Possession

Ana’s spectral screams as she flows and dances like a ghoul in the subway-tunnel. All I could do was cry at it, with her, for her. Some grave womb of the earth birthing up into abjection. Something freeing and all the bindings too coming up at once. Woman spirit seized by an affect too large for representation. The camera merely nearby. There are doppelgangers and spies and the shadow of the Wall and monsters and eyes. The creature consolidating into him. Helen the terrible inverse miracle. Softness without volatility, femininity without refusal, Mark’s idealized wish wearing Ana’s face. And it is so profoundly sad. It’s still settling slowly on me. I never feel capable of doing films justice with just a few words. Especially when I think how many lives were bound up in this thing. Sometimes for years. And it has merely passed me in two hours. Sometimes, though, I feel like the truest cinema sends me rushing to hold those I love. The film has overflowed itself and filled me with images and memories and people. Ana and Isabelle. Mark and Sam Neill. They stay, maybe forever. The film ends, but I am still orbiting them, her. In that moment, crying out. I take what closure I can from the falling bombs and the look in Helen’s eyes. Most of all from their last bloody kiss. The film fills you up and soaks its memories into yours. Not now, for me, a great loving work in the details. Just a small token of remembering. All this. And somehow I feel so deeply for Ana. Her sinister awakening is just being human. When the monster consolidates into him. Some idealized memory of him. And her in Helen, for Mark. How can it not strike you to the soul to see their love still on fire. When they could create anything, they still looked for each other. I want to cry out like Ana. It’s the childish part of me that can’t abide the truth of their loss. I can’t let it go. The film repeatedly says "don’t go," asking for the face again, the scream again, what is gone to be brought back. I recognize myself in this. I also try to keep things. I write because I can’t tolerate everything moving away. I want people not to disappear into the inaccessible past. Moments. Versions of myself. I know love cannot mean arrest. I know it cannot mean turning someone into the image one needs. Still the instinctive NO before loss. Animal. I don’t want things to leave. I want them to stay. As they were. To come back. They find each other at the end. Both bloody. Dying. And they still find each other. Whatever monstrous possessiveness has eaten through their love, there is still love in there too, inseparable now from what has been done with it. The bombs begin falling. Helen looks toward the door. I return to Ana in the tunnel. Everything coming out. Nothing has actually been released. I can't let it go. Isn't that their problem? I'm sick for memories and the holding onto them, for remembering over and over.