Possession is a breakup story. The West Berlin-set 1981 film was written by director Andrej Żuławski during his own divorce, and it’s grotesque, absurd, relentlessly painful, and surprisingly comic. In other words, it is a portrait of heartbreak.
During my most nervous-system-destroying breakup to date, I found myself feeling like an abandoned child, the victim of a broken contract. “It’s like my mom told me she doesn’t want to be my mom anymore,” I remarked to my therapist, friends, and myself over tear-soggy cigarettes. In reality, I was no more a victim of my partner’s agency than he was of mine. We both voided the unofficial contract of our relationship by changing to the point of incompatibility. Of course, feelings of pain, bereavement, and betrayal with no one to vilify can be particularly crazy-making. “Healing” is an unwelcome pursuit when to repair yourself is to concretize your separation from your once-beloved.
To feel reduced to infancy by a breakup is not only the result of perceived abandonment, but also a response to perceived helplessness. To be broken up with is, essentially, to not get your way. If Żuławski was left kicking and screaming in his highchair, then Possession is the collection of mashed peas and spaghetti he threw against the wall: visceral, beautiful, and a reminder that destruction doubles as an act of creation. And so Possession is a breakup story and also a genesis: an ode to the violent birth of the self; a transition.
From Possession’s onset, one thing is clear: Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill), a young married couple who share an apartment and a son, can no longer be together. Ostensibly, the rupture is caused by Anna. She is the one, we learn, who phoned Mark while he was away on vague spy business and introduced the idea of leaving him. When Mark returns, he is intent on smoothing things over, if not particularly interested in understanding the nuances of her marital discontent. “When will you know?” “Do you want me to spend the night somewhere else?” “Were you unfaithful to me?” His pragmatic questions stand in contrast to Anna’s increasingly volatile frustration. There is no conversation to be had; she has made up her mind. His pleas are cloying and pitiful. To this end, Anna, too, is disinterested in understanding Mark’s feelings, a stance about which she is nothing if not honest. (In a particularly comical exchange, Anna asks Mark what he is feeling. “Are you really interested?” he responds. “No.”)
From Mark’s perspective, Anna is being irrational, incomprehensible. Her severe actions spring from an opaque and sinister source. In the absence of legible cause, her insistence on breaking apart their family, and breaking his heart, is evil. It is impossible to reconcile his Anna (the woman who took vows and likely meant them) with the Anna who stands before him, annoyed by his pain, unconcerned with her identity as a wife and mother, steadfast in her resolve to extricate herself from their union. Mark, if unconsciously, follows his logic to the conclusion that Anna’s motives are not her own. If inside of Anna there is a force pushing her to make choices destructive to the family unit, it is because it was planted there by an external (male) force: an interloping seducer. That the force is congenital, long dormant but inevitable, does not occur to him.
Initially, the malignant foreign body attaching itself to Anna, penetrating her walls and spirit, is Heinrich: her philosophically laidback, martial arts-practicing lover. He is the reason she is leaving Mark (“There’s always someone else when these things happen.”) Then, when this cause falls flat — Anna is not living with Heinrich, she is undevoted to him — the blame is shifted to the Creature, another foreign, male body. More specifically, the Creature is an oozing octopus-like sort of monster that Anna appears to tend to and serve. What Mark fails to realize is that the Creature is Anna, and her transformation is less a possession than a becoming: an alignment of her warring selves.
Before I transitioned, I read the late gay, trans activist Lou Sullivan’s published diaries, We Both Laughed in Pleasure. In the space between realizing he is trans and acting on this knowledge, Lou writes extensively about his ostensibly straight boyfriend, J. The surer Lou becomes of his identity, the angrier he grows at J for unwittingly holding him captive within the bounds of their heterosexual relationship. Lou finds himself wishing, he confesses, that J would die so that he could be free to live as a gay man.
When I read these words, I was relieved and concerned to discover how deeply I identified with them. At the time I had an ostensibly straight boyfriend with whom I was very much in love and also hoped would die. I wanted to grieve him because I had no other choice, not because I had willfully ended our relationship. I wanted to be free.
Breaking up with the person you love more than anyone in the world feels nothing short of insane. Growing to hate that person because you are trapped by your love for them feels worse. Tearing up your life, tearing up their life, tearing up everything that depends on your union in order to pursue the necessarily self-involved aim of being yourself feels monstrous, and being monstrous feels bad, and also good. Trans people are often characterized as selfish for accepting the collateral damage that accompanies transition. The fact that destruction frequently paves the way for all manner of discovery is deemphasized. (If you blow the roof off your enclosure, you might get rained on, but you’ll also be able to see the sky). I’m disinterested in fighting against the selfish trans stereotype. I prefer to accept this idea, conditionally, so that I may enter it and take a look around at all the debris, heartache, and fury left in the wake of breaking free.
Unlike Mark, Żuławski does not rush to moralize or condemn Anna. Though the subject matter of Possession is unambiguously personal, Żuławski presents this heartbreak with an intellectual detachment that does not force us into uncomplicated sympathy for Mark. We wade through the mess and madness of transformation, berated by torn apart rooms, endless yelling matches, and rising violence, all while remaining a step or two ahead of our protagonist. It’s clear Mark demonizes Anna as a way to make sense of the pain he is experiencing. But his resolve is weak, and when confronted with her, rage gives way to despair. “When I’m away from you, I think of you as an animal or a woman possessed, and then I see you again and all this disappears.”
The simple thing would be to say that Possession may fruitfully be read as an allegory for transition and the consequential loss of a partner, but the film is more complicated than this narrative would suggest. Because it is not just Anna who transforms and transsexes but Mark, too. In analyzing low budget American horror of the 70s, Carol Clover argues for the utility of interpreting these films through a one-sex system, in which the vagina is not, as Freud would have it, the absence of a penis and symbol of castration, but the presence of a penis inside of the body. In the one-sex system, all “male” anatomy has its inverted equivalent in “female” bodies, and sex is a fluid category that more often proceeds from gender than the other way around. And indeed, in Possession, genders are scrambled and reversed long before sex enters the picture. Anna’s decision to leave Mark masculinizes her and feminizes him. She is cold, firm, and independent; he is hysterical, maternal, and helpless. She is focused on a project that benefits her alone, while Mark is in relational distress, desperately trying to hold their nuclear family unit together.
Following a swiftly called bluff to abandon their son if Anna goes through with the separation—and a three-week hotel bender—Mark returns home and becomes the primary parent of Bob. This includes, for the first time ever, bringing him to school in the morning, where Mark meets Bob’s schoolteacher, Helen, played by Adjani in a brown wig and green contacts. He is dumbstruck by the resemblance, but when he asks Helen if she has met his wife she casually replies, “Of course,” suggesting they do not register as doppelgängers to one another. Quickly, Helen begins to take on a parental role with Bob, but she does not relieve Mark of his child-rearing duties or allow him to return to his paternal role. She merely picks up the slack, essentially covering for him as needed. Gentle, soft, and always dressed in virginal white, Helen retains Anna’s beauty but is behaviorally her opposite. Importantly, Mark and Helen do not fall in love. They try and fail at a sexual relationship, perhaps because Helen is not, in fact, Mark’s idealized version of Anna, but rather his idealized version of himself. And lo, when Anna completes her Creature, who does he identically resemble but Mark, only harder and darker.
Anna and her Creature, quite infamously, do have sex, but in keeping with her admirable self-absorption, this lust strikes me as masturbatory. There is a long, transphobic tradition of attempting to distinguish “real” transsexual women from autogynophiles, cruelly casting the latter as sexually deviant men. By the same token, though less culturally entrenched, gay trans men are accused of fetishizing male homosexuality. Unsurprisingly, a key component of proving the validity of one’s transness is practicing heterosexuality, and this standard is used to cast doubt on the womanhood and manhood of trans lesbians and gay men, respectively.
In reality, due perhaps to compulsory heterosexuality being less likely to influence someone who has done the introspection necessary to transition, there are lots of gay trans men and women. (Being desired as one’s actual gender may very well be an early step toward realizing transness.) Anna is able to fuck and be fucked by her Creature, and when we see them having sex, he is not yet in human form, distancing them all the more from heterosexuality. Always running behind, Mark is unable to similarly release himself with Helen. When they attempt to have sex, Mark falls back into a traditionally heterosexual “male” role, and finds himself dissatisfied and lacking. Still clinging to the failing gender and familial roles of his crumbling marriage, Mark stops short of willful transformation, burying himself among the wreckage.
I am loath to yassify Possession into some inspiring tale of queer self-actualization. Like most good art, the film is complicated, uncomfortable, and does not diminish inconvenient truths in pursuit of clean messages. In Western culture, we are conditioned to prize our individuality even when it comes at the cost of relational obligations. While in an ideal world, one would not be forced into such tradeoffs, it is arrogant and dismissive to insist that being true to oneself no matter the cost is the only or most noble path in life. If we can attempt to excavate the words “selfish” and “selfless” from their loaded cultural and moral connotations, it is worth considering that most choices comprise just one half of an aftermath along with that which is foregone. There were times, in the depths of my heartbreak, where I wondered the point of medical transition if it meant I couldn’t be with the person I loved. What was more true, more essential? My manhood or my relationship? Unsurprisingly, I do not regret transitioning and doing so has greatly increased my fulfillment and enjoyment of life. I would make the same choice 100 times over, but even now, with a life that feels honest and full of love without excessive compromise, I would never trivialize the pain I endured and caused to get here.
Taking the text at face value, the outlook of Possession is bleak. In the end, Mark and Anna both kill themselves, officially ending their relationship by killing off its participants. But if killing themselves works to end their relationship, it does just as much to preserve it. The version of Anna that did fit with Mark, at least for a time, is able to die in his arms. Żuławski, clearly, is not optimistic about the future of the couple’s doppelgängers. This view is evidenced by Bob trying to prevent their union and ultimately taking his own life when he is unable to do so. Bob’s death is particularly upsetting, but it functions more as evidence of Żuławski’s need for his heartbreak to be taken seriously than an accurate representation of the effects of divorce.
It’s an understandable impulse. The grief of heartbreak is immense and isolating. However, for the most part, we do go on. We change and grow, and on the off chance that both parties of a former love grow into a newfound compatibility, it is highly unlikely that they will ever find out. It’s really fucking sad, and Żuławski renders this pain horrifically and unavoidably visible: a noble endeavor. However, viewing Possession with a heart that has healed since being broken allows, too, for a more hopeful understanding. Nothing can undo the pain, but following in the venerable tradition of queer villain reclamation, I am able to muster excitement for Helen and the Creature’s futures, even if they are separate. “I’m afraid of myself, because I’m the maker of my own evil,” Anna says, meaning, in my view, she is the maker of herself.
HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.
Since I’ve only seen Possession once I feel i can’t properly meet this intellectual level but I’m obsessed with this essay.