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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.
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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