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Notes -
The creator of the film Obsession, Curry Barker, claims that the One Wish Willow is not a monkey's paw, but I feel like this doesn't make sense, or, if it is true, it undermines the point of the film.
Bear wishes for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world." An aligned One Wish Willow should not have made her obsessive to the point of murder and cat-cooking. Even if you follow the logic that the real Nikki would never fall in love with him, so it has to create a Freaky Nikki persona who would, that also just isn't what he asked for.
Even if he was more in love with the idea of Nikki, than in her in her full personhood, Freaky Nikki is not Nikki, and not just in the minimal way that his wish should have implied.
I feel like Barker's statement implies that a more evil wish, like, "I wish for Nikki's personality to be completely erased and replaced with a robot persona that carries out my orders exactly as I intend them" would have had better results than Bear's comparatively less evil wish. But since the film is a classic "be careful what you wish for" horror movie, I find it easier to believe that the wish granter is actively malevolent in how it interprets any wish that impacts human agency, and even a wish like that will have a bad outcome somehow.
Like, is the take away really supposed to be that Bear simply should have waited to get a better sense of the limitations and proclivities of his wish-granting artifact, by watching other people use theirs, and then make his wish after running it by a lawyer? Surely not.
I'm not sure how much I should comment since I have only heard about the movie second hand, but I imagine that "all bad things that happened are 100% his responsibility and exactly what he wished for" is an easy way for the director to defend himself from accusations that he is making excuses for a male character that by all accounts the feminist set considers problematic and evil. In arguments-as-soldiers-verse, complicating details that water down the perfect narrative are enemy bullets.
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Nikki loved Bear more than anyone else in the world. Bear did not love Nikki that much. That’s what caused the problems. You see how the first few months when she thinks he does are fine.
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Barker doesn't strikes me as someone who very concerned with rigorous logical world building. He does seem to think a lot about producing an interesting and entertaining product. I don't think the movie is trying to make a point or even trying to explore any themes very deeply. I think the simplest explanation for the things he's said is that he doesn't want to be constrained in how the world works. Is it a monkey's paw? If he says yes that restricts in-world stories where the wish didn't have bad consequences. He's also said it's not a demon possession movie, but not really clarified beyond that. It's very clearly a monkey-paw-demon-possession-like movie, but there's no benefit in actually committing to this. I imagine coming from a sketch comedy background his instinct is to avoid boxing himself in, especially with an idea that turned out to be such a success.
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Barker’s commentary is just post hoc rationalization to appease feminist seethe following the movie.
From a lipstick feminist perspective, the takeaway is that Bear—as a low status male—had no right to wish for anything, much less be deserved of having a wish of his come true (even if accidental and mangled).
Bear should have read the One Wish Willow’s mind and known what would have happened. Failing that and after making the wish, he should have immediately recognized his wrongdoing and should have been hyperagentic and competent enough to just Figure It Out and undo whatever the One Wish Willow did. No, instead the clueless “Nice Guy” chose to rape Nikki with the One Wish Willow’s help.
Just have the emotional intelligence to recognize when a supernatural, possibly omnipotent force is up to no good and Do the Bear Minimum in defeating it to go back to accepting your fate as a low status male. Ugh, it’s that easy—why can’t men just get it? The bar is on the floor. This is why women choose the animal bear.
The wish itself is just window-dressing.
James Bond or Jason Bourne are an idealized, fantasized version of real spies/special forces soldiers. They are a convenient vehicle to show action scenes and maybe share some ideas about terrorism, conspiracies, state secrets, geopolitical issues etc.
In the same manner, having a man 'cause' a woman to be crazy allows to show what a crazy woman looks like, and give some words of caution about it.
Notice how in this real life setting you have a woman having multiple meltdowns in public and nobody really reacts whatsoever? Notice how the friend group is at best cursorily inquiring if the man is taking advantage of the crazy woman?
The message of the movie is possibly that a crazy woman will ruin your life, perhaps drive you to suicide and nobody will save you. The director is pretty clever for finding something that resonates with viewers and getting away with it.
I’d say James Bond was more the idealized, fantasized person you’re thinking of in that case. Not to dump on James Bond movies, but Jason Bourne was more the realism counterpart to what you got with Bond. A world where the police aren’t completely stupid and incompetent and the rest of the world the character inhabits doesn’t drop away or become indifferent to the plot.
Movies don’t stem from a vacuum. They emerge out of the cultural milieu and trends people respond and react to. I’d have thought movies like Citizen Vigilante were a clear indicator of this. Watch Mehdi Hasan lose his mind and become butthurt over it, and becoming more emotional than even Piers Morgan was glorious to watch. Stick to criticizing Israel homie, because it’s what you’re good at.
I’ve dealt with and certainly know “crazy” women. Depending on how you want to define it, but they’re definitely unhinged for sure. When I was a teenager there was a girl I was friends with in high school that wanted to have sex with me, in her car, parked right outside her ex-boyfriend’s house; in the fucking hood of all places. Are you fucking insane? We were active with each other but I nope’d out of that situation. And I’ve got a few handful of examples of similar experiences with girls I’ve dealt with who were equally eccentric. When I was living out of state with my girlfriend at the time, there were multiple instances of looks both of us got (or rather her) while we were on the street and out doing things. Physically, she was a complete knockout of a woman. She was in volleyball in high school and other extracurricular sports, was in shape, had a huge bust of a chest, very attractive face and eyes, and converted to Islam at a later point in her life. But we had a very long history together, we knew each other, our friend’s and family’s, etc. Ironically, my closest friends didn’t like her, the ones more on the periphery did; and most of my family didn’t like her either (not for her religious views at all but for her personality which they viewed as unbecoming of a woman; they viewed her as stuck up and someone who didn’t know her place; my younger female cousin and her even got into a real nasty argument at one point) but were respectful, even before we got our own place together and she was living with us, before we moved.
Anyway when we lived together in our apartment one day we had to go to the AutoZone to get a part for her car. She had a white Hyundai that was a beater and we had a lot of money saved for her to get a new car, but she wanted to keep it going awhile longer while we continued to save more. We were younger but weren’t strangers to standing on our own two feet before. We go inside, get the item and when we went to pay for it, the white guy behind the register who was probably middle age by my standards, tried asking her out and for her number, while I was right in front of him (didn’t know who he imagined I was). She just smirked and looked over at me and I just calmly said “That’s cute. She’s in a relationship.” And he had a surprised look on his face, we got our stuff and left and laughed a bit when we got outside. But then, we had to actually do the labor to fix the car part. Well she had a brilliant idea. She called someone she knew in the area (a young guy, probably our age at that time who was a mechanic), to see about fixing it. In his off hours, he comes over to our apartment still in his mechanic suit, while the car was parked right in front of the apartment, jacks the car up and does about two and a half hours work of labor (for free) and changes the part out, probably lowkey hoping he’d earn his way into her good graces and hoping he’d have gotten laid, despite telling him beforehand that we were together. This guy coaxed himself out of probably $750.00 on his “hopes and dreams.” And there were other experiences we had as well. In a restaurant once, in an apparel store. You see first hand how attractive women always get lowkey inundated with subtle (and not so subtle) advances of men who are trying everything they can because the want to fuck you. But she was also a bit “unhinged” at times. We had sex on the beach once and got surrounded by 6 people who started watching us because we just happened to get in the moment. This was all at 1am, and it was instigated with her making the first move. Looking back at everything in retrospect, you could say she was “crazy” if you want; I just think she had an exotic flair for things at times.
The James Bond from the books was a lot sadder. The violent and sexual wish fulfillment are still there, but Fleming was a lot more realistic about the consequences. He understands how sad Bond’s life and failure to connect with women are. In the books, the girl doesn’t just conveniently disappear at the beginning of the next movie. Fleming actually goes into exactly why the relationship ended up failing, usually because Bond is an emotional cripple. Sometimes because a hunky American Marine stole her heart, the wanker. The fact that he has no wife or children at 40 weighs on him.
And book Bond is just as effective a killer as his movie counterpart, but he takes a lot less pleasure in it. One of the books opens with ten pages of Bond brooding over a cartel sicario he had just had to stab. This man was trying to gut him like a pig, but taking his life still really bothers Bond.
Maybe this because the books were written by a real womanizing killer.
I’ve also heard the Bond of the books was quite different from his cinematic incarnation. Never read the books so I can’t say. Of all the Bond actors, is there one that comes closer to Fleming’s representation on him more than the others?
None of them really capture Bond’s attitude to violence right. Maybe Brosnan, but his Bond is very guarded and opaque so it’s hard to tell. Physically, Timothy Dalton, he’s the spitting image of the portrait Fleming commissioned of Bond. In terms of his complicated relationship with women being closest to the books, your best bets are Casino Royale, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Secret Service. Many here will say From Russia With Love but I’ve never liked it for some reason. Ironically, I think the movie Bonds do really nail how book Bond would have interacted with a female superior: cold professionalism shot through with a hurt little boy looking for his mother.
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This is the same bullshit way of thinking about the movie that your opponents use; they dismiss One Wish Willow as an agentic force that deserves part of the blame for the film's events because it's "just an allegory for" men controlling women. You've gotta handle stories at least a little bit literally.
I mean I don't claim to know what the director had in mind making the movie, but if I were a director trying to sell a movie showing a crazy BPD girlfriend and graphic physical violence against a woman, I'd try to give the impression that there's some kind of feminist message.
I'm not a horror fan as I can't make myself vulnerable enough to be scared on behalf of fictional characters, but I liked the story and appreciated the dark comedy throughout.
I think it'd have been interesting if there was a plausible doubt that the magic worked at all. Story would have been more subtle and maybe not worked as well as it did.
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For many reasons, I'm inclined to say that Barker is simply lying about this, which is unfortunate because it's a great movie; fortunately, the lie doesn’t survive contact with the film itself. It's a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, and also a classic deal-with-the-devil story; these archetypes classically go together and the film telegraphs both of them hard. Bear makes an evil wish and it is granted by an evil power; its interpretation of his wish is malicious, but the whole point of that malice is to damn him, and it can't do that with a cheap trick unrelated to his intent in making the wish. So Nikki is possessed by another personality (a demon, because this is basically the devil granting the wish) because Bear wouldn’t actually mind his wish being granted that way in principle; that personality is fucking crazy because that's the level of intensity Bear initially envisioned. And the Willow made its way into Bear's hands in the first place because he was the sort of person to do that, because he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.
TBH I think a large part of Barker's motivation in making these implausible claims about his film is just that he's scared of Hollywood reading it as religious. Which gets lost in a lot of the normie social media discourse on it, which thinks of demonic possession as a stock horror movie trope like vampires or zombies and not as a phenomenon a lot of the world believes in as part of their faith.
Given that Nikki’s body is covered head to toe in bizarre inscriptions and sigils by the end, I’m not sure how people don’t pick up on the fact there is a literal aspect to the movie in addition to the metaphorical one.
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Wait, the guy literally finds the wish-granting thingee in a creepy shop? That seems like a pretty strong monkey's paw callout in and of itself...
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I kept reading this infuriating take about demonic possession or something.
'anyone in the world' clearly includes psychotic, insane people that do crazy things like killing themselves to further political or religious causes. The magic is entirely about non-consensually shifting the behavior of a regular woman into the most insane possible woman infatuated with main character. You can probably find evidence of separate insane women doing all of the insane things Nikki does in the movie.
The Bear -the one they chose, get it?- essentially chose to have the worst possible BPD girlfriend.
The take-away is that you should pick carefully who you associate with, and pay attention to who you're spending time with. The wishing willow was only necessary to get the movie classified as 'horror' and maybe not straight up have the movie branded as a 'b# be crazy yo' movie.
The filmmaker was doing comedy/horror videos before. This is essentially a dark comedy about domestic violence. There's definitely something comedic about the pretty taboo ultra-violent scene unnecessarily lasting 30s too long 'look I get to show this on a screen, and I'm making millions too'.
While I think there is ambiguity in Bear's wording, I actually interpreted the wish to be for "Nikki to love [him] more than [she loves] anyone [else] in the fucking world" as opposed to for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world [loves anyone else]."
This is part of why I say it is a monkey's paw, or some other flavor of asshole genie. Almost any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.) The sign of a "good" genie, is that you make a wish in plain English, and they interpret in a way you would endorse via coherent extrapolated volition, or they at least make a good faith effort to give you what you asked for with no nasty gotchas.
If the One Wish Willow will just give you a million dollars in a pretty straightforward way, but it creates a demonic persona when you make a love potion wish, that's an entity that is out to get you in some way.
One interpretation means loving more than the most loving psycho out there, the other interpretation means loving somebody more than you love yourself, which might be even worse and explain most of the behaviors in the movie.
In that case of love, one can imagine it may be physically painful to be significantly apart from the loved one, like a junkie missing a dose.
Junkies are known to do crazy things for their drug, so that's also an explanation that does not require a demon.
I mean we have 'good genies' right now trying to give people what they want, without any magic, and we still end up with supposedly educated/smart people getting AI psychosis and thinking that they are the Chosen one who figured out some secret of the universe. Allegedly.
One million dollars falling from the sky might still cause plenty of issues, from simple tax problems to the paranoia of losing it all. This already happens to people who win the lottery.
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You know, I generally agree with you, but in fact Bear's buddy wishes for a million dollars and it comes in stacks of hundreds falling harmlessly from the ceiling, which complicates the monkey's paw claim.
Giving someone a billion dollars will turn them into a demonic asshole a lot quicker than any dark magic.
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I would chalk it to either an angler fish strategy, or the OWW having a sense of dramatic irony.
Since there are enough OWWs in the word that you can see other people's wishes granted, maybe the OWW lures people in by granting a subset of wishes not touching on human agency in a completely straightforward way. That way, it generates positive word of mouth and gets more people to use it for the kinds of wishes it likes to corrupt.
Alternatively, maybe the OWW just knew with high probability that the guy would never get to use the money because of Nikki, so it was happy to grant the wish for the dramatic irony his death would produce.
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I may be misremembering the movie, but didn’t Bear’s friend go to Bear’s house to brag about the money then immediately get shot by Nikki? That sequence of events was caused by the money, and would be a monkey’s paw.
Difficult to say. Certainly I'd say that it wasn't "caused" in the same way that Bear's wish caused Nikki to become possessed. If we're stipulating that there's no free will in the Obsession universe and Ian could not have chosen otherwise but to go brag about the money when Nikki was home and therefore get shot then that has some significant implications on Bear's culpability and questions about monkey's paws and what caused what become somewhat moot - the whole sequence of events was predetermined anyway.
Im a believer in compatibilism, so I don’t think there is a contradiction between determinism and free will. My personal headcanon is that any wish from the one-wish-willow either directly causes something bad, like Nikki’s possession, or indirectly causes something bad like the above sequence Friend gets money -> Friend goes to brag about it -> Friend gets shot by Nikki.
We are getting into death of the author territory at this point, so this is just a personal rationalization of the mechanics of the movie.
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My personal interpretation is that the One Wish Willow cared more about screwing over Bear than Ian, because he had more to work with psychologically, but also it knew that Ian was doomed anyway because he'd wander into Bear's house minutes later. But it wouldn't be in-character for the One Wish Willow to kill Ian by dropping money on his head, anyway, because it's demonic, it cares about corrupting the soul; if it's going to corrupt a wish for money, it's going to do it by provoking further doubling-down on avarice.
So no free will in the Obsession cinematic universe? Difficult to assign blame then, or discuss whether the genie is an asshole.
This btw seemed a very weak part of the movie - Bear has already seen the money, wtf is Ian barging into Bear's house for?
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