son and heir #6: damage
Many people seem to be coming just now to the awareness that humanity does not follow a linear path of technical or moral progress. The same is true of fiction. A work of fiction from the 2020s, ‘knowing what we know now’, is not necessarily superior to any given earlier work. This principle is illustrated by the 2023 Netflix limited series Obsession, an adaptation of the 1992 movie Damage, itself an adaptation by David Hare of Josephine Hart's 1991 novel. I wouldn't have watched Obsession except that I am trying to gather material for an essay about father-son incest, more on which later.
Damage (1992) stars Jeremy Irons as Stephen Fleming, an up-and-coming English MP. He is husband to Ingrid, father to twenty-something Martyn and child Sally. One evening Stephen meets Martyn's new partner Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche) and they fall into an all-consuming affair. Anna reveals to Stephen that her late brother Aston’s suicide followed from her refusal, despite their ambiguously incestuous closeness, to let him have her ‘all to himself’. On the final night of Aston’s life, fifteen-year-old Anna and a family friend kissed without knowing Aston was watching; Aston ‘went mad’, complaining that ‘they’re all going to fuck you’; he came into Anna’s room, wanting ‘to sleep in [her] bed’; Anna locked him out and listened to him beg for forgiveness until he went silent. ‘Damaged people are dangerous,’ Anna tells Stephen. ‘They know they can survive.’ Unfortunately Martyn arrives at Stephen and Anna's fuck-flat, discovers them sweatily fucking, and meets his death by falling backward into the stairwell. Stephen's marriage and career die on impact, too: he ends the movie disgraced and alone in a bare flat with an enormous photo of Martyn, Anna and himself on the wall.
Damage, like many other narratives about sexual taboo, works in the gothic language of doubling and mirroring. Anna's mother notes that Martyn resembles her late son, but Martyn and Anna also resemble each other, with slight builds and schoolboyish hair. Anna's wardrobe, monochrome and structured, typifies a very '90s kind of female masculinity that couldn't be replicated onscreen today without accusations of transgenderism (it was trans then too, the public just hadn't caught on). Anna is fucking her brother through Martyn, and Stephen is fucking his son through Anna. When Martyn finally witnesses Stephen and Anna together — naked, joined as one — he sees himself as his father fucking Anna, and himself as Anna being fucked by his father, perhaps even himself fucking/being fucked by himself.
The world of Damage is empty and silent. The characters are ghosts, temporarily possessing the roles England has assigned them. No dialogue is exchanged between Stephen and Anna the first time they have sex: Stephen arrives at the address Anna has given him, and Anna sinks from the bed to the floor in a sort of Christ-on-the-cross pose. When Stephen comes, he cries out as if in sudden, serious pain. Anna’s stories about her brother are offered as explanation for her terror of possessiveness, but everything else about them — about her — is inexplicable. What does she mean that she and her brother ‘grew closer and closer’, that she loved him, that on his final night he wanted to sleep in her bed? Is she lying? Is she omitting parts of the truth? In a voice-over at the end of the movie, Stephen tells the audience he ‘saw her once more only’, at an airport, with the former lover who played a pivotal role in her brother’s suicide, and with a child — but is Stephen lying? Omitting parts of the truth?
We never really know the Anna Barton of Damage. The crucial thing about her is that we sense there is something to know. Not so with Stephen, Ingrid or Martyn, who, as soon as they fall off the track laid out for them at birth, disintegrate. It's true that the viewer, left to decide the truth for themselves, might be a cruel interpreter. One might see Anna as the unwilling catalyst of patriarchy's self-destruction; another might decide that Anna is a remorseless manipulator who uses sex and sob stories to lure otherwise blameless men to their doom. But the risk the movie takes in leaving itself open to 'bad' interpretations is a signal of trust in the audience to accept, even to find pleasure in the ambiguity.
Obsession (2023) is just really bad. It exhibits all the sins of a narrative whose purpose is to communicate that it knows ‘what we know now’. Any flickers of eroticism in the sex between Anna and William [FKA Stephen] are firmly stamped out by demonstrations of Consent and Agency so heavy-handed they might have come from a Tumblr post. In their first sex scene, William enters the fuck-flat and Anna holds up her hand to signal ‘stop’, whereupon William dutifully goes still. She lies back on the floor and extends her arms in the same Christ-like attitude, but it’s only when she says ‘Yes’ that he descends to fuck her. Remember: it is important to establish consent before sex, and consent means saying ‘yes’. That is what we have learned since 1992. (Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?) Later, William is fucking Anna while she’s in rope bondage, but he complains that he wants to read her diary and she tells him to ‘earn it’, so thankfully we’ve established that it’s the good kind of bondage where we all know the woman has agency.
But if Obsession really does know better, why jettison the sexually ambiguous elegance of 1992-Anna’s costuming in favour of a sort of Zara lookbook that — despite the standard adaptation of menswear via blazers paired with corset tops, sheer button-downs that advertise the bra underneath, etc — insists on an inarguable sexual dimorphism? 2023-Anna shows cleavage and shoulders, wears colour, has a chin-length ‘pageboy’ haircut that would doubtlessly prevent anyone from misidentifying her as a boy. Anna’s mother still says that Jay [FKA Martyn] looks like Anna’s dead brother, but Anna and Jay look nothing alike. Anna is a woman, and we all know what a woman looks like. And if we can identify them by sight, we can identify them unerringly as victims of men.
2023-Anna is, of course, a victim. Sorry, sorry, I mean, yes, a ‘survivor’, but like, of a kind of sexual violence that was definitely not her fault. Upset by her mother’s comparison between her new fiancé and her dead brother, Anna tells William that Jay is ‘nothing like’ her brother: ‘He’s not cruel. He doesn’t need to possess me.’ (I’m not sure a character like Anna would really be so certain that her partner was incapable of abusing her.) William clocks her as someone to whom something was done: ‘What did Aston do to you?’ 2023-Anna performs a strange retelling of 1992-Anna’s story: ‘I finally said no to him. He came into my bed. I said no, and he destroyed himself.’ I have the sense that this telling of the story is meant to establish, in a way the 1992 version didn’t, that Aston was an abuser and Anna was abused. The ambiguity that persists — ‘I finally said no to him’ leaves open the possibility that she might have said ‘yes’ before — is merely an accident of half-hearted writing, an unwillingness really to struggle through the difficulty of using language to make meaning of sexual violence.
After Jay is dead and the relationship with William has fallen apart, Anna confronts her mother. ‘Aston loved you so much,’ the mother says. Anna says, ‘You should have stopped him. All those nights he came to my room, you should have stopped him!’ So the blame is assigned finally not to the perpetrator himself but to the mother who never stopped him. The mother is short, grey-haired, wrinkled, not especially slender. The only thing worse than the patriarchal violence visited on the young, pretty woman is the old, ugly one who allows it to happen.
In the final episode Anna runs away to — the south of France? — and leaves a nightclub with a man who then tries to rape her in a corridor. She yells stop, she walks away; when the man persists, she punches him, and he leaves her alone. (Perhaps he goes off and kills himself after.) Yelling stop, punching your would-be rapist: is that what a damaged person does that allows them to survive? At the very, very end, Anna goes to therapy. God help us! Take us back to 1992, when they still did psychoanalysis!