Sundance Film Festival promotional image for Possessor
Possosser (Cronenberg, 2019) was described by the delightful Sundance programmer at my screening yesterday as the biggest mindf*** of the festival, and next she informed us that since the director was not present “none of our questions would be answered.” Both proved to be true.
The film details the life of an assassin (Andrea Riseborough) who works for a firm (its head portrayed by Jennifer Jason Leigh) that links its assassins via a mind-meld machine into an unsuspecting individual who carries out the murder assignment and then commits suicide so that the corporation might get away scot-free. By portraying a hit carried out relatively smoothly within the first five minutes, the story-tellers implant (pun intended) a template of the film’s notion of normalcy before the second hit goes horribly wrong.
Possessor fits into a recent iteration of film that takes a spiritual notion, both in terms of theology and film tradition, and strips away all of the platonic notions of forms/ideas and focuses on the material alone. For example, the shape of the Stranger Things narrative revolves around the idea that an ominous, powerful force can be explained via scientific calculations, even while conveying its story via stylistic techniques that historically were used to evoke the demonic or satanic as representative of dark, evil properties—a haunting score, distorted unintelligible voices, and the like.
Similarly, in Possessor the notion of a spiritual entity inhabiting a human body is represented as an entirely scientific, rational achievement. Meanwhile, the soundscape alludes to horror films which intentionally set out to portray spiritual phenomena. What fascinates me is the way the absence of a spiritual realm within the scientific, existentialist worlds of these films successfully reproduces the very sense of spiritual darkness that previous filmmakers conveyed by accentuating its existence.
I also found in Possessor perhaps the best filmic exploration of our current social experiment: social media.
Painting with very (extremely) wide brush strokes for a moment, people once lived in relatively isolated communities in which fireside narratives were retold in ways that sustained belief systems that clashed with the point of view of others upon intersection. True, entirely simplistic, but I mention this only to contrast it with the present in which the most entrenched views (hi there, Twitter) are seemingly in constant, persistent, continual contact with alternate points of view.
The trial for many these days is the struggle to maintain a sense of identity within certain communities that attempt to pass down their own stories, but at the same time continually and inevitably encounter compelling counter-narratives. While I personally remain hopeful for a future in which this trial results in a solution and the arrival at perhaps a new home (following Campbell’s heroic journey model), Possessor focuses on the anger and rage this situation—constantly encountering multiple ideas that may appear at once threatening and equally viable—causes.
Moreover, these notions are not an abstract concepts in Possessor, but actual, lived experience. By portraying an individual placed into the body of another gender, ethnicity, and class, the film viscerally represents what it is like to embody an entirely different perspective. It is no wonder that the protagonist tends to avoid firearms when her/his bloody rampage commences, for pulling a trigger seems incapable of the type of catharsis repeated hacking gestures (with a knife or some other bludgeoning weapon—you have to see it) provides.
If the film is any indication, our social experiment has a few rough patches to undergo before the majority become used to encountering the other. After all, we’re physically linked.
