Obsession

Best movie to come out of these United States since The Departed 20 years ago. And now Marty is pro-AI so he gets knocked down a peg. And this movie has fake AI not real AI. The same way real AI is fake people. And in this movie there is a fake people. This Nikki is not human bruh😂. But she is, which is subversive and interesting. Marty’s not really knocked down a peg I still love Grandpa. This movie is real and brutal, brutally true, beside the blood. That makes people scared. And yet, it’s a summer blockbuster, so I have hope for the future. Second to Blair Witch Project, that’s alright by me. I enjoy the Twitter bait posts about this movie, the moralizing though, people pretending they’re better than it; you’re not. Like Get Out, this movie provokes the banal, numbed masses and makes them desperate to drag it down to their level, but they can’t, to save their lives. I heard a ridiculous take on Get Out just earlier today, that the movie is about how black people are physically superior, when the movie outright states, I think multiple times, that they use black people for an arbitrary reason, and that, to me, was what made the movie so shocking and great. This movie is similar to Get Out in more ways than one, but I don’t feel the need to list them. The ridiculous banal take I saw about this movie from “moids” was that Bear idealized Nikki and overflew her favorable characteristics and ignored her flaws, which is such trite bullshit, because really it’s clear that Bear’s idea of Nikki has nothing to do with Nikki except for the fact that she is a woman who is in his proximity, and that she is not Sarah; he proves this by at every turn shunning, rejecting, shaming, abusing the real Nikki and accepting while occasionally reprimanding her wished-for replacement. No, she’s not a bad person for taking Sarah’s cash and giving it to a homeless guy, and no, Bear is not choosing to ignore that she did it, the double cut to his smiling face with the sentimental music conveys, through the language of cinema, that this is why he ‘loves’ her, because she’s kind, because she was kind to him a long time ago when nobody else was, and that to this day he and she are able to be kind to one another in a way no one else can, even if it isn’t in a romantic way. Sarah, with her comment about paying for a guys heroin for a week, stands in opposition to this and is portrayed as having a weaker moral fiber. I guess, after all that, I was being reductionist about Bear’s feelings, they’re a little deeper than that, but did not give him the benefit of the doubt because of his heinous nature otherwise. That being said, people are being stupid about that too. Someone saying “when he didn’t kill her when she was laying on the bed is when I saw him as evil” and someone else saying “you’re stupid and/or a bad person for not seeing it as early as I did, that being when he called her Freaky Nikki, or when he was not sad enough about his cat dying.” My point is, it’s not a competition, and comparing anything else to the rape that happens in this movie is downplaying the rape, which is anti-moralism if I’ve ever heard it, so shaddup. It’s inarguable the scene where Nikki talks in her sleep is Bear at his evilest. Making a virtue ethics judgement is inappropos, he clearly degrades and lets more slide as the movie goes on, there’s some point about an ordinary person being given the opportunity to commit evil (like a pig farmer in 1930’s Rhineland), and if they should be prosecuted for having that untapped potentiality within them (they shouldn’t). So really it’s all about Arendt’s Banality of Evil, if that’s too high a reading level for you, try Marvel Comics’ Civil War II. Although the movie handles incredibly dark subject matter, it’s directed by Curry Barker from YouTube shorts comedy. There are heavy comedy overtones, and heavy romantic (love story) undertones, all the way to the end. It’s not immoral to laugh and/or say “Awww” at a movie in which magical wish coercive rape also takes place. I watched some Curry Barker shorts and they were ok. A lot like TomSka’s punchlineless situational comedy, certainly charming, but I didn’t see anything of what made this movie so great, although it’s a different medium. About real Nikki’s true feelings for Bear, I don’t think Sarah can be trusted, and on a second viewing the American Psycho mixed takes stuff really shows, although more than that it even seems ingrained into the script, and to literally flip from cut to cut, so I don’t believe anything can be really ascertained. The ew’s are definitely a sign pointing in one direction, but she says it so often it could just be an act or a tic. Between saying that she can’t talk to anybody the way she can to Bear, and right away switching to being worried about the surprise and later forgetting it, or apparently not forgetting it because her other self uses it as an excuse to come back up to the car, so I guess she pretended to forget so she could rush inside as quick as possible, her reaction to his story supports this. But the “do you like me” question also carries a lot of weight. I really do think it’s meant to be impossible to discern and totally ambiguous, it’s not an ending-of-inception bullshit where you’re meant to study it for 10 years and come to a concrete conclusion. Not everything needs a fucking answer, just watch the fucking movie, and if you’re so obsessed with answers stop going on fucking Snapchat and watch the fucking movie you paid to see. A conclusion I think is untenable, though, is that she was asking just to reject him, that doesn’t make any sense, and anybody spouting this while simultaneously labeling themself “a Nikki” is not to be trusted. Probably look like Sarah’s dad Andy Richter. It seems anyone who invests the most into movies and what the mean and the study of “cinema” are the ones least interested in actually watching the movies and it seems those most desperate for answers are those most unable or most unwilling to draw any conclusions of their own. It was funny Andy Richter said “karens,” and the movie impressively juggles anti-niceguy messaging (see Invisible Man for contrast) and BPDgirl horror (see Fatal Attraction for contrast) with wit and sympathy in equal measure, respectively. I think Fatal Attraction managed to be fairly sympathetic, but that’s nothing compared to this, in which an inhuman, murderous spirit from beyond is humanized to the extent that “it triggers” more than one person. I really can’t remember all I wanted to say. Maybe I ate too much. I didn’t know what to put for my Panera Bread name so I put Bear and maybe a radical feminist poisoned my Mac and Cheese. It’s a cautionary tale about moral cowardice and “limerence,” okay, anyone out there is much closer to Bear than they are to Nikki, any self-proclaimed Nikki is really the Bearest Bear of them all, not that you should trust a self-proclaimed Bear either. And I maintain that Sarah’s death would also still be sad if she didn’t get into Luther. Right. I can’t hardly see. Any ad hoc bs analysis like “the lights in her eyes show that there’s two people in there” or anything having to do with the Hansel and Gretel thing she said as an actual allusion to the Brothers Grimm drives me up a fucking wall. It’s not a movie about the fucking Brothers Grimm, nor is it a fucking Two Face Batman one shot. It’s a movie about real questions and it speaks to our times and our generation and I can understand if you don’t want to deal with that but don’t make it my problem, please. Also. I think that moment where they cuddle on the couch at the end is their tenderest, although Nikki is tortured, what has replaced her is free to be itself and feel accepted, and Bear seems ready to accept it and you may feel that they may be about to embark on a Demolition Lovers/Bonnie and Clyde style 2nd act, but I’m glad Nikki’s (or not Nikki’s) paranoia destroys the fantasy. Her reaction felt very true to life for me, as it did in several places, where I feel it surpasses Fatal Attraction in true and sympathetic BPD portrayal. She’s so pale on the couch, I can only imagine how much blood she’s lost. I feel I was a bit victim blamey at the end of the last, which ties into the way Nikki treated Sarah’s death, and how that ties into the movie’s themes of rape in an interesting way. And it was cool the dinner scene broke the 180 degree rule, and the extras in that scene were funny, and it was cool how the car park scene was the total opposite, and how Bear said “they’re close now” just as the camera entered the car, signifying a closeness between Bear and Sarah, as it had been cutting between them through the windshield until then. And it was cool how when Bear confronted Nikki about cutting his hair she was reading a book, but she was reading it upside down. And apparently there’s a shot-but-not-used ending where Nikki shoots herself before the wish wears off. I think it’s probable she shoots herself anyway. No need to see it though. Like the Blue Velvet ending where Dorothy jumps off a roof. No need. What they went with is better. Much better.