Curry Barker's Obsession: Live, Laugh, Love/Die, Scream, Suffer

Curry Barker’s Obsession has now passed the $300 million mark at the box office. In these days of uncertainty for the movie theater business, a film made for under $1 million, bringing in over $300 million in ticket sales, is a big deal. 

Given this, it’s understandable how much discussion about the YouTube to Hollywood pipeline has developed. As is true of the a few others who’ve made financially and critically well received horror films in the last few years, writer/director Curry Barker began his journey toward Obsession with short sketch comedy content and short horror films, building an audience on TikTok, and then YouTube. There’s been a whole lot of discourse about whether the film is “feminist” or not. And, as today’s audience are wont to do, there have been plenty of discussions about which characters are or are not “good people.” 

I put feminist and good people in quotes because these are subjective opinions, more than they are anything else, and despite the vehemence with which participants in those discussions might defend their conclusions, those conclusions are less the point of the discussions, and certainly less interesting than what is unearthed or revealed in the process of the discussions. Feminists can barely agree on what a feminist is, much less a feminist “film.” That’s not a roast, a knock or me throwing shade either. There can’t be and shouldn't be a hard definition of these things. Feminism isn’t served by creating a universally applied and understood ability to categorize. It’s served by the continued investigation and interrogation of ideas and behavior. The discussion is more important than the conclusion. 

The tendency to try to define whether a film’s characters are “good people” when it stems from the desire to use this as a measure of whether or not a film and/or story is of worth the time to see and engage with is baffling. Terrible people can make for interesting subjects and focuses in story. As is true with most varieties of stories, the way we the audience react to them, and why we react to them in the ways we do, are as interesting as the stories themselves. Film’s can be effectively built around either. I’m also deeply uninterested in a cinematic landscape dominated by depictions of characters where all of them are easily identifiable as “good” or “bad.” 

There’s nothing wrong with characters and stories built that way, in fact it’s good because the variety is good for us, in the broader cultural sense. We can tell stories where the good and bad are distinctly delineated, clearly established, and we can tell stories about the degree of complexity in human beings that results in the often contradictory behaviors and beliefs we demonstrate. They serve different purposes and have different intents. We’re clearly capable of creating both, and I have faith in human audiences to be able to handle seeing and engaging with both. One of the reasons storytelling exists is the human brain’s capacity for both conceiving of the theoretical and testing it. The systems of the brain that produce what we experience as the conscious mind or reflexive thinking exist to do just that. Storytelling and its importance in our lives and cultures are evidence of the evolutionary success of our ability to ask all these questions. Asking some combination of “who, what, when, why, where and how” of everything around us is something the brain evolved to do, and it turned out to be very successful in terms of preserving the species. It’s something we do, will probably never stop doing, and if history is any indication, attempting to stop human beings from asking these questions just draws attention to the existence of the questions, which just guarantees we’ll keep asking them. We like to assign moral values to the idea that people do this, artists included, when different forms of power, like authoritarian regimes, try to prevent it. We’ll say things like, “They’re so courageous!” It’s true there are individual acts of courage in those contexts, and yet it’s simultaneously true that it’s impossible to prevent, because it’s very literally something evolution made an inextricable part of what we are. Language, science, religion, art… they are all the result of the evolutionary adaptations that are being social animals, with the instinct to investigate the world around us, create complex and specific ideas about our experience in it and the evolutionary imperative to communicate them to each other. 

Maybe it was because I was seeing clips and interviews with Curry Barker talking about his path to directing Obsession across the various film focused press and media. Maybe it’s the regularity with which the connection between comedy and horror has been discussed so much more often since the explosive cultural impact of Get Out, as if they’re two sides of the same coin. I’m not sure exactly why, but I do know that as I sat in the theater watching Obsession, I couldn’t help but feel what I was seeing was the inversion of a romantic comedy. 

Both horror and comedy are expressions of the absurd. They tend to focus on the absurdities, the contradictions, in human behavior and human ideas. We often use storytelling as a way to put a spotlight on them, either just to highlight them, to acknowledge the way they influence us or to try to resolve them. We create that focus on them by inflating their outcomes to an outsized, often unrealistic and fantastic proportion because this insures they are impossible to deny or excuse, simply explained. Whether one looks at those absurdities and decides to do that through comedy or horror, is a matter of perspective. Maybe one of the best examples in film history is the difference between Look Who’s Coming To Dinner and Get Out. These are nearly identical premises from which to begin a story. Two people engaged in a romantic relationship, a Black man and a white woman, are introducing that relationship to the woman’s family for the first time. The perspective on the absurdities the characters encounter along the progression of events, is defined by the writer, and the experience they are attempting to create for that audience. 

A similar example would be the simultaneous explosion of the teen sex comedy and the slasher film in the eighties. It’s not a coincidence they came to popularity at the same time. Often, they were dealing in the absurdities of similar ideas and cultural beliefs. One recognized the humor in that absurdity. The other recognized the horror. Both of these are healthy and necessary reactions to that absurdity, because those absurdities and contradictions do produce both in our lives. Neither is necessarily superior or “the right way” to recognize and react to them. The recognition of that duality, is what’s important. In a cultural/collective sense, and as part of the process of “who, what, when, where, why and how” that the human consciousness engages in by way of its success as an evolutionary strategy, they’re both necessary, and illuminate different aspects of the reality we experience. Comedy and horror continuing to be lenses on these ideas and experience, in combination, gives us a more complex, specific and accurate picture of the whole. When we talk about these things regarding the arts, the phrase often reached for is that they exist “in conversation” with each other, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. They exist in symbiosis, each filling in different parts of the picture the other can’t, contributing to each others continued relevance. They’re making equally important, but different contributions to the whole of the environment that is human storytelling. 

Is John Cusack showing up outside of Ione Sky’s house and blasting Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes at the conclusion of Say Anything a deeply romantic act or is it stalking and harassment? The answer is in the perspective of both the writer and the person watching the scene play out in response to the events the film has presented. Is Andrew Lincoln showing up at the door in Love Actually to use cue cards confessing his love to Kiera Knightley an act of love and romantic or is it incredibly selfish, again bordering on stalking and certainly a disrespect to her relationship to someone he is close friends with? Is there something romantic about Ally Sheedy’s character integrating into the accepted social norms at the end of The Breakfast Club or does it undermine her autonomy and individuality, in the name of love? 

Any of these scenes, and the basic scenarios and premises that lead to them, could be turned into experiences of horror, if that had been the intent of the writers. Say Anything could have been the story of a woman coming to realize she wasn’t interested in the men vying for her attention, and Cusack’s grand gesture could as easily have become an act of intimidation. “I know where you live. I know everything I need to know to make you pay for this decision.” This is a real thing that happens in the world, and probably more often than it’s being received as a grand, romantic gesture. There’s a version of the story of Andrew Lincoln descending into an ever deeper madness in his obsession for the woman his best friend is in a relationship with. As for Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club, there’s The Stepford Wives, Don’t Worry Darling and a very long list of feminist works that treat the requirement to deny one’s individuality to perform within the acceptable parameters of femininity that is both culturally upheld and exists in service to the men in proximity to a woman. In its way, Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher, is the reverse version of these stories. 

There isn’t a romantic comedy as directly comparable to Obsession as Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is to Get Out, but there are a few that dabble in similar ideas about a perceived loss of identity and choice. Overboard starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell is predicated on the idea Hawn suffers total amnesia, and really, who we see ourselves to be is built from the history of our experiences, so the variety of total amnesia Overboard depicts would be an erasure of Hawn’s identity. Russell’s ruse to convince her she was his wife and mother of his children are, at base, is a kind of theft. There are, after all, a whole slew of thrillers based on the idea someone has experienced amnesia, and comes to find out the person whose inserted themselves, claiming to be their spouse, lover, caretaker of some kind has been lying, and has some nefarious ends in mind. 

While You Were Asleep balances on a similar premise, except the object of Sandra Bullock’s character doesn’t have amnesia. The premise is designed so that he will be convinced he does, because all of the people he understands to care about him and who were part of the experiences that made him who he is, are convinced he does have amnesia. It’s an unintentional group gaslighting, played for laughs, because it’s not intentional on the part of his family, and the story is aligned with Bullock’s character and her point of view. Still, Bullock’s character is engaging in a similar kind of theft as Russell’s character in Overboard. She is using circumstance to surreptitiously steal his ability choose for himself who he might partner with and what life he might have with them. 

The horror of Obsession comes from this same variety of loss of identity and autonomy, and in watching it, I couldn’t help but be struck by the number of scenarios and ideas we’ve seen in so many other stories involving love and romance, usually played for laughs. I think it’s this, that Obsession is dealing with so many of our culturally supported and communicated ideas about love and romance (which also tie it to the romantic comedy) that has been responsible for how contentious so much of the discussion of the film has been, including but not limited to the ways we’re socialized to understand them through the lens of gender. 

I’m going to confess to you, Dear Reader, the romantic comedy has been the genre of film I’ve least enjoyed, for as long as I can remember. There was, at a certain point in the past, a common assertion that men didn’t like romantic comedies because the presumed audience was women. I have interrogated myself about whether or not this was the source of my distaste and discomfort with them. The only real conclusion I could come to is that when it comes to media intended for a perceived audience of women, the romantic comedy would be the only place I find this distaste and discomfort so present, in scope and breadth. In other cases, it’s a much more individual response, to the creation/creator themselves. In sitting through Obsession, I realized my discomfort or distaste for romantic comedies is in the way they assume the audience comfort with the socially transmitted and supported ideas about love and romance that are most pervasive in our culture, including but certainly not limited to the ways they tend to rely on stereotypes about gender I don’t see as accurate, and are harmful as a result.  

I was very young, somewhere between seven and ten years old, when I learned the historical roots of the institution and tradition we call marriage. It was a capstone on the discomfort I’d been feeling toward the way our culture tends to communicate about love, romance, and this thing it’s expected to lead to, marriage. To put it plainly, I found it pretty horrifying to consider the implications of anything that in any way was associated with another human being belonging to me. Even at that young an age, maybe because I was an avid reader, I recognized how entrenched this idea was in the realm of love and romantic relationships. For some period of time, probably into my twenties, this did produce something like a commitment phobia. As I got older though, I realized commitment wasn’t the issue. Like anyone else, I want to be known by other human beings, in all the intimacy and insight committed relationships create, and I want to know others in this way too. I have loved, in the form of relationships I wanted the process of continuing to know someone more thoroughly, compromising to make that possible, recognizing who they were and what they wanted, all the things connection and intimacy are, to have continued until the day I died. As is common, they didn’t work out, always for a combination of reasons as complicated as the act of two people trying to create such a thing together. Committing to that process, the loyalty, care and investment it requires, is different from obligation, even as responsibility is involved in it. Living as an individual, with all that comes with living, is difficult. Trying to go about living (and I don’t just mean in terms of domicile) and creating a life with another person is the kind of herculean effort that wouldn’t be undertaken if it weren't worth it in what it contributes to our lives. Whatever that might be and whatever it might look like depending on the people involved, I can not conceive of being fulfilled or contented by it being defined by possession. 

Possession seems incompatible with creating the intimacy and trust that strike me as necessary in a human relationship of that variety and intensity. I never perceived the idea that I might be made for someone, their one true love as realistic, and in turn, the idea of conducting so intimate a relationship on the basis of a fantastical assumption, seemed the guarantee it would end in failure. From the time I learned the roots of marriage as an institution and tradition, I wanted nothing to do with it, for all these reasons. And though I experience love and intimacy, I’ve never wanted another human being to belong to me, and I have become aware I am not capable of belonging to another human being. I’ve never been married or engaged, as a result. It seems to me, even if a human being wants this, to belong to another human being, and for that human being to belong to them, it’s not possible because of what human beings are, for that to lead to any sustainable sense of satisfaction and contentment for either of the human beings involved.

Maybe there’s something as naively unrealistic in it as the idea of two people being made for each other, but I’ve always found the idea of a person’s individuality and autonomous use of that individuality being the foundation for commitment, loyalty, care and responsibility far more attractive. The support, interest and care in helping someone express, actualize and explore that individuality, and in that being reciprocal as part of the foundation of a relationship, has always struck me as more likely to allow for the relationship to be stable in the long term, and lead to contentment, happiness and genuine love between the people participating in it. Love has, at least as I’ve learned in my failures in it and its failing me, come to seem to be the desire to be present and invested in another person’s journey to becoming the version of themselves that suits them best, the person that results in them having that contentment and fulfillment. It’s wanting the person you love to feel their freedom in that love, to find out who the version of themselves that best fits them is. Whether it’s being a cheerleader for them or being the person they can lean on when that effort, in a world that doesn’t care about how its expectations harms them or creates barriers for them, has become exhausting and demoralizing. It’s also trusting that if they take a detour that leads to a version of themselves temporarily not so well suited to them and/or the relationship, they’ll course correct at the first moment they’re able to understand what that course correction looks like. It’s the choice to take that journey, in spite of how difficult it is, because you want to take it, with that individual human being. Maybe I’ve been fortunate, but I have come across people who’ve made me feel I wanted as close a seat as I could get to seeing them become whoever it was going to be that made them the most content and fulfilled and to be grateful to participate in that journey in what ways I could. 

Considering how variable human beings are in where we start from, where we think we might be going, and the ways these effect how we attempt to get there, it makes sense that love is such a hard thing for us to navigate and maintain. Even this definition of love doesn’t guarantee success, in the sense of producing a lifelong relationship we would consider romantic or coupling. However, it’s far more likely to result, whether or not the relationship continues as a coupling or partnership, in two people who haven’t so deeply harmed each other, they can still love each other on different terms. Some of the most remarkable relationships, of any kind, I’ve ever witnessed were people who’d been married or in long term relationships, and realized the people they were becoming didn’t make the continuation of that specific relationship possible anymore. I’ve seen people in whom that love has continued, and been present and active, even as they’ve progressed into what we more readily recognize as friends. They continued to be family, even when they aren’t together in the way we have traditionally defined family. I’ve also seen instances where the most loving thing people could do for each other, if a relationship ended, was to leave each other alone, because the ways their individual needs presented themselves were barriers to each others ability to become who they needed to be for that contentment and fulfillment to be present in their lives. 

Maybe, there’s just something unreal in the degree to which we are acculturated and socialized to believe there is only one kind of “successful” relationship, the one that continues with the same definition until the day we die. Maybe, success in love is its persistence, whether the terms, definitions and perceived status change. Maybe, expanding our capacity to love, within the different definitions of how the individual and collective relationships we have with each other change, is what success really is.

Love is one of the most complicated things in human lives, which is why its so central a part of so much of our storytelling, and why it’s not very surprising whether by design or by circumstance, Obsession would end up presenting us with the inverse of so many of the ideas and tropes of the rom com. 

It’s this, our deeply held beliefs, our socially conditioned understanding, and our individual experience working in combination that produces the intensity of reaction to Obsession that’s been on display. There are rom coms, and stories with love and romance as the primary subject, that are among the most popular films of all time, because they are dealing with all of these same ideas. 

Curry Barker, and the film’s leads, have repeatedly said in interviews that it’s not a possession film. Nikki (played by Inde Navarrette) isn’t possessed in terms of demonic or spiritual possession, in that tradition of storytelling. It is a film about a different kind of possession though. The possession at the center of Obsession is of the definition of the word we’re using when we say “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” This variety of possession is how Bear understands love when he makes the wish that Nikki will “love him more than anyone else in the world.” Bear wants Nikki to belong to him. Since the premise of the film derives from the supernatural in the form of a wish, Obsession recognizes this conception of love as possession as horrifying. To Bear, both because he’s male, and because it’s one of the central, primary ideas about love and romance in our culture in total. Love, in so much our media and our popular conceptions and expressions of it, is possession, but people aren’t objects, and in many ways, love that can persist is the constant reaffirmation and rediscovery of who and what the person you love is, because they aren’t an object. It’s the constant discovery and affirmation of the human being they are and are becoming. 

Even when it’s not so stringent an idea of one character deciding another belongs to them, romantic comedies and films dealing with the ideas of love and romance still rely on this idea of possession. The stories and plots are meant to evoke a sense in the audience that two characters belong together, as if it is fate, destiny, kismet. All of these things… are employing magic as the erasure of the autonomy of the characters. Whether the conception of that magic resides in a god, some kind of universe that has interest in the daily emotional lives of individual human beings or some other concept… any time the sense of “they belong together” is invoked in a story about love, it’s magic. 

What’s happening to Nikki through the course of the film, is that she’s becoming a version of herself most well suited to what Bear understands as love when he makes the wish. Bear, as is true of the majority of people in their twenties, navigating the territory that is youth giving way to adulthood, doesn’t know what love is in this context. At least from what we’re shown in the film, he has little to no experience in trying to participate in and create this thing we call love in the romantic sense. The difference in Bear, as compared to the majority of people navigating similar territory, is that a sense of individual identity barely exists for him. Everything about him is an attempt to draw a response from others that is either acceptance or to not notice him, to not draw attention if he isn’t going to be met with acceptance. He has no sense of worth, and instead, has turned the sense of his worth into a fantasy dependent on possessing Nikki creating worth for him. The reason he doesn’t speak up about his feelings for her when she asks him directly, is that the fantasy would have to end, should he be honest. He either has to navigate what it means to love and be loved, in partnership with Nikki or she says that’s not the relationship she wants with him, and the fantasy ends anyway. Everything about Bear demonstrates that he’s never spent much time at all considering who he is, what he wants or much of anything other than the next thing he can say or do to invoke approval from whoever he’s in proximity to. In turn the needs he has, because he is human, express themselves without the kinds of restraint, purposefulness and consideration that come with both self reflection and maturity. Bear believes this variety of love, given to him by Nikki, will make him feel whole in a way he feels he's missing ("You complete me," Jerry Maquire).

There is a gendered aspect to this, in the way we are taught to expect someone to act in their performance of this belonging, the behaviors we expect them to embody and demonstrate. They do differ, depending on the perceived gender of the individual. This has been interrogated thoroughly, in both the broad sense and in terms of Obsession specifically. A good deal of the privilege men experience is related to making not just easier, but preferable for them not to engage in the kind of self reflection that Bear is lacking in. It's part of how the sense of entitlement to women, be it their bodies or their labor or as in Bear's case, an object or symbol that defines their worth continues. The concept of love being possession isn’t strictly a one way idea though either. It isn’t simply that women are possessions of men, as much as that was the basis of the tradition of marriage, and has been part of patriarchal gender norms for centuries. What we’ve developed in our attempts to move toward a more egalitarian idea of love, is a turn to “we belong to each other” as the answer. At least in the heteronormative world, this has become reciprocal possessiveness. Reciprocal possessiveness would be parity, if we could erase the many other forms of gender discrimination that are barriers to parity, but I also think we'd still find this underlying sense of possession no less responsible for all kinds of problems.

Along with While You Were Sleeping, My Best Friends Wedding is an example of this. Julia Roberts character essentially decides the man she loves, this person she’s had this long term friendship with, belongs to her, and goes about trying to sabotage his wedding. In essence, she's trying to negate the choice he’s made autonomously. You’ve Got Mail more or less accepts Meg Ryan’s autonomy and sense of fulfillment in her career isn’t quite as important “finding” love. Being possessed by and possessing someone else is a worthy trade off in that equation. That’s her choice to make, as an individual, but it’s also not at all an uncommon idea in the way we tell stories about love. One of the things feminism has rightly and accurately recognized, is that this variety of sacrifice is almost always expected to be made by women, and this has become even more stark in the attempt to establish reciprocal possession as the model of love in a relationship. What we collectively seem to be unwilling to consider is that there are only so many hours in a day and week, and possibly, the amount of labor it takes to administrate a life in the contexts of US society means no one is every going to "have it all," and the underlying expectation is that we all sacrifice contentment, fulfillment and our well being, just to survive.

There are other examples in Obsession of the inversion of the tropes of romantic and relationship comedies. The scene when Bear and Nikki attend Ian’s party, is straight out of any relationship comedy centered on a social circle’s skepticism of a couple or one person in that couple. Sit coms like Friends and Seinfeld features episodes based on this scenario often. Long Shot starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogan plays this same dynamic out, related to the social environment of her career. The “socially incompatible pairing” is practically the entire basis of the Hallmark Christmas film industry. Sabrina and Roman Holiday play on this same idea, substituting class separations in for the expectation of incompatibility. 

Obsession is just taking the same sense of absurdity, lack of synchronicity, and awkward “cringe” social interactions, and revealing the horror in them. It seems like a rite of passage to have the experience of watching friends lose themselves in a relationship, and being unable to find the right combination of words and actions which both respects their ability to make their own decisions, and also expresses how clear it is they’re demonstrating a depth of self erasure that never ends well. The duality of situations like these is that there is a certain degree to which this is a typical behavior for human beings. It’s an absurdity that isn’t unusual, at all, but it can have dire consequences too, including emotional, psychological and physical abuse. 

Another aspect of the rom com, and most films involving the beginning or early phases of a romance or relationship, is the “will they/won’t they” factor. It’s something so fundamental to the formula, even a sit com so successful it was a cultural phenomenon at the time, Moonlighting, can be brought to its knees once the “will they/won’t they” tension is no longer active in the story. One of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, When Harry Met Sally is fully and completely centered in this. Millennial staple, 10 Things I Hate About You trades on this. Maybe more than anything else, “will they/won’t they” is the bread and butter of the rom com. 

Obsession presents the inverse. They will, they are, they have, and it’s so deeply discomfiting, we as the audience desperately want them to stop, and it’s among the reasons the film stays with many viewers for extended periods. When we get a scene showing Nikki and Bear having their first intimate moment, that suggests it’s heading toward sex, Nikki “snaps out” of whatever the state she’s been in might be called, slapping Bear. The rest of the film, is devoted to making the audience desperate to see the “magic” of this relationship end. 

It’s in this way Obsession is commenting on that magic aspect in our storytelling about romance and love, and the problems of choice and autonomy that often get erased in consideration of rom coms and other stories about love. Bear may have made the wish, but it’s the One Wish Willow that makes it come true. This isn’t so different from the intervention of fate, destiny or any of the other terms one might use to indicate a “greater power” intervening because two people belong together or are made for each other or are soul mates or any of the other terms we tend to use in this same vein. They violate the autonomy, and by extension, the consent of the individuals involved. 

On the one hand, we find the idea of a universe that might recognize us, individually, comforting. “If there is a universe that would intervene on my behalf, to give me this thing which changed my life for the better, then it has to recognize I exist.” Obsession is the other side of that same coin. The universe or some magnificent, magical power within it recognizes Bear, Nikki, Ian and Sara exist. If we take the events of the film as the proof, being recognized by whatever power it is that grants Bear’s wish, and the particular way it is granted, that recognition isn’t such a good thing. This duality has been at the heart of our storytelling since we invented gods. Being recognized by whatever cosmic or supernatural power the story supposes, changes the lives of the characters at the center of the story, but it's not always for the positive. In this way, Obsession sits neatly between cosmic and folk horror too. There is some unexplained, reality shaping power at work in the lives of the characters, and it isn't benevolent.

And all of this, I think, comes back to our inability to recognize ourselves for what we are, because we've now spent a number of centuries building societies and civilizations based on faulty assumptions about what we are. Life and consciousness are miraculous in and of themselves. There is no cosmic design sprung from a morality based purpose. Life is the purpose. If there is any purpose to life, it's for life itself to persist, because it is a miraculous thing that this one planet, among all those we can see and have some basic ability to understand, evolved life. Love exists, and persists, because life exists and persists, and it is part of our evolutionary legacy that we get to experience it. All of this, without any other larger meaning, inspires a deep sense of awe and wonder in me.

I think, as well, part of our evolutionary legacy, has been the ability to learn, and among the things we are learning, and on the cusp on understanding more accurately than we ever have before, is what makes us human, what makes consciousness what it is. I also believe that to understand this, will be the roadmap to understanding what well being actually is, and in turn, how to stop creating societies which present barriers to it, so that a very small few might experience a material wealth which produces nothing like well being for them either.