Possession

I don’t think the film is necessarily just a critique of heterosexuality, but instead a much more intricate reflection on the implications of human desire, and it merely uses heterosexuality as a vehicle to explore those implications. The movie is called “Possession” after all.

Many things about the film remind me of Zizek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, and in particular, his writings about how desire always has some excess attached to it. How there is always some remainder of desire inside of another person that one may not ever truly know or understand, regardless of how intimately connected any two people might be. Zizek goes further to say that we might not even be able to fully and completely and holistically understand our own desires—that we might say that we want something, but in that wanting, there is always some excess residue that is uncaptured, some box that is never checked, some itch that is never scratched, even after supposedly “fulfilling” that desire. If someone says for example “I just want them to like me”, then through this Zizekian line of thinking, one might ask “is that really all you want? might you also be longing for the feeling of security or validation or feeling recognized? what if you don’t just ‘want them to like you’, but that there might also be some underlying desire that you are not acknowledging?”

Another Zizekian idea I was reminded of was his account of how we build static and symbolic categories around the fantasy that we can completely understand human desire. That ideas humans have created, like “true love” or “husband” or “wife” might serve to distill our desires down and pour them inside of these containerized words. Yet, what if desire is precisely the things that fall outside those containers?

I think that’s where the underlying horror of Posession emerges, that as human beings, we are always having to grapple with the imperfections of language as a system of symbols and signifiers that are never able to truly communicate what we hope to say, in other words, that language might not ever be able to fully convey our desires, what we actually mean when we call someone our “true love”, that there is something that always falls outside of the container of “true love”. What desires might we have that are completely unable to be encapsulated by the symbols at our disposal, and how might we sit with that uncertainty?

This is where Derrida becomes relevant. If there is never a way for our desires to be truly and holistically and completely met, that there is always some “lack” in the Lacanian sense, then the Derridean notion of the “supplement” is what attempts to fill in that lack through a substitution and an addition to what might have been previously understood to be whole; yet the mere existence of the supplement proves that the “whole” was never truly “whole”, that there was something left outside or uncaptured by the “whole”, and that opening in the “whole” is filled in by the supplement. 

In the film, I think the supplement is precisely what is metephorized by Anna’s monster. It’s the residue that proves Mark, as well as those symbolic categories like marriage or husband, can’t ever fully satisfy her desires, and, as what exists beyond what can be included in the categories humans have constructed. The monster represents that very hidden never-scratched itch when one says “I achieved my desires”, as the residue that will always exist and always falls outside of symbolic categories, as the desire that can’t be encapsulated or containerized. Similarly, the supplement is what Mark hopes to re-containerize, reduce, and make transparent and knowable—he cannot tolerate obliqueness and frays in its face. In other words, the horror of the film is that as Anna follows the supplement into the unknown, Mark attempts to recontain it, and the film suggests that both are possible without proper resolution, and that unresolution is where the horror lives.

How I read the film, at least.
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“The key being the infinitive, to accept.” 

There’s something oddly comforting about that line, and it becomes even more intriguing when considering that it comes from an incredibly uncomfortable film. I think unpacking it might reveal what the film is really trying to convey.

Grammatically, the infinitive is naming an action without completing it, like “to run”. There is also not a temporal component— the phrase “to run” doesn’t have any sort of tense attached to it. If I said “to run”, no one would know whether I was talking about it in the past tense, the present tense, or the future tense. 

If that’s true, then combining those two ideas— that the infinitive is naming an action that is suspended in time— with the phrase “to accept”, combined with the phrase “the key being”, then, assuming that “the key being” refers to some core idea or orientation or way that one might live a life, and assuming that the film is mainly about interrogating  our understanding of desire and the uncertainties about potentially always having some residue of desire that may never be fulfilled or may never be known, I think the film is suggesting the “key” is to “accept” that in a manner that is ongoing and perpetual and suspended in time. How in a world where, if you really think about it, very few (if any) capital-T Truths exist, it is key to accept uncertainty in the infinite.