Obsession (1976) is director Brian De Palma and writer Paul Schrader’s homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The title suits the plot of the film, but it also addresses De Palma’s own fixation with Hitchcock. Of all of Brian De Palma’s films Obsession is the most overtly Hitchcockian to the point of abstraction.
Obsession deals with the same themes of doubles and repetition as Vertigo but rendered in broad baroque gestures. Obsession takes all of the tropes of Vertigo, distills them to their essentials, and then allows them to be acted out in a soft-focus haze or slow motion. The aesthetics of Hitchcock are abstracted and realigned by De Palma to reveal the plasticity of the image as fetish object. Every shot is an homage to Vertigo and therefore becomes a fetish object in its own right.
De Palma, like Michael (Cliff Robertson), desires nothing more than to reenact a moment in time, perfecting it. For Michael it is the ransom of his wife and daughter, for De Palma it is Vertigo itself. De Palma does everything Hitchcock did visually in Vertigo and then repeats it, replaying the fetishized images over and over until the twist ending.
The incest in Obsession is akin to the stylistic incest of the intertextual relationship between the fetishized object Vertigo and the fetishistic program of Obsession. Both are closed circuits with taboo connotations that challenge the audience. Obsession, as an aesthetic program, devours Vertigo and in turn itself. Obsession is post-modernism at its purest and most aggressive.
Obsession as an exercise in storytelling fails. It is too abstract in its aesthetic concerns to effectively support its plot. Who and why doesn’t matter in Obsession, only the images and symbols are of concern. In this way Obsession is Brian De Palma’s most avant-garde film since Hi, Mom! (1970). Obsession is a study in the breaking down of the cinematographic langue.
As such, it’s easy to see why both Paul Schrader and audiences alike have rejected De Palma’s meditation on Hitchcock’s style. It’s a film that confounds any traditional narrative interpretation. However, taken as a work of post-modernist deconstruction, Obsession is one of the masterpieces of the seventies.
