Like a lot of people, I really enjoyed Obsession. While some of its points are a little obvious, I appreciated its exploration of agency and exploitation, and the way people will twist reality into pretzels to cast themselves as the hero or victim of their personal narrative, rather than ever admitting that they might in fact be the villain, BEAR.
It’s been interesting to see the discourse—alarming at times to see people who think Nikki is anything other than a tragic figure in this story, and just about equally alarming to see some people miss the point and think that filmmaker Curry Barker, or the film itself, somehow takes Bear’s side.
Perhaps the real obsession should be the media literacy we gain along the way.
But weeks after I saw the film, there are two specific details that have stuck with me.
First: the scene with Sarah in the car.
It’s not the gore that pops back into my mind unbidden every few days—while it’s an intense scene, I’m fine with gore. And as soon as the spell took hold and Nikki became “Wish Nikki”, it was obvious to me that there was only one outcome. Sarah’s the other girl in the core quartet, she’s one of the only girls at the bigger party that Bear and Wish Nikki attend together (and the only one who gets real screentime), and she was clearly interested in Bear from the moment we meet her at the group’s trivia night, hours before Bear makes his wish.
Sarah was doomed.
But what keeps bubbling up and making me stop to think about Obsession again is the fact that she never even gets to know that she got into art school. There was a whole new life laid out in front of her, and she never got to take a single step into it.
Her applications to art schools form a tiny subplot that plays out in the background of the film. In the only scene in the film that might be described as “sweet”, Sarah’s dad, Carter Harper (who is also the owner of the music store that seemingly employs every young person in town, and is played by the fabulous Andy Richter) comes out onto the floor with a letter from one of her top-choice school. He opens it with her, and comforts her when it turns out to be a rejection. We learn that there’s only one school left, and it’s her #1 pick.
Crucially, she doesn’t want to go to school for painting or sculpture or animation—she wants to bolster her skills as a tattoo artist. She wants to dedicate the next few years of her life to learning an intimate, tactile, person-to-person art form. And when she has one last letter to open she doesn’t share that moment with her dad, she tries to share it with Bear, who she sees as a friend, who she clearly has other feelings for, who is not even remotely who she thinks he is. And reaching out to him gets her killed right before she can become the artist she wants to be.
Bear is the one who opens her letter. He sees that she got into the program. He gets to know that her work had paid off, and her dream school believed in her future.
Which leads us into the second thing that’s stuck with me. The day that Bear fails to be honest with Nikki about his feelings, and makes the wish that imprisons her, is the same day that she tells him she put her two weeks notice in at Mr. Harper’s shop. Not because of school, in her case, but because she’s making a big leap and dedicating herself to writing.
Is this practical? Hell no! But Nikki has made a decision to shake up her life, raise the stakes on her art, and take a chance on herself.
And the thing is, I’m pretty sure she’s a great writer.
In the scene at the party, her “Hansel and Gretel” retelling (that is also, essentially, a curse she’s laying on Bear, no?) is unsettling, upsetting, visceral, and an excellent piece of micro-fiction. It’s the story of two haunted, traumatized children sharing a relationship that both know is wrong, but feeling bound to each other anyway. She ends with a reference to willow wood to let Bear know she’s aware of what’s binding her. She tells a story of incest between a brother and sister to hammer home the fact that she saw Bear as a brother before she was cursed.
Given the story, and harm she inflicts on herself a moment later, I read that scene as Actual Nikki fighting her way through Wish Nikki, turning her experience into an allegory to communicate her horror in the only way she can.
If I’m right, and this is Actual Nikki, she was a writer with a strong voice who had her future taken away from her. If I’m wrong, Nikki was still a writer, with a voice we never even got to hear, who had her future taken away from her. She was two weeks away from finding out whether her hard work and talent could carry her into a new career, two weeks away from testing her skill, two weeks away from the life she truly wanted. But she made the mistake of talking about her plans with a man she thought was her friend, and instead, on the first day of her new life, she’s trapped inside a body that stands stock still, pissing and shitting itself, waiting for someone who never loved her to come home from the dead-end job she tried to leave.
This is what’s stayed with me: two young women who were about to embark on new lives as artists, both robbed of their futures by a young man who has no creativity or ambition of his own.
