I recently watched the movie Obsession and, like many people who did, I have thoughts. It’s a fantastic movie that you should definitely watch (especially before reading this). It touches on subjects of male loneliness, the nature of love and romance, abuse, rape culture, selfhood and identity, bodily autonomy, as well as bringing up issues of media literacy and sexism. Here I will only be able to cover some of these topics.
Spoilers ahead for Obsession.
Synopsis
I’ll give a brief synopsis before going into the analysis, though you will find the latter more fruitful if you watch the entire movie first. What I write here is almost certainly going to leave out a lot of important details. I would also recommend the following videos as even further in-depth synopses.
Obsession is about a twenty-something guy named Baron “Bear” Bailey (referred to almost exclusively as Bear) who has an unrequited obsession with a coworker and childhood friend named Nikki Freeman. Bear is a timid, anxious, passive man who doom scrolls Nikki’s social media after finding his cat, having gotten into a bottle of oxycodone, dead on the floor. Nikki then gets Bear to come to bar trivia night with their other friends, the somewhat domineering Ian and the somewhat timid Sarah (who has a crush on Bear). On his way there, Bear stops by a store to buy a necklace for Nikki, but instead buys a novelty item called a One Wish Willow, which claims that it can grant a person one wish.
After spending time at the bar, where Bear was stopped from confessing his feelings to Nikki, agrees to drive her home. He fails to confess his feelings again, this time out of timidity. In frustration, as she goes into her house, he uses the One Wish Willow to wish that Nikki Freeman would love him more than anyone in the world. The wish takes affect almost immediately. She comes back out to the car, acting strange, and gets him to take her back to his place (claiming her father is dying in hopes of getting Bear to comfort her), where she asks him to sleep with her. She has a moment of clarity, startled as she begins kissing him, momentarily unsure of what was happening to her. Bear sleeps on the floor and allows her to sleep in the bed, and during the night he looks online to see if the One Wish Willow actually works and gets mixed messaging on it (some people saying it does while others saying it doesn’t).
The next day Nikki has made breakfast for Bear, but has also retrieved the dead cat from the garbage and set it out like a monument. When Bear points out that this is strange, she doesn’t seem to understand why, indicating a sort of childlike naivete. The two go to work and Bear tells Ian about the strange night (nothing about the cat incident, though) saying that he thinks Nikki might be having some kind of psychological issues due to the pain of her estranged dad dying, all while Nikki stares at him in the background. Regardless, Bear goes along with what’s happening, seeming to finally get what he’d always wanted: a relationship with Nikki. There is a montage of them appearing happy with one another, but it ends with a scene at the restaurant where Ian calls and tells Bear that Nikki’s estranged dad is not actually dying and that Nikki had told Sarah that she’d thought of Bear like a brother, not a love interest. Bear confronts Nikki about the lie and she admits to it but throws a tantrum and asks why it matters. Bear says it doesn’t matter to him that she lied about her dad dying, so they go home and have sex (at least that’s what Bear would like to think, but her neutral expression, and the fact that we the audience know she’s under a spell, makes it all the more harrowing: she is being raped).
Later that night Bear awakens to find Nikki acting strange, standing in the shadows and watching him sleep. In a whiny, childlike voice she complains that she doesn’t think Bear loves her as much as she loves him. After getting back into bed, she refuses to allow him to get up. The next day Bear finds that Nikki has cut his hair while he was asleep. He scolds her for this and for acting strange the night before and she promises it won’t happen again. He goes to leave for work (she has the day off) only to find the door duct taped shut. He barely reacts to this, leaving her behind, where she proceeds to stand in the middle of the room with a creepy smile, the shot lingering on her for quite some time before she starts peeing, indicating she does not plan to move until Bear comes home.
At work, Bear goes to eat the lunch that Nikki prepared for him and has a conversation with Sarah. There are two pictures in the lunch box, one of him alone that says “you” and one of him and her that says “not me” (because, it’s implied, this version of Nikki is not the real version, but also indicating that he is not actually with Nikki). The sticky note and the strange smell that Sarah detects reveals that the sandwich was made with Bear’s dead cat. He vomits and passes the whole thing off as an inside joke.
At the ends of the shift Bear drives Ian home, who confronts him about the sudden and strange relationship Bear has with Nikki, and invites Bear to a party, but without Nikki, which Bear agrees to. After dropping Ian off, Bear stops outside his place to practice what he’s going to say to Nikki, but discovers a customer service number on the packaging for the One Wish Willow. He calls the number and asks if he can modify (not cancel, but modify) his wish, hoping to get Nikki to stop acting strange, but not wanting to actually give back her free will. Only when the person on the other says the wish can’t be modified does Bear ask if he can cancel it, but is told no. He asks if that means Nikki is going to be like this forever (not whether she will be trapped forever, but whether she will act this erratic forever) and it’s revealed that she will be this way as long as Bear is alive. The person on the other end asks if Bear would like to speak to Nikki, but all he hears from her over the phone is tormented screams, and so he hangs up, not wanting to confront what he’s done to her.
Upon going back into the house, he finds Nikki standing there in a puddle of her own urine and vomit. She hadn’t moved since he left that morning. Nikki goes to take a shower and he scolds her again for acting strange and feeding him his dead cat. She throws a fit about him going to Ian’s party and so he lets her come. There they play a Jenga drinking game where her block (which is not revealed, but she presumably does what it says) prompts her to read something from her phone, a bizarre version of Hansel and Gretel where they have some kind of sadomasochistic incestual relationship. Bear’s block then says to kiss the person to his left, which is Sarah (who has a crush on him). Nikki is very unhappy about this, moves Sarah out of the way, and gets the kiss from Bear. She shouts about her love for him to the other stunned partygoers (all while Bear sits passively) before having a moment of clarity, shouting that this is not her, and then seems to try excising the cursed facsimile of Nikki from herself by bashing her face with a broken liquor bottle, only for the facsimile of Nikki to regain control and pretend like it was all no big deal.
Bear tries taking Nikki to the hospital, but she refuses treatment, and so they go back to his place. There he scolds her again for acting erratically. He finally seems to admit out loud that this isn’t really Nikki, but she begs him not to leave and that she really is Nikki. She tells him (in so many words) that she’ll die without him. He agrees to stay.
That night, while both of them are in bed, he gets texts from Sarah telling him she needs to talk to him. As he leaves, a motionless Nikki speaks from where she lay on the bed. This time it’s the real Nikki speaking, not the facsimile. Bear refuses to make the distinction (because otherwise he would need to admit that he hasn’t actually been with Nikki this whole time). Nikki pleads with him to kill her and he asks if its really so bad being with him. She says that she’s never been with him. Bear leaves to speak with Sarah while Nikki continues pleading after him to kill her.
While meeting with Sarah in her car, Sarah reveals that Nikki had been hooking up with Ian (prior to the wish), which seems to bother Bear. She says that she had been the one Bear was supposed to kiss during the Jenga game. Bear seems receptive to dating Sarah, but instead Nikki bashes through the car window and brutally murders Sarah. At this point Nikki seems to understand that Bear made a wish that made her the way she is, but she still says she loves him. He helps her clear away Sarah’s body. Nikki then says she’ll handle the rest (presumably the disposal of the corpse) and Bear tries to see if he can do something to cancel his wish.
He first tries the store where he bought the One Wish Willow, buying out the rest of them, but is unable to make another wish (everyone only gets one). He tried to get Ian to wish that Bear had never made the wish, but the skeptical Ian instead wishes for a billion dollars, which begins raining down on him from the ceiling. Bear then goes to Nikki, hoping her love for him will convince her to make the wish to cancel his, but he finds that she’s been mutilating Sarah’s corpse (which is left out in a monument-like fashion, similar to Bear’s cat earlier in the movie) and trying to make herself look like Sarah (since she now suspects that Bear had loved Sarah instead of her, she wants to turn herself into Sarah), including wearing her clothes, drawing her tattoos on herself, and even scalping Sarah and wearing her hair.
Bear is able to calm Nikki down long enough to lock himself the bathroom away from her. She pounds on the door as he searches for a way to kill himself. Unsure of doing it with a gun, he attempts using the oxycodone (from the same bottle that his cat got into earlier in the movie). After swallowing them, he has second thoughts and goes to try vomiting them out, but before he does, Nikki finds his last One Wish Willow, which can be heard through the bathroom door. He stops attempting to induce vomiting, a happy look coming over his face, Nikki apparently having wished that he would love her the way she loves him.
Bear exits the bathroom, the two share smiles, then a kiss, but then he passes out in her arms. She cries, distraught at losing her love. She brings the gun up to her own mouth, about to fire when Bear dies and his wish wears off. The real Nikki is now in control of her body, but surrounded by carnage and knowing her life is completely ruined. She bawls in despair as credits roll.
–
I will now peel the onion of this movie and examine each layer.
Layer 1: What’s Wrong with Her?
This layer is the outer skin, covered in dirt and mold. This is the layer of analysis that begins and ends with “this bitch is crazy!” The movie, at least early on, wants us to sympathize with Bear (just the fact that he is the point-of-view protagonist does this), and so it must be that he is the good guy, because point-of-view characters cannot be villains, right? Plus, someone as timid and passive as Bear can’t be that bad, can he? It’s not like he’s overtly cruel. It’s the whole “it’s only rape if there is physical violence” way of thinking (see Layer 5 for more on this). There is not much else to say here, except that there are certainly people who don’t go any further in their analysis than this.
Layer 2: What’s Wrong with Him?
If someone thinks just a minute or so more about the movie, they might arrive at this layer of analysis, the slimy layer of the onion just after removing the crumbling skin but that someone will still need to wash in the sink. The thinking might be something like: “if this bitch is so crazy, why is this dude staying with her? Why’s he acting so weird and passive about all the nutty shit she’s doing?” While this is still very surface level, it is at least starting to brush up against the right questions to ask. It is strange that Bear is sticking with Nikki as she grows more and more erratic. It is strange that, even after she feeds him his own dead cat, that he goes back to her, scolds her a bit for acting so weird, but then doesn’t examine this disturbing behavior any further. It is strange that she lied about her dad having cancer and then proceeded to throw a tantrum when he confronts her about it. It is strange that he isn’t looking for some way to get himself out of this situation.
Unfortunately, this layer of analysis might transiently ponder these questions while failing to dig any deeper. It might rhetorically ask what is wrong with Bear, but fails to truly ask what is wrong with him that he’d be willing to overlook what is, at the very least, Nikki having a mental health crisis, just because he is obsessed with the idea he has in his head of Nikki and what it would be like to be with her (which is why he scolds her for acting erratic, since that is unpleasant for him, but never looks any deeper into why she might be acting that way).
Layer 3: Who is Bear?
We are now down to the edible part of the onion we are peeling back. This is the layer of analysis that most of the sources I’ve engaged with spend the most time. As such, since it’s already been covered a lot elsewhere, I am only going to give a brief exposition at this layer of analysis. See the following videos (and there are plenty of others ones you could find on your own as well) for even more analysis that is primarily (though not exclusively) at this layer for a lot more depth than I will give here.
What this layer of analysis does is honestly answer the questions raised in Layer 2: the reason Bear stays with Nikki even as she becomes increasingly erratic is because (drum roll) Bear is the one who is obsessed, not her. She’s under a spell and so her behavior can be excused, as she has no free will. But Bear has an unhealthy notion of what love and friendship and healthy relationships are. As a result, he is so blinded by his obsession – with her and with his own sense of entitlement – that he only sees her as an object of his desire, not as a full person. He’s Dr. Frankenstein, who we all know is the real monster of that story.
Most at this layer of analysis agrees on that. But there are a couple disagreements here. The first is: at what point can Bear said to have crossed the line to become the irredeemable villain of the story? The second is: what label can we apply to Bear? Is he an incel? A “nice guy”? Is he suffering from the male loneliness epidemic?
In the first disagreement, there are a few points in the story that people will land. Some say that as soon as he made the wish he had crossed the line. This seems very simplistic. Bear did not believe that magic was real when he made the wish and simply did something that probably millions of people do every day: wish that someone loved them (or, more generally, just behaved differently toward them). The latest that most people seem to agree that Bear crossed the line of no coming back was when Nikki was begging him to kill her and he asked if it was really so bad being with him. This is definitely the very last place any sane person would put the line of no return after everything Bear has put her through.
Other points before then and after the wish can also be proposed. There is certainly an escalation. Just after making the wish, upon getting back to his place, he had already noticed she was behaving erratically, but at this point they had been drinking and it was possible she had taken MDMA. It was obviously then the case not to do anything sexual with her, as she wasn’t in a state of mind to consent. Here, at most Bear might think that she is going through something (he believes her estranged father is sick and dying) and so ought to proceed with caution, though I think he could still be forgiven if, after sobering up, she still expressed feelings for him.
Where Bear should have taken a different course of action was the next morning when she created a “memorial” with his dead cat. Especially after she asks if it was a bad thing to have done this when he reacts poorly to it. This is clearly erratic behavior, and if he actually knew Nikki beyond some facsimile of her created in his own mind, he’d know that she was not acting like herself. It’s at this point he should have tried getting help for her, not continuing to pursue a relationship. Thus, it is here, in my estimation, that Bear becomes the bad guy, since he was willing to overlook what, at this point in the movie, appeared to be a mental health crisis just because he wanted to be with her. The remainder of the movie’s second act drives this point home even further.
The second question – how we can label what’s wrong with Bear – is also somewhat subjective. It’s left ambiguous. And this, I think, was done purposefully so by Curry Barker. Bear does not fit so easily into incel, because we’re shown that Sarah has a crush on him, and it is even left purposefully ambiguous whether the real Nikki (prior to the wish) might have been willing to date Bear. As such, if he is celibate, it is not entirely involuntarily so on his part. Also, the stereotypical incel tends to seem a lot more overtly toxic, which Bear is not (at least at first).
I also don’t know if we can say for sure that Bear is suffering from loneliness. He does have a friend group, though it’s interesting to note that his friends are all coworkers. This means they might only be friends by mere proximity, and so it may be that Bear does not actually like being around them all that much, leaving him with a sense of loneliness. I’ve seen others point out that, for instance, Ian does not tell Bear that he’s been hooking up with Nikki, which might suggest that they are not super close, but this might also just be because he knows Bear has a crush on her and so wants to avoid starting drama. Though to be fair this seems like something someone who isn’t super close might do. Again, it’s ambiguous how lonely Bear might be. He is, as he himself admitted, very private, and we are shown that he is quite timid and passive, but those are traits someone could have even if they didn’t feel particularly lonely (I can attest to that). Perhaps the greatest evidence of his loneliness is just how much he pines after Nikki, to the point that he is (after making the wish) willing to look past a lot of erratic behavior and commit sexual assault (after he realizes Nikki is no longer the real Nikki he knows he is doing this) on someone he professes to love, which is indicative of someone desperate for connection, and believes himself entitled to it, even if it is just some simulacrum of connection.
Whether Bear is being the “nice guy” – someone who acts nice to a person in hopes, or in expectation, that the person will reward them with sex – is a bit less ambiguous. He is shown to do favors for Nikki, including going to the store to attempt (but give up on) replacing her lost necklace, and giving her a ride home from the bar. It’s not made explicit that he was only doing these favors in anticipation of sex somewhere down the line, though his willingness to continue the “relationship” with her during all her erratic behavior (not getting her help but only chastising and pleading with her to act normal so as not to embarrass or inconvenience him) strongly suggests that this might have been his motivation. Certainly, the scene where he asks if it’s so bad being with him even while she’s begging him to kill her demonstrates that he feels entitled to her. It’s at this point he can no longer plausibly deny that the wish worked and that she is just a facsimile of Nikki who he has been sexually abusing during their entire relationship, and so refusing to help her says that he still feels entitled to her.
Again, there is a lot more that can be discussed at this layer of analysis, but plenty of others do a great job of it, so I will not dwell here any longer. Instead, I would like to move on to two layers of analysis that are touched on less often elsewhere (at least from what I’ve watched and read, which is certainly not everything).
Layer 4: Who is Nikki?
The movie is clearly supposed to be a meditation on Bear and the kinds of men who behave like him. Yet the movie does, at least to me, beg for an interrogation of what this situation is like for Nikki. One thing that demands this question is why Nikki acts so bizarre, even early on before things escalate. The easy (and probably real) answer is that this is a horror movie and so creepy things need to happen (i.e., Writer Guy in Pitch Meeting: “so the movie can happen”). But let’s try to think about things from how they would be in-universe.
There are a few different interpretations for how we can think about what this experience is like from Nikki’s point of view. The first, and what seems hinted at, is that this is some kind of possession, perhaps demonic. The fact that she occasionally snaps out of it and has moments of clarity suggests that there is some other entity inhabiting and controlling her body and the “real Nikki” is trapped in some sort of sunken place, present and aware of everything happening to her but with no control over her movements and speech.
Another interpretation, the one that the wish being true would suggest, is that something in Nikki’s mind (the one and only real Nikki) has actually been altered so that it is true that she now loves Bear more than anyone in the world. This interpretation would be supported by the call to customer support where the person on the other end confirms that the wish is real. But this would fail to explain the moments of clarity that occasionally happen, where the real Nikki seems to poke through the facade. On the other hand, if Nikki is possessed by something that is controlling her and making her behave as if she loves Bear more than anyone in the world, then the wish didn’t really come true since it is not Nikki that loves Bear, but something else that is not Nikki.
To sum, what we need is an explanation that takes the following into consideration:
- Nikki must still be Nikki and not something else (a demon or ghost or even just some philosophical zombie of Nikki).
- It must be that Nikki actually is in love with Bear (not just behaving as if she is, but actually, subjectively experiencing love as an emotion).
- It must be that there is something within Nikki is not actually in love with Bear (in order to explain her moments of clarity, or the “not me” photo, or the conversation when Bear is going out to talk to Sarah).
Yet this seems like a contradiction: how can Nikki both love and not love Bear? Yet I think the best interpretation is that something other than Nikki loves Bear, but that thing is Nikki. Curry Barker has confirmed that the wish is true. In other words, this is not really a Monkey’s Paw sort of story, where the wish goes bad due to some loophole or ambiguity in the wording. The wish acts on the intention or spirit of the wish, not the letter of the wish. This means that Bear got what he wanted, and so it was what he wanted that was wrong, not how it was worded. Bear has a very flattened and two-dimensional view of who Nikki is. When he wished that Nikki Freeman would love him more than anyone in the world, he got that flattened, two-dimensional version of Nikki to love him, not the real version. Thus, she is possessed by this flattened, two-dimensional version of Nikki that previously existed only in Bear’s mind (but was, in some very shallow sense, actually Nikki), meaning that it is a Nikki facsimile and not the real Nikki who is in control. We therefore need two ways of referring to Nikki, where I will use “real Nikki” (or some variation thereof) to refer to the Nikki that existed prior to the wish, and “Nikki facsimile” (or some variation thereof) to refer to the flattened, two-dimensional version of Nikki conjured out of Bear’s mind from the wish.
If Bear had actually felt love, rather than just romance or lust or obsession, then perhaps it would not have been this Nikki facsimile that took over. This raises the question, though, whether it would be ethical if it was still the real Nikki in control of her body but that she now loved Bear, rather than having some facsimile of Nikki possessing her. This is assuming that this would even be possible, of course. No person can fully know another person, so it may just be that the only way a wish like this could ever work, a wish that so drastically changes a person, is to replace them with the facsimile of that person born of the wisher’s own mind. This might even be the case if someone wishes something to change about themselves, since we don’t really even fully know ourselves.
But if we assume that it would be possible to have the wish change a person without replacing them with a facsimile, then the question of the ethics of this still remains. How, for instance, would a wish for someone to love you be different than, say, convincing them to love you through your own actions? In both cases, the hope is to implant some new thought, some new way of seeing and interpreting the world, into a person’s head in order to make them understand you differently. This is, of course, what the discourse (in this movie and in cultural studies in general) around “performative males” and “nice guys” is all about: at what point does a man being a nice guy cross over into being a “nice guy” or “performative male”? Could we say it’s unethical, for instance, for a guy to change their wardrobe in hopes of attracting women? Is this not implanting some false thought or perception in a person’s head? The difference here, I would think, is that the person is changing themselves and leaving the reaction to that change up to the other person’s will, whereas with the wish it seems much more invasive in that it is altering the victim against their will and without the wisher having to do anything to change themselves. This line of inquiry (about the ethics of changing people’s minds and performativity) could go much deeper, but I won’t harp on it here.
What I’m also interested in is how would this possession be subjectively experienced by Nikki and how this relates to the persistence of identity through time. If we take my thesis, that there is a Nikki facsimile possessing the body while the real Nikki is suppressed in some way, then this question is twofold: how does the real Nikki experience this, and how does the Nikki facsimile experience this? The real Nikki is obviously tormented by this experience, which is why she begs Bear to kill her. But what is the phenomenology of this experience? How present is she for it? How much thought and memory and experience is shared between the real Nikki and the Nikki facsimile?
Given that the real Nikki does not get much screen time (especially at the end after the wish wears off where she might speak on the experience), there isn’t a lot of evidence to draw upon for how this wish is experienced by the real Nikki, except that she does seem to be aware of what is happening, i.e., aware that the Nikki facsimile is not her and that Bear is sexually abusing her. The scene where the real Nikki begs Bear to kill her while “she” (the Nikki facsimile) is asleep shows that this state of affairs is worse than death for her. Whether that is because of the actual phenomenology of not being able to control her body, the self-harm the Nikki facsimile is causing (e.g., standing in the middle of a room for hours while soiling herself), or because of the fact that in this state she is being repeatedly and continuously sexually abused by Bear (who she thought at least cared about her as a friend), is not made clear, though it could easily be a combination of all these. At the end of the movie, the real Nikki seems to be aware that the Nikki facsimile is permanently gone (she was about to kill herself but then stops, and she doesn’t resort to self-harm in an attempt to excise the Nikki facsimile like she had during the moment of clarity at the party). This suggests that she is aware, even during moments of clarity, of the Nikki facsimile’s presence (or absence).
I wonder at what point the real Nikki became aware of this diverging (in a sort of Parfitian teletransportation sense) between her and the Nikki facsimile. Right after making the wish, when she has a moment of clarity, she says something along the lines of “I am acting weird” using the personal pronoun, whereas later, written on the picture and spoken during the party, she says that this is “not me”. This suggests that very soon after (or, perhaps, during the process of) this divergence there was still a sense in which the real Nikki and the Nikki facsimile overlapped and had a unified experience. It may have been in the next scene, when she started kissing Bear and then startled, saying she “saw something” that the divergence completed. Perhaps this very moment of clarity occurred as a result of completing the divergence, the shattering of her unity of experience.
I think two scenes that could lend evidence to what the real Nikki is experiencing after the divergence are at the party, when she reads off part of her story, and after the party when she tells Bear what would happen if she went to bed by herself without him. In both cases, some semblance of the real Nikki’s thoughts might be finding their way into the Nikki facsimile’s consciousness. In the former she reads off a section of a retelling of Hansel and Gretel where the two are seemingly engaged in some kind of sadomasochistic incestual relationship, which reflects something about how the real Nikki thinks of what is going on with her and Bear (who she thought of more like a brother). The latter, to me, might reflect something about what the real Nikki is experiencing as the Nikki facsimile is taking over her body, where everything is sort of fading into nothing, losing her sense of self.
Yet, these two interpretations are in tension, where the first suggests that the real Nikki is very aware of everything happening to her, and can even exert some influence, even while the Nikki facsimile is in control, while the second instead suggests that the real Nikki’s consciousness (and therefore awareness of what is happening to her) is fading away. It could perhaps be that the fading is occurring slowly, or even that this is what the real Nikki is attempting to do (she does beg to be killed, and even self-harms, during moments of clarity, and so might prefer to allow her consciousness to slip away instead of continuing to be present for the abuse) or what the Nikki facsimile hopes to do to the real Nikki. The latter – the consciousness fading to nothing – might also simply just be what the Nikki facsimile would experience if Bear left her (like when she stood in the middle of the room the entire day while Bear was gone); or if Bear died and the wish went away, causing the Nikki facsimile to disappear. It’s difficult to determine which version of Nikki is showing through during the fading-to-nothing speech.
Now let’s turn to the subjective experience of the Nikki facsimile. This version of Nikki appears to lack some level of interiority, at least early on. This would make sense, since the facsimile of Nikki from Bear’s flattened conception of her didn’t really have any interiority, but was just an object of his obsession. Additionally, Bear’s flattened conception of love does not require a sense of interiority since to him, Nikki loving him consists of merely a series of outward displays of her desire for him. Her love for him is all about him and not about her.
Assuming that there is something it is like to be the Nikki facsimile, that she is not just a philosophical zombie, what might this experience be like for her? The wish stipulates that Nikki loves Bear more than anyone in the world. This would presumably mean that she loves him more than she loves herself, which might explain some of the self-harm behaviors (standing in the same spot all day waiting for him) and lack of any sense of self-preservation (willing to ram her head into a car window to murder someone out of jealousy and damn the consequences). The wording of the wish has Nikki loving Bear more than anyone in the world, but not necessarily anything. This must mean that, even in the very flattened version of Nikki that Bear had in his head when making the wish, Nikki is still at least conceived of as a human being (whom she loves less than she loves Bear), which suggests there must be some level of interiority for her, even if it is, as I keep saying, flattened. In a way this is almost more horrifying, since it means Bear is willing to put her through everything he does to her even knowing full well that she is a human being.
If the Nikki facsimile has interiority, then we would need to explain some of her bizarre behaviors. If we start right after the wish, where she seems confused, this might be explained if the Nikki facsimile at least shares, or has access to, the memories of the real Nikki. To her, the experience of the wish would be going from having ambiguous romantic feelings for Bear (or even none at all) to suddenly, unexpectedly, and without explanation, having extreme romantic feelings for him. Bear failed to confess his feelings for her before she went back to her house, and so, assuming she didn’t see through his stammering lie (and the Nikki facsimile, being the version from Bear’s mind, likely would not have), she didn’t know that he lusted over her. This would explain why, now that she has come to some “realization” that she loves him (i.e., the Nikki facsimile’s consciousness, occupied foremost with an obsession for Bear, diverged from the real Nikki), she wavers between behaving coy, upfront, and manipulative: she loves him but doesn’t know that he loves her, and so attempts several approaches to coax him into loving her.
As an important note as we go forward, I want to make it clear that when I am using the word “love” this needs to be interpreted as the flattened sort of love in Bear’s conceptualization, since his love is, in reality, an obsession (like a feeling someone might have toward an object of desire) and hers is the facsimile form of love from his flattened conceptualization of her. In other words, her love manifests as obsession because that is what Bear thinks love is and so is what he meant by love when making the wish, and so the word “love” here needs to be understood in that context.
When I first watched the movie, I think what puzzled me the most about the Nikki facsimile’s actions was her behavior with the corpse of the cat, her behavior when watching him sleep, and when she stood in the middle of the room all day waiting for him while he was at work. If she is not possessed by some kind of demon or something, how can these behaviors be explained merely by her loving Bear more than anyone in the world? This, I think, is explained by my Nikki facsimile theory.
As I said earlier, to Bear, Nikki loving him consists only in outward displays of desire for him. Leaving the cat out in the morning is an almost primordial, underdeveloped, animal-like display of desire, like a cat presenting a dead bird to its owner and hoping for a pat on the head, where Nikki is the docile pet and Bear is her owner. Her asking if doing this was bad was this childlike facsimile of Nikki not knowing what a proper display of desire ought to be, and having had no such instruction just attempts the first thing that comes to mind. The Nikki facsimile then learns more what displays off affection ought to be during the montage, which is why she presumably does not engage in any of her unsettling behavior during this time (though another interpretation might be that Bear was just blind to her erratic behavior during this time and so it is only remembered by him as something romantic; there is not enough evidence to break the symmetry between these interpretations). I think feeding Bear the cat is a similar sort of display of affection as the dead cat memorial, since he expressed wanting to be a food critic during the dinner date scene. The primordial, underdeveloped, animal-like part of the Nikki facsimile’s mind that wanted to display her desire thus thought something along the lines of “food critic want new food experience? I give new food experience.”
Another interpretation of this suggests that it was the real Nikki poking through and trying to punish Bear for what he is doing to her, but to me this would be occurring too early. While he is not doing anything to help her, he has not yet done something irredeemable (at this point he doesn’t yet know that Nikki has been replaced by a facsimile since he doesn’t yet know that the wish actually came true). It might also be some kind of cry for help (if she does something completely erratic, maybe he will snap out of it and realize she needs help), but I think the interpretation that the Nikki facsimile is still in a state of early development is at least equally in evidence.
The watching Bear sleep scene I think is probably the most difficult to explain behavior from the Nikki facsimile. I think the best way to explain this is to assume that the Nikki facsimile is still sort of coming online, i.e., is undergoing cognitive development. Throughout the movie the Nikki facsimile acts very childish, which may reflect Bear’s immature conception of love, but it also may suggest that the Nikki facsimile is undergoing development in her interiority similar to that of a child. Prior to the dinner date when Bear confronts her about lying about her dad’s cancer, the notion that Bear might not love her back hadn’t yet entered her underdeveloped facsimile of a mind. In Bear’s flattened conception of love, if person A loves person B, then obviously person B must love person A (i.e., since Bear loves Nikki, then Bear is also entitled to Nikki’s love). But after that dinner date, it enters the Nikki facsimile’s mind that it’s possible for Bear not to love her back even if she loves him more than anyone in the world. This causes a sort of short circuit that leads to the bizarre and creepy behavior exhibited in this scene: the Nikki facsimile is confused and doesn’t know how to act given the epiphany that Bear might not love her as deeply as she loves him.
Standing in the room also seemed to me somewhat puzzling, especially since Nikki is never shown to exhibit this behavior before or again (while the montage showing them as being happy does not explicitly say how much time has passed, I would guess it was at least a few days given that it showed them doing both morning, work, and nighttime activities; during that time this behavior is never hinted at). What about loving Bear more than anyone else in the world might explain this? First, we need to remember that the wording of the wish means she loves Bear even more than she loves herself, and so might find that waiting for him, or just pining over him, more desirable than attending to her own needs. It might also be yet another animal-like display of desire, demonstrating her commitment to him. But it can also make sense if we remember that Bear told Nikki prior to making the wish that he had no feelings for Sarah, and at the point where she stood in the middle of the room for an entire day she had no reason to feel jealous of Bear and Sarah’s relationship (the facsimile would have believed the memory of Bear saying he wasn’t into Sarah). Thus, without Bear around to occupy her flattened, two-dimensional facsimile of a mind, there wasn’t anything to do except stand there and pine over him. But after the party, when the Jenga block prompted him to kiss Sarah, this instilled in the Nikki facsimile a sense of jealousy. After both the realization that it is possible for Nikki to love Bear without him loving her back, and that it is possible for Bear to love someone who is not her, this caused the complete breakdown of a mind whose sole purpose is to love Bear in the flattened, obsessive version of love as conceptualized by Bear.
It may also be that the Nikki facsimile is basically just an NPC who only has thoughts and actions while Bear is around, but to me this would be in tension with the idea that the wish came true since it would take away too much personhood from the Nikki facsimile. Also, we know that later in the movie the Nikki facsimile does things even when Bear is not around (e.g., waking up and going to find Bear and Sarah in order to murder her; mutilating Sarah’s corpse while Bear was looking for a way to cancel the wish). While I certainly can’t conclusively reject this interpretation, especially since it seems to be the one preferred by Curry Barker, I think my interpretation is at least equally in evidence.
After this point in the movie, while Sarah was still alive, the Nikki facsimile became absolutely fixated on Bear reciprocating her love, which then explains her behavior from then on. In a childlike manner, the Nikki facsimile thought that simply removing other potential objects of obsession for Bear, like Sarah, would make it so that he would love her and only her. When that didn’t seem to work, she then figured, again in a very flattened and simplistic way, that just becoming more like Sarah might make Bear love her. When even that didn’t seem to work, she bargained that maybe giving him what she thought he seemed to want (to break up or give each other space) might do the trick to bring him around to loving her. Finally, at finding the One Wish Willow, she knew she could get him to love her by making the wish.
I think there is a lot more that could be said at this layer of analysis, maybe even better than I ever could, but this post is already getting quite long. There is one last layer that gets brought up more than this one that I will now turn to.
Layer 5: Who are We?
This is no longer an analysis of the movie, but instead an analysis of ourselves encouraged by the movie. The above analyses allow us to sit outside the movie and judge the characters, but the movie beseeches us to look inward and ask: how much of Bear do we have in ourselves? I’ve seen this layer of analysis done elsewhere, but I think it deserves more attention. The following two videos go more into this layer of analysis if you are interested and hearing more about it.
That all being said, I think this is the most important layer of analysis, since reflecting on this could help us all improve as people.
It was a stroke of genius to not have Bear be unambiguously a lonely incel or be overtly violent. It is for this reason that lot of people stop at Layer 1 or Layer 2 of analysis. Yet it prompts us to keep peeling back the layers, only to find ourselves looking back up at us from the center of the onion. With Bear not being a clear-cut villain (at least at the start of the movie), he reflects something about ourselves. We all have insecurities, self-esteem issues, indecision, moments of passivity, bad in-the-moment reactions. None of those things turn us into villains, but we can cause a lot of harm even while making what appears (at least in the moment) to be good decisions. We can all get in our emotions, feeling bad about ourselves, feeling like the world doesn’t treat us fair, feeling like we are owed something, even from other people. This can make all of us act manipulatively, be deceitful, cause harm to others to get what we want.
Bear may be a particularly bad case of this, but the movie forces us to confront the fact that even those who are as bad as him are not monsters, they’re still people. He’s not overtly hateful or violent. If we saw him in real life, we’d just think he’s another guy. Hell, you might be friends with someone capable of being just like Bear if put in his situation. For all you know, you really might be like that, too, especially if put in the right situation. It’s painful, but healthy, to look inwards at ourselves and think about times that we may have behaved in that same way. I can definitely think of moments in my own life where I behaved like that. Nothing to the extreme shown in the movie, but in ways that played on people’s emotions to try getting something from someone. Putting on a ‘woe is me’ routine to try getting pity. Refusing to speak up so that I don’t have to be responsible for something. Neglecting to have tough conversations because it would be too uncomfortable for me. All of it passive and timid, but still potentially harmful. And worse, looking back on myself when I was much younger, I could easily see myself having done even worse if the situation had arisen; I’m very fortunate never to have found myself in situations where I could have done real harm to people.
While it’s important to reflect on ourselves in this way, we also need to think about what conditions lead people to behave like this. What is it about our society, our culture, or our biological hardwiring that makes people act like Bear? What sort of permission structures do we live in that makes it possible for us to harm others all while feeling completely justified? What is it about our society, our culture, and our biological hardwiring that makes people willing to see Bear as the victim and Nikki as the villain?
A lot of these questions can be answered by appealing to things like patriarchy and rape culture, and those are definitely true. See the two videos embedded above for more on that. Here I’m going to approach it from a slightly different angle.
I think part of the dominant ideology of western, liberal, democratic capitalist culture is that problems are not really problems unless they are physical. In other words, you are not injured unless there is something physically wrong with you. Mental or emotional injury is “just in your head” and so you can “get over it” through sheer willpower. This is seen, for instance, during World War I when people suffering from what we today might call post traumatic stress disorder were said back then to have shellshock. This is because they had a difficult time conceiving that someone would have purely mental injuries, and so their symptoms needed to be explained by physical injury.
The reason for this stems from the sort of protestant work ethic that has come to dominate western culture. Under this ideology, people care more about physical safety because if you are physically injured then you may not be able to keep working. On the other hand, if you are ‘merely’ mentally or emotionally injured you can keep working if you can just “suck it up” and “get over it” using willpower. The physically handicapped are treated poorly enough already for no longer being “productive” members of society, but the mentally handicapped or the emotionally distressed are seen as simply lacking in willpower, which is interpreted as a moral failing.
Willpower and productivity here are the key concepts. In our hyper-individualistic culture, we are said to need depend only on ourselves, our free will, in order to shape our own mind and focus it on our chosen ends. And in our capitalistic society, each person’s value is tied to how much they can produce and consume, as well as how fecund they are in producing a new generation of producer/consumers. This ideology – of infinite growth, eternally increasing GDP, rising stock prices, number doing up – requires that anyone deemed capable of work and consumption has a moral obligation to do so.
How this relates to Obsession is in the fact that Nikki is still physically Nikki, even if she no longer is mentally. Yet, because Bear lives in a culture where the physical takes primacy over the mental, he cares only about her physical body and not her subjective experience (which is why his biggest gripe with how the wish turned out is the way she behaves erratically, not what it’s done to her mind). If she is giving physical displays of desire for him, then this is seen to be just as good as (i.e., equivalent to) her actually loving him. He views the Nikki facsimile to be just as good as (i.e., equivalent to) the real Nikki. Thus, if she is not being physically coerced then it must be that she actually wants what is happening to her. If physically capable, the culture dictates, then she has a moral duty to resist. But since she is not resisting, then Bear thinks he is under no moral duty to stop what he is doing.
This is reflected in real life situations where, if a woman does not physically fight back against having sex with a man, then this is taken as consent, regardless what the internal subjective experience of the woman might be. She might only be going along with it because she is afraid of what might happen if she doesn’t (whether the threat is explicit or implied), or because she has been indoctrinated into thinking she has some obligation to do it (perhaps in exchange for something the man has done), or she might be intoxicated (whether self-induced or because she has been poisoned against her will). If what matters, within this culture, is what someone physically does, then a necessary condition for something to be considered rape is physical violence met with at least an attempt at physical resistance.
This is perhaps how some people can watch the movie and not see Nikki as being the victim of rape, because her physical body is displaying signs of desire for Bear, regardless of what her internal subjective state is experiencing. Just like a person is fit for work if they are physically able, regardless of their mental or emotional state, if a person physically engages in sex then it is not considered rape, regardless of their mental or emotional state. Thus, this protestant work ethic ideology contributes to our definition of rape as being something only physical, since mental or emotional states are deemed morally irrelevant. I think this contributes as well to how rape victims are treated. If there are no external signs of trauma, if all the trauma is mental/emotional, then it is dismissed because the victim can remain “productive” and so simply needs to “get over it” because it’s “all in their head”.
This same ideology, that the physical is what matters, also applies to Bear. Since he does not view himself as committing rape and exists in a permission structure that justifies this view of himself, given that the Nikki facsimile displays outward signs of desire, and (at least at first) he had not intended to commit rape, then he lacks what is called mens rea (Latin for guilty mind). Not only that, this ideology would suggest, but because Bear was a nice guy who did things for Nikki then he is merely collecting what he is owed, namely access to Nikki’s body.
As the movie progresses, the Nikki facsimile shows signs of physical aggression toward Bear in order to coerce him to stay with her. If we are only taking this view that the physical is what matters, then this would very troubling, since the dynamic appears inverted with Nikki as the rapist, not Bear. This is where the first layer of interpretation begins and ends and why an alarming number of people take this away from the movie. They fail to take Nikki’s mental/emotional states into consideration. This is regardless of whether we are thinking about the real Nikki or the Nikki facsimile, as the former is a prisoner in her own mind, her autonomy stolen from her, while the latter is an underdeveloped, childlike mind conjured out of Bear’s wish. Bear is a rapist and, in a sense, a pedophile.
Concluding Remarks
There is a lot more that could be said about this movie. Plenty of people are saying those things. This post is already long enough, and I am probably not smart enough, to touch on everything that could be said. I would encourage you to both watch the movie for yourself (hopefully you’ve already done that before getting to this point in my post) and to seek out other analyses and interpretations as there are probably things that I’ve overlooked.