I tried to incorporate several quotations from previous posts in this one, but it got complicated so I gave up… So this is in response to various things above, but I will start by quoting something feihong said:
feihong wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:03 pmI've seen that subway-tunnel scene described as a miscarriage, but it seems to me the fulfillment of the logical extreme of the Grotowski method––a physical explosion of a character's emotional underpinnings, thrust to the surface.
Anna herself describes it as a ‘miscarriage’, but I agree with you that it’s an extreme expression of her emotional state. I think this film resists any efforts to impose a coherent interpretation on it, but I find it helpful to think about it in terms of alienation and trauma.
The situation at the start is apparently that Anna has been left alone for too long by her husband, and the loneliness has damaged their relationship. But as with another Anna – the one in
L’avventura who misses her fiancé terribly while he’s away, then can’t stand him when they’re reunited – it turns out that the ‘loneliness’ in question here is rooted in something more profound than mere physical separation. There are some clues in the opening shots: Mark rides home in a taxi, staring out from this protected space at a devastated, traumatised, haunted Berlin; then we see Anna, from behind, her arms clasped about her body like a strait-jacket, stalking through the sterile walkway that leads from the tenement block onto the street. Her surroundings are so pristine, so cold, so oppressive, and when Mark greets her she is inarticulate, almost speechless. We get the impression of a world where intense trauma is lurking just below the surface, but has been forcibly buried under the ‘propriety’ and ‘order’ that Mark spends most of the film trying to enforce.
One of the most impressive things in this film is the way it conveys a sense of trauma within the trappings of domestic normality; and it never feels like we need to scratch the surface to feel this trauma, because the surface is already scratched and bleeding profusely. It’s a genuinely skin-crawling experience. The most vivid instance of this is when Anna and Mark are on the sofa and he’s trying to have a sane conversation, in that maddeningly false tone of rationality and sympathy, while she’s right next to him literally clawing at her own arms and writhing in agony. Earlier, when she says that she can’t stand to be touched by him, we instinctively understand why. It reminds me of another Antonioni couple, the husband and wife in
Red Desert: all he seems to see in her is a woman who’s temporarily lost her balance and needs to be stabilised; he doesn’t see the ‘something terrible in reality’ that is so painfully present to her…
…except that in
Possession, the husband does gradually come to see and even embrace this ‘terrible thing’. Anna insists on her need for her extra-marital lover, and Mark yells ‘Fuck your needs!’ She slaps him, and something changes here: we cut to an extreme close-up of Mark’s face, reeling from the slap and then turning to look directly into the camera. It’s a moment of unexpected connection and arousal. ‘Do it again,’ he says. Then we cut to an equally extreme close-up of Anna looking into the camera, panting for breath and wiping her mouth, a sinister smile spreading across her face in reaction to Mark’s request. It’s important that she’s started to slobber with excitement, excreting something slimy during an act of violence – it’s part of the wet-and-slimy texture of this film that Daniel Bird refers to in his commentary with Frederic Tuten. She needs this, and she’s showing Mark that she needs it in response to ‘fuck your needs!’, and something in him drives him to ask for more. We sense a new level of connectedness between them because of the into-the-camera close-ups, and the film is staring back at us as well, daring us to connect with what is happening, and to like it. When Anna then pulls away, Mark stops her from leaving and repeatedly hits her across the face, drawing blood – a minute later, out on the street, the blood oozes profusely from her mouth.
This is an emotive topic that perhaps requires a content warning, but we could get into the ethics of how this film portrays domestic violence here. In this context it’s perhaps worth citing the story that Żuławski proudly tells about threatening to smash Adjani’s head against a wall when she refused to play a scene with the green lenses that were hurting her eyes… I guess I’m just flagging that this is an issue, and that the film is arguably ‘problematic’ in some ways, before I return to analysing it on its own terms.
Anna herself later shakes her head when asked whether she is afraid that Mark will hit her again, and indeed she seems comfortable with violence throughout the film: although she makes some efforts to get the detectives to leave her alone, once they’ve refused she quickly resigns herself to murdering them; and she stabs Heinrich as though it meant nothing at all.
If anything, the violence is part of what brings her and Mark closer together. As he hits her, he says, ‘This is for all the lies!’ and she retorts, ‘Then you’ll have to add much more!’ He doesn’t yet understand what he’s tapping into, or what the true significance of her ‘affair’ is, but he is gradually getting there, and she’s challenging him to keep digging (but sceptical that he’ll be able to deal with the consequences).
The meat-mincing scene offers a tense going-through-the-motions portrait of domestic life, with the husband constantly in the way and the wife saying ‘Excuse me’ as she goes about preparing the food. Something is ‘off’ about the way Anna stuffs that meat into the machine, and the low-angle shot makes it look as though she were feeding
herself into the mincer, translating her own body into that raw, red goo that drips towards the camera. It’s both shocking and not at all surprising when she then presses the electric carver against her own neck. This oppressive, sterile domestic world is one where blood and meat and ooze are carefully controlled and ‘safe’, and Anna’s gesture here is less an attempt at suicide than an attempt to externalise what is internal, what is repressed. Mark, as well as tending to her wound, then inflicts some on himself, and agrees with Anna that ‘it doesn’t hurt’.
Mark’s conformity with the larger systems and structures around him is signalled in various ways: his talk of propriety and order, his dismissal of Anna as ‘ugly’ and ‘vulgar’, and the affectations in his mode of speech. One really interesting manifestation is in the use of rocking and rotating chairs. At three crucial points in the film, Mark sits in his rocking chair, and each time the repetitive back-and-forth motion evokes his insistence on the status quo – the rhythm of normal family life that he wishes to restore. But this motion, like his superficially reasonable but verging-on-crazy speeches, is a little too violent, too exaggerated, too repetitive. There’s a remarkable shot where he rocks savagely in and out of focus, staring straight ahead like Jack Torrance in
The Shining and ranting about how he’s ‘taking over’. When he goes to the detective’s office, both characters sit in swivel-chairs: the detective rotates gently from side to side behind his desk, and by contrast Mark’s swivelling seems absurdly over-the-top. The camera tracks slowly across the room, making sure to observe these two swivelling men from a number of different perspectives, like a more restrained version of the sweeping camera movements during Mark’s grilling by his employers. A static shot would have made the swivel-chair scene comical, but the moving camera instead creates a more disturbing effect, giving us a distanced, objective, observational perspective; these gestures no longer seem normal when portrayed in this way, and we can’t help but sense the madness and violence simmering beneath the surface.
The way in which Mark disposes of Heinrich suggests, quite definitively, that he is no longer at all uncomfortable with vulgarity, impropriety, or violence. This liberating descent continues through his blowing up of Anna’s flat (inexplicably prompting the woman outside to dance for joy), the car-crash/gunfight sequence (I have to admit I have no idea what’s going on here), and his motorcycle ride through the alley-way, oozing blood and letting out primal screams as he hurtles towards his final destination. All of this seems like his way of joining Anna in her new mode of existence, rejecting all the rules and norms had previously stifled them. Perhaps the monster takes on Mark’s shape in parallel with his descent. The consequences of the descent are ‘so hard to live with’, as the second Mark says to his dying predecessor, because the journey Anna and Mark go on is like that of Bonnie and Clyde, and can only end in an orgy of blood-letting, a simultaneous ascent to heaven (to the top of the staircase) and descent into hell (as Mark plunges to his death).
Perhaps it would help to relate this back to the concept of trauma – a trauma so extreme that it cannot be repressed, escaped, or embraced without bringing destruction. In
The Third Part of the Night, the trauma is of the kind Helen describes (while cleaning raw meat from the carver), clearly embodied and identifiable in the actual torture and violence that are waiting to get you around every corner and behind every door. Amidst the relentless Nazi atrocities, the doppelgängers and ghosts in that film are marked as hallucinatory responses to trauma, offering a brief respite now and then before the machine guns flare up once again. The world Anna and Mark inhabit in
Possession has buried and sanitised and tried to forget this trauma, but one way or another it has to erupt and kill. There is a real love between Anna, Mark, and Bob, and at times they feel like a potentially (and genuinely) happy family, but there is no place in this world for their pain, their needs, or their desires. Anna and Mark re-connect when they find a space to express these things to each other, but this isn’t
Secretary, and a happy or stable resolution seems out of the question.
Like feihong, I also don’t know what to make of the doubles getting together at the end. Helen knows trauma in its more direct and obvious forms, and has fewer illusions about it; monster-Mark is born from Anna’s trauma, but he does (and says) so little in the film that it’s hard to know what to make of him; and why does Bob not want his new mother to open the door to his new father? In the ‘Other Side of the Wall’ documentary you get a glimpse of the final page of the original script, and it looks like the flashing lights and air-raid noises are not in there; instead, the film ends with Helen walking towards the door, and we never learn whether she reaches and opens it. In the ending we have now, she turns from the door (whose glass pane is being pawed at by the new Mark) and looks blankly into the camera. I feel like too many ideas are crammed in here, and I sort of wish the film had a simpler ending, but perhaps the messiness of it is part of the point. What do we do with ourselves, and each other, and our jobs and our families and so on, in this world that has no idea how to remember and process the traumas of the past (or of the present)? The walls we put up make things worse rather than better, and when the walls come down we lose our minds and bleed to death.
So perhaps the ending is asking, can we re-make ourselves from scratch, see the world through different eyes, find a way of living with everything that’s happened and everything we’ve done, and thereby find a way of living with each other? In one of the interviews, Żuławski attributes his own ‘difficult’ personality, and his tendency to give his films apocalyptic endings, to the fact that he was born out of and formed by the Nazi/Stalinist horrors of the 40s and 50s, which casts an interesting light on this film that is, in part, about why his marriage failed.
The ending of
Possession feels despairing to me: the bombs are falling again, the world is lapsing in and out of light and darkness, and the child is already diving into a state of denial, saying ‘don’t open, don’t open’. He doesn’t say ‘don’t open the door’: the vagueness of his plea makes the verb both transitive and intransitive, as in ‘don’t open
anything’ and ‘don’t
open’, as if people could just ‘open’ the way Bob’s parents have, or the way the monster does when it lies on the bed with a big whitish gash opening and closing in its chest. Until it becomes Sam Neill, the monster looks like a man who’s been skinned alive, who is constantly and completely ‘open’.
The key scene of the whole film, of course, is Anna’s ‘miscarriage’, which is really a many-splendoured thing that expresses a range of emotions. She finds herself in the subway tunnel, and this location in itself is multi-faceted. It’s claustrophobic, with no visible way in or out, but instead a seemingly endless and repetitive structure extending forever in both directions. The moist black floor mirrors the harsh lights in the ceiling like inescapable interrogation lamps that hit you from above and below. And of course there’s no one else here; and we’re buried underground. But the underground is also a liberating space: it’s lonely when no one can see or hear you, but by the same token you are free to be and express yourself in any way you want to. So Anna expresses everything. Nothing remains inside.
She starts with a wild-eyed, transgressive laugh, and then as she scrapes against and bounces off the walls she works through a myriad of extreme emotions. At times, as Żuławski directed Adjani to do, she is fucking the air and experiencing a prolonged orgasm. At other times it’s as though the H.R. Giger xenomorph were tearing her apart from within; at still other times she’s performing a ritual dance, and since she’s a failed ballet dancer I think it’s appropriate to see ‘artistic expression’ as one of the repressed things that comes out here (and to be constantly aware that we’re watching an amazing piece of acting by Adjani, within a very disturbing and transgressive film). She’s also incandescent with rage, and her pulverising of the milk and eggs (both associated with conventional ideas of the ‘maternal’) seems like a very deliberate and pointed gesture, not a random spasm brought on by her pain. When she finally delivers the creature, she is both dying (something explodes inside her, erupting from every orifice, and her face goes blank) and generating a new life that is both part of and separate from her, a mixture of self, child, lover, and husband. Her scream at this moment is both a scream of someone being destroyed and a scream of ecstatic release.
I’m not sure how to make sense of the ‘faith and chance’ stuff – Żuławski talks a lot about ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ in the interviews and commentary, so I guess I’d try to relate it to that – but when I watch this scene in the tunnel it just seems like a moment when ‘everything’ happens, and it seems to sum up everything else in the film. Anna has too much – she has everything – going on inside her, and it all comes out in one go, all mingled together. Again I think of Giuliana in
Red Desert, so constrained by her surroundings that she can no longer separate out the emotions that have accumulated inside her.
I also want to single out another detail I love in this tunnel scene. When Anna is thrashing about in the middle of the floor, as her head jerks up and down the light catches her face and makes it seem deathly white, then it’s plunged back into darkness, then back into the light, and so on. It reminds me of that subliminal image of the devil’s face in
The Exorcist, and it’s linked to a series of other close-ups of Anna in the film. There’s one in particular – I think it’s when she’s on the sofa, describing the miscarriage – where she gets so close to the lens, and pulls her features back, and her pupils dilate so that her eyes are scarily dark, and her face becomes an unrecognisable death-mask... Adjani is so amazing in this film. One great thing about the monster, despite Żuławski’s misgivings about Rambaldi’s condom-puppet, is that when we do see its white, gaping face, we sense an association with the Anna death-mask – I think that’s why the shot of the monster’s face (when Heinrich sees it) is quite chilling, and not at all comical or absurd.
feihong wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:03 pmAt the end, when the alien version of Mark escapes we get the sense of a sort of Berlin Fantomas, haunting the rooftops of the city, descending on his prey.
Żuławski wanted to film an extra scene where Mark climbs out onto the rooftops and surveys Berlin from above, and he said that he would have done so if they’d had an extra day of filming. Would that reinforce the idea that new-Mark and Helen have acclimated perfectly to their surroundings – or that they had both transcended those surroundings, and were therefore more successfully transgressive than their respective prototypes?
One final comment: it would be interesting to contrast this film with
Rosemary's Baby, where the failing marriage and horror trappings (and the journey the heroine goes through) are similarly tied up with broader problems to do with abusive structures and conventions.
