Friday 13 December 2013

An Inland Sea - a short story



Penelope pressed an ear against the green rough-cast wall of the water station. Often she came here, drawn towards this strange edifice which rose up like a fortress in the middle of her world, and dreamed of a time when she would stand triumphant atop its battlements, to look out across a vast bowl of blue water. Like Tess throwing herself upon Stonehenge would hold herself to the cold stone to become part of it, part of its mystery, its otherness, listening hard for the lapping of water on the other side.
She hadn’t noticed the boy until now; he had slipped out of the door that opened into one of the small watchtowers that flanked the corners of the water station. Had he been watching her? She was sure that he had, for as she had turned her head to the east he had darted back into his lair, staying long enough for her to see his wiry frame, a shock of red hair. Leaning back against the wall, she felt the pulse in her forehead, thrumming the beginnings of one of her headaches again. What had he seen? How long had he been watching her there, pressed against the stone? She felt a surge of embarrassment, of ridicule, which filled her brain with an urgent flow of blood. How dare this boy spy on her, she thought. Or did she speak it out loud, to herself? She was never quite sure; so much time did she spend alone.
She was at the foot of the metal staircase now that led up to the doorway; like a medieval princess hunting for her knight, a fantasy in reverse.
“Hello,” she called. “Who are you?” Heels clanking against the black steel as she ascended the stairs, winding round, now facing east, now south and each step taking her closer to the dark portal. What if he was in the tower itself? What if, when she crossed the threshold into the darkness he was there, inside, waiting for her? She shuddered and called anew. “Hello, hello! I know you’re there.” The one forty bus crawled by, plume of grey smoke from its tail, a red dragon swallowing a queue of people.
This time her call was answered.
“You shouldn’t be here, you know. Shouldn’t be here. “
Penelope stopped. It was the boy’s voice, slightly deeper than the other boys at school; older, more brutish. She stopped at the landing and gripped the rail, for the first time seeing the sun-bruised grass through the slots in the metal beneath her feet. A dizziness passed over her and she felt for a moment that she might fall.
“Neither should you,” replied Penelope, still holding onto the rail.
“Yes, I should. I live here.”
The boy’s voice became more confident, as if he had played a trump card against an inexperienced player. Now the blood was in the porches of her ears, tiny canals of dull sound. She looked down at the cracked paintwork which mapped out time and weather on the rusted surface of the railings; pressing her palms onto its dirt, she felt the pock-marks, the abrasions, the rust-toil of years.
“Do not,” said Penelope. “How can anyone live here?”
Still the voice from within answered: “I do. Look there, just over the wall. The house. The white house. That’s mine.”
The breeze brushed against Penelope’s skin and she felt the sickness pass. Feeling a little bolder, she took a step forward towards the entrance, perhaps to see through the gap between door and frame; to see and not to be seen. Like mother used to do. But the voice inside cried out.
“You can’t come no further.”
“Why not?” said Penelope, feeling now that she had the upper hand, for she felt the fear in the other’s voice. Through the gap, she saw a shape prowling in the darkness, caged and cornered.  From inside, the voice trembled.
“Because.”
“Because?” scoffed Penelope. “That’s not a reason.”
 “I know,” said the other. “But that’s my reason.”
“Okay,” said Penelope, backing away from the door. “I’ll sit here then, until you come out.”
“That will be a long time,” said the other. “I know a short cut down to my house from here.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Penelope. “There is no other way down. You’re stuck.”
Penelope arched her back over the railings to peer round the other side of the little green turret and raised one leg up higher, just a little, like they do in the movies; her cotton skirt above her knee, small welts, their scab-masks having fallen away that morning.
                  “Well,” said the voice, “maybe I am. But you are too.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I know who you are, I’ve seen your face and if you don’t go now, when I get home I’ll tell my father that you’ve been trespassing on his ground and then you’re in for it.”
Trespass. Penelope bridled and straightened up immediately. She had seen the word, trespass, on signs everywhere. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Trespassers will be fined. It was a fearful word, trespass.
 “Not so cocky now, are you?” he said.
“Then I’ll go,” said Penelope. “But not until I can see your face. After all, you’ve seen mine.”
Down below, a child rode past on his scooter, the wheels clattering over the cracked paving stones. Penelope ducked down, although the boy had eyes only for the ice-cream van that was singing its siren song at the end of the road.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? You mean you won’t.”
“Won’t then. Why do you have to be so picky?”
“Then I’ll come back tomorrow, and I’ll wait for you at the foot of these stairs.”
“And I’ll tell my father and he’ll chase you away. He doesn’t like girls.”
“Well my father doesn’t like boys. Or fathers who chase away girls, so maybe you’ll want to take it up with him then.”
Penelope thought for a moment.
“You say you live over there, in that cottage?”
From inside the gloom, there was a mumble of agreement.
“So are you the caretaker?”
“My father is.”
A plan began to form in Penelope’s mind. She wanted adventure and it had found her.
“Then I’ll go. I know when I’m not wanted.”
“You must. Don’t look back. Please,” said the boy; this time Penelope detected something besides defiance. It came from far away, that sound, she had heard it in her mother’s voice once. At the end.
The mid-morning sun warmed her neck; she unpinned her hair to protect her skin from its searching gaze, pirouetting on her right foot towards the stairs, so graceful; she hoped that the boy had waited to see her do that. Her father said she was his princess; he liked to watch her dancing in the kitchen as he made tea and toast for breakfast, laughing as he bowed down before her with a flourish of his long wiry arms. On her right, the curtained wall, a jealous guard holding captive the fierce waters of the reservoir and she too felt jealous; jealous that the boy should be able to see the secret that lay behind the walls. But he would show her today for didn’t her father say that if you don’t ask, you don’t get? The heavy wooden door snicked to and she turned, breaking her promise, to see only the boy’s burnished hair sink behind the other side of the turret like a sad sun.
Penelope marched up the rough paved path, stepping over the clumps of gorse and gyp that gathered between the cracks, careful not to scuff the brown leather sandals that her father had polished the evening before whilst they listened to the story on the radio. It had been her father’s favourite, of a beautiful princess (was she a princess? she should have been) buried alive by her mad brother and their house that crumbles into the water just as she arrives to claim her revenge. Penelope had asked whether the priest had made sure that her mother was dead too; her father tried to smile and kissed her on the forehead. All through the night she had wondered about the girl in the story, Madeleine, and how she had clawed at the thick oaken lid of her casket, tearing her skin down to her fragile bones and screaming and screaming until it was the power of her soul itself that had broken through the darkness. Of course, when the thick dust motes gathered around her window in the warm light of day, Penelope knew that her mother had been truly dead. She knew.  
This was the house. This was where he lived.
The front door was set back into a small porch which shut out the warmth of the sun; she wished that she had brought her cardigan. After knocking against the blistered paintwork, she stepped back, fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, pulling it down below her knees to hide her bruises. There was no answer and she imagined shades of people gathering around the hallway, like in The Listeners which she had copied into her scrapbook and which reminded her of all the times when she and her father hid behind the sofa from the rent collector, stifling their laughs as the old man pressed his bearded face against the window. “I know you’re in there, Ellis,” he would say. “It’s no good hiding”. This time, she pushed against the metal letterbox to peer through and saw only a long hallway with pale green tiles that made it look like the public toilets in the market place. From somewhere behind the door, out of sight of her searching grey eyes, she imagined shadows laughing at her confusion. Fearing what was behind its dull grey lid, she let the steel flap close, careful not to trap her fingers, until it sealed the hole in the door before stepping back into the sunlight to peer up into the upstairs windows. Perhaps the boy is alone, up there watching her. Or perhaps he isn’t there at all. With the sudden realisation that she had been outsmarted, she turned back towards the watchtower, at the pathway that led down to the house.
The door to the little turret room was open again.  A panic caught in her throat and she wanted her father, caught as she was between the house and reservoir walls. The front of the house seemed to lean in towards her, its shadow lengthening across the ragged skirts of pebble and weed that spread out before it; she imagined a scar tearing across its face, like in the story from the night before; imagined it falling down around her, and the gun-metal letterbox clattering to her sandaled feet, opening up its cold grey lid and staring at her, accusing her of that word, trespassing.
She ran.
Head down, watching as the hem of her dress flapped against her thighs, bringing her bruised knees as high as they would go. Up to the foot of the stairs which led to the watch tower, clambering up the stone steps, fingers gripping their ragged ridges, back to where she had come from.  When she got to the top, out of breath, her chest damp with sweat, she began to gather herself together. From a little pouch in her dress, she took out a handkerchief which carried her name, Penny, embroidered there by her mother, and wiped the soil from her fingertips, the grit that had lodged into the palms of her hands, before pressing her dress back into shape against her body.
If he was in there, he was trapped, she thought. She had him now and he would have to show her what it was that lay behind the green walls.
The door was open just wide enough for her to slip through without disturbance. Inside was a space no bigger than a telephone booth and her senses were assailed by the smell of nasty things in the darkness. She thought that this must be what a tomb felt like. Pale light speared through one of the little slits in the wall, and Penelope could read the dirty things that had been written there over the years.
Something rose up towards her from a corner.
“I thought I told you to go home?” The voice was stronger this time, because nearer. Penelope turned around to find the boy slumped against a wall, his head against his chest, face hidden beneath an upturned collar.
“I didn’t want to.” Voice in the cold darkness. Her voice. “I called for you.” To stop herself from gagging, she buried her face in the crook of her arm, and tasted her own moist flesh on her lips.
The boy gave no answer; instead his head seemed to collapse inwards until he was just shoulders. 
“You’re alone, aren’t you?”
The boy sidled crab-like along the wall towards the open door, and the edges of his red hair caught fire in the sunlight.
“Don’t go,” said Penelope. She didn’t want to be alone; not in this cold chamber. The boy’s curls licked at the darkness and she was drawn towards them, like a moth to a candle. But she stopped herself, and held out her arm as a barrier, to stop the boy from leaving. Only a sliver of light crossed the floor between them.
“Don’t go,” said Penelope. “I can keep you a secret.”
A shadow inside a shadow, the boy edged back towards the other corner of the room.
“What do you want?” His voice emerged from the stone, like a moment of time escaping from inside its tiny cavities.
Penelope knew what she wanted. She wanted him to show her the secret behind the wall, she wanted to see the smooth waters of the reservoir and feel the warm breath of summer glide across its glassy surface. And he would take her there.
“Perhaps we can be friends. You are alone, aren’t you? There is no-one in your house. You’re the king of your own castle.”
“Perhaps it isn’t a castle. Perhaps it’s a dungeon.”
“But you’re not locked in here, silly.”
Then he laughed and Penelope heard a jangle of keys.
“No, but perhaps I can lock you in here.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” said Penelope. There was no intention in his voice, no malice although she edged just a little closer to the door, just in case.
There was moment of silence.
“I can be your friend.”
“You wouldn’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m ugly,” declared the boy, his voice daring her to deny this.
“I’m sure you’re not,” she said “and it doesn’t matter anyhow. We can be friends.” It was true, she thought, it didn’t matter. But she had to get out of this place. “I’m going outside. It’s horrible in there. I don’t know how you can put up with it.”
Before he could answer, she opened the door, wide this time, and stepped into the sunlight, breathing in the scent from the lavender bushes that hugged the green stone walls. Even as she did so, she turned around and saw that the boy had turned his face towards her in defiance. Or revelation.
“God.”
The word fell out of her mouth like an insect before crawling away into the shadows.
 “I told you,” cried the boy and was about to return to his lair when Penelope dashed between him and the door. The boy turned away, hiding his face from the light as if it might turn to ash.
“I’m sorry,” said Penelope. She felt opportunity slipping away, and this time she dared to touch the red flames that licked out from the boy’s collars. Beneath her fingers, the hair was soft, silken even, not flaxen the way it really should have been, exposed as it was to the filth and stench of the dark parapet that he had made his home.  “Really I am.” She turned her gaze to the green walls of the reservoir, noticed for the first time dark stains around its upper edges as if it had been weeping. She would be his friend, the kind princess. She can brave the taunts. What does she care? After all, she is the witch-child. She let her hand fall onto his shoulder, and as he began to turn around, she steeled herself once more against the sight, locking away all expression.
“My father...” said the boy, the rest of his sentence carried off by history.
“I don’t know your name,” said Penelope, looking at the seared flesh without inquiry.
“Jason. It’s Jason.”
“Like the Argonauts?”
“Like the Argonauts.”
Penelope followed Jason’s gaze which had turned towards his father’s house, felt his weakness trapped between the clashing rocks of his new friend and his father’s prohibition.  A dog barked, high pitched, discordant, and somewhere off in the distance she heard music carried on the breeze.
“What happened?” said Penelope.
“There was a fire.” The boy lifted up his face towards hers.
That day when she had found her mother in her pyjamas, outside, crouching amongst the milk bottles, the rain settling in pools around her shivering frame, dark rings forming around the hems of her trouser legs, spreading further and further upward, turning sky blue cotton to grey slush as if her mother was being absorbed into the elements. That’s what Penelope remembers. She shouldn’t have listened to her father; she shouldn’t have gone to school, and he shouldn’t have gone to work. When he had finally collected her from school, after the long wait in the walnut panelled room outside the headmistress’ office which smelled of musty bed-sheets like her grandmother’s bedroom, the rain had stopped. Conflagration. That was the word they’d used. Her father said that her mother had made her own funeral pyre and Penelope thought this made her mother sound like a Viking warrior. Penelope had liked that. And now this boy with the melted face; this is what her mother would have looked like. And beneath the flame of his hair, beyond the hunched silences, between these two remnants of ash and smoke that stood frozen in the July sun, something flickered like the smouldering embers of last night’s fire, enough to make her reach out a trembling hand and touch the bubbled flesh. The girl felt the presence of the walls behind her, felt their impassive gaze as she stared into the deep set eyes of the boy with the marbled skin, her dirty fingertips exploring its scars. There was no resistance from the boy; it was as if the moment were a continuation of his own history, an inevitability that in the end it would be pity, as his own father had warned him, which would find him at the centre of things.
There were no more words for she understood his pain. And what could he say in return for her silences? For in them was acceptance without judgement; and as she let her hand fall from his wounds, he fell softly to the ground and laughed as he cleared a patch of grass from pebbles and dried dog droppings so that together they may sit down and pass the mid-day hour together in silence.
Mopping her brow, Penelope smoothed out the lap of her dress and picked at a rash of daisies, breaking open their juicy stems to feed one inside another until she had a crown of wilting flowers that she placed ceremoniously over her head. She saw that the boy had begun to grow in the light and even though he remained just a little behind Penelope, scared perhaps that he might turn her to stone if she were in full sight of his horror, he began to yield to her.
“They normally stare at me. Other kids. Not you. You look at me differently. Like you don’t see the scars.”
Finally, she stood and walked towards the shade of the green stone walls, placing her hands once more on the surface.
“That’s what you did earlier,” said the boy. “Why do you do that?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Because I’m ugly?” mocked the boy.
“Because you don’t live inside my head.”
She turned to face him, resting her back against the wall. It was in her blood now, in her veins, the sound of the vastness behind these walls. She must see it, she must.
“Can you take me to the top of the wall?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been up there before. My father forbidded me.”
“Forbade,” said Penelope. “ You said forbidded. It’s forbade.”
“Does it matter?”
“Well can you?”
“Are you still my friend?”
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Even if I didn’t take you to the top of the wall?”
Sighing, Penelope turned her back to the boy. “My mother died in a fire.”
Jason lifted his head and put a hand to his scarred brow.
“So, I understand,” she continued. “They call me a witch-child. Say that my mother burnt at the stake.”
“But it doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“It bothers me. I can’t look in the mirror; I despise myself. They call me yoghurt-face.”
Penelope laughed.
“They didn’t let me see her. It would have been too distressing. Do you think she would have looked like you?”
“I’m not dead.”
“Would she have suffered? Did you?”
“I don’t remember. It was the smoke.”
“She set fire to herself. Paraffin.”
Jason shifted uncomfortably, felt the skin around his eyes and mouth tighten.
“I like it here, but I stay out of the house as much as I can. That’s why I go up into the tower. It’s cool, away from the light.” He laughed again. “It makes me sound like a monster, doesn’t it? A vampire.”
“What do your parents say?”
“It’s hard for them. They feel responsible. I suppose they were, in a way.”
His words seemed to trail off and Penelope understood that the subject had drawn to a close. And she too wanted to get away from this death. Jason stood up and held out a hand which Penelope took and together they walked in the shadow of the green walls.
“How come you’ve never been to the top?”
“Perhaps I’m not as adventurous as you. What do you expect to find behind the walls?”
“My destiny.”
Jason laughed again. “I like the way you talk. You talk like you’re in your own story. You must read a lot.”
“It’s my father. He’s a writer and he likes to read stories to me. We write down all the good words, the juicy plump words that you can squeeze and squeeze.”
The boy’s finger closed tight around the girl’s hand and with his free hand he opened the gate which led on to a flight of green iron steps that dog-legged back on itself; ugly, brutish things that reminded Penelope of a prison that she’d seen on television.  Even as he warned her to watch her step, her foot slipped through the open riser, grazing her shin on the ragged edge. Blood trickled onto her polished sandals.
“Do you want to go back?”
“Of course not, Jason.”
At the sound of his name from her lips, he smiled and vowed that she would not fall again. Raising his face to the sun and mindless of the heat, he marched on, looking back at every step to make sure that his new friend was safe. She saw him turn around, saw his watchfulness and she knew that the time had come. Warm blood fell in the dark spaces between her toes but she would not turn back. In a few moments, she would be there with the tremulous grey-blue waters filling the vast expanse of her imagination. The prospect of this made her dizzy and she threatened to fall yet again until Jason grabbed her wrist. Only in her father’s hands had she felt protected before and she looked up to this boy, his red hair haloed by the full sun. She felt the blood in her cheeks, in her throat; she felt its pulsating rhythms and imagined the waters beyond swelling in sympathy to her body, as if she had become the moon itself. Through the open risers, she could see the boy’s house far below, no longer a threat; instead its blank white face stared up at her in admiration at her courage, at her determination. A procession of figures crossed the landscape of her imagination: princes who climbed towers to liberate enchanted maidens; poor village boys clambering blindly up magical beanstalks in search of lost treasure; Babylonians in a tower of stone, reaching blindly for God. And all was one to her now and they would no longer mock her for soon she would have possession of the gold at the end of the rainbow.  
“Here we are,” said Jason.
They were on the parapet and Penelope looked across the estate below them, slate grey roofs spreading out on all sides, a sea of black caps pronouncing a sentence of death or worse on all those who stayed there. The wind picked at her hair and wrapped it over her eyes to save them from the trouble of seeing.
“We just need to go up this ladder here,” said the boy. It was his turn to make contact, lifting the hair from her face, folding it behind her ears, stroking it into place. They smiled to each other and Penelope knew that here indeed was a friend. Her heart beating anxiously, she imagined her mother and herself standing at the edge of this man-made lake, the water cooling her mother’s searing wounds, extinguishing the pain of memory and loss.
“Thank you,” she said to the boy, pressing her lips to the hard ridges of his forehead and placing his hand on her heart. Jason looked away, angry at his unforgiving skin, at its taut, leathery response to something so soft. He let his hand fall and mounted the three metal steps onto the tiny wall.
And waited for her to come to him.
Following in the boy’s footsteps, she took the three steps slowly and deliberately. In the stories she had read, the princess would close her eyes, or else she would be blindfolded and the hero would tell her when it was time before revealing the glorious sights to her. But she wanted to absorb every moment, wanted to be able to write down each second so that she might relate it to her father and to her mother, in her prayers that night. As she ascended the staircase, the green walls on the opposite side came into view and surely now she would behold the vast expanse of water that had called to her daily from the other side.
“What do you think?” asked the boy, oblivious to the chaos in the other’s mind from which no form or design could be made.
She could not speak.
In front of her was not the inland sea that she had hoped for, that mighty expanse of water tamed by the hands of man; not for her the sunlight glinting off ripples of grey-blue that caressed its stone boundaries. She began to cry.
“What is it, what’s wrong?” said Jason, fearful for her safety and already regretting  the fact that he had brought her to this height. If she fell in, he’d be for it from his old man. “What’s wrong?” He followed her gaze to the labyrinth of pipes and tubes that spread out before them, the cold steel innards of some huge beast left open and naked to the skies. If he bent forward, he could hear the steady hum of the motors or the pumps as they worked tirelessly to flush out the waste and the filth, cleansing and remoulding the detritus of the estate into something else. He saw the beauty in this act of rebirth. He smiled again at Penelope but a fierce darkness had crossed her face; her hair had fallen down around her cheeks and she had the look of a Maenad.
“What is this?” she cried. “What have you brought me to?”
Jason looked back at the pipes and the machinery then at Penelope, confused.
“But this is it. This is what it is. I ... I thought you knew.”
“It’s vile, ugly. I thought ... I thought ...”
Jason could only repeat himself. “It is what it is,” he said, chanting it as a mantra and pointing at the sight before them to help his new friend to make sense of it all. Penelope screamed and tore at her hair and Jason, beginning to fear for his own safety, backed away. She turned to the boy and saw his weak smile collapse into the stunned flesh that barely covered his grotesque face.
“Ugly, vile,” she whispered. “How can it be?”
In the chasm below, the sun flared off the steel pipes. The boy crept away into his isolation, fulfilled in the knowledge that all things will be, just as his father had said so.


Lance Hanson – May 30th 2013ness. o too Beth would press her young frame to the cold stone in a desire to become part of it,

Possession part one


 

Possession – Andrezj Zulawski 1981

Two worlds exist within Zulawski’s Possession (1981); set in Communist Berlin, the film’s location presents the tear in the psycho-geographical fabric of both characters and place, depicted in the opening shots of scare-crow like metal rails that line the concrete wall. This divided setting also pre-empts the divided selves within the film, where doppelgangers fall from nowhere and a woman’s psychological breakdown is physically embodied in a monstrous other that exists outside of her self.

A psychoanalytical reading via Kristeva would suggest that the reptilian creature that Anna lives with is the personification of a sexuality that cannot be controlled by either her husband Mark (played by Sam Neill) or her Tantric lover Heinrich. In fact, there is much in Possession that lends itself to psychoanalytic readings, not least the doppelgangers; the return of repressed drives that fuel the destructive relationship between Anna and Mark. But to do so might well ignore some important motifs and images in the film, not least its setting in post-war Berlin, but also the apocalyptic imagery that accompanies its bizarre conclusion. As Victor Galstyan writes:


Is [the film] meant to critique the patriarchal/capitalist structures of Western society, the stifling repression of the Communist system or is it a Freudian poison-letter to the castrating horror of the female body? The film’s lasting power lies in its omnifariousness, which enables it to withstand any number of readings.[1]

I have recently been reading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.  In his book, Bachelard approaches domestic and intimate spaces from a phenomenological viewpoint. I was struck by his discussion of the dialectics of outside and inside space, space which from a phenomenological perspective suggests the notion of being and nothingness. Thinking of the self, the subjective ‘I’ that forms the basis of phenomenological thought, he states that “outside and inside are both intimate – they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility”. Narrative spaces are full of these dialectics – the Jekyll and Hyde schism of inner and outer self, but having recently watched Possession I was stuck by the impact of place upon self, and how the divided world of Berlin in the 1980s, itself a hostile environment with an all-too-visible architectural wound cutting through its geo-political landscape.


“intimate space loses its clarity” write Bachelard, “while exterior space loses its void, void being the raw material of possibility of being. We are banished from the realm of possibility.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Zulawski’s film at this point; its geographical spaces seem interlinked with psychological space. But to understand Zulawski’s images, the spectator must attempt to bracket out the context of the film – and this is difficult when you consider the powerful impact that the grey landscapes have upon our understanding.


Anna’s psychological space is crowded; she is claustrophobic and Zulawski underscores this with repeated close ups of her, the mise-en-scene confining her between multiple doorways which evoke both escape and the utter absence of escape. Amongst the clutter of domesticity, inner space provokes breakdown, mentally, physically. With outer space should come freedom, but she is followed, if not by a camera that pushes in on her bloodied body, then by her two lovers, two men working for a detective agency. Men surround her, own her, try to possess her. Anna’s subjectivity is lost amongst men; in the scene where Mark plays back a home movie made by his rival, Anna stares at the screen, talking to the two men in her life when she says “that’s why I’m with you. Because you say ‘I’ for me”. Later on, she ridicules Mark by saying “you look at me as if I need you to fill me up.” In essence, Anna’s feels that her sense of self is defined by men and her descent into madness is accompanied by the destruction of Mark and Heinrich for whom Anna is simply a receptacle for their own insecurities.

Anna’s sexuality cannot be contained by the two men in her life. Mark admits to Anna that when she’s away “I think of you as an animal as a woman possessed.” Mark admits here that he needs Anna to be a beast, because this is the only way he can explain her behavior. And yet, in thinking of Anna as a beast, Mark is also admitting the desire for the Other, this beast that exists within her.  His attempt to control Anna is depicted during their scenes of self-mutilation when he binds Anna to him with a bandage: dog-like, on a leash.

Her presence in outside space produces mayhem – a breakdown truck spills its load trying to avoid her. She cannot wait to be inside again, rushing to her other home, the home which provides sanctuary for her away from the possessiveness of patriarchy. Here, yellowed wallpaper, grimy, the very opposite of the clean domesticated spaces of her apartment with Mark; this is a place of decay. Freudian’s might call it a womb-space, the slimy Lovecraftian thing which clings to the walls could well be a mucal representation of some disgusting embryonic creature. Anna feeds it with blood, as if she is feeding the schism in her self.


Anna says that goodness is only some kind of reflection upon evil; the film embodies this in its depiction of doppelgangers but also the domestic spaces within the film. Marital harmony depends upon tidy spaces – note the clean lines of Mark’s apartment. When Helen comes to stay, he admires her domesticity, running his fingers along clean surfaces, caressing appliances as if they were a substitute for the female body, thanking her for being the obverse of his feral wife. For Anna, the domestic space reflects her own psyche; at one point she stuffs laundry into the fridge, suggesting the interchangeability of the domestic appliance, it’s heterogeneous shape and colour. Groceries are smashed off the walls of the subways in the abjection of the miscarriage scene; severed heads reside in the vegetable tray giving new meaning to the fridge’s ‘drawer of death’. In fact, Zulawski points up the inner violence and frustration contained within the straitjacket of domesticity: in one remarkable scene, Anna stuffs meat into a grinder and clothes into a washing machine even whilst she and Mark scream at each other. Wardrobes – scattered clothing; symbols of struggle. Clothes thrown in, thrown out
I can’t think of another film which strips away the mask from cosy domesticity and reveals the utter frustration and psychological meltdown that waits at its core. The kitchen, the bathroom, corridors, hall-ways – all become scenes of psychosis, breakdown, underscored by Mark’s search for order even in the maelstrom: “.

Earlier, Mark claims to Helen that he is at war with all women to which Helen replies:

“There is nothing in common among women except menstruation… I come from a place when evil is easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the flesh. I find pathetic these stories of women contaminating humans.”

The notion of Woman as embodiment of disease is as old as Eve; in Possession, disease is the phenomenology of division, the thing that is borne from angst and paranoia. Anna recognizes it in the abjection of her being: “We are all the same – different versions in different bodies; like insects” she says. There is so much rage in Anna, in her world. Rage and pain. Think of the scene in which she all but tortures a young protégé in a sadistic ritual that emphasizes the notion that only through pain will the female body know ambition and a desire for success.

“Fear does not come from the outside. Nor is it composed of old memories. It has no past, no physiology. Nothing in common, either, with having one’s breath taken away. Here fear is being itself. Where can one flee, where find refuge? In what shelter can one take refuge? Space is nothing but a ‘horrible outside-inside’”

What Possession does is make this fear manifest in the body of both Anna and the thing that she has given birth to. To move beyond narrative absurdity, the spectator must equate the thing with Anna’s inner space

Anna’s breakdown is a breakdown of being, a spiral into the madness of division. She feels the world as a crumbling decaying wreck and the thing that lives in the house is not merely an exterior manifestation of her sexuality; this would be too simplistic and the scene in which she is having sex with this Other would suggest narcissism. Instead, if the thing is the exterior manifestation of fear itself, fear of what is to come, then it no longer becomes narcissism.




[1] http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/35/possession_dvd/