Obsession, the box-office sensation directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, is a sign that the economics of Hollywood are changing, with internet-incubated stories overtaking superannuated IP. It also marks the arrival of a new film genre: heteropessimist horror, which channels the despairing view of relationships that is typical of Gen Z.
In Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston), a twenty-something music-store employee, tries and fails to ask out his friend Nikki (Inde Navarette). Everything changes when he buys a mysterious novelty item called “One Wish Willow” and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the entire world.” She does—with a demonic energy that reflects not her natural inclinations but the spell he has cast on her. That spell works as a metaphor for the loss of control suffered by individuals who fall in love: To be totally devoted to another, it turns out, is to lose your individuality, your will, your soul. Suddenly, a normal-seeming boy and girl are transformed into the crudest sex stereotypes: the clinging, hysterical woman and the abusive man who seeks to possess but refuses to take responsibility.
About three-quarters of Obsession’s audience is between eighteen and thirty-five. They can find the same dark view of heterosexual relationships in a number of on-trend shows this year. In the third season of HBO’s Euphoria, which premiered in April, Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie marries her high school sweetheart. White turns to black when a loan shark shows up and beats the groom to a pulp, revealing that he’d lied about his finances. Cassie cries, “It was supposed to be the best day of my life!”
In The Testaments, a Hulu series and follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale that debuted this spring, shots of a wedding are intercut with those of a woman’s execution. The Godfather did something similar when it showed the mob boss attending a baptism while his lieutenants carried out a series of hits. But that scene presented an ironic contrast between baptism and murder, and gained meaning from their obvious incongruity. The wedding scene in The Testaments, by contrast, suggests that marriage and death are very much alike.
“Marriage and death are very much alike.”
That is also the thesis of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, a new Netflix series that tells the story of a young couple a few days out from their wedding—which will prove to be a gruesome affair. Its director, the thirty-one-year-old Haley Z. Boston, told The New York Times: “I do have a bit of a secret subliminal message in the show … that heterosexuality is the real horror.”
In fact, the message is supraliminal. In the first episode, the couple listens to a true-crime podcast while driving down the road. A woman who survived having her throat slit explains, “When you lose a lot of blood you can actually feel euphoric. It was the same way I felt on my wedding day.” They stop at a diner, and the bride-to-be observes that some women have giant babies with “huge heads tearing everything.” She wants a very small baby. In the final episode, the groom underlines the theme: “Marriage destroys people.”
Camilla Morrone, the 28-year-old actress who plays the heroine, talked to the Times about her peers’ fears of marriage: “Will it feel like death? Will I feel like I’m chained to the bottom of the ocean?” These anxieties, she said, “have put my generation in a chokehold.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, a string of films explored the horrors of having children. Chillers such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976) explored a pedophobic anxiety that those perfect little angels were actually demons in disguise. Not coincidentally, the abortion rate more than doubled after Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973.
Heteropessimist horror likewise responds to social shifts. Marriages are happening later and less frequently, with one scholar projecting that one-third of today’s young people will reach age 45 without marrying. Young adults are having less sex. Even school dances seem to be declining. This fall, Wall Township High School in New Jersey canceled its homecoming dance due to lack of interest. Ribault High in Jacksonville, Fla., did the same after only twenty tickets were purchased for homecoming. Attendance drop-offs were also reported in California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
This retreat from relationships comes in the wake of #MeToo, which expressed a new sense that relationships are dangerous—especially when they involve women and men. In the 2019 essay that coined the term, Asa Seresin observed that heteropessimism “generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem.” The term encompasses everything from women’s everyday complaints about men’s failure to commit to more radical condemnations of men and marriage. It casts coupling between men and women as passe, even strange. In her 2015 memoir The Argonauts, the theorist Maggie Nelson wrote “heterosexuality embarrasses me.”
A dim view of conventional relationships is not confined to critical-theory seminars. One year before #MeToo took off, Pope Francis declared that “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null.” It’s hard to imagine a clearer indication of heteropessimism than a pope’s calling into question the majority of Catholic marriages.
Various voices have begun to push back against this negativity. Phoebe Maltz Bovy found it necessary to write a book arguing that “it does not make a woman frivolous or conventional to like men.” Magdalene Taylor insists in The New York Times that our “all-but-unprecedented sexual, social and romantic liberty” should make us more, not less optimistic about heterosexuality.
Obsession suggests a darker reading of the trends Taylor celebrates. Bear, inclined to lean on old formalities, hopes that asking a girl out on a date can lead to a serious relationship. His friend, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), takes a different approach. He gets the girl—by hooking up with her in a casual situationship. He has more confidence than his friend does, and not surprisingly, he is better able to navigate a deregulated sexual marketplace.
It is only the less capable, the less beautiful, the less prosperous who have need of antiquated forms. Indeed, many heteropessimist complaints center on the uncertainty of dating in modern life. What exactly is our status? Why hasn’t he texted me back? How will he respond if I ask for some definition in the relationship? The costs and benefits of sexual liberty are distributed unequally.
“The costs and benefits of sexual liberty are distributed unequally.”
A very different response to heteropessimism can be found in Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. Alice, a millionaire novelist, writes to her friend Eileen, the editor of a literary magazine, about the problems with heterosexuality—and the lack of a workable alternative.
“People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see,” Alice complains. “Traditional marriage … ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life.” She goes on to ask, “When we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it?”
Rooney reinforces this theme by having Eileen fall for Simon, an older man who is devoutly Christian. She finds “his paternalistic beliefs about women charming.” He has a “primal desire to subjugate and possess” her, which she finds sexy. Rooney connects heterosexuality to patriarchy, and suggests that maybe patriarchy isn’t such a bad thing.
Even if one accepts this provocation, a problem remains. Suppose that women do want a man they can look up to. Where are they going to find him? Simply hymning the importance of marriage won’t produce such men at scale. Neither will finger-wagging. What’s needed is a change in economic and social conditions, such that men have more to offer women than they currently do. Until that change comes about, the horrors of heteropessimism are unlikely to end.