There are viewers who will undoubtedly leave the theater thinking that Obsession is a film about the terrifying and incomprehensible nature of female hysteria. My answer to them would be that this film does say something about that, but not in the way they think. However, before getting into the film analysis proper, I thought I would talk a little about the project of this blog.

The reason I like to write film analyses isn’t merely because I love film. I do, but I’m not nearly that invested in passion projects (too busy). It also isn’t totally a vanity project to flex the analytic muscle. Writing these analyses is helpful in that regard, but that’s not the point. Rather, it is because, and I follow Slavoj Žižek here, I believe that film reflects the status of our individual symptoms at the level of the socio-cultural. I say this because I am deeply invested in exploring the ‘American’ psyche.

Given the nature of the U.S.A.’s economic colonialism —via neoliberal capitalist ideology—, I believe that investigating the symptoms that plague ‘Americans’ will also shed light on the exported conditions that shape contemporary symptoms globally. This is all important to say because I think that Obsession— written, directed and edited by Curry Barker— is a very important artifact through which we enter into the psychology of —and level a critique at— perpetrators of rape. More importantly, not just any perpetrators of rape, such as the stereotypical figure of the pervert who attacks their victims on the street. Rather, it is the so-called “nice guys” (famously, from Promising Young Woman) whose version of logistical planning to pull off a crime are the moral (superegoic) and ethical (of the order of the big Other) mental gymnastics they have to do in order perpetrate and justify rape.

To read more, head to my substack here.