Obsession

The duality between Burial’s Archangel and Ray J’s One Wish. Ray J’s song is about this overwhelming urge to be with another. Burial’s song highlights how disorienting that desire can be through its galloping drums and sampled lyrics like “couldn't be alone”, “holding you”, “loving you”, “tell me I belong”. And near the song’s end, he samples the line “never trust you”.

In many ways, Archangel and Obsession are parallel — both are revealing the contradiction inherent to romance and the desire to accumulate enough love objects to finally satisfy the lack.
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Todd McGowan has a fantastic chapter in his book Capitalism and Desire about the relationship between capitalism, psychoanalysis, and love. The question posed by Bear early in the movie is precisely the same question McGowan takes up — is love and romance the same thing?

For McGowan, the two are very different; romance is tied up with the desire to accumulate the love object, fulfill the lack, and achieve satisfaction. It is capitalism par excellence. It is the commodification of love, taking desire for the love object and turning it into a consumable product for satisfying our desires. McGowan says the dating service/dating app reveals that logic quite vividly: it requires building a profile that entices a stranger to swipe right; the profile must market the supposedly most desirable parts of the self for the potential match’s consumption (*1). It also requires entering a user’s “type” and matches the user to love objects that may satisfy that desire. Romance functions according to the logic of accumulation, the idea that if enough love objects are consumed, the lack can be satisfied. And the real carrot on the end of the stick: the promise of the “soul mate”, the “one”, the love object that can completely fill the lack.

However, love, for McGowan, runs precisely opposite to romance. It is traumatic, painful, and hits you out of nowhere (*2). It runs contrary to the logic of accumulation and rests on the decision to cease chasing after other love objects to satisfy the lack. Love is contradictory and anticapitalist in this sense — to love requires not choosing to accumulate more love objects, to be complicit with the lack.

With that in mind, Obsession asks all about that duality. What would it mean to have a love object that satisfies your every desire? The penultimate “soul mate”? For someone to “love you more than anyone else in the world”? Barker does a good job, I think, of showing how dreadful that might be. It has a sort of Hegelian beat beneath it — take the position and push it to its logical extreme in order to reveal that the position necessarily rests upon and is constitutive of its negation, of what it is not. The position could be framed as the wish — “I wish for Nikki to love me more than anyone else in the whole world” — and the film pushes that to its logical extreme by depicting the kind of draconian elements of framing love as an object that completely satisfies the lack, revealing that the lack is never actually ever truly satisfied, that the wish for a fully encompassing love is precisely what prevents it from emerging.

Put differently, I think the film is playing out an interesting contradiction that could be read as drawing together psychoanalysis with the Hegelian dialectic — push romance to its logical extreme, a “soul mate” such that no other desire is foreseeable, and reveal how that position is deeply contradictory, because the lack is never fully satisfied (*4)

I was interested in revisiting this after reading McGowan’s book, and applying his framework to this film, I think, reveals some of the brilliance amidst a lot of the shittiness that people have rightly harped on.
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One part of the movie that felt like a generally odd decision: the moment when Nikki gets twenty dollars and gives it to the person sitting outside the bar, implying that Nikki has high moral character. Not to say that assisting the unhoused doesn't make someone a person without high moral character -- that could certainly be true. But the representative and rhetorical decision to communicate that high moral character in this way is a bit questionable.
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(*1) A lot of great writing has been done on how dating app algorithms are constructed on racial features
(*2) This is where In The Mood For Love is a truly fantastic film.
(*3) I’ve written a lot more about this on my blog.
(*4) I’ve also written about Hegel’s Fragment on Love on my blog.