Possession (1981): Are They Lovers? Worse.
Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it's, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.”
– Slavoj Žižek
When thinking of love and its counterparts, we may automatically, subconsciously conjure up the mental pictures of those soft, lovely trinkets – heart lockets filled with the image of the beloved, inked love letters, sweaters taken from X’s apartment – feelings, special places, specific songs and movies and melodies, and maybe even a particular person, the object of our love. There is also the dark underbelly of love and its murky aftermath, its catastrophic end. As Freud postulated that the aim of all life is death, that death and construction must counterbalance our Eros, our passion, fertility, life drive, etc., Possession hyper focuses on this dichotomy of love and destruction, of pleasure and pain. The film, at its core, tells a tale of grief over lost love, the supernatural, the nature of God, and internal struggle, focusing on the disintegrating marriage between Mark and his wife Anna in their Berlin home.
After a lengthy stint working as a spy, he returns to an initially indifferent Anna, asking for a divorce, and his young son who falls to the background of the couple’s incessant verbal warfare, sometimes escalating into the physical. What makes the film so brutally harrowing is seeing their relationship destruct so violently on screen, with the pair being unable to let the other one fully move on. We have all witnessed those in relationships slowly begin to morph into the other throughout the course of their love, picking up on explicit traits or quirks that the other person has in the relationship, whether consciously or subconsciously. This phenomenon of romantic partner convergence, which several psychologists have attempted to tackle, is displayed for us in this film, begging the question – What happens when the person you become one whole with, this person you have formed a deeply intimate connection with, splits from you? What is the deformity left behind by this breaking of the union? Love, ultimately, is a process of transfiguration; “I saw love disfigure me into something I am no longer recognizing”, as sung by Phosphorescent in “Song for Zula.”
In one of its most famous scenes, Anna suffers a miscarriage in a subway, collapsing and screaming while foaming at the mouth. She recounts this episode to Mark as her miscarrying “Sister Faith” and making way for the birth of “Sister Chance”, with a possible interpretation of this being a dual personification of her morality. Sister Faith represents a side of Anna akin to the life drive or Eros, a belief in the success of her failing marriage, in God and divine love. Sister Chance is entropy, the inevitable chaotic elements of the universe, a drive for chaos and death. Anna has effectively lost faith in order to pursue destruction. In an earlier videotape for her lover Heinrich, she says “... what makes me go on is to know he'll [Mark] return, and I'll make him suffer, and… And I'll hurt him, and… I'm betraying him, but… this brings me small rewards.” In response, Mark replies, “You look ugly. You've hardened. For the first time, you look vulgar to me.” He follows this statement with a childhood tale in which he watched an aging dog crawl under the porch, yelping before succumbing to death, as if it’s “seen something real.” Mark sharing this story immediately after admitting to Anna that she has been transfigured into something grotesque, something he can no longer love, is symbolic in the dog “seeing something real” before dying as the pair being faced with an almost-supernatural horror embodied within the end of their marriage – their poisonous attacks launched upon one another, the endless bouts of jealousy and inflicted pain and confrontations and cries, have effectively almost brought about the existence of some third, sinister force outside of Mark and Anna, something so horrifying one can only yelp in its presence.
If I haven’t lost you yet, I may lose you now. Aside from the viscerally open and painful arguments we as the audience witness, there is something else lurking within the plot. There is a tentacle monster that Anna has secretly been hiding in a dilapidated apartment that only she has access to, throughout the entire film. It is certainly unpleasant to look at, an oozing, bloody mess that rots on a mattress on the dirty floor. Yes, Anna occasionally goes to the apartment to have sex with it. By the end of the film, we see this alien creature eventually become a physical clone of Mark, mirroring his body language and patterns of speech, but acts much more cold, calm, and stoic than the usual erratic human Mark. Anna is unable to let go of Mark, so she creates a version of him that is more palatable, more catered to what she now wants. In the midst of their impending end, Anna still aches for physical contact, for sex and passion; as Mark has hardened against her, she now turns to the alien doppelganger.
Though the love may die, and people separate frequently, it may be true that we look for bits and pieces of our past loves in those we meet, hoping to see some glimpse of a similarity in them.
There are many, many films out there that double as thinkpieces on troubled relationships as well as achingly raw, therapeutic cinematic endeavors for the directors to vomit out their own romantic troubles, mostly post-divorce – Sofia Coppola with Lost in Translation (2003) on her divorce with Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze’s own loose re-interpretation of their divorce in Her (2013), Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2013) drawing inspiration from his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Andrzej Zulwaski in crafting Possession. In an interview by Stephen Thrower and Daniel Bird, he says, “Possession is essentially a very true-to-life autobiographical story. As I said even the kitchen dialogue is remembered and transcribed. What’s untrue is the monster, all right… Possession is a fairy tale for adults.” It’s gory, grotesque, haunting, endlessly unhinged, but ultimately cathartic, and my favorite film of all time. Don’t let the tentacles scare you away. Please.