There are “systems of thought” upon which our civilization is based and one of them is the myth of romantic love. Star-crossed lovers who commit suicide together to burnish that love forever are its epitome; overcoming obstacles — she’s already betrothed, they come from different social classes (“Titanic”) — and then one of them dies helps solidify in our minds this conception of “true love.” As I say in my workshops, “There is no ‘Pretty Woman II’”.
In “Love in the Western World”, Denis de Rougemont argued that romantic love as we know it is a peculiarly Western invention, traceable to 13th-century courtly culture, and that it is structurally dependent on lovers overcoming obstacles. Passion requires illicitness and overcoming. Forbidden love, prohibited love, love across impossible distances… these are the subconscious engines of romance. Extrapolating from de Rougemont, in “We: the Psychology of Romantic Love” Robert Johnson observed that when a man’s projections on a woman evaporate, he announces he is “disenchanted” — disappointed not by her, but by the fact that she turned out to be a subjective human being rather than the objective embodiment of his fantasy. This is precisely what the new film “Obsession” dramatizes. Bear does not really want Nicky as a full, separate person; he desires to overcome the friendzone obstacle and possess his idealized prize forever. Even entranced, however, Nicky refuses to be objectified and her subjective subconscious rebels in myriad hysterical ways.
A combination of feminism, the #MeToo movement, dating apps, and the pandemic have eviscerated the objectification necessary for the traditional incarnation of romance. Bear’s wish for unconditional love transforms Nicky — like Midas’s touch — into a one-dimensional object: a codependent love-addict that incarnates Bear’s fantasy and allegorically displays for the audience that the extreme of this myth or fantasy is lethal. (Note the pronoun: “that,” not “who” — she has ceased to be a subject; subjects have emotions, objects do not.)
On a practical level, we mistake emotional intensity for intimacy and call the confusion romantic love. Intensity is immediate, chemically convincing, and narcissistically flattering. It produces urgency, fixation, the feeling that something extraordinary and irreversible is happening. It makes us feel alive. Most of us, thanks to capitalism and the insatiable human desire to possess “stuff,” realize that there’s not enough stuff to fill the hole in our souls that capitalism produces. The people at the top try to own and consume more and more — houses, cars, food, elite experiences — and all of us beneath them socioeconomically assume they must be happy, so we want more “stuff” too. But if stuff made people happy, would Elon Musk be microdosing ketamine? Happiness, it turns out, is an inside job.
So we settle for its poor cousin: drama. Intense drama. Because it makes us feel alive.
Unfortunately for Bear who is subconsciously battling the dreamless doldrums of a retail salesperson’s life, Nicky’s dramatic intensity is the dark mirror of real intimacy. True intimacy is slower and less theatrical. It requires patience, mutual recognition, and the willingness to remain interested in another person after the initial surge of idealization has faded. Intensity gives the nervous system a rush; intimacy gives the self a relationship. Our culture has become extraordinarily good at manufacturing the former while providing almost no education in the latter. Women, meanwhile, have learned one thing: being objectified and losing agency isn’t worth all the gold in the world.
Bear’s wish for Nicky to love him above all others functions like King Midas’s touch — what is granted becomes unlivable because it was never meant to be total. What Bear actually craves, though he could not name it, is the eroticization of longing itself. This is Esther Perel’s paradox made visible: “How can you desire what you already have?” Bear is not pursuing intimacy. He is pursuing the feeling of pursuit. As the cliche goes: There’s more in the chase than in the catch.
Romantic fantasy is so seductive because it speaks directly to childhood hunger. Children crave unconditional love and once we are thrown into language (“use your big words, honey”), we can only gain love conditionally. This system establishes a giant Resentment Factory as we crave something impossible and try to fill the lack with stuff — houses, cars, food, elite experiences.
This is why “Obsession” evokes nervous laughter in the audience: because we feel dead inside and crave peak experiences to make us feel alive. Bear’s wish for absolute romantic certainty is not a personal quirk; it is a cultural fantasy 10X-ed. We are trained by legacy media and social media to conflate sex with love, obstacles with proof of feeling, and emotional activation with genuine attachment. The industries that profit from this confusion — film, music, publishing — have every incentive to keep lack alive and fulfillment deferred.
The genius of “Obsession” is that it explores the other extreme: love not ungained, but the horror of love overgained.