DAEMONIC DIVINITY
WOMAN’S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS IN POSSESSION (1981)
“[Woman] turns a gob of refuse into a spreading web of sentient being, floating on the snaky umbilical by which she leashes every man… The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”
“Do you believe in God?… It’s in me.”
Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is an endlessly mystifying work that has received much analysis from both film critic and enthusiast alike. Attempting to add to the existing plethora of ideas that surround this film is a daunting task, and perhaps at the end of this essay I will reach nothing spectacularly novel. But this is a film always lurking in my psyche, throbbing in my veins. In the main character Anna (Isabelle Adjani) I see a divine wholeness birthed from the chthonian gob of which Camille Paglia calls the “daemonic,” a word which comes from the Ancient Greek daimon, meaning spirit or guardian shadow. Daimons were morally ambiguous, occupying a gray realm of both good and evil. Above all, they were inextricably linked to the procreative world of nature, just as Woman herself is. Paglia explains in her book Sexual Personae:
“Nature is the seething excess of being… [it’s] cycles are woman’s cycles. Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns, beginning and ending at the same point. Woman’s centrality gives her a stability of identity. She does not have to become but only to be. Her centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks.”
Through her embodiment of the daemonic Anna reaches something akin to divinity — a “seething excess of being” that her husband, Mark, cannot access or understand. Once she no longer fits into the proper role of Wife and Mother, chaos reigns. Upon discovering that Anna has a lover, Heinrich, Mark descends into his own brief psychosis, wasting away in a hotel, rocking back and forth wildly. “You must restore order!” he finally yells, ‘You must leave him!”
Mark’s fear of Anna’s centrality — as both housewife and free woman, garden and serpent — results in his compartmentalization of her through a doppelgänger. While their son’s schoolteacher “Helen” looks exactly like his wife, she embodies all the qualities Anna has neglected and which Mark needs. Helen is soft spoken, stable, and motherly, yet still retains opinions of her own. The much murkier realm Anna occupies baffles Mark, for he believes that if he can’t control women, they must certainly be evil. Indeed he admits he’s “at war against women” to which Helen startingly refutes “It’s so sad that for you freedom seems to mean evil.”
For most of the film, Anna is a woman torn. Her madness comes from a similar place as Mark’s fear, for she cannot reconcile the different sides of herself. She desires freedom, but does not have the faith to become a complete being separate from men — “I cannot exist by myself because I’m afraid of myself,” she admits to Heinrich, “Because I’m the maker of my own evil… That’s why I’m with you. Because you say I for me.”
Little surprise that the film is also fraught with non-specific religious imagery, from the eclectic collection of religious books in Anna and Mark’s house (most likely bought haphazardly and never read), to the obsession with mentioning God in conversation. This vague uncertainty surrounding God is in part what leads to Anna’s hysteria. She is on a quest to restore her faith, which has been drained into nonexistence not just by her husband, but by conventional religion itself. Right before the famous “freak-out” scene in the subway tunnel, Anna stands helplessly in a church, whimpering as she stares up at the cold, unfeeling face of Christ. He is yet another male figure who will not answer her pleas.
Out of desperation to restore her faith — in herself, in her husband, in belief itself — Anna creates her own god by embodying the daemonic. It is a bloody, oozing, squid-like creature that is her child, lover, and idol all in one. Her ability to birth this entity organically, without needing a man, is proof of her completeness. By taking the ultimate “chance”, Anna has become the perfect being she once believed impossible. A far cry from her previous confession that she is “the maker of evil,” her eyes fill with ecstasy as she later asks Mark, “Do you believe in God?… It’s in me.”
The creature’s “excess of being”, when looked at with male eyes, is monstrous and terrifying. What Jude Doyle argues about the pre-patriarchal rule of Tiamat in Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, can also be applied to Anna’s creature: “[it] is frightening because it is organic” she explains, “fleshy, bloody, slimy, sexual, tied to a cycle of birth and death, governed by instinct and desire rather than set rules.” This daemonic femaleness is threatening to the man because it is mysterious and unpredictable; his usual methods of control and compartmentalization are useless. Heinrich, who wrote he saw “half of God’s face” in a postcard to Anna, is temporarily blinded once he lays eyes on the creature. The detectives, who Mark hires to follow Anna on her increasingly frequent rendezvous to see her “lover”, also react in terrified awe as they exclaim “Mein Gott!” But while the men recoil in horror Anna gazes with ecstasy — only Woman, a complete being in and of herself, can look upon the whole face of divinity in all its terrifying beauty.
That many modern women, including myself, see themselves in Anna is a testament to the psychological division we still carry with us everyday. We exist in a male universe, dominated by their perception and validation which is seen as more important than our own. Society tells us that to be perfect for a man is the ultimate goal: we must be desirable, interesting, and likeable, not to ourselves or to other women, but to them. The ever present male gaze effects even the simplest aspects of daily life; we play along with their fantasies both consciously and unconsciously. We become our own voyeurs, just as Anna confesses “I read that private life is a stage only I’m playing in many parts, and yet I still play them… You’re looking at me as if to tell me that I need to you to fill me up, as if I’m an empty space.” Author Margret Atwood echos these thoughts in a favorite excerpt of mine:
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy… Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
The psychological madness this breeds into the psyche of young women is extremely difficult to fight. While it is not always expressed overtly like Anna’s hysteria, the latency of such feelings creates its own kind of insidious terror. But through Anna I see hope — while we may not be able to physically birth God, we can find wholeness and divinity within ourselves divorced from the male gaze. Through the daemonic offal of blood and slime we can create our own beauty.
