Deadlights: The Home Front

With his 1981 film Possession, Polish director Andrzej Żuławski took the most commonplace domestic imagery imaginable and dragged it screaming into a mindless, convulsing place of grunting, sweating flesh and impulsive self-destruction. In everything from a child-sized dining table to a tacky electric carving knife of the sort not usually glimpsed outside of farcical sitcoms the film locates deep feelings of anxiety, self-loathing, and antisocial desperation. It's a melodramatic treatment of common feelings, an admission that the nuclear family idealized throughout the Western world is a tomb for the women whose labor and emotional presence sustain it.

The magnification of the quotidian into the divine and the monstrous is a foundational element of fiction. It allows viewers to see their own experiences and the experiences of others in a new light, lifted out of the context of daily life and magnified. It's a movie about the deformed expression of long-repressed anger, resentment, grief, and isolation, about the apathy bred in the course of an unwanted life, about the infantile neediness of men and the stymied rage of the women forced to care for them. Its tone is hysterical, every interaction bloated to grotesquery. Conversations become screaming matches. Arguments turn into bizarre expressions of self-harm. Children vanish, swallowed whole by the sucking indifference of adults who never wanted them.

When Mark (Sam Neill) complains to his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) about the toll their separation is taking on him, Anna dissociates and either remembers or imagines herself having a violent psychotic break while carrying groceries through a subway station. The domestic and the deranged are inextricably linked as Anna's menstrual blood mixes with spilled milk and eggs while she drools vomit on the tunnel floor. She beats her head against the tiled wall, her befouled hair flying. She screams. Her frustration and feelings of being trapped while she sits expressionless, listening to Mark, echo horribly inside the cavern of her hidden self. It's the film's single most enduring image, perhaps because in its wild intensity it approaches the actual feeling of sitting and listening to some man you can't stand whine about how you owe them your body and your life.

Possession is a difficult film to watch, full of distressingly intimate and relatable violence. It is not a beginner's horror film, and it may prove too much for some viewers, but it is the single purest distillation of modern life's petty frustrations into the language of fear and nausea. Understanding can emerge from that kind of misery. We see ourselves convulse in the grip of things we hardly know how to discuss and while the blooming of that awareness may turn the stomach and disturb the mind it also enables us to dredge the canals of our unconscious, to haul dripping and filthy the garbage we all carry with us out into the frigid air where at least we can be sure we're not alone.