Heteropessimist Horror
Gen-Z's despairing view of relationships hits the big screen
Obsession, the box-office sensation directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, is a sign that the economics of Hollywood are changing, with internet-incubated stories overtaking superannuated IP. It also marks the arrival of a new film genre: heteropessimist horror, which channels the despairing view of relationships that is typical of Gen Z.
In Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston), a twenty-something music-store employee, tries and fails to ask out his friend Nikki (Inde Navarette). Everything changes when he buys a mysterious novelty item called “One Wish Willow” and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the entire world.” She does—with a demonic energy that reflects not her natural inclinations but the spell he has cast on her. That spell works as a metaphor for the loss of control suffered by individuals who fall in love: To be totally devoted to another, it turns out, is to lose your individuality, your will, your soul. Suddenly, a normal-seeming boy and girl are transformed into the crudest sex stereotypes: the clinging, hysterical woman and the abusive man who seeks to possess but refuses to take responsibility.
About three-quarters of Obsession’s audience is between eighteen and thirty-five. They can find the same dark view of heterosexual relationships in a number of on-trend shows this year. In the third season of HBO’s Euphoria, which premiered in April, Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie marries her high school sweetheart. White turns to black when a loan shark shows up and beats the groom to a pulp, revealing that he’d lied about his finances. Cassie cries, “It was supposed to be the best day of my life!”
In The Testaments, a Hulu series and follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale that debuted this spring, shots of a wedding are intercut with those of a woman’s execution. The Godfather did something similar when it showed the mob boss attending a baptism while his lieutenants carried out a series of hits. But that scene presented an ironic contrast between baptism and murder, and gained meaning from their obvious incongruity. The wedding scene in The Testaments, by contrast, suggests that marriage and death are very much alike.
That is also the thesis of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, a new Netflix series that tells the story of a young couple a few days out from their wedding—which will prove to be a gruesome affair. Its director, the thirty-one-year-old Haley Z. Boston, told The New York Times: “I do have a bit of a secret subliminal message in the show … that heterosexuality is the real horror.”
Forgive us, we know not what we’ve done :-(