Okay I’m sicka reading about this movie Obsession. Everywhere I look I see reviews of it which turn into commentary on Gen Z morals or…just culture.
Chill the eff out! This is a common fairy tale/ mythology trope, remember, wherein a mortal makes a very ill-advised wish which he or she has not thought through. Not in the least. The protagonist hasta find some one or some thing that will grant the wish exactly as formulated, and…hijinks ensue!
So, Semele is incinerated when Zeus grants her wish (which he has already rashly promised to do) to see him in his divine form. Tithonious wished for immortality—but forgot to wish for eternal youth! King Midas inadvertently turns his beloved daughter to a golden putti. In The Monkey’s Paw, said to be the inspiration for this movie, the decayed corpse of the wisher’s son is on his way to their address.
IS an entire generation really thinking, OMG this could happen to me, I better not get entangled with anyone?
Y’know what? Maybe their cultural education has been so …sparse, that that is actually possible.
(But hey, if you want a lesson in how to wish prudently, read A.S. Byatt’s " The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye".)
Seems more like another bunny-boiler movie than a deep dive into mythology. We get it: psycho stalkers are scary. And, yes, women are more likely to have borderline personality disorder. Fatal Attraction scared the bejesus out of guys in the 1980s. I guess it’s time for a revival.
Well, the middle-aged lady in Byatt’s story thinks long and hard about her wish after she releases the genie. She doesn’t wish to be “young again”—after all she might end up as an infant! She pronounces, “I wish my body looked the way it did the last time I really liked it.”. See? Specific. She knew what she was getting and that she would be happy with it; she’d already been there!
It raises an interesting philosophical aspect about wishes. It is safe for a person to wish for something she once had but has now lost – like her former (younger) body. It is not safe – or more likely to lead to unforeseen consequences – to wish for something a person never had before, like King Midas’ turning everything to gold. Or for that lady instead to have wished for a body like that of a 21 year old supermodel.
There are echoes here of the Biblical tale of the negative consequences of hiding the talent under a bushel instead of using it to accomplish things. If a person is given an opportunity, should she really use it to the max?
Just, it’s hard to know what the boundaries of 'the max" will be…
And also the wish-grantor is always very literal-minded. A woman who sez “I wish I hd the body of 21 year old supermodel” might find herself cradling a pulchritudinous corpse.
Since you mention the Bible, there is a much more apt example of this trope, except it’s the rash promise rather than the rash wish: the human sacrifice of Jephtha’s daughter (Judges 11).
(Scofield barges in and sez it’s all Daddy J’s fault for daring to think he could somehow reward God! He puts in the heading “Jephtha’s awful vow”. And God doesn’t spare the father or the child at the last minute that time. )
