• Obsession

    Obsession

    I finally saw Obsession.

    Months ago, it was a huge, huge hit. A gigantic shadow, raring on the wall. Hard to tell with shadows, though. Sometimes they’re cast by a moth, batting against a light.

    Obsession is a 7/10 movie. In fact, it is 7/10, The Movie: the most 7/10 movie ever made. It is seven and then a dot and then as many zeroes as we can calibrate.

    It packs a whallop. It’s scary and tense and charming. But it will be interesting to see the legacy it ages into—already, few people seem to talk about it. Maybe there’s not much to say.

    The plot is minimal—a “be careful what you wish for!” story very similar to many Goosebumps books, and Are You Afraid of the Dark, and The Monkey’s Paw. (The director claims to have been inspired by The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror II. An interesting fact about the future is that culture is now in the hands of people whose main exposure to iconic stories is in the form of parodies of those stories—I suspect we’ve hit a crossover point where people are more familiar withShrek than the fairytales it’s laughing at.)

    It’s hard to describe Obsession’s plot without spoiling it. It’s hard to watch the first ten minutes of Obsession without spoiling it. In a first-ever occurrence, it’s hard to imagine the events the Obsessions’s plot might involve without spoiling it.

    The writing and directing are serviceable. Inde Navarette carries the movie quite hard. Her face seems to be wired up with additional muscles that the rest of the population does not have.

    Why Has It Made Eleven Trillion Dollars?

    The horror genre has spawned many a sleeper hit, but they’re usually not inexplicable sleeper hits. There’s typically an obvious reason why a given popular horror movie is popular. This is not true for Obsession.

    It is not formally innovative like The Blair Witch Project, not the beneficiary of a hot new distribution medium like The Evil Dead, wasn’t helped by a moral panic like Cannibal Holocaust and The Last House on the Left, and will probably will not be remembered as a major example of a film movement like Suspiria. It is distinctive in its unremarkability. So why has it become so popular?

    A Backlash Against Prestige Horror?

    “Prestige horror” refers to the recent surge of horror movies that have (relatively) high budgets, famous actors, cold blue/gray/sepia color-grading, and a lack of fun. Prestige horror desires respectability. It despises and repudiates any connection to “low culture” things like pulp, grindhouse, VHS rentals, porn, or Youtube (except to condescend to them, and show it’s above such tawdry fare). Prestige horror has tense, almost angry aspirations toward being serious art or social commentary.

    Quoting from Will Sloan’s review of Helloween Kills:

    In recent years (since approximately the release of Get Out), the idea that horror movies can be used to smuggle serious sociopolitical ideas has reached a new level of popularity. As a result, the new Halloween movie climaxes with Jamie Lee Curtis delivering a monologue about how Michael Myers represents the fear that divides society and turns people against each other. That’s right, folks. Michael Myers is partisanship. Michael Myers is horseshoe theory. Michael Myers is Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn and the Berniebros and the Capitol rioters. Putting aside how stupid it is, her monologue says a lot of things that are better left unstated, because the thing about metaphors is that they’re supposed to be metaphors. If a character in a Halloween movie starts saying that Michael Myers is a symbol of the fear that turns society against itself, the proper response from another character would be, “Actually, no – he’s a masked man who’s quite literally on a killing spree right now.”

    Aside from this, I personally find it a bummer—almost like artistic gentrification—when Hollywood moves in on scrappy, low-budget genres. To me, this “uptown” approach often loses the rampaging energy that makes the genre appealing to begin with. Great horror films generally feel like a pitbull raging at the end of a leash—a force so malign that even the director seems barely in control of the snapping teeth and bulging muscle.

    Perhaps others are sick of prestige horror too.

    Obsession feels like an anti-prestige horror film. Its budget is small, its actors are or were unfamous, and its aspirations are quite humble. It doesn’t want to change your life. It wants to entertain you for a little while and then let you go. It’s the opposite of Inde Navarette’s character.

    But there are other recent trends that Obsession avoids, to its credit.

    It’s slow-paced. It’s not an unhinged gorefest or an alienating exposition of “style”. It’s not the You can watch it without thinking about its artistic forerunners, because it basically doesn’t have any.

    It feels the way watching a movie did when you were a child, and had little connection to culture. When you were an island, in other words.

    But just as a Sentinelese islander who finds a coke bottle is now in contact with an international global brand, Obsession does gesture at some interesting ideas.

    Unconditional Love is Evil

    If someone says they love you unconditionally, there might be hope. They could be lying. Or maybe you misheard them.

    Love with no conditions is evil and abject and monstrous. And it’s also meaningless. Nobody is worthy of that love, and nobody should want it.

    Most people who value it have not internalized just how.

    You are not thinking about what unconditional implies: love without any conditions at all.

    The unconditional lover doesn’t care about you. They assign you no personal subjectivity. They don’t particularly love you for any reason.

    Their love is an alien force that has no connection to anything in the real world.

    Imagine a person whose adoration is so unchanging that they wouldn’t care if you punched them in the face. Or murdered their pet dog. Or tattooed the entire text of Mein Kampf on your face in really small print and didn’t shake your head even once to show the tattooist you disagreed with it.

    An unconditional lover would discover that you have a pile of murdered people in your basement…and they wouldn’t care at all.

    Would that love mean anything? As the recipient, would you value it?

    It goes further: imagine devotion so total that they wouldn’t even care if you died. Their love is not for you, it’s for the pile of atoms you consist of, and they’d be just as happy to love your dead and rotting corpse (and, presumably, the dirt under your body that soaks in your residue) as your living self. Hell, they might even murder you. Why the hell not? If their love could be impacted by trivial distractions like “alive” or “dead”, it wouldn’t be unconditional.

    Obsession is clearly aware of these ideas.

    To an unconditional lover, there is no difference between a living, purring cat and a bag of stinking, matted fur, its blind eye sockets boiling with worms.

    He reacts with revulsion. He might have loved the cat.

    He doesn’t matter to her. His wishes do not matter. He could punch her in the face and she’d still love him.

    Whatever lives in “Frikki’s” demon-doll face, it is not love.

    Conditionality gives love its power. It’s not a foregone necessity for two lovers to stay together: they can leave at any time and are choosing not to.

    Is The Protagonist A Rapist?

    First, the facts.

    The protagonist purchases a supernatural toy called a “One Wish Willow”. He makes a wish on it, forcing a woman (Nicky Freeman) to love him.

    But this is not his original plan. He intends the One Wish Willow as a gift for Nicky. Curry Barker’s original screenplay contains this graf.

    “Bear grabs one. “THE ONE WISH WILLOW. SPARK THE MIDDLE AND BREAK IT IN HALF!” He flips it over. “You only get one wish, so make it count!” Bear smiles; Nicky’s gonna love this.”

    After an awkward interaction with Nicky (she gives him an extremely obvious go-signal, he fumbles it), he’s left stewing in his car, alone. Frustrated by his inaction, he snaps the One Wish Willow in half and makes his own (“half serious”, according to the screenplay) wish.

    I wish Nicky Freeman loved me more than anyone in the fucking world.

    I don’t think this makes him a rapist.

    Because he did not actually think the One Wish Willow would work.

    The world of Obsession is not a fantasy world where wishes come true. It is (apparently) an unmagical one like ours. Bear surely knows that if One Wish Willows granted wishes, they would not be allowed to sell them in stores. They would be tightly controlled by the government, or something.

    “But then why did he make the wish?”

    Because he was blowing off steam. Because he was angry and in pain and needed an emotional release valve.

    The One Wish Willow was not a dastardly plot to control Nikki Freeman’s mind. He just wanted to feel like he was in control for a few seconds.

    A child who stamps their feet and yells “I WISH MOM AND DAD WOULD DISAPPEAR” does not want mom and dad to disappear. Even if, for a few seconds, he thinks he does. It’s emotionally satisfying—if hollow—to enact a fantasy where you have power.

    Nikki kisses him. How does he react?

    “What the FUCK WAS THAT?!”

    …He’s surprised! Shocked! Confused! Because he didn’t expect his wish would work!

    Basically, Bear is in the same situation as a man who gets fired by his boss. He storms out and mutters “I hope an anvil falls on your head, you jerk…” An overly helpful alien overhears him. SPLAT.

    Would we say “the man killed his boss”? Yes, in a sense, he did. But emotionally, we do not regard him as guilty of murder.

    In the same spirit, I do not regard Bear as a rapist.

    Nostalgia For A World Unremembered

    This movie portrays the past.

    Yes, technically all films portray the past: even a livestream of a gamer saying the dreaded N word (meaning “narraag̉iitchuk”, Iñupiat Inuit for “has abdominal cramps”, which as we all know, white people have no right to use, ever) offers a window into the world of a few seconds ago.

    But more seriously, Obsession depicts the unending cultural past that pop culture seems to be stuck in.

    The Simpsons is a perfect example. This is Homer’s car.

    Cars do not look like this anymore. This “three-box” sedan look has gone out of fashion: everyone drives a SUV or a hatchback now. Cars no longer need a big radio antenna. You can listen to the radio via Bluetooth on your phone if you want (which you probably don’t.) Homer’s car is a Plymouth, a brand that hasn’t existed since 2001.

    Notably, the Simpsons is still nominally set in the present day is (mobile phones and so forth exist, as does Lady Gaga). But its stylistic trappings are stuck in the past of 1990 or so. Homer’s car will look like this for eternity.

    Obsession is the same. Despite a few half-assed modern signifiers (a Reddit lookalike, a ChatGPT lookalike, “I don’t wanna get some Karen to…”) everything in it is an artifact from the past.

    • Everything looks retro. The bar is old-fashioned. Bear’s car has roll-down windows. There’s a lunchbox with Polaroid photos inside.
    • the characters work together in…a musical instrument store? That feels like a 90s setting. Today, such stores are mostly dying or dead. Would such a tiny location drum up enough foot traffic to employ a rather large staff of young people with company shirts and so on? People don’t really form bands or play physical instruments. They make music on laptops. Or on Suno.
    • The plot device of young people going out to “grab drinks”, and being passionate about trivia night…while not wrong, it does seem out of step with most of the young people I know. Interests have fragmented down a thousand weird, polarizing rabbit holes, away from public places like sports bars. Bear would be the mod for a Europa Universalis V fan wiki. Nikki would have a femcave where she goons to fujoshi brainrot.
    • The regard One Wish Willows are held in (they don’t work…except maaaaybe they do? Woooo!) feels very “90s”: reminiscent of the days when nobody had internet access and thousands of weird urban legends about the hook handed man could spread by word of mouth.

    It’s an interesting choice how everything is a thing that exists as a pop culture concept, but not necessary as a thing in real life anymore.

    It’s also interesting how the director was born in 1999, meaning he has likely no firsthand memory of the things he’s referencing. It’s all just stuff he saw on TV/movies/Youtube. (Backrooms is an even more extreme example: “liminal horror” and the 90s VHS aesthetic as presented by a 21 year old who was born four months after the creation of Youtube.) Can you feel nostalgia for someone else’s memory? Someone else’s world?

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  • Who is japan_nobunaga? An investigative report

    Who is japan_nobunaga? An investigative report

    Everyone, go follow @japan_nobunaga on X.com!

    It’s the funny, whimsical stories of a Japanese person exploring America and learning about their customs! Like salsa chips! And trucks! 🙂

    I just love reading his very real stories which very much happened to a human! 🙂 🙂

    They’re extremely believable. Particularly this one, where he goes to a car wash, pays for the cheapest option, and a rando car wash attendant upgrades him (for no perceptible reason) to premium service while talking like a badly-written NPC in a videogame (“OVERRIDE! UPGRADE HIM TO THE TITANIUM HURRICANE! ON MY DIME!”)

    And I love his adorable art, which (as he explains on his website) is not AI art! (Which just couldn’t match the warmth of hand illustration.)

    I also love his not at all insane-sounding political opinions about immigrants and gay people!

    (This was the only post on the account I could find that wasn’t AI generated.)

    And it’s delightful that his account is based in “Japan”, but has a pesky little warning symbol beside it, indicating that he connects via a VPN.

    And it’s divinely magical that his account has an August 2023 join date, no activity before Nov 14, 2025 (tip, search old tweets using by adding until:2026-01-01 or whatever to the query), and nine username changes. Seems legit. Not at all like he’s a professional marketer who asset-flipped an account through several failed gimmicks until one gained traction. (His earliest public posts appear to be discussions on how to game the X algorithm. They’re in Japanese, which allays my suspicion somewhat. Not completely: it’s odd that he’s so fixated on Trump and US culture war issues. I also wonder how many Japanese people would be comfortable doing an exaggerated, caricatured portrayal of their nation for the edification of borish Americans. I’m Australian. The idea of creating an X.com account called @australian_nedkelly where I pretend to tour America while saying stuff like “blimey, you seppo bastards really call ‘taps’ ‘faucets’, don’t ya? straya, mate. throw another shrimp on the barbie.” makes me want to put the barrel of a gun in my mouth and commit teddy bear picnic)

    Next comes the part we’ve all been waiting for. Where you say one of three things in japan_nobunaga’s defense.

    “1. My urine is green and cloudy”

    You probably have a urinary tract infection. I am not qualified to comment further. Please see a GP.

    “2. He admits the stories are fiction on his website/profile, doofus!”

    He says this:

    These stories are not journalism. They are not realism. They are not a think-piece about America. The samurai is fiction. His misunderstandings are fiction. The diner waitress who calls him “honey” is a composite of every diner waitress who has ever existed.

    There you go! Surely, that’s good enough, right?

    1) His tweets go viral with none of this context included. The average person does not read his website and probably never clicks back to his profile (which contains a vastly different claim anyway, that he uses “AI to polish [his] English” and for research.)

    2) The stories offer no hints that they are fictional. They are written in the first person, in a naturalistic style, and involve everyday events. There are no “winks” to the audience, no pulling back the curtain. The “samurai” does not behave as a samurai would. He’s a “clueless foreigner” stereotype, corny but not unbelievable, and is easily mistaken for the narrator himself.

    3) Even if the writer’s intentions are good (doubtful), most of his audience absolutely does not realize they are reading fake AI slop.

    Here are some replies:

    “Brother, thank you for these posts. If you ever get to Florida let me know, dinner and drinks are on me.”

    “I love your objective view of true American culture and your desire to go beyond observing culture, but to participate in it. “

    “I love the effect that the World Cup is having, bringing us together as good humans regardless of our evil leadership! Here’s a visitor from Japan experiencing free chips and salsa for the first time.”

    This Reddit thread describes his fake truck story as

    “A longer, yet outstanding, tweet by a Japanese man living abroad in the US.”

    The account has received coverage from the withered vestigial organs of the old school printed press, which mainly treat its stories as real accounts.

    Spoon University describes him as “a Japanese tourist” who “shared his experience” of going to a Mexican restaurant.

    The New York Times found the matter so unclear that they DM’d the author for comment.

    Nobunaga, the Japanese wanderer whose reverential written meditations on X about bottomless baskets of chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in the United States, isn’t quite what some observers have taken him for, either. He is a pseudonymous character. He isn’t on his way to any World Cup games, either.

    In response to a direct message, Nobunaga’s creator said the premise of the account is that an ancient samurai had traveled through time and space to land in the American heartland. When he wrote that “the trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it,” it was meant in a spirit somewhere between parody and cultural commentary.

    4) His “stories” are incredibly boring and pointless if read as fiction.

    “I ate some salsa chips”

    “A guy called Kevin moved my sofa.”

    There is no twist, subversion or element of surprise. They are big bags of nothing. They suck and are dogshit. 100% of their juice comes from the fact that people think it’s a real Japanese person having real experiences.

    “3. But who cares if it’s fake! They’re nice stories!”

    Here are real reactions people have had after realizing they’re huffing Claudeslop:

    “In some ways… I’m OK with that in that the story was a nice story, it resonated with a lot of people and it shows how humanity at one of it’s better sides.”

    “I like your stories. I realize most of them aren’t exactly the truth, who cares? It’s entertainment. Your stories are also very pro-American and down-to-earth…something rare these days. Write on, Samurai.”

    I do not agree that they are nice stories. They are maudlin pap, are written horribly, and they don’t show humanity at “one of it’s [sic] better sides”. They are focused with steely intensity on the classic samurai virtues of consumerism and gorging yourself like a pig on fast food.

    What’s great about America, according to nobunaga?

    – the food is cheap

    – they give you large portions

    – sometimes businesses give you free shit

    – sometimes a guy named Kevin moves your sofa

    The reality that the “free” salsa chips are a loss leader in the Mexican restaurant’s expense account (they are counting on consumers being enticed by free chips to indulge in more expensive, higher-margin items) is lost on the samurai. As is the fact that “Kevin” (if he even exists) is performing reciprocal altruism—today you, tomorrow me. A good practice, to be sure, but he’s hardly doing it out of the kindness of his heart. He’s accruing positive social capital, to be cashed in when he needs help.

    This is saccharine, condescending AI slop, poorly-written by a machine, documenting a dying, decrepit nation trying to cheat death by being too obese to fit into its coffin. They are vapid celebrations of an unworthy life spent rattling like a dry and empty can from one toy to the next. Maybe they are an accurate portrayal of America. This should be a national embarrassment.

    (Also, are they not written in a manner that’s…pornographic? Excessively sensual, etc? “I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.” … “By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.” I wonder if this is “algo-speak”. Social media won’t allow descriptions of fucking, so we transplant erotic frisson onto things like food.)

    In 2017, HuffPo published a wokescold piece titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People”

    It’s a fine example of vintage 2017 wokescoldery, almost fit for framing in a museum. “I’m done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.” Great stuff. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. It’s nearly up there with Tommy Needy Drinky.

    Right now, I am feeling “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About The Truth”.

    When I was a child, I was a compulsive liar. Or at least I had an impulse to fabricate details about myself that made me look cool and important. I would claim to have done things that I hadn’t, to know people that I didn’t. Sometimes I would lie just to fill an awkward silence.

    My internal justification was “It doesn’t hurt anyone, and helps my social life. Who cares about a lie here and there?”

    What changed me (aside from growing up) is that I cared when other people did it to me.

    When someone lied and I caught them, I felt violated and betrayed. Even if the lie was small, I had a hard time getting over it and forgiving them. It was like violently disliked the person who had done it. It was like like reality was a swimming pool, and they’d whipped their dick out and pissed in it.

    And I was doing this to other people. If they ever caught me (and since I was catching other people, it was obviously very much a live possibility), they would probably feel the same about me. And they would be right to do so.

    The account is lying. The internet is awash in AI junk, and a philosophy of “well, this particular incident of lying seems harm-free” is not defensible. I could easily take this in a thousand uncomfortable directions. Nobody is obviously harmed when I claim you owe me money. Or if I claim only five million died.

    To be clear, I would not have a problem if the stories were obviously fictional and fantastical (like if nobunaga drew his blade and practiced Kiri-sute gomen / 斬捨御免, on the car wash attendant, cleansing his ride in filthy commoner blood). But instead they trade on blurring a line between reality and fiction, where he gets to present them as real experiences while rugpulling them as fictions when convenient.

    Maybe they make you feel good, though.

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  • Helloween – Straight out of Hell

    Helloween – Straight out of Hell

    Helloween’s fourteenth album has a bland title but good music. It reverses course from the dark tone of Seven Sinners, delivering “happy” power metal with more upbeat lyrics and a free, less burdened approach to songwriting. Apparently the band was delighted that (contra Mayan prophecies) the world didn’t end in 2012. Fair enough. I, too, was pleased by that development.

    It has one of the great Helloween tracks, Weikath’s “Burning Sun”. A spellbinding fast track where the band’s constituent parts together meld together in a great fiery heat: Judas Priest riffs, Iron Maiden lead melodies, Deep Purple organs, and a Weikath/Sascha guitar solo duel that is short, ferocious, and memorable note-for-note. The lyrics (depicting a technological flight of Icarus of sorts, except the captain knows he’ll burn up) are unusually well-written for a band that usually barely writes songs in English. This is an all-time top 10 Helloween song for me.

    The rest of the songs more trend toward “okay” than riveting, with further standouts being Weikath’s nostalgic “Years”, Deris/Gerstner’s upbeat anthem “Live Now!”, and Deris’s fiery, charging “Nabataea” (the Nabataeans were an ancient proto-Arab kingdom, who left behind some fascinating monuments. Deris is something of a traveller and it would not surprise me if he saw many of them firsthand).

    Charlie Bauerfeind’s production is softer and easier on the ears, with less of the blatantly sampled drums that I disliked from past efforts. The guitars have a 70s Marshall sound, acting like glue over the mix rather than sticking out. All of these decisions are more or less the correct ones.

    The usual filler does the usual filling. “Asshole” is a either a joke in search of a point or a point in search of a joke. “Hold Me In Your Arms” is a ballad that provokes no reaction. “Wanna Be God” is “We Will Rock You” off Temu.com, and I don’t like the original much. As always, these songs feel more like ballast and counterweight for the real songs (trifles that allow the listener time to think and reflect) rather than music that’s substantial in itself.

    The final three songs are paced pretty similarly and do blur together. Gerstner’s “Church Breaks Down” has a striking anti-religion tilt breaks from the band’s past lyrical outlook, which has generally been Christian or at least Christian-inspired (there’s a large pile of songs like “Hey, Lord”, “Revelation”, “Time of the Oath”, and that’s not even considering the latter Michael Kiske material, which would often go into all-out gospel territory.)

    This is a band that’s set in their ways, but their ways are good. A lingering question: why are there gas masks on the cover? They’re pumpkins. They don’t breathe.

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