An essay about the causes and consequences of madness, as seen through the films of Andrzej Źuławski.

———

“Only God knows, only God would believe /
That I was an angel, but they made me leave”

Ethel Cain - “Punish”

“So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’s very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day.”

Virginia Woolf - Diary entry, November 28, 1928

“What’s going on with you?”
“A mistake.”

Andrzej Żuławski - On the Silver Globe (1988)

———

If you read my last two essays, you already know that big ideas about “art” and “God” are topics I am prone to rambling on about. Breaking news: fork found in kitchen, etc. 

I clearly did not need any additional encouragement to be *Like This*.

But it is a great joy to inform you (or warn you) that immediately after finishing the Twin Peaks essay my steering-into-the-skid ass dove right back into the deep end of some really intense art that I now need to write about. Whoops! 

I would trot out the whole “I really didn’t think I’d be back so soon”, “I’m gonna try to keep this short” routine … but I think we all know by now that I can’t help myself. 

This will not be short, nor will I be “chilling out”. 

Call it whatever you want: an essay, a manifesto, chapter 3 of this novella.

It is happening again, again.

I can at least promise you that this essay will not be about Perverts or Twin Peaks or David Lynch for what feels the 100th time. We're not gonna talk about Judy at all. We will not even be bringing Inland Empire into this, despite the fact that I totally could have justified it given the extreme Polish-ness of it all.

I’m going to try to focus on two main subjects here, two films from one director: Andrzej Żuławski.

Telling a story using the texts and ideas from his films, along with some words of my own. 

But fair warning: I am allowed to break my own rules when necessary. 

The first two essays were intended to work complementary to each other, an ourbourous of Ethel Cain and David Lynch. While this one completes a trilogy of sorts and touches on some similar ideas about art & God, I hope it communicates something a little less didactic. 

As Lynch would say, don’t try to “understand”, but instead “feel-think” your way through it.

If “I Think People Are Perverts” and “We’re In A Dark Woods Now” are the Father and the Son of this trinity of manifestos, then consider this the Holy Spirit. 

The ethereal third form. 

———

As the other two essays address at length, I have become increasingly frustrated with the way art, arts writing, and by extension expression as a whole have been restricted and devalued in our current society.

The greatest irony of the invented “free speech” boogeyman that helped elect Trump is the fact that the actual Powers That Be have been silencing us in countless ways far more tangible than so called “cancel culture” or “wokeness”. They have silenced us by not funding our projects, by firing us from media jobs. By “disrupting” industries and systems in order to make artists and writers and performers and craftspeople more precarious and thus easier to exploit. 

They see us as expendable, as useless, as inferior. 

Art is being strangled. Technology has turned against the consumer, making us act as human batteries for profit rather than existing to try to help the user do something. They want to take your time and your attention and your money and your will to live. They are blood-sucking vampires and they have taken over.

I think that we are all very sick. The systems and ideals we hoped we could carry us into the future are dying. They are killing us.

But I also think none of this sickness is immutable or inescapable.

———

I’m not tired of talking or writing — which I’m sure must be very obvious — but I am growing tired of explaining myself. Of trying to communicate “clearly” or “efficiently”, or “productively”. Of trying to be “understood”. 

I am tired of feeling like I need to obviously spell out my ideas, in order to justify their existence to an impatient or uncaring audience. I am tired of writing lengthy introductions, like this one, that exist to convince you to not change the channel. 

I am tired of trying to communicate the experience of transness, the experience of my life, with uplifting catharsis. I am tired of feeling like I have to manufacture a “happy ending” to my own story, so I don’t bum everyone out too much. So I am given a chance to tell any story at all.

I am tired of the idea that only the literally autobiographical is “personal”. The idea that all writing must exist at the opposite extremes of dryly impersonal writing done at an “objective” remove, or “open” and “honest” first-person narration (which can be just as vacuous). Everything is so fucking boring.

I am also tired of the idea that using the ideas of others is a “crutch”. The ego that we always need to articulate something in a “new” way; the hubris in discarding the countless people past and present who have also pondered these same questions.

I obviously had no hesitation quoting from other sources in the previous two essays (a habit pretty much every professional editor I’ve worked with has tried to get me to knock off) but I’ve ramped it up even more here. I find something liberating about being able to borrow, re-shape, and re-contextualize the thoughts of others. Cobbling them together into something new. Inside my brain these things all exist side by side: a spiderweb of images, words, songs, and ideas that have influenced me.

When Andrei Tarkovsky depicts the idea of memory in his film Mirror, he does not just show us a sequence of past events in a non-chronological order. As the man sees his life flash before him, what we watch play out on the screen is not just memory, not just time, not just space – but rather the way those streams merge into one great river of consciousness. History books, paintings, literature, gossip, nature landscapes, newsreel footage, philosophy, stories, feeble words, and childhood memories – so vivid it’s like you’ve stepped all the way into them, all swirling in our perception. 

A man is not just his life, his memories, and his physical form, but also the way those things intersect with others, with history, with the world.

By taking quotes, lyrics, and dialogue from other sources — threading them together like a DJ playing records from their collection – I can build a tower to God that reaches higher than one built on the foundation of my ideas alone. 

Why share one monologue from a singular point of view, when I can have words and ideas and images ping-pong off each other? Creating entire networks of feeling and meaning. Contemplating art in isolation minimizes the vastness of this larger story that we tell collectively.

Why have only my own voice present, when we are all one thing? 

One pulsating, fluid organism; bound together by love. 

As the poet Moondog puts it in Harmony Korine’s stoner comedy The Beach Bum:

“I get all these things going, man, and they are all turning me on. And my wires are connecting upstairs and I start to hear music in my head. You know, and the world is reverberating back and forth and I hit the frequency and I start to dance to it. My fingers get moving, my head gets soupy, I'm spinning all over the fucking place…

and the fucking words come out.”

In this essay, quite foolishly, I will also attempt to summarize the plots of both movies. Be warned that I will be “spoiling” a lot of Possession and On the Silver Globe, but I also think these movies are more or less spoiler-proof — at least in the sense that no amount of me trying to convey to you what they are like or describing things that happen will dampen what it is like to experience the real thing. 

[Side note: feel free to reach out if you want to watch these movies yourself and don’t know how to find them].

Not to mention the fact that trying to come to a consensus on even the most basic plot points of On the Silver Globe quickly devolves into something that more resembles priests debating over the interpretation of a bible passage than fans discussing a movie. For example: it’s not even fully agreed upon whether On the Silver Globe is intended as an adaptation of just the first book in a trilogy of novels, or the first two books, or all three books (only volume 1 of the Lunar Trilogy is titled “On A Silver Globe”, though that doesn’t really clear anything up).

It’s not hacky film bro speak or flippant exaggeration to say that On The Silver Globe makes Lynch’s Dune look like Star Wars. As a work of narrative, this movie is nearly impenetrable. “A film that reconfigures itself from shot to shot, and often within the same image.”

The main thing that me and these two Źuławski films have in common— besides being A Lot in all senses — is a desire to “go ape shit” that trumps a desire to be “understood”. 

A need to share overwhelming feelings that can only be expressed through overwhelming art. 

An impulse to go stark raving mad, rather than calmly ignoring the horrors around me.

There’s a reason that his work inspired the French to coin the term “Żuławskienne”, meaning “over the top”, and it’s that same reason that I in turn have fallen head over heels for this Polish freak. He directs with the soul and poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky and the gonzo extremity of France’s finest perverts. He is instantly One of My Guys.  

———

Because the two main works I will be discussing here are movies with super dense scripts — especially On The Silver Globe and its nearly 3 straight hours of yapping — I will be quoting extensively from both, without regard to chronology, context, or which character said what. By using movie dialogue as a sort of free-floating fridge poetry (something I love to do in shorter form basically every time I log something on Letterboxd), I hope I am able to bend and re-structure these words towards revealing my own ideas about the work. 

I am writing to remember. Braiding the texts together until they merge into one flowing thing. To show you how I experience the art. 

*** From here on, when you see a quote in bold that means it is from the 1981 horror / drama freak-out Possession and if you see a quote in italics that means it is from the fractured 1988 sci-fi epic On A Silver Globe. ***

If this all reads to you as the incoherent, solipsistic ravings of a woman consumed by madness — dare I say a woman Possessed — well… 

Maybe that’s because I am one. 

Take as long as you need to read it. 

Enjoy it, or don’t. 

This too, is a message of love.

———

“He’s gone mad!”
“No, he is performing.”

“There is nothing to fear but God… whatever that means to you.”

“Only this recording makes sense to me… I must be careful.”

———

[ RECOMMENDED SOUNDTRACK]: nthng - Unfinished (2021) ]

Andrzej Źuławski was born in Lviv, Ukraine to Polish parents in 1940. His father, a writer and later Polish diplomat, had been working in that city while it was part of the Second Polish Republic, prior to its annexation by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1939. Following the Nazi occupation of Lviv in 1941, his family eventually moved to Czechoslovakia and later to Poland – at a famously chill time and place in Poland’s history. 

As my designated Polish friend and talented actor / writer / editor / all-around cool lady Lily Kazimiera put it to me over text:

“with every successive bit of our art I encounter: this is simply what 600 years of being the knot in a three-way continental tug of war will do to some MFs imaginations”

[As a quick disclaimer: because I do not speak Polish, I am having to rely on the English subtitles for the dialogue for On The Silver Globe, and Lily has made me aware that there are several nuances and double meanings lost in translation. For instance: there is a line that refers to "sounds of another world" but the actual translation is closer to "voices of another world"; a small change of wordplay with totally different implications! I could give a bunch more examples, but the point is, language is cool!!!]

After many years attending prestigious film schools in Paris and assisting under another Polish director, Andrzej Wajda, Źuławski made his debut in 1971 with The Third Part of The Night. It should be no surprise that a guy with his upbringing — the same director who later made one of the most shocking “video nasty” horror films of all time — started his filmography with a supernatural holocaust drama. This film’s inciting incident is a man in occupied Poland watching his entire family get slaughtered by Nazis, and that’s BEFORE you even get to the mysterious doppelgänger of his dead wife or the Nazi laboratory where Jews and members of the resistance are employed as blood feeders for parasites infected with typhus in order to produce vaccines (inspired directly by his father’s own experiences in occupied Lviv).

His easy-breezy filmography continues from there with his 1972 film The Devil, which – if you can believe this – was banned by the Soviet-controlled occupying government of Poland for controversial and violent content (in this case, “controversial” is the understatement of the century). I certainly can’t imagine why anyone would be offended by this movie, which one Letterboxd user described as “Andrzej Żuławski’s loveletter to Satan written with the blood of lambs and stained with tears of the politically oppressed”, but nonetheless the Soviet government got all weird about it and Żuławski left to go make films in France.

In 1975, he released his third film, titled That Most Important Thing: Love (notably, for our purposes, the first of many depictions of cucking in his filmography). His modest financial success in France foolishly convinced the censors back in Poland that Żuławski had chilled out (Żuławski will never “chill out”, he does not understand the concept), and thus he was encouraged to return to his native country and make a film there. Of course, he was given that inch and tried to take two miles.

In 1976, Żuławski arrived back in Poland. He believed he was going to make his opus, his 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, much like his recently dissolved marriage from his second wife, the Polish actress Małgorzata Braunek, life doesn’t always go according to plan.

While he has had many partners and failed relationships over the years (including multiple with actresses), this particular divorce is not just context for his life’s story but crucial to the actual text of the films at hand. On The Silver Globe and Possession are both movies fixated on divorce and infidelity: the first involves an astronaut turned messiah who was betrayed by a “famous actress” sleeping with another man back on Earth, and the latter is a literal divorce movie about a spy who is getting cucked by a Sy Abelman-esqe European hunk (and perhaps also a literal demon). 

So, shortly after the divorce papers were filed, Żuławski began work on On The Silver Globe; embarking on a two-year filming process across several locations in Poland (and also: the Gobi Desert, the Georgian Caucasus Mountains, Crimea, and the Baltic Sea). The film is a religious sci-fi epic adapted from a series of novels written by Żuławski’s great-uncle Jerzy Żuławski, spanning hundreds if not thousands of years (totally unclear) across two diverging but seemingly identical Earths. A story that, in the end, is somehow also about cucking.

Unfortunately, this film’s story is also one of tragic and unnecessary censorship. The Soviet cultural ministers that invited Żuławski back to Poland quickly changed their mind when they got wind of what he was making. The film, which he estimates was about 4/5 complete at the time, was not only ordered to halt production by the repressive regime; they actually destroyed some of the costumes, decorations, and props.

They burnt whatever they could get their hands on, such that the movie would never have a chance to be finished as he intended. They salted the ground beneath them.

Almost a decade later, after the sociopolitical conditions shifted back towards freedom of expression, Żuławski returned to Poland with a mission to stitch together the remaining footage into something as close as he could approximate to his original vision.

He does this by cutting away from the action when necessary, using his own narration to explain crucial plot points at the moment they would have appeared or to read scene directions and dialogue from the parts of the script that were never performed. These placeholder narration sequences are overlaid with city-set footage from Poland circa 1986, a choice that initially feels jarring in an otherwise immersive sci-fi tale, but eventually reveals an entire other meta layer of meaning. 

Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that this otherworldly story is, of course, a parable about our present. The censorship itself becomes part of the movie, modern life intruding into an imagined future. Why not give a blank screen to project these unfinished scenes onto? “Why do such a thing when intertitles could serve such a purpose? I realize it's because both worlds have converged.”

It bums me out to see people in places like Letterboxd writing about needing to “punch a wall” to get over the pain of “not seeing” this film as it was intended, even though ***they literally just watched it***. 

Rather than appreciating what we do have, they mourn what it is lost. Or they reject its vision entirely. One particularly dramatic one-star review claims that watching this movie was “So painful I had to take a break every half hour, for fear I might try to cut my throat with the paper envelope the DVD arrived in.”

In some fairness to that guy, this movie is undeniably pretty exhausting. On the Silver Globe is not a film for the faint of heart, with a few shots in particular that could make even Paul Verhoeven blush. There’s a lot of blood, blasphemy, and emotional carnage, and if you aren’t a fan of stuff where nearly all of the dialogue is philosophical / religious diatribes, this probably isn’t the movie for you. I wouldn’t blame you if the roving fish-eye camera, unhinged performances, and constant monologuing make you nauseous after a while; I myself had to split my first viewing into two large chunks to properly take it all in.

The visible seams of this film present their own potential hurdle, but it is hard to imagine that even a “finished” version of On The Silver Globe would have been all that much easier to follow narratively. It can be a frustrating experience watching an already dense work of art in this fractured form, but I believe we should “keep your eye on the donut, not the hole” as David Lynch famously liked to say.

On the SIlver Globe is a miracle. What remains and can be experienced of this film is a gift. A work of agony and beauty so overflowing that it is impossible to hold on to all of it at once. 

It is a work rescued from the void of history, whose very unfinished form and narrative incomprehensibility are among its strongest attributes. 

Because times of no sense and reason call for art of no sense and reason. Because the world as we thought we knew it has already ended. 

———

The Soviet government of the time never publicly articulated what exactly it was that was so offensive to them about this film – how could they be offended by that which they do not understand? Authoritarians are against art by their very nature, inherently opposed to anything that might empower people with a sense of belonging with this world. Something that might enrich the social fabric more than anything of monetary “value”. They see art for art's sake as a waste in the zero-sum game that is life. When they shut down the production in 1977 they claimed it was because the film had gone over-budget.  “Or, at least, that’s the official story”. 

Because I cannot claim to be an expert on Polish history, beyond what I've read on wikipedia and Lily giving me the most basic gist, here’s an excerpt from a great Mubi article written by Z. W. Lewis on the context of Poland at the time and the film’s meta power as a defiance of censorship:

“Wilhelmi was reportedly disturbed by the sheer amount of religious imagery in the film that seemed to propose that dogmatic acceptance of political power is no different from dogmatic acceptance of religious power. While this comparison may seem tame and uncontroversial today, it’s important to keep in mind that the Polish People’s Republic was vehemently opposed to the power of the Catholic Church that embedded itself in all of European history and culture.”

“The shutdown of Żuławski’s production marked one of the first acts of re-Stalinization in the Polish People’s Republic. In the same year, Polish censor Tomasz Strzyzewski defected to Sweden to reveal what, exactly, his government wanted excised from the minds of its citizens. Solidarity, a trade union consisting of Roman Catholics and the anti-Communist left, began to exert political sway until Communist Party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski shut it down and imprisoned its top members. Before the spirit of Solidarity reached the general Polish population in 1989, censorship and the removal of civil liberties was fairly common.”

“To my mind, this is the most powerful use of breaking the fourth wall in cinema history, asking each viewer to live both in and out of the film, national history, and production history.  With the opening lines, Żuławski growls that the film was “murdered” by his government. This is not another Star Wars.”

———

Humans are often scared of that which they do not understand, or refuse to even try to grasp. 

The most pathetic and spineless of the bunch often respond with violence or cruelty in some form towards that which confuses or scares them.

Government repression now, government repression then. 

Erasing of identities and histories. Burning of books, burning movie props and costumes. Canceling filming shoots. Stripping our government for copper wiring. Cutting funding to anything that might help foster stories told by us.

Anything that suggests a future including us.

Anything that might even imply a helping hand.

They want to salt the ground beneath us, even if they poison their own crops in the process. 

They want to make sure we are never welcomed again.

———

“A nightmare has come without dreaming, a dream without wake, a wake without sense.
There is suffering but no subject of suffering.
There is action but no subject of action.
There is solace, but there is no man to reach it.
There is a road, but there is no one to follow it.”

“So sad that for you that freedom seems to mean evil. And what about lack of freedom?”

“Freedom exists and is lying in darkness.”

———

Since I was a child, others could see the weakness in me and tried to prod at my vulnerabilities. Long before I came out as trans, people looking for a target for their cruelty could sense that I did not believe in myself. 

And they were right. 

My life as a man was a front, a mirage. A performance I continued to put on, one that even I wasn’t buying. How could I expect anyone else to love me if I didn’t love myself? They saw right through my act. My deadname used to be like a catchphrase, a laugh line that you could say like an exasperated sitcom character. My very existence was a cruel joke. 

They bullied me because I cared too much, because I wanted to be liked too desperately. 

They bullied me because it was easy. 

I think often about the scene in the movie 20th Century Women where someone crudely spray paints “ART FAG” on the family car of the teenage protagonist, just because he likes the Talking Heads. I think about the word “WOLF” that was spelled out in toilet paper on my family’s front lawn, presumably because I was too enthusiastic about liking Tyler, The Creator. Or the time, on a school trip, when people grabbed the aux cord and played one of my DJ mixes on the bus ride. To make fun of me directly to my embarrassed face. 

Because I’m annoying. Because I talk too much. Because I try too hard.

———

Without directly equating me getting consistently bullied with oppressive government censorship, I would argue that the crisis of art and the ever-growing crisis of our collapsing civil society are both downstream of a larger crisis of cruelty. A crisis that poisons ever well and affects every soul. 

So many have convinced themselves this cruelty is necessary, confusing kindness for naiveté. 

They tell themselves that caring is a weakness. They see vulnerability and sincerity as things to be avoided at all costs. 

It is suffocating. 

———

In a series of Instagram posts about the death of an 11 year-old girl who killed herself because of bullying around her immigration status, poet and author Hanif Abdurraquib hits the nail on the head:

"I have been on my knees begging people to understand that interpersonal cruelty is a crisis, a massive crisis — a crisis from which several other crises are born. And it's a top-down crisis, which means that at some point, it is learned from the actions of the worst people in power, it filters down to "everyday" people, and we choose how to engage with those impulses, what to do with a desire to enact small (and not small) cruelty towards others, a desire to feel some small bit of power or relief by the harm that can be enacted on others.

It is a choice! Regardless of however else it gets framed, it filters down to us and we have a choice!

Yall, I promise you this is an untenable course. Look at the internet. Look at the way people talk to each other about every single thing. Think about what even just witnessing that, repeatedly, has maybe done to your own brain, your own heart, your own level of defensiveness, your own fear of vulnerability, your own anxiety about your own excitements and affections, whatever it may be!

Interpersonal cruelty is the crisis! The ease and casual nature with which so many of us rely on it is the crisis! That it can become a primary language in every corner of society is the crisis!

And so many people are making the wrong choices, so frequently, and taking such pleasure in that choice-making, and it filters down, again, to fucking children, who learn cruelty through witness, same as I do or you do, but they also don't have the same level of impulse control that I have or that you have.

A society that is obsessed with cruelty and punishment fails people. To be obsessed with cruelty and to be obsessed with punishment, to let those feelings govern your actions with any consistency (because we all have moments, of course) - you have failed yourself and the people who bear witness to your failures or who are a victim to your failures are also suffering."

———

When you are treated with cruelty, and when you are encouraged in turn to treat others the same way, it rots away at your soul. It turns you into a monster to yourself. 

I received external hostility that spurred on my negative self-image, but very quickly I learned to manufacture this self-hatred without anyone’s help. 

It became an inside job, and the world has continued to feed me fuel for this engine I have built.

I kept up the practice of hating myself long after these childhood tormentors forgot about me.

I keep it up to this day.

———

As my friend Rosemarie Smith put it, in her excellent piece about the movie A Different Man, titled “It Isn’t Enough”:

“This both is and isn’t in my control: people instilled it in me years ago for the simple intent of inflicting misery upon and othering me, and I, in turn, willingly carried the torch of it along since then. Abuse of the self is so much like abuse which arrives externally, in that it’s cyclical, feeding itself through nauseous repetitions of rage & pity.

After a long enough time getting into needless fights with the consciousness carrying you around, you start to loathe the cycle itself, because you’ve already broken it down into its component parts. You know how the machine operates, but you still let it run every day because you quietly don’t want to burn it down in the first place. You’ve created a nightmare for yourself, and leaving doesn’t sound like any more fun than continuing your one-person sparring match.”

———

Yet the very thing that made me a target — art, and by extension my connection to God — has also been the thing that has kept me alive. That has allowed me to transcend my unloveable self. 

I don’t believe in a Christian God, but I believe in something that we’ll call “God” for simplicity's sake. 

I believe in God in a “the beauty and bounty of the universe”, “everything and nothing”, “all of us are one thing” woo-woo sort of way. 

I believe that we can get closer to God through art. That we can get closer to understanding each other through art. That we need art to live in harmony, to see beyond one's self. To save this Earth and by extension ourselves.

Art is magic. It is real. It is a living, breathing thing.

Art is an ungovernable land. It cannot be turned into profit without understanding and respecting its power. 

Thus, the incurious, anti-knowledge fascist regime must destroy art. Because it offers us a portal out of the restrictive domain of “logic” and “reason”. The fascism of “efficiency”. 

———

Music producer Nick Sylvester recently wrote about this on his substack smartdumb, describing this obsession with “efficiency” that plagues the tech world, the art world, and now our government in the form of Elon Musk. He uses the example of music to illustrate this point:

“Of course, not all inefficiencies are great or deliberate. But when you worship at the altar of efficiency, you're only a few stations of the cross away from saying the great swath of us are useless eaters, and that the plants and animals we can’t eat are the most useless eaters of them all.”

“Perhaps that’s why I feel the singe of “inefficiency” so acutely. Music is an inherently inefficient medium. There are more direct ways to get your point across….Like a dog in a bathtub, recorded music can’t be held down to singular interpretation.”

“One easy way to out yourself as a horrible person in the music industry is to say, “You know what they say! Don’t bore us! Get to the chorus!” The artists and I might make a section we absolutely love, that makes us feel all the things we want to feel from this piece of recorded music. But we are up against the cold unfeeling logic of songwriting efficiency, i.e.: is this section necessary? Is this word necessary? … The most efficient songs are not the ones that make you feel something more deeply over time, but the ones you understand on first go. The logic can get brutal quickly.”

“I watch with empathy as tech company after tech company shows up to solve the music industry’s collaboration problems, rights management problems, payment problems, etc. There are so many problems! But maybe not all of them are problems, at least not all the time. Every music industry worker intuitively knows to leave room for a little inefficiency.”

———

“Efficiency”, as used by our oligarchs as justification for brutal austerity, is a lie. 

There is nothing “efficient” or “logical” about planes and bodies falling out of the sky. No matter how much money they “save”, we are all poorer if we are without vaccines and funding for necessary programs. We are all poorer without basic protections and infrastructure of civil society. 

They are saving a penny now and it will cost us everything, quickly. There is nothing efficient about any of this, but these people have mistaken their immense cruelty for intelligence. 

They tell us “facts don’t care about your feelings”, but they also lie about the facts to soothe their wounded feelings and their empty hearts. They are inventing words like “effective altruism” to convince themselves that it is not only good but Right and Morally Necessary for them to become living Gods. 

They tell us that their raping and pillaging is actually just a noble sacrifice they are making on our behalf. That this is just cold, hard logic. That we’re the ones who are crazy. 

They tell us that they are only doing this for our own good, that this is going to hurt them as much as it hurts us. 

They lie, to us and to themselves. 

———

“I am wounded, wounded like an animal.”

“I do not understand a word. I feel fear. Chaos. Darkness.”

“It is I who always forgets that I know everything and I don’t understand anything.”

“I am in the prison of my own freedom, in the hell of the one who is watching.”

“I am an animal among the animals. A wolf in the forests. The one who has devoured all is the only one. Only he endures.”

“You’re looking at me as if…to tell me that I need you to fill me up, as if I’m an empty space.”

“A well without echo and bottom.”

———

I believe the reactionary instinct to deny the importance of art and this rise of tech bro fascism are directly related. That the use of religious dogma to persecute the marginalized, and the restriction of God’s light, as seen through the prism of art, are connected repressions.

I really do believe that memes about the curtains being “fucking blue” and the instistence that art should only exist for our personal entertainment and satisfaction are a path to fascism. To ignorance, to cruelty. Why would they need to deny art if it means nothing? What are they afraid of?

A population without art is easier to rule.

Art without meaning is easier to control. 

A population without meaning and belonging is easier to divide. 

The narrow-minded among us think that anyone who believes in art is lying to themselves, or is trying to pull a con on the other suckers who believe. They cynically think that we are watching movies and reading books and writing poetry because we’re “trying to sound smart” rather than believing we could seek knowledge or art or God for its own sake. 

They see no value in what they do not understand, and they cannot imagine worldviews that are not their own. They see us as “NPCs”, a projection of their own lack of agency. 

I believe that art matters, that it has inherent value, that we wildly underestimate what the average person is capable of “getting”. 

When I talk about the art I love, even if you don’t share my taste at all, what I hope to instill is a reminder that there is always more out there. Art that could help complete your understanding. 

There are histories, ideas, and experiences for you to discover. There is always another world beyond the one you know, just outside of your reach. One portal away. And each new discovery begets more worlds and more discoveries. 

It is this endless possibility of art that gives me hope. The work of learning is never done, and this too is a gift. 

They can never destroy all of our cathedrals. They can never kill our memories, our dreams, our souls, our love.

We can believe in a thing that we do not see, and it can take us anywhere.

———

“This is a story about religion. And faith.”

“Maybe they saw a star… “

"He will be an angel or the son of man.”

“Do you believe in God? It’s in me.”

———

So, with all that background out of the way, we’ve arrived at the two hardest questions I have to tackle here: 

1.) Literally what the hell happens in the film On The Silver Globe?
2.) And what the hell does it mean?

Allow me to give it my best go: 

This is a story about two planets. Doppelgängers. One, like ours, is dying. Is being squandered. Another lies virgin and pristine (or so it seems). A group of astronauts leave Earth for this new planet, one that looks remarkably like our own. 

A do-over. A second chance.

For the sake of clarity: let’s call the dying planet Earth I, and this newly colonized land Earth II.

The parts of the movie that depict life on Earth I are vaguely Mad Max coded, but whatever causes the world to deteriorate into a post-apocalyptic society is never explicitly articulated. We are quickly introduced to two groups on Earth I: more advanced spacemen who still speak Polish, and humans of more primitive cultures, whose language and society have regressed over time. It is not clear what remains of the world as we know it, but Earth I is in some form of ruins. 

Our story begins on Earth I, as the chief of one of the primitive human tribes arrives on horseback. He delivers to the spacemen a piece of debris, an object that fell from the sky. It is a piece of technology they identify as “ancient”, with data disks of an “old style” that can only be viewed in a long since abandoned laboratory. 

From here, we jump back into the past, as the recovered data contains video diaries of an exploration to another world. 

In this extended flashback, a group of astronauts leave Earth I, having failed to maintain God’s bounty. The spaceship crash lands onto Earth II, killing many of the people expected to help colonize this new land.

Earth II is eerily familiar to the world they left behind: a giant field of mud and water, reflecting a silver blue sky. 

They are spit out onto this landscape filthy and new. Reborn.

Enough of the crew survives the initial crash that humanity is able to plant roots on Earth II. The first child of this new race of humans is born, and this planet begins to flower a new civilization. 

For reasons never explained, this new race of humans grow and age much faster on Earth II. A small tribe of dozens quickly crops up around the last remaining survivor of the original expedition. The rest of his fellow travelers die, including Marta, Earth II’s Mother figure. Before long, this man is the last remnant of the world they left behind.

His name is Jerzy, but these new humans take to calling him “the Old Man”, hailing him the Father of life on this planet. A living God. 

He is surrounded by other humans, but they are not like him. The Old Man is alone in his understanding.

He begins to resent his own demigod status, “disgusted to find that these new humans have lapsed into mythologizing their origin almost immediately”. He knows where this will lead, but is powerless to stop their nature. 

The humans born on Earth II and the humans that came from Earth I exist on opposite sides of a gulf in understanding. They ask the Old Man what Earth I was like, why we left. They begin to worship this man from another world like a demigod, a strange figure whose despair and regrets they cannot fathom. Whose knowledge comes from a world they will never know. 

But the Old Man is merely human, like them. 

And he dies.

———

“Whoever will know the world will find a corpse.”

“Here, everything is as on Earth. The same chaos, the same absence of truth. The same lie.”

“Where there is living, there is killing.”

———

“Don’t forget what we escaped, just to repeat with impunity what we believe in.”

“Darkness is easeful. And temptation to let go promises so much comfort after the pain.”

“When I was a boy my dog crawled out onto the porch to die.
Before the end it yelped, as if it had seen something real.”

———

Left to their own devices, a prophecy has taken hold among the new civilization on Earth II. They have predicted of another man from the stars, like their Father. One who would return to save them. 

An indefinite number of years later, long after the Old Man dies, another human arrives from Earth I. 

The second coming. The one who was foretold.

This character is a planetary scientist named Marek (the Polish equivalent of Mark), but something about this guy is giving me a real “son of God” vibe, so let’s just go ahead and call him Jesus.

They proclaim this astronaut Jesus as their savior. But he, too, is feeble and fallible. They tell him that his knowledge is all knowledges, that he is God and he is within them. But what they see in him as divine is only madness. His existence as their savior quickly becomes a curse.

As previously stated, nearly all of the dialogue in this movie comes in the form of circular, often self-contradictory monologues about the meaning of life and God and suffering. Pretty much every single character, and especially our Christ figure Marek, is constantly despairing and moaning about the existential horror they face. About the challenges of being a living god. “Every single line is delivered with the same intensity, which becomes exhausting, and the only time you get a break is when someone gets upset and runs into the ocean, which happens with great frequency. People are forever trying to run from their problems into the ocean, getting to waist depth, and then delivering another monologue.”

[sounds familiar?]

Without knowledge of what went wrong on Earth I, without a way to know what catastrophe might lie before them, the people of Earth II are doomed to repeat the history that they do not understand. The gulf between what they see and what they believe drives them to madness.

It is happening, again. First as tragedy, and second as farce. 

Religion, art, and science all exist to try to help us transcend, to reach beyond the stars, but we cannot fully escape these sacks of meat that are our physical forms. 

We will never get a do-over. Even if we did, we would probably just make the same cruel mistakes all over again. There is no second chance, because the very nature of humans bends towards entropy. 

Because we already had it all, and we already fucked it up. 

We can go wherever we want in this vast universe, but we will still be stuck with ourselves. With our madness.

Humans are nothing more than animals, slowly but surely coming apart at the seams. 

Flesh decaying. Organs failing. Minds deteriorating. Hearts breaking. Wills weakening. 

———

“He says you are like a worm, sir. That you came up to the surface."
“So why did I come?”
“You did not come, you were expelled.”

“It is terrible to be caught in the hands of a living God.”

“You believe in God, don't you? That God you try to get to through fucking, or dope?”

———

What happens when a mere mortal is expected to perform miracles beyond his power? To look and have the sea part before him? 

What happens if he believes what they tell him about his holiness? 

What happens if he is told that his will is God’s word, but he knows not the words he speaks, nor their meaning? When power courses through his veins, and still he feels nothing? 

———

What happens when he is told everything in this land is of his own making, and so is the understanding? Even though he knows nothing. Even though he makes nothing. Even though he is nothing.

What happens when the man they call “victor”, is actually a reject? 

What would it mean if the savior, the man who one planet perceives as a prophet arriving to save them, was actually banished; sent away so his wife could fuck someone else without him around? What happens if Jesus was sent to earth not to save us, but because he was being cucked?

———

What if it all meant nothing? What if he was just a fallible man? An empty vessel? “A mistake.” 

What happens if there’s nothing at the end of all of this? If there is no sign or signified, no road or destination, no heaven or hell? What if there never was a dying Earth, if there never was an Old Man? What happens if everything is “silent and empty”?

What happens when a man is told he is more powerful than fear, and feels afraid anyway? When he sees them grovel and despair and his feet, and he has no words to comfort them?

———

What happens when his own memory of the world he left behind begins to lie to him? When he allows his ego to lie to him? 

What happens when he believes he is a god and also cannot believe in the peace that would give him? 

What happens if he wields this great and mighty power over man, but cannot be made to feel whole again? 

———

The answer is simple: 

He suffers. He fails. He dies.

———

“The faith is coming to an end, since you have come. Now the reality is beginning.” 

“Who was I doing it for, after all.”

“There are a sect of scientists that claim that they are not there, that they are only a reflection of ourselves, called out from the dark.”

“Goodness is only some kind of reflection upon evil. That's all it is.”

———

You can probably figure out where Marek’s story is heading from here (Spoiler alert for the Bible, but it doesn’t exactly work out great for ole’ Jesus), but there are several equally insane plot threads in the back half of this movie that also need to be addressed. 

When Marek first arrives on Earth II, we learn that this new civilization of humans isn’t as alone on this new planet as we initially thought. The people who welcome Marek as God warn him of a terrifying enemy on the other side of the vast ocean: a telepathic, bird-like race of beings that they call Sherns. 

At first, it is unclear if the Sherns are an imagined boogeyman invented by the humans. A fear of the unknown. But before long, one washes up on the shore of this fledgling civilization and we learn that the Sherns are, in fact, real. The soldiers chain up this beast, and Marek arrives to interrogate it. But the Shern is wiser than him, and through his telepathy he can sense Marek’s fear. He knows immediately that this man is a false prophet, and he taunts him with this knowledge. 

“He is laughing at you… he is saying you have never taken and you will not take. Because you are dry and dead… and you are not alive at all, because you are an object created by objects, and you don’t know the name nor the meaning…”

This encounter with the Shern drives Marek to madness. 

As this planet’s Christ and also military leader, Marek decides to lead the humans on a brave expedition across the ocean, a mission of conquest to defeat the horrible Sherns. When a human God does not believe in his own power, he needs to create an enemy. An explanation for suffering. A new land to pillage. 

This too, is a step towards his undoing. 

When Marek arrives on the other side of the ocean, what we see is not a primitive animal species, but in fact the ruins of a city. The land of the Sherns, though clearly dilapidated over time, was once a mighty civilization. Far more advanced than what we see from the new human race on the other side of Earth II. 

These colonists arrived on a planet that they believed was up for grabs, what they thought was virgin land, but another civilization was here long before they were.

[Sounds familiar??]

It turns out, before the Old Man and his fellow astronauts were sent to colonize Earth II, a different group of humans was sent to colonize this planet. The Sherns are presumably the remains of this initial expedition of humans, their time on Earth II transforming them into unrecognizable monsters. In the end of the film, we see that one of Marek’s human concubines on Earth II (who is only referred to as “The Actress”) is transforming into a Shern herself, as a result having sex with the captured Shern. As she begins to transform, she hides her changing appearance behind a faceless veil. 

The rest of the world can not know that the Sherns and the humans are but two forms of the same thing.

In one of many sequences that never had a chance to be filmed, Żuławski describes Marek entering a Shern temple on the other side of the ocean. It is in this moment that he realizes that the other, the people he perceived as a race of foul monsters, is merely a reflection of his own humanity. A haunted mirror:

“Marek looks at the murals on the temple walls. They are rotten and time-mellowed, but readable, they depict Sherns in thrones, posing, pompous, holy. Sherns gazing up at the highest, supreme Shern and still higher into the clouds, with adoration.”

“Marek’s lips silently articulate the words: ‘Home.’ ‘Home.’”

———

Lastly, in perhaps the most confusing element of this already over-stuffed movie, while Earth II’s Christ figure is on the descent, we begin cutting back to Earth I and following a THIRD main character named Jacek.

Jacek and Marek were once fellow officers in whatever remaining space exploration / government institution existed back on Earth I, but Jacek was having an affair with Marek’s girlfriend, the actress Aza (Chekhov’s cuckold!). 

They devised a plan to get rid of Marek, and it worked better than they could’ve imagined. Marek is sent off to go live on Earth II as their God, and now they have all the time in the world to pursue the carnal pleasure that he stood in the way of. They no longer have to leave room for Jesus. 

“We sent him there to make our love grow stronger.”

But, of course, they are not satisfied. To believe in pleasure or beauty or lust as your one and only God is to believe in a thing that by its nature cannot last. To fall in love with the physical form is to fall in love with the sands of time as it slips through our fingers. We can only hold it for a moment, and then it will leave us forever. 

“In a few months, your girlishness, beauty, and youth have disappeared. You have grown old and your face scares me. For any push to the end brings matter to the self-explosion, as if beyond a certain barrier there was a pulp with death at the bottom….”

As Aza cries in his arms – hurt by his words, but without someone else to hold – Jacek grabs under her dress and begins to reach inside her. Assaulting her. Her wails of pleasure and despair become indistinguishable:

“You are taking part in an auction. But you don’t know that it is not you who sets the price, the value in this market. That the hand which fumbles inside you and which cruelly turns your glands inside out, is the hand of the very principle of the market. The murderous hand or eye which finds pleasure in seeing how the actors, lustful like dogs, are wearing out.”

Jacek and Aza go mad, left only with crumbling ruins and their waning desire. They try to communicate with Marek back on Earth II, but cannot. They try to enjoy themselves, and they cannot. 

They are alone, trapped in a "prison of their own freedom".

Meanwhile, Marek isn’t doing much better, despite the fact that any woman on Earth II would be honored to sleep with God. No matter how many women throw themselves naked before him, he still feels impotent. The women who sleep with him and bow before his holiness can do nothing to fill this void. Because he knows their worship is built on a lie. 

He knows why he was sent here, he knows what Aza and Jacek doing back on Earth I. He knows his true nature.

In his mind — only Aza, the woman who spurned him, can make him whole again. A woman he will never see again. 

“Such is the power others have over us.”

———

What makes On The Silver Globe such a compelling text to dissect and analyze is that its narrative contradictions and circular logic illustrate a larger point about the nature of power and belief. 

To believe in the divine without question is as all-corrupting as nihilism. To believe in the self as almighty without hesitation can be as destructive as worshiping someone else. 

Religious authoritarianism and authoritarianism principled on the complete absence of religion (i.e. the occupying Soviet government) are both paths towards madness. A complete devotion to either carnal pleasure or to religious chastity alone will not save us.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Absolutism of all kinds must be rejected.

The value in this film lies in the questions it poses. 

We, in turn, must decide the answers for ourselves.

———

From the same Z. W. Lewis Mubi article quoted previously:

“It’s up to films like On the Silver Globe to make us reconsider our assumptions about how a society should be set up and managed. Should there be an overarching Platonic noble lie to keep the body politic stable? Whose authority is scarier: leaders or the broad public? 

Perhaps, as stated in one of the astronauts’ final soliloquies, we should place our highest value in epistemology and seek to not only know our “true” history, but rather seek to know the tools by which we can evaluate our history’s veracity. Perhaps we should admit our faults and try to reform according to that old adage: “think locally, act globally” (or was it “think globally, act locally”?). 

Perhaps we should return to idealism. 

Or, perhaps we should burn it to the ground.”

———

The final shot of this film takes place neither on Earth I or Earth II, but on our Earth. Our silver globe.

As Źuławski reads out the final scene directions for the film — asking the audience to imagine in our minds the image he intended to leave us with — the camera films pedestrians walking around Kraków in 1986.

The movie’s script opens with a man on horseback, and ends with no man in sight:

“The final shot of this film recorded in the screenplay was the following:

428. Long shot. 3 metres.

In the dawning light: a horse without a rider galloping across the steppe.”

Then, as the shots of city life continue to flash across the screen, he once again details the censorship and cruelty the film endured, thanking the film workers who did everything they could to hide the props and film canisters from the government. 

The actual last shot of the film is a self-portrait: an image of the director himself, reflected on the glass pane of a window. 

“My name is Andrzej Źuławski, the director of the film “On The Silver Globe” 

In between filming On the Silver Globe from 1976-1978 and its release in 1988, Żuławski set aside his seemingly failed passion project to make what would eventually become his most popular film, Possession. 

Since this is his biggest “hit”, and one of his only english language movies, he must have tabled all that philosophical mumbo jumbo and pretentious art nonsense and made a real crowd-pleaser… *checks notes* wait, I’m sorry…  *checks notes again* … what’s this? 

An apocalyptic divorce drama / body horror / espionage thriller / monster movie ??? About God?!?!?

[I find some of the jokey letterboxd reviews of this movie mildly annoying, but must admit I enjoy “Kramer Vs. Kramer Vs. God” as an elevator pitch].

Possession has become a gateway drug to a world of more avant garde horror, increasingly popular with the young cinephile / Letterboxd crowd in the decade or so since Żuławski’s death in 2016. It plays like 6 different midnight movies all stuffed into one clown car: a truly deranged, brain-scrambling experience that will make you nauseous in an entirely different way than On The Silver Globe. As melancholy as it is disgusting, as funny as it is horrifying, as liberating as it is soul-crushing. 

It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you squirm. It will make you its little bitch.

I made this exact same joke about Magnolia in the last essay, but Possession feels even more like someone cranking a lever labeled “MOVIE” so hard that the lever snaps and the machine breaks. Men will get divorced + have their opus film killed 2 years into production by an oppressive government and instead of going to therapy they will literally make Possession about it.

Shot in West Berlin 1980, Possession takes place within spitting distance of the Berlin wall (once again, Żuławski popping up in Normal places at Normal times in history), a choice underscored by the film’s opening shot of the wall itself. Centering around a relationship between Anna (played by French actress Isabelle Adjani in an iconic, batshit, GOATed performance) and Mark (played by Sam Neil, a reliably manic actor in his own right), Possession is a wickedly upsetting movie long before it becomes a gross and gory one. Their marriage is dissolving from the film’s first frames, their son (hilariously named “Bob”) is already caught in the crossfire between a spurned father desperate for control and a mother losing her grip on reality. 

This fracturing relationship and twinned emotional meltdowns can be interpreted as a statement on the socio-political conflict happening in divided Berlin around them, about the intuitions of marriage and family, or any number of other allegories – but I want to focus on what this film has to say about love, God, madness, and the ways in which we seek to demonize each other. 

———

“I’m a good person, I'm a powerful person. 
I don't believe in evil,
 I think that evil is an idea created by others to avoid dealing with their own nature. I understand my own nature. 
Good and evil have nothing to do with it.”

“I see.. beyond words. Truth…. Evil… they mean nothing.”

“And then I read that private life is a stage, only I'm playing in many parts that are smaller than me, and... yet I still play them.”

———

“No one is good or bad — but if you want, I’m the bad one.”

“A monster, a whore.”

“The angel of the extinct heart.”

———

As soon as it is revealed that Anna has been cheating on Mark with the more worldly Heinrich (In one scene, Mark gestures at Heinrich’s library of books and says “So this is how you've been controlling her.”), Mark’s ego – as defined by his masculinity – begins to crumble. Everything that gave him stability and a sense of self was built on a lie, and rather than accept his new reality, he invents a more fantastical one that can confirm his prior beliefs. He invents a reality that allows him to keep dreaming:

“You know, when I'm away from you, I think of you as a monster or a woman possessed”. 

It is somehow easier for Mark to accept that his wife is a crazed woman, or a literal demon, than it is to accept that he was not enough to make her whole. He claims to want to see her happy – he frantically jumps into action to patch her bleeding neck after she impulsively takes a carving knife to it – but his paternalistic protection is just a means towards ownership. He has to keep Anna’s body from leaking, so that she can remain intact and he can preserve his dollhouse fantasy of domesticity. 

He tries to tell her that he knows what is best for her, and it only drives her more insane. 

We enter into the social contracts of marriage and family on the premise of “unconditional” love, but what happens when that promise is pushed until it bends and breaks? What happens when the way we imagine each other as demons becomes manifest in real flesh and blood? In oozing wounds, blistered skin, exposed entrails?

The title Possession is a double entendre: when he cannot control and thus “possess” her, he believes that she has become “possessed”. The more he believes it, the more she believes it too. Until eventually, his nightmares appear as monstrous reality.

He has to watch it play out in front of his eyes. A dream he cannot wake from.

This is what he wanted to believe: that the monster is real. That she has been infected. 

Now, his wish has been granted. 

———

“I thought that as I would be going and learning, I would turn inside out my whole life like a glove.”

“Now I, I am the most despicable. Because I have come to terms with myself. I will not change anything in the world. My illusion is not even a ripple on the world’s cool metallic surface.”

“You can arrive at a state in which you must admit, submit, let your guts out. As if recognizing that this is just inside, and that the sight of your entrails means giving up the secret, exposing and discarding your ego… without remainder.”

“For the first time, you look vulgar to me.”

———

Possession’s most famous scene is obviously the subway tunnel sequence, the acting setpiece that defined Isabelle Adjani’s career and launched a million “she just like me FR”’s on the internet. 

This was the part of the film I was most aware of going in, and I had definitely seen at least part of it as a clip online. But by the time I finally got there – with every other insane thing that happens in this movie throwing me off the scent – I had somehow forgotten all about it.

It hit me as hard as it must have hit back in 1981. Probably a lot harder.

The scene arrives early enough in the movie such that Anna is still going through the motions of normalcy, but far enough along that you already know everything is fucked. She’s returning home to her family with eggs and milk, but something overtakes her. 

She can no longer perform sanity. She can’t take it anymore.

It is so fucking hard to have this kind of scene not come across as silly, to avoid it feeling like an actor performing the false idea of “going crazy”. To move and gesticulate and have it appear as if she has truly lost control of her actions. To make us believe her madness is real. 

But holy shit, dude: Isabelle Adjani does not “perform” being possessed, she IS possessed. It lives up to all the hype.

This unseen thing moves through her, thrashing and twisting her around until she is writhing on the disgusting floor. She begins to shake, as she has some sort of horrible alien miscarriage. Blood and pus start leaking out of her, gushing from her mouth as she screams in pain.

———

“I am a body, sir! Splitting. The idea of splitting. Self-consciousness in splitting. There is duality of nature here and duality of life.”

“These two women, wrestling in an arena, with their hands locked at each other’s throats…… each waiting to see who will die first”

“The thought of duality is part of my nature. It’s the contradiction between form and desire. Between the answer and the language of darkness. Hence, I am god. I am God.”

———

“I recognize the self who has just done something horrible like a sister I’ve casually met on the street...

It’s as if the two sisters were too exhausted to fight anymore.”

“But at the same time, I know there's a third possibility, like cancer, or madness. But cancer or madness contort reality. The possibility I'm talking about pierces reality.”

———

Among the countless other types of movie this is, Possession is also a story about doppelgängers. As Mark unravels, he shockingly meets a new woman in the form of his son Bob’s schoolteacher Helen. Helen is, of course, also played by Isabelle Adjiani. 

[Ultimately, Possession is a story about what happens when a girl gets bangs.]

She is the prim and proper woman that Anna is not: as if Mark’s imagined fantasy version of her — a woman she never actually was — has manifested into his reality. A tulpa.

In the movie’s SECOND dopplegänger reveal, it turns out that Anna is also manifesting a new being, a new "Mark". But her replacement is a little less neat and tidy than Helen.

In the twist of the knife that makes most people go “wait what???” (besides the ending, which itself is like a 10 car pile-up of “wait, what???”), we learn that Anna’s replacement for Mark is not Heinrich at all. 

Sure Heinrich reads books, but only as the cynical means to an end that Mark accuses him of. Given a chance alone with Anna, Heinrich drops the worldly gentleman act and pins her against a wall, groping her. His objectification of her merely takes a different form. 

Possession is not a movie about Mark getting left behind for a better, more noble and virile man. 

It’s about what happens when you are a woman caught between two conflicting impulses. A snake eating its own tail:

1.) Men will be the death of me

2.) I need one to fuck me or I’ll die

Left between two different but equally unpleasant options, she creates life of her own. 

A secret third thing. 

It is horrible.

It is beautiful. 

———

It is at this moment when Possession finally becomes the Medusa creature-feature that its poster implies - with the reveal that Anna’s new “Mark” is still a bit of a work-in-progress. 

In my new favorite bit of movie trivia: the special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi who created the monster for this movie followed up Possession with another movie from the early 80s. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of it:

Just goes to show, make a few slight tweaks and suddenly E.T. could have been really scary. If you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil Possesion’s monster (or your appetite) — but let’s just say it does kinda look like E.T.’s fucked up cousin. When it comes to things from another world, hideous or cute is in the eye of the beholder.

———

This new lifeform is a (rather phallic-looking) monster, with a vaguely cylindrical body rising up out of a tangle of extremities. We see barely formed, beady eyes and something vaguely resembling a mouth, but calling this thing “humanoid” would be a pretty big stretch. 

We see it sitting in a corner, or resting on Anna’s bed. “He is very tired. He made love to me all night.” It lies in a pool of its own fluids, tracking blood and slime all over the room. As your eyes scan down this creature, the movie delivers what it promised on the poster: tentacles and entrails pulsating. 

A man enters the room, sees it, and turns to stone.

It is not dying, it is new. Fresh.

It is growing. 

It is changing. 

Anna isn’t the monster. The monster is inside of her.

They are becoming one thing.

It is making her whole. 

———

My favorite piece of writing on Possession that I’ve read so far is from my friend Elise Soutar, an excellent writer and a fellow Girl Who Gets It™:

“maybe some of us envision god within ourselves, all-consuming and writhing, like it pushes to make room inside us—as carnal as it is holy. but if we act as god’s host, we require someone less than monstrous to tend to our overflow: maybe a carbon copy of someone we once desired. they believed in their god within them more, so we had to excise them (or exorcise them).”

“why can’t mark hold her now, as she lets evil soak from each orifice to create life anew, all-consuming and writhing itself, only serving her? wouldn’t god create life pulsing (mark’s double) instead of inheriting the promise of chastity (helen)? god breathes ugly, spewing life that man couldn’t dream of.”

“what happens when these visions of god clash so fiercely that they burst? what happens when gunfire shoots up from the earth’s core to force god from you? what happens when you’ve had enough, and you have no choice but to force it from yourself? kiss the passing ship eternal good night. it’s a disease and it’s in me.”

———

“Maybe we are sick, sir… sick of evil and passivity. Maybe we live momentarily like an ulcer. And you want to re-arrange our destiny.”

“Maybe I am a disease turning towards the new unfamiliar freshness.”

“The submission to the narrow labyrinths of one’s own sensual passion… transforming oneself into a killer gland which believes that everything is its property.”

“For me God is a disease.”

“That's why, through a disease, we can reach God.”

“I suffer, I believe, I am.”

———

By the time you reach this movie’s ending (which I wouldn’t dare spoil or even attempt to describe) the monster’s metamorphosis is complete.

The inhuman thing has become man.

She too, has imagined a version of Mark that never existed: the version she thought she fell in love with. Someone who could fulfill the needs she couldn’t articulate with words. 

Anna has brought forth new life: in the form of a blank, wide-eye version of her husband. Smiling and astride her. 

When it comes to the incomprehensible, the things beyond what we can describe or understand: there is a thin line between "divinity" and "madness". 

"Sublime beauty" and "unspeakable horror". 

Perhaps they’re the same thing. 

Like other artists who have had the strange honor of their name being turned into an adjective, ala “Lynchian” and “Żuławskienne”, you’ve probably heard “Lovecraftian” thrown around as a term to describe the realm of so-called “cosmic” horror — the horror of the indescribable. The incomprehensible. Stories like the 1994 John Carpenter movie In the Mouth of Madness (conveniently, for our purposes, also starring Sam Neil losing his mind).

You likely also know that this term comes with a lot of baggage, due to the fact that H.P. Lovecraft himself was a repellent racist. This is something that cannot be simply dismissed when discussing his work. It is quite ironic (or perhaps just telling) that the person most famous for capturing the horror of the cosmic beyond would harbor an immense fear of those who he perceives as different. 

Like an inverse of the way the trans allegory of The Matrix has been willfully misread by right-wing opportunists, latching onto the film’s power an an awakening narrative to advance their own agendas, it’s easy to see how the elements of so-called “Lovecraftian” horror could be manifestation of a more sinister ideology.

[read more about this in my Matrix manifesto about taking the REAL red pill]

“Cosmicism”, the name he gave to the philosophy that defined his fiction, was premised on the idea that “reality” as we know it is but a thin veneer over something much more vast and horrifying. Something so incomprehensible, that if we were to witness its machinations, we would be driven to madness. We would weep at our insignificance, at the foolishness of believing we had control over our place in the universe.

Reality as we previously knew it would suddenly become impossible to bear. 

China Miéville, an acclaimed sci-fi writer and critic (and, contrary to Lovecraft, a socialist) wrote in an introduction for “The Definitive Edition” of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness: "Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact." 

People on both sides of the left vs. right divide know what it is like to feel alienated, to feel indescribable horror upon learning the nature of the world.

But what those revelations are, and what actions we each choose to take when faced with a new reality, are quite different.

There is a small but crucial difference between fear of the other and fear of the unknowable.

———

Lovecraft is not the be-all-end-all of cosmic horror, nor was his work my own personal introduction to the world of the incomprehensible.

After seeing the 2018 Alex Garland film Annihilation (a 4-star movie that would be a 5-star banger if you made it a silent film apart from the sick score and cut the hacky Women With Trauma™ backstories), I sought out its source material, the 2014 novel of the same name. 

The first in the Southern Reach series, Jeff VanderMeer’s excellent novel contains one sequence that has stayed with me long after I first read it, dealing with that fear of the unknowable, the unthinkable, the indescribable . 

[Remember when I said I would only be talking about two movies? I love lying.]

If you’ve seen the film you know the basic premise: a group of scientists enter into a mysterious zone that has formed deep in the Everglades, encircled by a “shimmer” that is slowly growing larger. Garland’s script smartly makes some changes to parts of the book that would otherwise be very difficult to film, but he also loses some of the power that the novel derives from the written word’s flexible relationship with reality.

While the characters in the filmed adaptation of Annihilation have first and last names (hence the padded-out wooden backstories), the characters in the book are solely referred to as their titles within the expedition team: the Psychiatrist, the Anthropologist, the Surveyor, and our main POV character the Biologist. 

The journey they are embarking upon is a suicide mission. No one returns from these expeditions, and those who do have forgotten everything they saw inside. It turns out, this growing energy field emits a kind of radiation. It is an unseen force that affects all living organisms inside it, getting more and more intense as one nears the center of the zone. 

It has a cancerous effect, causing every living molecule to become destabilized. In the same way that a ray of light can be refracted into a rainbow, their cells are being refracted by the “shimmer”, multiplying and mutating out of control, faster and faster. Animals cross-breeding with other species, humans cross breeding with plants. Their bodies – down to their very DNA – are being transformed.

As they begin changing from the inside out, the effect this is having on their physical brains rapidly deteriorates their perceived sense of reality. Tissue and flesh and organs begin to move inside them, flowing “like liquid”. 

The Biologist describes a growing “brightness” that she feels inside her, beginning to melt her from within. The “brightness” begins to wipe away the old self, her memories, her sanity.

She is terrified. 

She is being destroyed. 

She is becoming something new.

While the movie’s climatic sequence takes place in a lighthouse, a setting that figures prominently in both versions, the best part of VanDerMeer’s novel is something that would have been truly impossible to film. 

In the book, their research centers around a different structure, one that they return to several times. The Biologist describes it as a bunker of sorts, a stout building with a staircase that spirals down into the dark. Confusingly, the Biologist repeatedly refers to this structure as a “tower” — as if the very geometry of the building is blurring in her perception. 

At the entrance, words are inscribed:

"Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead…”

Even more strangely, the sentence keeps going… and going… and going. 

Trailing off, into the dark unknown, the sentence appears infinitely long.

No matter how far down they go, the run-on sentence never ends. [Sounds familiar???]

Over several trips, they venture deeper and deeper, trying to find the person or thing writing the sentence. The thing that the Biologist names “the Crawler”. 

Eventually, in this “tower” they find the dismembered body of the Anthropologist, who had previously gone missing. Whatever this thing is, it is clearly dangerous. 

But the Biologist has little else left to live for.

She needs to know. She needs to see it with her own eyes.

Finally, she does:

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”

“As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough.”

“It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage.”

“This moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing—this moment of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience—was beyond me.”

“Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it right now.”

- Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation (2014)

———

“I don’t want to see any more.”

“I want to know." 

“I want to be there.”

———

There’s a specific reason that I didn’t show you any images from the Alex Garland film, and it's not just me being a hater.

I wanted to demonstrate the difference between words and images.

The difference between seeing something, and imagining something.

If you’ve already seen the movie, I did not want those images to flood back into your mind. When you see a work of fiction turned into film, or when you read a book after you’ve seen the adaptation, it can be hard not to insert the film’s visual language into our experience of the book.

There are advantages to communicating with words alone that are impossible to capture in filmed images, and vice versa. By not giving you a visual aid, I am forcing you to imagine.

By not showing you the monster from Possession, or “the Crawler”, or the “tower”, or the Sherns, I am trying to get you to imagine them. Something that is impossible to see. The incomprehensible.

With words, I can make you picture something in your own head. Like the shark in Jaws, implied but not seen. 

As in On the Silver Globe, where Źuławski describes scenes that were never filmed, I am tasking you  — my audience — with filling in the blanks.

A word is a symbol, it always means the same thing. 

Images are a metaphor, they can mean many different things.

A word can have its meaning perverted, or changed with incessant use. But they are supposed to mean something specific, something fixed. I can attempt to create new meanings and ideas by using words in different combinations, but they are just building blocks.

Images, unlike words, are up for interpretation. Unfixed. An image of water has no one fixed meaning, the word “water” always means the same thing. 

The same image of a woman crying can evoke different meanings, depending on what happened in the rest of the movie before it. 

Depending on what sounds are playing while you see it. 

Depending on what life experiences you bring to the image.

Whether you can relate to her. 

———

What happens when words and images are able to find harmony?

What happens when you experience both at the same time?

Symbol and metaphor, meaning and feeling. Braided together into one thing.

What happens when the incomprehensible is put on screen? Made real?

When, in the world of the image, you are able to capture the feeling of words? Of Poetry? What happens when one is able to film the un-filmable? 

When one is both seeing, and imagining?

One of my favorite things about Twin Peaks: The Return is the completely unique way that it deploys special effects. Certain visuals from the show – like the one pictured above – achieve exactly this feeling I’m describing:

Seeing and imagining at the same time.

Some of the effects, like the famous atom bomb in episode 8, are as stunningly “real” as you can imagine, but that is not typically the show’s highest priority. Many of the effects, which you could uncharitably call “janky”, are uncanny and frightening in ways that computer generated images are rarely capable of. Lynch is choosing — with specific intent — exactly how much to care about making something look “real”, and when.

———

If something like magic exists in our universe, if the impossible is possible, then why would it resemble “photo-realistic” images that make perfect sense to our eyes? Why should we be trying to make the impossible look natural? 

What happens when the line between what we can imagine and what we can see is crossed, when the unreal becomes real? 

That feeling is called “madness”.

———

What is madness if not trying to understand that which cannot be understood? 

Doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a different outcome?

What is madness if not the consequence of cruelty, the sickness poisoning every well? 

Is madness a disease? Or is it God, speaking through us? An expression of the Earth itself, crying out in pain at what we are doing to it. What we are doing to ourselves. To each other.

Perhaps what we call “madness” is just God, trying to tell us that this life we have built for ourselves is all wrong. The splinter in our mind that tells us there must be something else.

Anything other than this.

———

I think about Virginia Woolf at times like this. I am not walking into the ocean with a heavy stone in my pocket any time soon, but I understand anyone who does. 

And I do not blame them.

I think about what it must have been like to be a mad woman in Virginia’s time, stuck in the mental health system as it existed 100 years ago. Dealing with a mind that is fighting against you. Pain that you cannot get rid of. Abuse suffered upon you. Living within a society that barely understands what is going on inside your head, and ostracizes you for it.

I try to imagine what it would be like to be institutionalized for months at a time. Force fed. Isolated. Locked away without company or art or purpose. Being traumatized further by people trying to “help”. 

So much of what used to be called “madness” or “hysteria” in women of the time was simply the natural reaction to the unnatural conditions forced upon them. 

The way the world then, as it does now, always bends towards womens’ suffering. The way we always pay for the sins of others. 

———

"I feel like I know her, but sometimes, my arms bend back"

Laura Palmer - Twin Peaks

———

I imagine, at times, that being someone like Virginia Woolf must have felt a bit like being a trans woman now.

People who are not like us holding the keys to our freedom. The experience of knowing our own minds and bodies intuitively, yet being forced to comply with those who say they know it better. Not being believed, not being trusted. Told to engage in practices that we already know don’t help.

Ignored, neglected, mistreated.

Being forced to do shock therapy, being lobotomized, and often just killed. 

Being driven so mad that you end up doing their work for them.

Trans people have always been here, and there will always be more of us. 

We are like a disease. We are like God.

We are always changing. Adapting. Growing.

We learn to give up everything: to leave behind the world and life we thought we knew, on a journey to an unknown destination. 

A do-over. A second chance. 

We have always been fighting this fight. It has never been easy, and it will never be easy. Sometimes it gets slightly easier, and sometimes - like right now - it gets way harder. But this fight will never go away.

Our physical form, our very transness, represents a tear in their reality. Other groups can be assimilated into the status quo — and so can we, to a certain extent — but our very flesh and blood is a violation of the established order. Even the most privileged among us are subjected to mindless cruelty.

Our bodies are the crossing of a boundary, a violation that must not be tolerated. Our bodies are a symbol to everyone else that the world is more vast and mutable than as they define it. 

We are a sign that change is possible for all of us.

For them to witness our changing bodies is to be confronted with a new reality, one contradicts with their own. When they cannot accept it, this discrepancy drives them mad. Their entire worldview warps around its gravity. 

In particularly bad cases, we become all they ever talk about. It possesses them. They fight against us to their dying breath, forgetting who and what they were before we intruded on their “reality”. 

They would rather believe that the world is ending – and it’s our fault – than believe they were wrong.

Rather than construct a new view of the world that includes us, rather than accept the gift of a world with more possibility, they self-destruct under this pressure. 

They would rather salt their own crops than allow ours to grow.

They become consumed by hate, a noxious bile that they try to pass on to others. Their own inability to accept change becomes our problem.

But I’m done trying to turn the other cheek.

———

If you think I’m crazy,

if you want to believe that I am a monster,

that I’m the antichrist?

Then so be it: 

your wish has been granted. 

We are a paradox, a bug in their system.

We are a threat and we are helpless.

At the same time too strong and too weak. 

———

We are supposedly so disgusting, that our mere sight is revolting to them. 

Yet somehow, we are also too inherently lustful to be seen by children.

We are unfuckable, and we are sex incarnate. 

———

We are beautiful monsters, and we are filthy angels. 

Holy and profane.

A perfect mistake.

———

Our radiance is horrifying to them. Our metamorphosis is their nightmare, our freedom their hell.

They can not abide by what our existence means. The questions it makes them ask about themselves, about their God.

They refuse to accept it.

———

They want to fuck us and they want to kill us. 

Often both. One and then the other. The natural order of things.

They need us to know their hatred, so they can be clean.

———
 

From my initial Possession review:

You want to cast me as the antichrist? Fine. I’ll play the role I’m given. I will roll around in the mud until I am clean. I will suffer. I will be the crazy fucking bitch you think I am.

I will pursue my pleasure and my freedom until I become monstrous and unrecognizable to you. Until I become too vulgar for you to look at. Until my own self-destruction is yours; is the world’s. 

Until the bombs crash and the flames rise and the sirens blare. Until our bleeding remains lie strewn on the ground like sacks of shit. Like insects. Like meat.

———

BECAUSE THE MADNESS IS IN ME

BECAUSE YOU MADE ME LIKE THIS 

———

I am real, I am alive, and I am changing.

I am being destroyed. I am becoming something new.

I am a monster, and I’m finally happy. 

Crying, snarling, screaming, thrashing, wailing.

Ungovernable. Unloveable. 

Happy.

———

When we commune with art, 

we are asked to see that which is not there, to believe in something that is not real. 

But inside our mind, it can be.

The most beautiful, terrible thing

whimpering and moaning at the altar of God.

This too, is a message of love.

———

“Now is Ever.”

“Now. Here. Ever.”

“Here, not There. Here”

“Take Me. Take Me.”

“Do it. Hold It.”

“Almost. Almost. Almost. Almost.”

“I am crazy! I am crazy!”

———

“As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.”

Virginia Woolf - Letter to Ethel Smyth, 1930

“Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns and the woman was dressed in purple and scarlet and adorned with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup full of abomination and the filth of her prostitution. And on her forehead was a name: Mystery.”

Book of Revelation - 17

“Because we are sinful and dead, we call from the depths. Let us creep into the grace of our resurrection, melt into your goodness and experience your mercy in order to attain resurrection with you. 

Mystery, because we are small and dead.”

Andrzej Żuławski - On the Silver Globe (1988)

———

So, the question remains: 

What is one to do with all this madness? 

This suffering?

When we know that the heavens are empty?

For an answer, we can only look to the past. 

Or, towards the imagined future.

To words.

Poetry.

Books.

Art.

Movies.

Meaning.

Belonging.

Love.

———

“Do not fear what is, because there is only what you do not feel.”

“Welcome… grace”

“How much can one accept? How great is the mercy to be felt?”

———

“We are all the same. 

Different words, 

different bodies, 

different versions. 

Like insects! Meat!”

———

“Ultimately, every reduction to physiology is the fascism of the soul. 

“Be. Don’t think!”

“You are to act. The hope will return when you are gone.”

———

God.

Penetrating,

into me,

out of me,

through me.

Until it is all one thing.

If the nature of man is towards madness,

towards entropy,

towards destruction.

Then what is the appropriate response, 

if not kindness? Love?

Oh God,

I shall love our collapsing forms,

this meat.

———

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

Andrei Tarkovsky - Stalker (1979)

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”

Andrei Tarkovsky - Interview “Le noir coloris de la nostalgie” with Hervé Guibert in Le Monde, May 12th, 1983.

“Meanwhile this small drama of a film, and the grand and hopefully dignified drama of our life, will continue to intertwine… in a common mosaic of successful flights and crash landings.”

Andrzej Żuławski - On the Silver Globe (1988)

———