The 200 Point Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto: Part 4, by Adam Lehrer
Bullet points 151 through 200 of the 200 Point Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto
151. Andrzej Żuławski Returns Home and Finds His Son Abandoned by His Wife for Several Hours
The Polish film artist and provocateur Żuławski was in a deep depression when he first went to New York to workshop the script that would eventually be turned into his arguable masterpiece Possession (1981). His marriage to Polish actress Malgorzata Braunek, with whom he shared a five-year-old son, was in free fall. Żuławski, exhausted by his travels between Paris and New York, found his wife slipping away from him. This came to a head in 1976 when, after coming home to Paris from the airport, he found his son alone in the apartment. The boy was neglected, covered in jam, and Malgorzata had abandoned him over seven hours previously. Żuławski divorced his wife, and the pain, anguish and rage that the split evoked in him was converted into fuel for his creative practice. Possession is the result of that mania.
In the film, an intelligence asset working for some Western government, played by Sam Neil, learns that his wife, played by Isabelle Adjani, is having an affair. Desperate to repair his marriage, Neil leaves his work and promises his wife to do anything necessary to save their family. It doesn’t work; while he leaves his job to save his family, she leaves her family to indulge in the dark forces of life. Neil is driven to the brink of madness trying to save his son while his wife cavorts with a strange lover, who we learn eventually to be none other than a tentacled Cthulu monster, and it seems like his attempts to snap her out of her lustful fugue are futile. There’s a scene in the film in which Neil returns home to find his son abandoned by his mother and covered in jam in the exact way that Żuławski discovered his own abandoned son. There can be no mistake then: Possession is a film about a male artist’s rage against a woman, and a rage against any woman is a rage against all women. Possession is one of the most powerfully misogynistic works of art ever.
Some feminist art critics, like Agata Pyzik here, have downplayed the misogyny in Possession in attempts to justify its artistry. But the reality is that to downplay the misogyny of the film is to downplay its artistry. Just as Houellebecq located Lovecraft’s racist paranoia as the source of his vibrant imagination, Żuławski’s misogynistic fury is the source of his most brilliant, accessible, and well-crafted film. Safety Propaganda, in principle, is against the suppressing of hatred. Hatred, for all its toxicity, is a vital aspect of the subjective experience. It is a universal state of being. Therefore, we support the exploitation of hatred. We embrace the hate, deconstruct it, and find the central truth that political correctness would have us obscure. Hatred and truth: they sometimes need each other.