Double Feature: Of Love and Anxiety (Audition & Possession)

Relationships are a lot of work. Or at least that’s what people tell me. There’s compromise, listening, having arguments neither person can remember what about, and of course, plenty of anxiety. As with many things in life, female and male anxiety in relationships manifest in different ways. For this double feature, we’ll be covering movies that explore both sides of this anxiety and turn it into something truly disgusting.

Leading feature: Audition (1999)

Audition is a movie known for its grotesque climax where the lovesick and completely helpless main character is tortured by his perfect woman. Like a lot of the extreme cinema we cover, more people know about the final few scenes (and one closer to the middle where the tension first gets introduced) than have actually seen the full film. The long and short of it is a widower Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is convinced by his friend to set up a fake audition with the goal of finding a new wife. He selects Asami (Eihi Shiina) who turns out to be unstable and possessive. After they have sex, she drugs him and tortures him, stopped only by Aoyama’s son arriving too late to save his father’s life. And foot.

There’s considerably more to this movie than that crude broad stroke but for those of you who haven’t seen it, giving you the play by play is doing you a disservice. Regardless of one’s opinion on this movie, it deserves to be seen as a whole, not just for the grotesquery.

Where the anxiety comes into play is once the descent into hell begins. It’s hard to not to label this movie as male anxiety since Asami’s sadism comes to the surface after the couple consummate their relationship. There’s plenty of male anxiety surrounding female sexuality, and one of the most prevalent is the idea of women getting too attached. Asami is jealous and enraged at seeing a photo of Aoyama’s late wife; she demands he love no one but her once they are intimate. 

The audience knows the sicker side of Asami before Aoyama does, starting with the man in the bag. In Asami’s apartment, she is keeping a man who she had blinded and mutilated so that he is dependent on her. To feed him, she vomits into a bowl, and the starving man appears grateful for the sustenance. Asami doesn’t want a partner in life; she wants human pets. She wants men who could never abandon her even if they wanted to. The male anxiety in that specific sequence is palpable. 

Flashback moments and scenes where Aoyama is searching for Asami when she briefly disappears builds a sad backstory to Asami, but this is ultimately a movie about a man done in by his loneliness. Where there is the common anxiety of men thinking women use sexuality as a trap, there’s also a layer which speaks to the emotional repression of men. Aoyama is genuinely looking for a partner, and he is susceptible to Asami for that reason. He wants to believe he has found the second love of his life. When he searches for her and uncovers the bizarre pieces of her past, we believe he still cares for her. In what might be the last moments of his life bleeding out on the floor of his apartment, he repeats words Asami has said to him as if he is conjuring the idealized image of her she presented at the audition.

At the heart of it, Audition is a grotesque meditation on the anxieties men have towards women.

Second billed: Possession (1981)

If you paid me a million dollars to tell you which anxiety is thicker in Possession, male or female, I truly don’t think I could answer that. The film is saturated with both kinds and from all angles; from performative nature of masculinity, body horror for both sexes, the claustrophobia of being trapped in a role and a relationship, and the omnipresent fear of not being enough.

Again, this is a movie where the quick synopsis provided here is not going to be adequate so I urge you to find and watch it for yourself. In the absolute broadest of strokes, Mark (Sam Neil) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) are a married couple whose relationship and happiness is disintegrating around them. Mark discovers Anna is having an affair and badgers her for painful information like how much more she enjoys sex with the other man. They constantly argue, and go so far as to self-inflict wounds. A merry-go-round ensues of Anna trying to leave, Mark not letting her, Anna hiding out, Mark searching for her until it’s discovered that Anna has a separate residence wherein she is growing a strange squid creature. This creature eventually becomes Mark’s doppleganger but the couple are shot then commit suicide once the double is revealed.

Makes sense? If not, please feel free to pause here and go watch the movie then return so you can tell me that you still don’t get it. This is a weird one.

Possession alternates between moments that seem to be intentionally funny like Mark meeting Anna’s lover Heinrich who flounces around and beats him up with a goofy combination of ballet and karate and horrific imagery. In my heart of hearts, I think this to be a satire of relationships and how absurd humans can act when they feel threatened. Nobody seems happy with their position in life; nobody seems to know what they’re supposed to be doing. Mark blunders along while Anna appears to be in a constant state of hysteria. The scene where Anna has a breakdown and possible miscarriage in a subway station is rightfully famous for many reasons, and it acts as a perfect visulization of Anna’s fragile state of mind. 

Both characters are villains and sympathetic; both of them are duplicitous and duped. They are creating their own problems and floundering for solutions. Anna pulls away while Mark becomes destructive and they wind up destroying themselves just by being around one another. This also points to the political subtext of a movie that takes place in Berlin and has two of its main locations (their home apartment and the one in which Anna grows the squid creature) situated along the Berlin Wall. Possession is a film about being divided yet being right next to each other, and the ways anxiety manifests in the most commonplace situations.

Enjoy this double feature with a loved one. Preferably a romantic partner.