teacher, who Mark develops a connection with, also wears Anna's face. In the position as Bob's primary caretaker, considering the lack of parental care he receives at home, Bob's teacher is the surrogate mother - the perfect Anna.
Skinamarink, too, features parental doubles. Following the disappearance of their father, Kevin and Kaylee spend the majority of their time downstairs, in front of the television. But that doesn't stop their occasional trips upstairs, to the bedrooms, where something both familiar and foreign lurks. Kaylee, the oldest, is the first to succumb to these forces. The dark thing inside their house alternately takes the form of the children's father and their mother, speaking to the children in their parents voices, giving them increasingly upsetting commands. Come upstairs, look under the bed, put the knife in your eye. When Kaylee refuses, the creature takes her mouth away - a clear symbol of the one piece of agency a child has, the voice, being stripped away.
The doppelganger has various meanings within horror. It has origins in many ancient myths, and has been highly theorized throughout history - relating to Freud's theory of the uncanny. In Possession and Skinamarink, stories of relationships and disintegration, lack of agency and control, the doubles are mirrored inversions of the original parents. In Skinamarink, the nurturing parents are taken away, and replaced with a destructive force. In Possession, Mark and Anna are the destructors, and their doubles, framed as the perfect non-threatening versions of their own partners, are both eventually abandoned by Mark and Anna, who find that they prefer the dysfunctional comfort of each other. Only the children, Kevin, Kaylee, and Bob, continue to be themselves, perhaps due to the inherent formlessness of childhood - they cannot be split, because they are not yet whole.
Both slow-moving films, light on plot and heavy on visuals, Skinamarink and Possession tell heart-wrenching stories of abandonment and neglect. They carry the distinct air of loss inside of them, and are films that leave room - movies that we walk away from desiring something we cannot have. They are stories of how, sometimes, things are taken away from us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. No matter our age or how secure we may feel, anything can be lost in an instant, and we don't have to understand why. This is one of mankind's most primal fears. It's why, forty years later, Possession continues to be hailed as a cult-classic and why - I'm calling it now - forty years from now Skinamarink will too. Neither film is for everyone; they won't sit well with a general audience - I approach recommending them with caution. But for the viewer with the right mindset, one who is willing to surrender, they are films that you will not easily forget.
Possession is currently streaming on Shudder. Skinamarink is out in theaters now.
Stretch Brock - Favourite horror movie soundtrack?
ohhhhh thats a good one let me think i feel like i pay more attention to the scores….OH bride of chucky has an epic soundtrack
Nica Pierce - Dolls and puppets, scary or no?
in general no, i think i became less scared of them by default because they scared my older brother when we were kids and were thus a tool for me to terrorize him
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