Because you Say “I” For Me: The Doppelganger in Possession (1981)

Credit: Oliane Productions/ Marianne Productions/ Soma Film Produktion. Distributed by Gaumont

Andrez Żuławski’s Possession (1981) is a disturbed, sprawling film that borders on incoherence. But it’s a productive incoherence.

This is a film that is so raw that its filming led the lead, Isabelle Adjani, to both attempt suicide by its completion and win the Best Actress award at the 34th Cannes Film Festival. It’s so ambitious that as an exploration of divorce, it manages to incorporate espionage, body horror, the Cold War, possession (of course), Eastern spirituality, Western spirituality, murder, and nuclear apocalypse.

It attempts a lot, and critics have rightly suggested that it’s not always successful in pulling all of those disparate elements together. Still, its ambiguity is as much an asset as a liability: Possession’s fissures, inconsistencies, and indeterminacies are part of what make it so rich.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the film’s use of doppelgangers, which while being the key to understanding its deranged ravings, resists a single reading. What to make of them?

Plot

It’s either really easy or really hard to give a summary of Possession.

In short, Possession is an avant-garde, psychological horror film. It is about an international spy, Mark (Sam Neil), who returns to his East Berlin home, where his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), has been living with their son, Bob (Michael Hogben). Anna requests a divorce, and it’s revealed she’s been having an affair. As the film progresses, she is shown engaging in increasingly strange and violent behavior while having a second affair with a tentacled monster in a rundown apartment.

That’s an accurate enough summary, but it’s simplified to the point of disingenuity. Possession is a convoluted and hateful film through which Żuławski channels the venom of his own messy divorce. It’s confusing and painful to watch.

The Doppelganger: “Too Hard to Live With, Brother”

There’s no shortage of threads to pull on in Possession. Much has been (rightly) made of the film’s use of doppelgangers—doublings of Mark and Ana, who share the same electric green eye color.

Many commentators have interpreted the doppelgangers as reflecting the characters’ idealized versions of their partners. Thus, on this account, Mark’s unnamed doppelganger is a more confident and less emotionally needy version of Mark, while Anna’s doppelganger, Helen, is the ideal housewife.

That reading definitely tells part of the story, but a few complexities remain. Mark’s doppelganger is grown out of a literal monster that Anna nurtures on the blood of her murder victims. Anyone who sees it in its monstrous, larval form is horrified. The doppelganger isn’t shown as anything resembling Mark until the film’s final scene, when it idly watches Mark and Helen be shot by government agents before inexplicably pressuring a bystander to shoot at those same agents and fleeing to the roof.

Prince Charming, right? It’s hard to say what’s being idealized here. Anna is of course possessed (or something), but that doesn’t sound like the type of fantasy to which one would look for emotional comfort in response to a murderous and abusive husband. The doppelganger is arguably more controlling and homicidal than even the “real” Mark, though potentially more competent and self-assured (in an odd, distilled way).

In contrast, Mark doesn’t harvest Anna’s doppelganger from a monstrous, larval state. Instead, he finds her working as his son’s teacher, Helen. Notably, while everyone seems to find Anna’s tentacled monster to be hideous except Anna, no one seems to see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger except Mark. Helen is mystified when Mark attempts to unmask her as Anna when he first meets her. As Bob’s teacher, she knows Anna but has no idea that they look alike.

In a later scene, Bob asks Mark if he thinks Helen is more attractive than Anna (“our mommy”). The question doesn’t make sense—the two are identical in appearance. That’s the point. Bob isn’t Mark, so he doesn’t see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger. Mark sees Helen as a version of Anna because he’s blinded by his obsessive, solipsistic misogyny and can’t see women he’s attracted to on their own terms.

Of course, Helen isn’t a real-life doppelganger any more than Anna is possessed by a real-life supernatural spirit. Both strange occurrences reflect the way that the surreal horror of unhealthy relationships can manifest as mental health episodes. In a very different way, this relationship was wonderfully explored in anthropologist/philosopher João Biehl’s brilliant, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.

As in the case of Mark’s doppelganger, one question is how idealized Helen really is for Mark. After all, one could argue she is the one to initiate an affair with Mark when she goes to his home under the pretense of wanting to talk with Anna late at night. She sleeps with him (or some approximation of such) despite him being married and his wife not being home. She is right to then note that Mark will interpret this as confirmation of his angry, spiteful attitudes.

Thus, on this reading, while the doppelgangers have idealized elements, they retain a twisted undercurrent because neither Mark nor Anna are capable of imagining a doppelganger that isn’t refracted through the bitter prism of their failed marriage and codependence (the film ends with the two embracing for a final kiss, which is almost romantic until you remember all of the murder, private detectives, and vomiting of green goo). The doppelgangers are projections of crazed, manic minds.

Who’s Possessed? “We are all the Same. Like Insects! Meat!”

Seen from this perspective, while commentaries on the film often emphasize Anna’s possession, it could just as much be argued that it’s about Mark’s possession. Through the two characters, the film explores how dysfunctional romantic relationships can breed mental illness, which codes as “possession” in the film.

It’s interesting that Possession ends on a scene of Helen. As the sirens sound that indicate the start of the apocalypse, she turns her back on Mark’s doppelganger, who lurks creepily at the door. This is after she has defied Bob’s screaming protest not to let his father into the apartment.

It’s implied she would have let Mark in, but upon seeing that it’s the doppelganger, she turns her back on him, leaving him outside. On one level, this makes sense: Helen had previously said that she comes from a world where “evil takes physical form,” which would seem to suggest that she is equipped to see the doppelganger as a physical manifestation of evil (in this case, an “evil” bred of toxic emotional codependence).

Yet, the film heavily implies that the apocalypse is the result of Mark’s work as a double agent (via the famous pink socks MacGuffin). Aside from kicking off the apocalypse, Mark is a controlling, dishonest, and physically abusive murderer. One wonders: for someone who professes to be able to see evil in the flesh, how does that register for Helen—particularly given both her and Bob’s response to the doppelganger?

One take on it would be that Helen isn’t that understanding, and Mark’s impression of her as such is another manifestation of his biases and delusions. Alternatively, we could reframe it and see Helen as a nuanced, empathetic thinker capable of recognizing the flawed but well-intentioned undertones of Mark’s humanity. If Helen has any request for him in the film, it’s that he recognize her individuality—time and again, she challenges his self-pitying misogyny. Maybe she thinks he’s capable of more.

In a final reversal, maybe Helen is as blinded by her own preconceptions as any of the other characters. There’s no reason to take her at her word when she says she can perceive evil in the flesh (even if she thinks she can). Who’s to say how she sees things or why. In an ambiguously figurative and literal sense, it might only be when the twisted undercurrent of Mark’s and Anna’s dysfunctional relationship appears before her in physical form that her own preconceptions are punctured to the point that she has an inkling of the horror that’s at her (metaphorical but also literal) door.

Put differently, maybe Helen is in a sense as possessed as any of the characters.

Possession is a paranoid, cynical film. It’s too equivocal to provide closure for the endless loop of reflection it can inspire. Really, this is fitting--maybe the point of its indeterminacy about who or what is possessed is that we’re all vaguely possessed and indeterminate.