Triumph of the Freaky

I'm really happy about how well Obsession is doing at the box office. I saw on Twitter/X this morning that it's overtaken The Exorcist for sixth highest grossing horror movie of all time. As usual, that's not adjusted for inflation, but for a movie made for $750,000, that's a clear win. The director has won the lottery, except it's not entirely luck. Though luck has to be part of it because great movies are made and largely go unseen all the time. Obsession's success makes me hope there'll be a new era of funding for arthouse films, that big studios will fund movies that focus more on character and intriguing ambiguities instead of movies that are mostly special effects with screenplays whittled down by committees into boring incoherence. The writing's been on the wall for a long time but even the dullest studio suit can't fail to see how The Mandalorian crashed and burned while Obsession soared.

The key to Obsession's success is the conversation that it instigated. Kat Rosenfield said, in her piece "The Ideologues are Wrong about Obsession", "Feminists think the horror film is about the toxicity of the Nice Guy; the manosphere argues that it proves women are crazy. But it's much deeper and better than that." But Rosenfield's wrong, too, because she and the ideologues are right. David Lynch could've told them. Oscar Wilde told us; "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself." People keep going to see Obsession because they don't want to be left out of the conversation. And the movie couldn't have done that if director Curry Barker had definitively gone for one interpretation or another in his film. Of course, even if he had, the film itself is ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted different ways even if he didn't want it to be. But if he's smart and mature as an artist, he'll see that as a good thing. Just as Tristan and Isolde compelled its audience to wonder if their love was true or entirely a fabrication of the potion, people will continue to ask if Nikki or Bear or the One Wish Willow is the true villain of the film.

One lesson I hope people will take to heart, as far is their personal lives are concerned, is to be kinder and more forgiving. Life is ambiguous and sometimes the things we interpret as evil are really people being weak. Or their true selves are being suppressed by a demoniac entity.

And I also hope it'll teach some people the importance of examining the primary source for oneself, of making up one's own mind, instead of letting partisans lead them by the bridle.

Sonnet 1998

With interlocking nostrils, nosy wights
Demand inspection seconds daily forced
Upon the weird and maybe prone to fights
Against the right politic'ly endorsed.
The clanking guards conceal the dame betwixt
The chilly stacks of pasty stones that grace
Their dungeons deep beneath the morning mist
That shroud the castle's grim imposing face.
Invasive crowds would read her drops of snot
They find on stolen handkerchiefs and then
Derive predictions made and fortunes got
For bottom feeders taking ev'ry win.
The gleeful crew then swap their stories straight
And tell themselves how fierce they are and great.