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Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies
film studies/pop culture
410 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2007
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June 27, 2024
Throughout history, intense and tumultuous love stories have fueled our collective imagination and fantasies. The unresolved passions of such characters as Heathcliff and Catherine, Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere are timeless and powerful enough to be continually reinterpreted. Cupid's arrow seems to strike with great depth the most unlikely of lovers, those from the wrong families and backgrounds, the wrong sides of the tracks, the wrong ages and situations - yet they all share one particular trait in common: Obsession. When the flame within lovers' hearts reaches the white-hot level of desire that characterizes obsessive love, it can become something else altogether - dangerous, reckless, irreverent, jealous, but above all exhilarating, and even spiritual for those who are consumed by it.
Obsession is a different form of love, if it is indeed love at all. It seems more like psychological fetishism of the very act and emotion of love itself. This passionate mania defies society's idealized expressions of love and romance, promulgated by treacly romantic comedies and greeting card companies. It is edgier, perverse, and far more intense, often manifested in the form of worship and grand objectification. For lovers in the grip of obsession, the obscene is transfigured from vulgarity into a shared sacrament, a complex dance and pathological ritual.
Displays of the extremes of worshipful and obsessive love, celebrations of passionate dysfunction within a relationship, have long been a powerfully alluring theme in literature and cinema. This concept of love has much more in common with the 19th century vision of Romance in its sexual psychology, angst, reversed gender roles and dark world.
While audiences are allowed to enjoy viewing the illicit pleasures of transgressive characters and intimately relate to them, often the story also delivers a moral statement about the dangers of flouting society’s rules and giving in to such temptations. The lovers may suffer terribly, their own obsessive love and alternative relationship structures leading them to ruin or shame. It is the very risk of self-destruction that makes the legendary star-crossed lovers so intoxicating. These films tell of lovers who took the road less travelled, often meandering into a storm that destroys most couples. Their stories warn of the danger, yet dangle the tantalizing prospect of a live so intoxicating that it could send a person into madness.
“Mad love isolated the lovers, makes them ignore normal social obligations, ruptures ordinary family ties, and ultimately brings them to destruction.”
——
Schuyler’s final destruction comes in the form he most desires, at the hands of his dark mistress. Jealousy torments him as The Vampire cuckolds him with other men. But it only takes a touch from her to send him back into submission. As drink and poverty begin to take their toll, Schuyler ages exponentially until he is a shell of the man he once was. In the final scene we see him lying once again at The Vampire’s feet as she spreads the petals of a flower over him, as if he’s already a rotting corpse.
——
Gizella’s ex lover returns and she agrees to marry him. This distraught Pygmalion cannot accept the loss of his Galatea and holds onto her the only way he knows how: he strangled her as she poses and then paints her, capturing her on canvas forever.
——
When Cheng arrives to find his "broken blossom" dead, he shoots Burrows repeatedly and carries his beloved back to their "love nest". There he installs her in his bed like an idol, lights incense and candles to her and Buddha, his two gods, and commits suicide.
——
"Do you really think we'd be happy?" she asks. To which the obsessive Philip answers, "No, but what does it matter?"
——
Lola is a free spirit who cannot be controlled by any man. There is no doubt that she is fond of the professor. She seems genuinely happy with him, making him breakfast, calling him "sweet", helping him develop his act. But she also expects that he know his place and accept that she is independent of him.
——
"What do you mean by breaking in like an assassin? Are you my father? No! Are you my husband? No! Are you my lover? No!"
——
Like so many amour fou couples restricted by the norms of society, these two form a plan to kill the husband and be free of those restrictions forever.
——
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is one of the key works of obsession and the template for many novels and films, particularly in its precise delineation of how violence, love, hate, and jealousy can intermingle in one relationship and produce an overheated tale of immortal passion.
——
When Catherine tells Heathcliff that she "prefers to be the wind and the rain and beat you", we believe it. Their fluctuations between love and hate are rooted in a madness that cannot be defined or contained by this world and its values. When Catherine locks herself in her room, mad from Heathcliff's betrayal with Isabella and her own pregnancy, she starved herself into a hallucinatory fever, dragging her body about the room, pulling down the linens of her bed, smashing her head through a window. After Cathy's death, Heathcliff starts to dig up her grave with his bare hands, crying, "May you not rest while I am living... Do not leave me." And in response, her spirit appears on the hill above.
——
The only reconciliation now possible for these star-crossed lovers is death. And so they choose suicide. "We will always meet". And be responds, "We will make of dying nothing more than one last embrace."
——
Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars and shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness of obsession.
Derangement of the senses is one of the key symptoms of those suffering from amour fou (mad love). Love and madness intertwine, leaving victims crippled by their own overpowering emotions. This runaway freight train of desire is characterized over and over again in art and media by the surrealists, whose tremendous passion for their muses set the measure for the expression of obsessive love for generations to come.
——
“All my life I’ll wonder where is he?” Giovanni exclaims his eternal love for her and then jumps from the moving train.
——
Han has retreated to an “ivory tower” to protect herself from the vagaries of fate and the world. She warns him, “Do not awaken a sleeping tiger.” That tiger is her passion, long buried (“I feel on the brink of something. I don’t want to feel this. It frightens me.”)
——
The story of “Brief Encounter”, a short-lived, quasi-adulterous (the relationship is never physically consummated) but intense romance between two ordinary people. They experience turbulent emotions stirring within their souls. “Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair, not even life lasts long.” Her brief madness is over. The final sequence of the movie begins with a jump cut from Laura standing in the doorway of the tearoom to the frame of the story - Laura sitting in the study with her husband. She looks disorientedly at him, as if the abrupt change of scene had jarred her rudely awake, as if her life has already ended and she now realizes she is buried alive in this English suburban nightmare.
——
Possession and objectification mark the depths of desperation in dysfunctional relationships, and voyeuristic pleasures are clearly maximized in the frequently contrived “undetected camera” scenes that are so prevalent.
Obsession is a different form of love, if it is indeed love at all. It seems more like psychological fetishism of the very act and emotion of love itself. This passionate mania defies society's idealized expressions of love and romance, promulgated by treacly romantic comedies and greeting card companies. It is edgier, perverse, and far more intense, often manifested in the form of worship and grand objectification. For lovers in the grip of obsession, the obscene is transfigured from vulgarity into a shared sacrament, a complex dance and pathological ritual.
Displays of the extremes of worshipful and obsessive love, celebrations of passionate dysfunction within a relationship, have long been a powerfully alluring theme in literature and cinema. This concept of love has much more in common with the 19th century vision of Romance in its sexual psychology, angst, reversed gender roles and dark world.
While audiences are allowed to enjoy viewing the illicit pleasures of transgressive characters and intimately relate to them, often the story also delivers a moral statement about the dangers of flouting society’s rules and giving in to such temptations. The lovers may suffer terribly, their own obsessive love and alternative relationship structures leading them to ruin or shame. It is the very risk of self-destruction that makes the legendary star-crossed lovers so intoxicating. These films tell of lovers who took the road less travelled, often meandering into a storm that destroys most couples. Their stories warn of the danger, yet dangle the tantalizing prospect of a live so intoxicating that it could send a person into madness.
“Mad love isolated the lovers, makes them ignore normal social obligations, ruptures ordinary family ties, and ultimately brings them to destruction.”
——
Schuyler’s final destruction comes in the form he most desires, at the hands of his dark mistress. Jealousy torments him as The Vampire cuckolds him with other men. But it only takes a touch from her to send him back into submission. As drink and poverty begin to take their toll, Schuyler ages exponentially until he is a shell of the man he once was. In the final scene we see him lying once again at The Vampire’s feet as she spreads the petals of a flower over him, as if he’s already a rotting corpse.
——
Gizella’s ex lover returns and she agrees to marry him. This distraught Pygmalion cannot accept the loss of his Galatea and holds onto her the only way he knows how: he strangled her as she poses and then paints her, capturing her on canvas forever.
——
When Cheng arrives to find his "broken blossom" dead, he shoots Burrows repeatedly and carries his beloved back to their "love nest". There he installs her in his bed like an idol, lights incense and candles to her and Buddha, his two gods, and commits suicide.
——
"Do you really think we'd be happy?" she asks. To which the obsessive Philip answers, "No, but what does it matter?"
——
Lola is a free spirit who cannot be controlled by any man. There is no doubt that she is fond of the professor. She seems genuinely happy with him, making him breakfast, calling him "sweet", helping him develop his act. But she also expects that he know his place and accept that she is independent of him.
——
"What do you mean by breaking in like an assassin? Are you my father? No! Are you my husband? No! Are you my lover? No!"
——
Like so many amour fou couples restricted by the norms of society, these two form a plan to kill the husband and be free of those restrictions forever.
——
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is one of the key works of obsession and the template for many novels and films, particularly in its precise delineation of how violence, love, hate, and jealousy can intermingle in one relationship and produce an overheated tale of immortal passion.
——
When Catherine tells Heathcliff that she "prefers to be the wind and the rain and beat you", we believe it. Their fluctuations between love and hate are rooted in a madness that cannot be defined or contained by this world and its values. When Catherine locks herself in her room, mad from Heathcliff's betrayal with Isabella and her own pregnancy, she starved herself into a hallucinatory fever, dragging her body about the room, pulling down the linens of her bed, smashing her head through a window. After Cathy's death, Heathcliff starts to dig up her grave with his bare hands, crying, "May you not rest while I am living... Do not leave me." And in response, her spirit appears on the hill above.
——
The only reconciliation now possible for these star-crossed lovers is death. And so they choose suicide. "We will always meet". And be responds, "We will make of dying nothing more than one last embrace."
——
Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars and shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness of obsession.
Derangement of the senses is one of the key symptoms of those suffering from amour fou (mad love). Love and madness intertwine, leaving victims crippled by their own overpowering emotions. This runaway freight train of desire is characterized over and over again in art and media by the surrealists, whose tremendous passion for their muses set the measure for the expression of obsessive love for generations to come.
——
“All my life I’ll wonder where is he?” Giovanni exclaims his eternal love for her and then jumps from the moving train.
——
Han has retreated to an “ivory tower” to protect herself from the vagaries of fate and the world. She warns him, “Do not awaken a sleeping tiger.” That tiger is her passion, long buried (“I feel on the brink of something. I don’t want to feel this. It frightens me.”)
——
The story of “Brief Encounter”, a short-lived, quasi-adulterous (the relationship is never physically consummated) but intense romance between two ordinary people. They experience turbulent emotions stirring within their souls. “Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair, not even life lasts long.” Her brief madness is over. The final sequence of the movie begins with a jump cut from Laura standing in the doorway of the tearoom to the frame of the story - Laura sitting in the study with her husband. She looks disorientedly at him, as if the abrupt change of scene had jarred her rudely awake, as if her life has already ended and she now realizes she is buried alive in this English suburban nightmare.
——
Possession and objectification mark the depths of desperation in dysfunctional relationships, and voyeuristic pleasures are clearly maximized in the frequently contrived “undetected camera” scenes that are so prevalent.
September 11, 2015
This is a very good and fairly well-written survey that does what it says on the cover. It's rather lightweight though without very much explanation of the psychological/theoretical frameworks that have been explored in this area of film studies. I accept that that is the subject of a fair few other books but it would have added to the impact of the text if some summaries of a few concepts could have been included (such as scopophilia, Lacanian ideas, Laura Mulvey's work, and so on). The book also neglects to mention Blue Velvet which is a very odd omission indeed. Even so, it's excellent for dipping into, has some nice touches of humour, seems well-researched and is well illustrated. A worthy addition to my film-related book shelves.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews