So as a devoted fan of the genre, and now a horror blogger, I feel compelled to maintain a certain degree of street cred, so to speak, and there are some films that loom so large that, even if I’ve never gotten around to watching them, I find myself behaving as if I have, as if ‘of course, I understand this reference, for I have undoubtedly consumed the canon of the great works of horror cinema in its entirety.’ And often, you don’t need to have seen something to have a strong impression of it, to have taken in so many iconic images, to have had the ending spoiled, to know a work’s themes and where it fits into the history and larger context of the genre, to know that this or that performance is most esteemed or reviled, to know that this is a ‘very-important-work’ of a ‘serious-film-maker.’
Today’s film is one of these.
So, the other day, I finally sat down and subjected myself to Andzrej Żuławski’s Possession. The next day, I watched it again to take notes, and here I am now, writing about it…I just wish I had actually liked it. But, you can’t have everything in life and my intention on this blog is not to write movie reviews, declaring things good or bad, but rather to process my thoughts about work that is worthy of consideration, and even if I find it difficult to get through (this was not the first time I tried watching it, just the first time I succeeded), it is that.
One programming note: while Żuławski was indeed a Polish director, I’m not including this in my somewhat dormant series on Polish horror films (which can be found here, here, here, and here.) Filmed in West Berlin in English, I feel this doesn’t qualify – or if it did, so would Rosemary’s Baby, and that doesn’t seem like useful taxonomy. One day, I’ll finally return to that series and check out either his Diabeł or Szamanka, both filmed in Poland in Polish.
Possession (1981)
Apparently inspired by Żuławski’s own, this is essentially the story of a divorce. Mark (Sam Neil) is a spy who has finished a recent assignment and returns to his home in West Berlin to find that his wife, Anna (Isabella Adjani), wants to split up. They shout. He goes on a three week bender. They shout some more. She moves into a derelict building. There’s additional shouting, a small child covered in jam, and now some domestic abuse. He finds that their son’s teacher, Helen is Anna’s doppelgänger. Shouting continues. Anna stabs some guys and puts a head in the fridge. Shouting. Mark and Anna cut themselves with an electric knife and have sex in the kitchen. Shouting. Anna kills her friend, Margie. Shouting. Mark drowns Anna’s lover in a toilet. Shouting. Anna’s been having a sexual affair with a giant, bloody, tentacled, squiddy creature (maybe feeding it somehow with these men she’s killed?). Shouting, and gunshots, and more doppelganging, and a final, disturbing image and soundscape of war. The end.
I mean, I’ve happily never gone through a divorce, but I guess that’s what it’s like?
I think a key in looking at a piece such as this is that, though it comes with the trappings of horror, it is really not a typical work of narrative, genre based storytelling. The dialogue vacillates between being naturalistically banal and unrealistically poetic and/or philosophical. The performances are totally stylized, expressionistic, making no attempt at recognizable, human behavior, but rather trying to express thoughts, feelings and experiences that transcend verbal elucidation. There are visual themes and concepts that reflect each other and all contribute to a kind of tone poem of bitterness and neediness and jealousy and separation and control, and a desperation for something that can’t quite be expressed, but which is no less necessary. It is captivatingly filmed, with a kinetic, ever circling lens; it makes no attempt to deliver likeable characters, focused as it is on two people in extremis, all kindness and tenderness exhausted; the score is compelling and sometimes even surprisingly groovy; and somehow it is even occasionally funny. It is an idiosyncratic, challenging, unique piece of work, a nightmare vision of the lack of love, human connection, or any form of meaning, and the hunger for something to fill that gap, and while I still find it difficult, it is certainly an artistic piece worthy of respectful analysis – so, I’m sorry if I took a mocking tone in the previous paragraph – the constant level of shouting just wears me down.
So, how might I analyze it? What do I do with it all? Let’s consider some images and themes. It focuses on divorce and takes place in a divided city, the wall ever-present and East German soldiers always visibly surveilling through binoculars. Mark is a spy, and throughout the film, his jealousy and need to control mirrors those soldiers. This drama and trauma play out amidst brutalist modern architecture – spaces that do not seem designed for humanity or human relationships. We also have two pairs of doppelgängers; is the self doubled, or is it divided like the city? We barely meet Mark’s double, but Anna’s is totally different from her – warm, present, helpful, loving, articulating her thoughts in a way that Mark can receive. What and why is she? A fantasy for Mark – the ‘perfect wife’? A challenge to him? Even in the presence of someone so warm and giving, he is just as much of a bastard – how could he be otherwise with someone who doesn’t embody this ideal? And might that mean that with her tentacled paramour, Anna is creating an ideal as well? I don’t think the film sees a need to justify or explain.
I feel both characters inhabit a world where relationship is an impossibility. Mark is self-centered, abusive, and possessive. The possession of the title may reference that. Something he’d had was taken from him and he needs it back, even if he has already spoken of how he’s fallen out of love and has no interest in what his wife feels. Still, even lacking that interest, he needs to know what is going on with her – where she is – who or what she is in bed with – that knowing being a form of having her. Anna, in her turn, is inscrutable, driven towards an inexpressible exigency which Mark can only be an obstacle in the way of. There is really no way that these two could ever hope to relate to each other.
So much of this plays out in the performances, both of which are commendable, if also pretty arduous to endure. Mark is situated as the main viewpoint character, but no steps are taken to warm us to him. Emotionally clingy, physically abusive, and pettily cruel, he’s pretty much the worst. But all of these traits are also human, identifiable. It is easy to see the processes spinning in his fevered brain that result in his awfulness. Anna is not so readable. Her thoughts and feelings are an opaque mystery, and the deeply poetic words she speaks are inadequate to truly explain anything. One might assume that anyone would want to divorce this jerk, but I feel the film implies a greater depth to her dissatisfaction and desire for change.
I can only assume that this is rooted in the extent to which the film is informed by lived experience. Perhaps Żuławski could foreground a descent into the ugly emotional reactions with which he was more familiar, but the female counterpart remains essentially unknowable. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong to project my limited knowledge of his biography onto the characters. That may be an unfair oversimplification.
But the performances go farther than simply portraying difficult characters undergoing hard times. There is a stylization to the acting that pushes beyond anything so basically realistic. I must admit I found it more than a little off-putting, but I then also had to question why. I mean, the performances are really great: nuanced, physically and vocally extreme, expressive, unguarded, ugly (which is harder than it sounds), and magnetic – but they simply don’t talk and move and react like human beings tend to. However, I genuinely believe this is not a failing, but a clear artistic choice. In stage acting, performances are often stylized (the same could be said for the text), and in that context, I expect I would have had no issue, but in the cinema, we so rarely see anything like this, and that makes it more difficult. I am not well prepared to suspend my disbelief in this way in this medium, but it is surely not the responsibility of the actors or the film to only deliver that which we are used to seeing. If I have trouble connecting, it may simply be that I am not bringing enough to the film as a viewer, investing the attention and doing the work to meet the artwork in the unique space which it inhabits. I’m, of course, allowed not to respond well to everything; not every film is for everybody, but I feel like in this case, the film asks a lot of me and I’m not always up for it. I wonder how different it would have been if I’d had a chance to see it in a cinema rather than on my sofa.
This stylization is most clearly evident in the famous subway scene. In a rare peaceful moment, seeking to explain what she is going through to Mark, Anna tells the story of how she “miscarried her faith.” We see in flashback Anna walking through the subway and then simply snapping. She shrieks and shakes; she dances in a trance state; her groceries are smashed and, caked in egg and cream, she writhes and howls until blood and bile and pus and something bubbling and green start to pour forth out of her. The performance is intense, resembling more than anything, Maya Deren’s ethnographic footage of Voudou rituals, possessions in which the faithful are ridden by the gods. Possession has been put on display in countless horror films, sometimes very artfully and effectively, but this is different. It is an absolute act of performance art, but it feels less formed, not shaped to be scary, to tell a story, and rather more a documentation of a performer putting herself through something ineffable, something which I could only witness from some distance. And Adjani is really something here – there is a sense of truth to the performance, even if I had no concept of how to interpret what I was seeing on first viewing, or second. To be honest, I’m still not so sure, but here goes:
She confronts an essential existential absence. Nothing is important. Nothing is necessary. Life is empty chaos, a horror. She purges herself of whatever false faith she had still maintained and having done that, is somehow opened to the divine. She is ridden by it. Maybe she births it. She is consumed. And there is no possible return to life as lived before. She can live in her crumbling flat in worship of/service to/sexual communion with this phallic, cephalopodic monstrosity, murdering anyone who comes too close, who threatens her link with sublimity (How do I not absolutely love this? On paper, this is my jam!) and has no other needs, perhaps reflected in the fact that she never changes her dress for the whole film, though weeks or months have passed. This is beyond Mark. For him, god is a dog that has crawled under the porch to die. And, as he is our sole lens through which to view her and all the action of the film, we can never really understand what we witness. Our comprehension dies with him in a hail of gunfire as the whole spy subplot somehow comes back, and we are left as bereft of meaning, of the holy, as he is.
It is a confounding, confusing cinematic artwork which is horrific and funny and shrill and grotesque and ecstatic and somehow even somniferous (meaning it kept threatening to put me to sleep) – but maybe that’s just a defense mechanism on my part, seeking escape from the monotony of this emotional, sensory assault. And I haven’t even touched on so many other components that may carry meaning or may be there just to break the brain with their incomprehensibility: the esoteric lover, Heinrich and his suicidal mother, the pink socks, Mark riding a motorcycle, screaming manically before spectacularly wiping out for some reason, Mark’s double instructing a random lady to shoot at the spies; the list goes on. But I think it was worth putting myself through, worth reckoning with it. If nothing else, now I don’t have to pretend that I’ve seen it.
—
So, that was Possession, but why was it so hard? I feel like the older I get, the more difficult it is to put myself through challenging work. Perhaps, had I seen this at 23, I would have fallen in love with its weirdness, its artistic unity, its extremity, its bloody, gooey, horrific divinity. But at 43, it feels a bit more like doing my homework, eating my vegetables. (Though I must say that I’ve enjoyed considering it and writing about it a great deal more than I did watching it, and the more I think on it, the more my appreciation grows – but I don’t think I’ll watch it again.) Am I getting lazy? Less adventurous? So much of what I come to horror for is just such extremity, to be challenged on a dramatic, moral, psychic level – and it does just that. In recent years, have I seen anything new to me that was such a challenge which I actually liked, or do I just have a warm place in my heart for difficult work seen first when I was younger (von Trier, Noé, Aranofsky, for example) and now I need films to be more ‘fun?’ If that’s true, is it a problem, and should I challenge myself more?
Maybe? Maybe not. Good art can also entertain and I don’t know that it’s exactly personal weakness to want to actually enjoy the things I take time to shove in my eye-holes. (Ouch.) Anyway, I’m glad I finally made my way all the way through it, twice. Whew. Good for me.