CONTROL AND THE FUCKTOPUS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS KELSO ABOUT ŻUŁAWSKI’S ‘POSSESSION’ by Alice
Chris Kelso is a Scottish writer of dark, weird fiction. I came to his work through Voidheads (Schism), and he’s since published Metampsychosis with Feral Dove, and most recently, a monograph on the film Possession with PS Publishing’s Midnight Movie Monographs.Possession, as it happens, is a long-time mutual obsession of ours, so when I freaked out in Chris’ Instagram comments about this monograph he very kindly sent me a copy. So I decided to interview him about it. He’s a great sport. Didn’t even get annoyed at my stupidly long ‘questions’, which are at times more monologuing than questions, honestly. ALICE: I think you said your research into Possession was a natural consequence of feeling reflected in the film, is that right? What was the impetus to write a monograph specifically?CHRIS: Yes, I think that’s often what happens. Writing is a response to overarousal. I have an emotional response to something and then I untangle it by writing it down. I can’t approach much in a purely intellectual way, and I’m certainly not an expert on, well, anything really, but I do know grief, insecurity, and grave self-loathing. I suppose addressing those intrinsic traits both motivated me and qualified me for the job of writing a monograph. And Possession is such a unique film, one which most people have an intense reaction to. So, I’m not special. I don’t think I have a particularly groundbreaking take on the film from an analytical perspective—that said, I didn’t really have much of a say in the matter. The reaction was authentic and part of my processing was to write this thesis. Żuławski’s Possession was merely a lens filter to modify the light before it hit the sensor.ALICE: “Writing is a response to overarousal” seems like one of those big truths I’m going to chew on for a long time. Because you’re right! Art in general is a response to overarousal. Yes, there’s the drudgery of it, and yes, you need a skill set to execute anything, but art seems like, at an essential level, where we put everything which overflows. Like a drip tray. What effluence you get depends on what’s overflowing: emotions or thought or images or whatever is too much.CHRIS: I agree. And I do feel really self-aware that these (intensely personal) artistic projects I've been involved with lately are serving that exact purpose: to contain that industrial run-off, but also to prevent further infection or contamination. The imagination should be drained like a cyst, because left untapped it’ll bleed out of your pores and make you do questionable things. This process is also good if you use emotional memory as a funnel. Lots of spill-prevention imagery here.ALICE: You might be able to tell I don’t like romanticising this process, at least not in public. I also think the best work comes from filth. (Well-tidied, precisely-described filth, but still.) Which is why I adore this film. Filth, as I’ve always thought of it, seems to be a similar idea to Julia Kristeva’s abjection. You mention Kristeva, and I’ve only recently started to parse Powers of Horror thanks to our mutual friend Elle Nash. How did you come across Kristeva’s work?CHRIS: Like you, I first came to Kristeva through Powers of Horror, but back in my university days. I was also looking for meticulous filth and all its acolytes. I find her to be a really fascinating thinker (most French feminists are), but also someone who is empowering as a female voice. Interestingly, she has a novel called ‘Possessions’.ALICE: I wanted to ask you about your feeling of possession over the film itself: you say it feels like it was meant for you somehow, that you dreamed about it before you’d ever seen it. I felt so much kinship with you there: I have dreamed about things, and the dreams carried the weight of meaning, even though I couldn’t understand that meaning at the time, and then I’ve later found out that not only did the dream have specific meaning, it was a clear and precise reference to something extant in the world, and so reflective of it that the dream seemed almost like precognition. I grew up in a very—how do I put this—post-Enlightenment household, and have been a soft sceptic all my life, and the process of developing true doubt is recent and unsettling, because belief itself was abject in my upbringing. How did this feeling of precognition change your experience of the world? Has Possession become something of a sacred object for you?CHRIS: That’s really interesting. I’d describe myself in similar terms, although in truth I tend not to think too deeply about it. The only thing I know for certain is that I know absolutely fuck all. I remain sceptical; like you I’m loosely aware of the roiling unpredictable energy of the universe. All I know is how I felt at that time, and how I chose to express that probably doesn’t do the phenomenon justice—because these things should not be defined by the limiting parameters of language. That said, I’ve gone along with it all. I’ve never tried to rationalise something so formative and emotional. Possession is totemic for so many people. It could just be the transcendent quality the film has, but to me the film is important in a way that’s difficult to define. ALICE: It feels right for you to be another Mark doppelgänger. I feel like there are uncomfortable lines connecting me to Anna like cobwebs. I wonder if the film taps into something universal when it comes to our shadow selves and dark sided emotions, and turns most of us into Anna and Mark doppelgängers. Do you think Żuławski intended that, or did he intend to say something about his own toxic relationship and tapped into common fears and insecurities while he was doing it? Reading your monograph, I thought there might be arguments for both: he seems to disregard the internal lives of other people (his actors in particular) in pursuit of his art, but the film does deal with several socially-relevant emotions like the toxic relationship between East and West Berlin, spying as a metaphor for observing our significant other, etc.CHRIS: Absolutely. I think it’s reasonable to assume Mark and Anna express an archetype of domestic insecurity and psychological fragility. I’m not sure about Żuławski. He was a very complex artist, a genius by most accounts, yet I’m still not sure he was consciously aware of his own intent. Granted, he was going through a devastating break up at the time and Possession was certainly a communication of his pain. Whether or not he had it all worked out, I’m not so sure. As you know, there is a latent or instinctive force at play when producing any kind of art. We’re subtly coerced towards certain themes and often that attraction will have something to do with where we’re at in our personal lives. Then again, he was a genius, so maybe he was consciously working through these themes with a kind of ordered methodology—planning dialogue that was pertinent and rich with subtext, forming deliberate metaphors, etc.ALICE: I rarely like high concepts which explore wordplay, but Possession is one of them. The film discusses possession in the demonic sense and possession as ownership, and what counts as possessing/being possessed. Your monograph mostly addresses possession as object. I've always been curious about why, given this, there are minimal references to Christianity in the film. In fact the only one I can think of is Anna's wordless discussion with a wooden Jesus mounted on a crucifix, immediately before her flashback miscarriage in the subway. I've always taken this as her rejection of religion: she says to Mark that she “miscarried faith.” In your monograph you discuss the miscarriage as a form of abjection: rejecting her married life with Mark, expunging it from her body, which would make it a form of self-interest, i.e. Kristeva's jouissance. Jesus fucking christ, this question is getting long (bear with me)... CHRIS: Long questions are always welcome! I’m so glad this book worked for you. It means a lot, because I was utterly terrified of what people would think.ALICE: I can only speak for myself, of course, but I appreciate anything which is carefully and deeply considered, especially if it gets me to think deeply in turn (especially especially when I’m allowed to pester the author with questions about it).Okay, so, first, do you think the ideas of Anna expunging her marriage and her religious beliefs can co-exist as interpretations? And secondly, if Anna's fucktopus is the larval form of the Mark doppelgänger, do you think it'd be fair to say that Anna is miscarrying her traditional marriage and the real Mark, in favour of the idealised, perfected version of Mark she needs?CHRIS: I think these two ideas can co-exist, absolutely. I was interested in finding an interpretation that would empower Anna, because I’m not entirely sure the director had that in mind when he was making the film. I think it’s likely Żuławski wanted Anna to simply be a bit of a mental she-devil who shagged a monster in an act of unbridled female promiscuity. I’m also not interested in Anna being a victim: she deserves better than that. I think you’re right, though. I think it's healthy and intelligent to project emboldening ideas to Anna’s character. I believe the miscarriage is a physical excretion of her old life to a man she never truly loved. In truth, the message and intention of the film is very muddy—and I suppose that’s why we love it!ALICE: This really speaks to the power of interpretation, because I find it impossible not to relate to Anna, and if the director really did intend her to just be an insane villain who fucked a monster, then my whole experience of the film is a simulacrum. But it’s a useful and beneficial one, right? Because otherwise I’d lose one of my favourite pieces of media. Anna being exclusively a she-devil in my head would make the film far less progressive to me, and therefore unwatchable. CHRIS: Me too. I think the audience has power here, though. We do have the ability to reclaim and reinterpret, to imbue and elevate. The film is more than just Żuławski; it’s also Adjani’s performance and the raw paranormal energy she brought to it. It’s the softer, more nuanced hand of Frederic Tuten. Art can take on many new faces the more people who look at it. I don’t think any of the truly ‘great’ pieces of art have one true interpretation anyway, despite what the creator intended. ALICE: This is why monographs like yours are so relevant and useful: they open new avenues of interpretation to an audience who might not otherwise connect with a piece of art. I don’t fully ascribe to “death of the author,” but maybe a soft version of it, like “the author should shut up and let us interpret their work on our own, thank you very much,” simply because these interpretations allow art to say more than it was probably intended to say. Of course we can and should consider the author’s interpretation of their own work, and the author’s situation and environment during its creation, but other interpretations have inherent value as useful simulacra. CHRIS: Hear hear! And I also think masterpieces can happen by accident sometimes, almost willed into existence by certain forces (the audience in particular would count as one of these extant contributing forces). Not to get all spiritual on you!ALICE: Why do you think Anna dies? Every time I watch this film I'm left with the impression that this was what she wanted: the two of them to die together. But I can't decide why I think that is.CHRIS: I’m going to give a bit of a cop-out answer to this one. Anna dies because she is the hero. And I believe all truly great things should end. Great TV shows should have a finale. Epic books should have a last page. Your favourite bands should disband. People should die. There is nothing more unnatural than ‘going on’. Our end is what gives our lives meaning in the snapshot of time we get to be here. If we kept going for hundreds of years we would become exhausted pain-camels made evil with boredom and apathy. Anna is the feminist hero we’ve needed for a while. She had to die to become a legend.ALICE: I don’t think that’s a cop-out at all! It’s an observation on the demands of narrative, and completely correct. I’m gonna pin you down with a different question, though: what do you think happens at the end of the film? I’ll tell you what I think happens: Mark’s incompetence at his spy job (i.e., not noticing that one of his bosses is in fact pink socks man), because of his divided attention due to the destruction of his marriage, has led to some international incident, and this results in the destruction of Berlin with an atom bomb. That’s what I see in the ending, like, this marriage was so fucking toxic it ended in nuclear war.CHRIS: Jesus Christ, that’s better than anything I could come up with. I think I’ll just glom on to your evaluation. ‘When you’re beat, you’re beat’, as they say. tips hatALICE: I'm talking a lot about Anna because your monograph was uncomfortable, which I think you intended, and one of the reasons it was uncomfortable for me is that it's an inevitably male point of view. I'm aligned with Anna, so a lot of your personal observations and interpretations of Possession are those which would have never occurred to me. It feels like we're standing on opposite sides of a sculpture and can't really imagine the sculpture from the other side. Which is kinda, you know, the point. And what it must have been like in Berlin at the time. Until reading your monograph. I never even thought Mark could be a pathetic character, an impotent one, or powerless—but of course he is. Your version of Mark was so convincing to me, I'm rethinking some of my past relationships. But still, Mark, for me, is the aggressor: I assume Anna's behaviour is in response to aggression Mark has no knowledge he's committing, or limited consciousness of, because Anna's behaviour has a desperate escapism about it which I recognise in myself, in my own desperation to escape, despite still loving my partner. There's a liminal emotional state where all you can think about is your toxic partner, and you don't want to end the relationship, but you want to pull away however you can, and you end up in completely nonsensical behavioural patterns as a means of escape without escape (Anna emptying cabinets, putting clothes in the fridge, preparing a cut of raw meat for nobody). CHRIS: I agree that Mark is the aggressor. He is also pathetic. Most aggressive, controlling, and insecure men are pathetic. That’s how they convince themselves and other people that they’re victims, and probably how they justify awful behaviour. Their patheticness is weaponised. Something I shamefully know about all too well.ALICE: In contrast to how your Mark tries everything to possess Anna and fails, I see Anna trying everything to satisfy Mark except the things she absolutely cannot do, or risk complete loss of her Self. She says, desperately, that she's failing him, she's a slut, she's a monster—she admits to all his accusations. She is willing to accept his accusation that she is not a socially palatable woman. You struggle with Mark's desire to control in your monograph, and you admit to feeling the same desire to contain and control a woman from your past. I noticed something, and I wonder if you know this: the monograph itself seemed (to me) to be a species of control. You want to get ahead of our opinions of you; you want to reassure us that you're okay now, you're cognisant of what you did—but you want us to feel a certain way about you, and even attempt to regulate our emotions through chapter-specific song suggestions. What's it like to grapple with this tendency to want to control? I deeply empathise with it: I experience a lot of obsessive thinking. Does thinking about Possession help you control the difficulty of controlling your desire for control? I don't have control over this question anymore. I think I'm asking: how are you now? Did you write this with the idea of reaching out to other people struggling with the issue of control?CHRIS: Yes, that’s a very astute observation. First, it’s interesting you mention Mark committing these small atrocities without even being aware of what he’s doing. I find that’s a common vice among young men, including me way back when. I think men can be so driven by lust that it genuinely clouds empathy. That’s not an excuse, but I think it rings true in most cases. I look back at my own failings as a human being and I can’t undo any of it. I am desperate to talk about it, though, and to improve myself. If I need to overcorrect laterally then that’s what I’ll have to do. That’s kind of what I’m doing with this book. It’s an acknowledgment of past transgressions and an untangling of a knotty ego. Control is a big problem for people who are profoundly insecure. At the best of times it feels like life is always slipping away from you, ultimately because of what you lack. You cannot control because you don’t deserve control. That’s your punishment. Yet you keep trying to insidiously impose your dominion over other vessels-of-consciousness, and if you’re a man you can feel entitled to those vessels. When these vessels-of-consciousness demonstrate agency you’re left reeling in a whole new spiralling vortex of uncontrollability. When you grow and realise you cannot control much of your own life, and nothing of other people, you go about seeking to impose it in more positive ways – like being an obsessive ‘fixer’ or giving too much of yourself to too many people. Or becoming a public authority figure like a teacher in my case. If this book connects with anyone then I’ll feel good about it, but the main impetus was really a selfish self-therapy. Maybe the book is voyeuristic in that sense. I think when my wife went through her pregnancy I realised my relationship to control had to change in a big way. The terror of watching my wife give birth. The terror of watching my newborn become a toddler. The terror of a new love that engulfs you in its fist, deeper and more agonising than any love you have ever experienced before or thought possible. You cannot live a life of control under those circumstances, so you need to recalibrate. I think I have a better grasp of it all now. I’m doing well – thank you for asking! I think I need to be ‘checked in’ with every now and again, lol. ALICE: Your research, speaking of, is impeccable. I especially enjoyed the final dialogue between Jörg Buttgereit and Graham Rae. What was it like, transcribing that? Getting to know two artists of that calibre?CHRIS: I owe that interview to Graham who is a close friend of Jörg. Jörg is obviously a wonderful director and it was a privilege to have him involved, reaffirming my belief that literature and discussion is the closest we get to true magic. ALICE: Ah, right! So let’s scrap that question, and ask another: have you had any interesting conversations about the film as a result of researching this monograph, which you didn’t write about (for whatever reason, like narrative flow or length)?Also, I couldn’t agree more: I feed on theory. I’m one of those annoying participants of a destination workshop who never wants to talk about anything but theory, haha.CHRIS: I actually have fairly regular interesting conversations about this film with my friend Rachel, who might love Possession more than we do. She would’ve written a much more interesting monograph, in truth, but all our conjecture and theories have wound up in the book. There is something about this film which brings people together in a weird, very specific way. I’m looking forward to chatting with you in person about Possession - and I’ll bring Rachel with me!ALICE: Looking forward to it!
