Class of 1981: Andrzej Żuławski’s POSSESSION and Reflections on the Destruction of a Marriage

When we decided to celebrate the films of 1981 this year for our “Class of” series, I knew immediately that I wanted to take on Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, which is a nearly impossible task for many reasons. One, the film is so layered and kinetic that it still defies categorization after 40 years, and two, so many other scholars have already provided their thoughtful analyses on Possession, so what could I possibly offer to the discussion? Truth be told, not much. Especially since it is a film that continues to leave me emotionally devastated with every single viewing, and it’s easily one of the most harrowing and thematically dense movies to be released during the 1980s.

So, instead of taking the scholarly route, I thought I’d come at Possession from a more personal perspective. Because as it turns out, today would have been my 20th wedding anniversary with my ex-husband, so why not write about one of the most devastating cinematic examinations of marriage to mark the occasion? That’s a perfectly normal thing to do, I’m sure (just so we’re clear: yes, that is a bit of sarcasm).

Anyway, one of the reasons that Possession is a movie that totally destroys me whenever I watch it is because of the truths I saw in Żuławski’s cinematic prose that directly correlated to the demise of my marriage. See, it wasn’t until I saw Possession in 2014 at a special screening during Beyond Fest that I finally had this huge revelation: regardless of how hard I tried to do things the “right” way, I became the villain in my own marriage. The truth of the matter is that I destroyed everything in that relationship without even thinking twice about it. Do I regret it after all these years? I do not. But in retrospect, I’ve come to realize that regardless of your intentions, the total breakdown of a marriage is something that completely transforms both people involved in that relationship in so many ways that you may not even realize it until years later. And it took me nearly seven years to recognize that that’s exactly what happened with me.

I also distinctly remember what happened after that first viewing of Possession back in 2014 after leaving the Egyptian. There I was, getting into my car to head home to this new ideal life that I’ve worked hard to build in the wake of my failed marriage, and I just absolutely lost it. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t even drive, so I pulled over and let the terror and guilt wash over me because it finally hit me after all those years just what I had done to my now ex-spouse. I don’t regret my divorce, but I regret how much damage I did throughout the course of the nearly two years between the moment I knew I wanted out of my marriage to when I walked out of that courtroom a free woman, no longer tethered to this life that I had no desire to be a part of anymore. And coming to terms with your own selfish destructive acts can be a brutal pill to swallow.

At the start of Possession, Sam Neill’s character, Mark, is returning home from a work trip, greeted by his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), and from the very first words they utter to each other at that moment, you know there’s already this huge emotional chasm between them, and their marriage is most definitely doomed in its current state. From there, things only get worse between Mark and Anna, and most of their issues stem from a lack of communication; they’re both talking to each other, but neither is truly hearing one another. It’s a recipe for disaster, with “disaster” being the formative word here because everything that follows in Possession is a total catastrophic meltdown between Mark and Anna.

While the meltdown of my marriage wasn’t nearly as dramatic or as overly complicated (there was no “Heinrich, and there certainly wasn’t a tentacle monster, either) as what happens between Anna and Mark here, there were some striking similarities that still make me wonder about the universality of this experience for any couple whose relationship is rapidly deteriorating. Very early on in Possession, Mark is desperate to try and appease his wife, who seems distracted by some other force in her life. Mark asks her, "What do you need?" as Mark is seemingly putting Anna’s needs before his own. That very quiet line, in a movie filled with these huge, emotional outbursts, is one that has always stuck with me because it was something said to me shortly after I admitted to my ex that I no longer wanted to be married to him.

To me, that line cuts into my soul like a hot knife, because every time I hear it, I immediately remember my answer. I won’t repeat it here, because again, that would turn this into a very different piece (this isn’t a therapy session, after all), but I just remember the pain I saw in his face as he realized I had already started to make plans for a future that wouldn’t include him. And honestly, back then, I was indifferent to that pain—I needed to be—but now, as I reflect upon everything that happened that day, I feel awful about how callous I was throughout that conversation because it’s not the person I truly am. Or so I thought.

In the cafe scene when Mark and Anna are trying to hash out their issues, Adjani’s character says, "No one is good or bad. But if it helps, I'll be the bad one." And that was precisely my approach to ending my marriage; I knew what I was doing was for the best for both of us, but I recognized that at the time, my ex did not see it that way. But I knew that if I could play the villain for him, it would eventually push him to the point where he would no longer try to hang on. So I did what I had to do, and it eventually worked.

Throughout Possession, Anna’s behaviors are often irrational, frenzied, and unpredictable. Her volatile actions cause irrevocable harm to both Mark and her son, Bob (Michael Hogben), as she begins disappearing for long periods of time, leaving them both to wonder whenever she’d return home. And while I’m ashamed to admit this, that was me throughout most of the initial separation period with my ex, up until almost the day that our divorce became official. Now granted, a lot of that was due to the fact that we were in the midst of the 2008 housing crash, and things had started to get rough financially.

At the time, I had to take on working three jobs while trying to get my writing career off the ground since my ex had decided to prioritize his education, which put most of the financial burden on me. So, to make things easier, I began sleeping on an air mattress four nights a week at my mom’s (since she lived near my main job), and then I was crashing at a friend’s house on the weekends so that I could stay close to where I was working part-time (the house we were living in at the time was about 40 miles from my job and with gas prices at over $5 a gallon, it was just more economical to live out of a suitcase for ten months, which is awesome when you’re paying a mortgage for a house you rarely see).

In any case, I never really checked in with my ex during most of that time, and I just began creating this life completely separate from him. I had new hobbies. I had new circles of friends. I started going to all these music festivals and experiencing a life that I had put on hold to cater to the demands of domesticity. He had no idea at all as to who I was becoming. And in the brief moments when our paths would cross at home, it was like living with a total stranger. I no longer knew him, and he no longer knew me. That’s one of the biggest themes in Possession that always crawls right under my skin—this idea that this person who you thought you knew, that you pledged to share your life with, suddenly was someone who suddenly knew nothing about you and vice versa. That’s a frightening proposition, even when you know in your heart that it needed to be that way.

Throughout most of Possession, both Mark and Anna are driven by desperation, albeit their end goals are much different. Mark just wants his wife back so that he can maintain the status quo of their relationship as it existed in the past, while Anna’s desperation comes from a dark and terrifying place. And in the case of what happened in my life, the situation was very similar. Again, I won’t go into specifics because my ex never asked to have his personal life on display, so I don’t want to betray that—even now—but I can say that there were moments when he crossed a few lines out of desperation, and his actions drove me into some very dark and destructive places. I mean, I wasn’t chopping up bodies to satiate my tentacled lover that I frequently visited at our dilapidated love nest or anything like that. But let’s just say that there was a lot of Captain Morgan consumed over the course of that year or so, and many nights spent on the floor singing loudly to my friend Cully’s cat as I did my best to cope with everything.

Throughout Possession, Żuławski touches upon the concept of doppelgängers, which is like a replicated version of one’s self. In my marriage, there were two versions of me: the one that everyone expected me to be, and the other was the version of myself that longed to break free and hated having to live up to everyone else’s expectations. I wanted to write. I wanted to hang out and drink. I wanted to enjoy the things I enjoyed without having everyone look down on me (which included horror). I didn’t want to think about mortgages anymore. I didn’t want someone else’s debt hanging over me. I didn’t want to have to worry about existing on other people’s clocks anymore, especially during the holidays. Ultimately, I just wanted to be happy, and the life that I had been living since I was 19 years old was just the facade of happiness. Inside, I was constantly terrified of screwing up and I was always nervous about my inability to be an idealistic wife who was able to meet my partner’s needs. I was always putting myself second and somewhere along the way, I lost myself in all that pretending.

Beyond that, I worried about failing to meet the familial expectations that came along with my marriage because there were a lot of those, too. I did a great job of hiding it—often enthusiastically—but there was an enormous pressure that weighed on me steadily and I spent many nights crying myself to sleep (my ex worked a lot of nights, so I was often alone then) because somehow I always felt like it was never going to be enough. And I’ll admit that some of it was my own doing, because I have always pushed myself too hard. But in many cases, most of that pressure came from elsewhere and one day, I just cracked. I couldn’t be that person anymore. That person who everyone thought I was didn’t actually exist. She wasn’t real. The person I am today—that’s who I was then. I just had to spend some time finding her on my own terms.

But the reality of the situation was that everything that went wrong in my marriage boiled down to one thing: I could never be the wife that I knew my ex needed. No matter how hard I tried. And I did try. I really did. But the funny thing about love is that even though I was no longer in love with him, I still loved him enough to recognize that he deserved the chance to build a life with someone who would be there for him in ways I knew I never could be. I had to rid myself of my metaphorical doppelgänger and finally live my life the way I wanted, regardless of how selfish that may have seemed.

Which brings us to Possession’s showstopper moment. I don’t think it’s out of turn to say that Isabelle Adjani’s miscarriage/subway breakdown in Possession is probably the most unnerving and iconic scene in the film. It’s a haunting and dizzying sequence that long stays with you, regardless of your life experiences. But for me, that moment hits me hard for very specific reasons. In fact, I had my very own “subway” moment on New Year’s Eve 2008, at a Hum concert of all places. Throughout this whole process of leaving and divorcing my ex, I was pretty anti-emotional about the whole thing. I rarely ever let the cracks in my armor show, as I always felt like showing strength was the best way to demonstrate that I knew exactly what I was doing.

But that night, on the eve of a new year that was sure to bring about so many changes in my life, the enormity of everything just hit me (during the song “Stars,” which sounds like such a cliché , I know) and I broke down. I hit the floor so hard and everything that I had been holding in for 18 months poured right out of me. All my anger. All my fear. All my sadness. All my uncertainty. It all just came spilling out right there on the floor of the Double Door that night. I had just snapped. Thankfully, my friends were pretty understanding (especially for a bunch of dudes in their twenties who were just looking to go out to a show and didn’t need to deal with my emotional baggage), and even though I was a wreck, they didn’t judge me. They were just there for me, and that simple act of kindness meant everything to me (and it still does to this day). It was the first time in a long time where I truly needed someone else to be there for me, and they all were.

And now, here I am, 20 years to the day when I walked down the aisle so I could marry my high school sweetheart, and I’m left ruminating on how I could just so easily destroy someone else’s life the way that I did with my ex. I’m not one of those divorcees who delights in how much pain I was able to inflict on someone else. In fact, it’s the opposite, really, as I may have acted selfishly, but I tried my best not to be cruel. I have never doubted my decision to move on with my life and pursue my own happiness elsewhere, but I do still feel terrible about how I acted so that I could get to that point. I was the only person he had ever dated and loved until then, and I had to destroy that love in order to fully transform into who I am now. This is akin to the conflict that Anna and Mark inflict on each other throughout Possession, which also destroyed the lives of those caught in the crosshairs of their marital strife, including their young son.

It may sound weird to say this, but for as twisted as it is, I always find the final moments of Possession to be slightly comforting (this does not include poor Bob, of course). And it’s not because I want the monsters to win, but because in the end, we’re left with the “ideal” versions of Anna (technically Helen) and Mark in the wake of all that destruction. I know I’m slightly skirting the point of Żuławski’s thesis by actually finding the positive in this rather negative and disturbing situation, but after all this chaos and pain, both Anna and Mark are made into better versions of themselves if nothing else.

And while I’m not exactly a monster that has finally transformed into a human being or anything of that nature, the weight of the experiences of my divorce ensured that I was always going to work hard in all of my future relationships so that I never had to cause someone else this kind of pain again. Thankfully, I met the love of my life in June 2009, just a few months after my divorce went through, and if there is one positive here, it’s that I finally have the happiness and peace that I never thought I’d ever get to experience. And I believe the same could be said for my ex, as he remarried years ago as well.

So, while the ending to our story had far less catastrophic implications than we experience at the end of Possession, I do think the universality of Mark and Anna’s tumultuous journey throughout the film is a cathartic one for anyone who has to be the “bad guy” in breaking up a relationship. I had always understood that I had hurt my ex throughout this process, but it took Żuławski’s unflinchingly raw examination of emotional trauma to make me fully understand and reckon with the enormity of my actions all those years ago. It’s a harsh truth to have to live with—when you realize you became the villain in someone else’s life—but I still do not regret moving on, either, regardless of the emotional fallout we both experienced back then.

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