Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 104
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
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.
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...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link