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Obsession Special Part 1: The Beautiful House · Divine Dialogue

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello listeners and welcome to the Divine Dialogue Podcast, where we dig deeper into the trove of wisdom and guidance stories have to offer.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever watched a movie and felt moved?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Felt called to make a change or reflect more deeply on your own life?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: If so, this podcast has a lot to offer you.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So happy, happy, happy Halloween Eve to all of you listening today.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: If this is your first episode, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a returning listener, welcome as well back to the podcast.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I will be starting my part one of two of the 2026 movie Obsession.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to I gave kind of a breakdown of how I was going to approach this two-parter special here, but I will essentially do part one will be covering the beautiful house, which, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, that is referencing how Bear lives in this fantasy world in his head about him and Nikki.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the beautiful house.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna be part one, and then tomorrow's episode, part two, we'll be covering the screaming basement that he built over, which is not just Nikki, but also his own basement, because we do see in his life that he has a pretty dark, dank, you know, kind of miserable life.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's living in his grandmother's house who's deceased, and as far as we can tell, he hasn't like adjusted the house or done anything with it, and then his cat dies.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Jade knew I was gonna be talking about the cat, so now she's chiming in.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: His cat dies because he leaves medication out, and so we know that his existence is pretty like undeveloped, like he lives in a pretty miserable situation, and so he's got his own screaming basement, and that's why he wants to build a beautiful house over because it's a lot easier to build a fantasy or basically make things look good, even when there's a lot of rot and unhealed stuff underneath, like in the foundation.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what he chooses to do.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So for part one, we're going to talk about the beautiful house kind of motif of the movie that I think is running through Bear's psyche when he, you know, becomes the villain in the movie.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: I would just say, uh, to start off this series, which I will also mention for episode two, that this is going to be like I've marked Dr.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep as explicit.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I will mark any movie that's an R-rated movie as explicit because we are going to be talking about some things that could be triggering.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just going to put that out there for a movie like this, since it is an R-rated movie.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially for the Beautiful House, we're not going to do the traditional scene recap, soul, meaning, personal mirror, you know, rhythm exactly as I usually do because this is going to be covering kind of the theme of the movie as a whole, broken into two parts.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So for the beautiful house, I would say that Bear also lives in a screaming basement himself.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that it's his own free will to do so.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he has The Beautiful House primarily just centers around his obsession with Nikki.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, in the movie, we're kind of led to believe that Nikki is obsessed because she's, you know, bewitched into obsession, but actually he's obsessed with her.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And his entire beautiful house idea hinges on them being a couple.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like he just has this very obsessive idea of a romantic, you know, infatuation with her.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, obviously I'm not a psychologist, but perhaps a bit of a love addiction type of fantasy going on with her because we see him in his bed after he's come home to his cat dying from the medication that he had left out.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's on Instagram just looking through her pictures.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like he really is, you know, even when she's not around, he's spending a lot of his time fixated on her as like a probably because he's pretty miserable by himself and in his own existence, she represents like a a place, like an escape hatch for his mind to go to.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's his beautiful house fantasy.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: He wants a relationship with her.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what I really love about the movie is we see, especially early on in the the cursing of Nikki that he does.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Beautiful House is probably gonna be shorter than the Screaming Basement because honestly, the Screaming Basement is definitely more of the movie since it is a horror movie.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: But what I want to touch on is so basically we see this is like a threshold point when early on when she's been cursed, she's already acting very strange, and we see snippets of the real Nikki show up randomly, like in the beginning, when she walks back to his car after he drops her off and doesn't know why she's back there, or like when they're kissing in his bed, and then she snaps out of it.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: We see her snap out of it a couple times.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's already given some indication that something is off, and he even looks in his back seat of his car at the one wish willow to be like, you know, what the fuck?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is she acting this way?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So he has indications that something is abnormal going on with her.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: But then she shows up at his door after a work day, and that's kind of where I want to start this beautiful house because this is really where we he gets like a very short-lived trial run at a relationship.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can't even really call it that because she's obsessed with him against her own will.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: But what I love about this is per particularly is that she's shrouded in darkness, so she is a screaming basement in front of him, but he is so delusional that he sees a beautiful house because she comes up with a completely ridiculous excuse, like, oh yeah, you know, I was wasted, I was on MDMA, and like I didn't know, and she's doing all this like coy stuff, and you know, eventually she says, like, well, I know you like me, bear, you know, and then he can't even admit that he likes her when she gives him such an opening, just like he couldn't admit it before he curses her when she deliberately asks him if he likes her after he calls her freaky Nikki, knowing that she doesn't like it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he can't even admit to his feelings when she's giving him a completely open door to do that.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: He still makes her say it first, which might be part of his beautiful house idea, like that he never has to be vulnerable.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He can just, like, she can just come to him and fulfill his fantasies, and he doesn't have to have any kind of risk of discomfort or you know, anything that would push him off of feeling completely stable even for a moment because he just can't handle discomfort at all.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, so she, you know, eventually it pans to when they confess their feelings for each other, like this montage of you know, them together and like super affectionate and kissing and dating seriously, and they're like having breakfast and everything's happy, like it looks like a literal beautiful house.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like they look like a couple, you know, newly in love with each other, and that's his fantasy.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so for that very brief time, we see this like different scenes of them cooking and going on dates and coming over, and it just looks like such you know, nice relationship.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the beautiful house, it's very short-lived, and we even see like little hints of this.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is something I really want to focus on in terms of kind of where the beautiful house in the screaming basement overlap here because towards the end of this montage, it's it's kind of like subtle things, but the music changes from like pretty upbeat to it starts to sound a little bit eerie.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're watching a movie together, Bear is watching the movie, and Nikki is still watching him, and he like tilts her head with his hand back to the screen.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's like other things where she's trying to get his attention and he like kind of redirects her away from him.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I really think that the reason why the beautiful house becomes the screaming basement very quickly is because, and this is kind of a theory that I had when I was watching this all the way to the end, is that Nikki, the reason why it looks pleasant for however long it is, because I was thinking about in terms of you know how we fall in love and like the science behind the infatuation stage and how that can last, I think anywhere from like six months to maybe a year and a half, something like that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like during that time, however long that time is supposed to represent, we're not entirely sure how long it is, but I really think that the reason why that worked, quote unquote, as a beautiful house relationship in terms of how it seemed to be, is because Bear, although he's not cursed, cursed and bound to Nikki like Nikki is cursed and bound to him, his infatuation for her is close enough in frequency, like energetic frequency, that it doesn't bring out the the freaky Nikki that we start to see later.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think freaky Nikki primarily emerges because Bear shifts from the very normal and natural infatuation fantasy, you know, in love, like falling in love phase to he's more settled.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's more in the settled part of the relationship, which is not as obsessive, it's very, it's a lot calmer.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that triggers a freaky Nicky response because she is tethered.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: She really can't, she's kind of like a dog that's like tied to a pole in the backyard.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: She can't move any further than that chain will allow her to move, and the chain, of course, being the one which will occur, and he's free to move, and I think she feels that.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like when he settles into his, you know, comfortable state of the relationship being like a stable part of his life, he's not as roller coaster-y anymore, and she is stuck on that roller coaster forever, and so the beautiful house starts to gradually turn towards the screaming basement, pretty much after that montage, because then we get the dinner scene, which Indy Neverett is now famous for, like that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, don't do that.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna try to replicate it because that's that's her line, but like she nailed that, and that's where she got a lot of attention is for that scene.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason why we kind of see the beautiful house start to crumble is because Ian.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, they work with, you know, they're two friends at the music store, and so Ian is very Ian and Sarah are both very perplexed by why Nikki and Bear are suddenly like all over each other and in love and dating all seriously when they were just all friends like two seconds ago.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ian calls Bear because Nikki had told Bear after she was cursed at the very beginning that her father had cancer.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ian calls Bear with news that she lied about that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Bear, this is also a huge point in where he becomes undeniably the villain in the movie.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think he's not the villain in the movie, please go to therapy because he's the villain in the movie.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: He is so obsessed with keeping his fantasy going, and he continues to do this.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even after this point.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about a few other scenes where the beautiful house he tries so hard to hang on to the beautiful house, even after the beautiful house goes from being like 95% of the picture to 5% of the picture.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: He is still trying to ignore the screaming basement, even when it becomes pretty much the whole canvas.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: He is so focused on maintaining this beautiful house fantasy.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, Ian tells him that, you know, Nikki lied about her father having cancer.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: He goes back to the table, she asks, why, you know, what was going on on the phone, and he asks, you know, does your father have cancer?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Does your father really have cancer?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then she does that no, no, no line where you're not entirely sure what she's doing, but she's not saying no, he doesn't have cancer, she's saying don't cause a rift.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because ironically enough, like, so he has this beautiful house fantasy.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: She also is bound by that same fantasy because if he's not happy, she can't be okay.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Even though part of her is fighting this and resisting this, the cursed part of her is so strong that if things are rocky, then she like her beautiful house illusion also shatters and she freaks out.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where we really see the beautiful house.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: He still tries to hang on to that because as soon as she freaks out about the question, he just does what anyone who cannot handle an ounce of conflict does, and he says, because she's like, I thought we were having a nice date, and he's like, We are, we're having a nice date, we're having a nice date.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, he gets her to sit down because she's making a scene at the restaurant in front of everybody, and she's like, So why does it matter?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, It doesn't matter to me.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then we cut to probably the most disturbing scene in the movie where he is essaying her, you know, in his bed, and she looks completely like just a lifeless doll, where you know, the cursed part of her might be enjoying it because he wants, you know, to fuck her after all that insanity, which should make him if he if he actually had any care for her and love for her, he would not do that.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: But because it still represents his beautiful house fantasy, he's like, oh, this is the best thing in the world, you know.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really the huge turning point where we see more of this of the screaming basement show up because then, you know, he wakes up and she's acting all strange, which I'll kind of cover that more in the second part because we're gonna split it that way.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna kind of cover the remnants, the last bits of the beautiful house, because there's a couple more scenes here that I wanted to touch on that have to do with preserving the beautiful house.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one is gonna be right after that night, where he wakes up and he talks to her about what happened the night before.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, she has this, like, I'm so sorry, like, and then she gives him this really creepy smile, like, is this better?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, because she's trying to figure out what he wants to see because you know, he took away her authenticity, so the best she can do is mimic like Nikki, but she's not actually Nikki, and so he says it's one of the funniest parts, actually, when she smiles and she's like, How's this?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: and he's like, Not great.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: But she leans in, you know, and says, Come here, and then she kisses him, and you see it in his expression that he is like buying into it again, like because she kisses him, that gives him enough of the beautiful house.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like he says, you know, I love you because he's breathless by that kiss.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's all it takes for him to ignore that she lied about her father having cancer, for him to ignore that she was just in his bedroom playing, you know, musical chairs, literally as a chair herself in the corner, you know, sobbing like crazy, and then you know, she gets back into bed and runs fucking this weird ass like step that she does with the flower pot, gets back into bed, and then he's about to get up and she screams, stay at him.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's willing to overlook all of that because the beautiful house popped back up for a brief moment in the form of a kiss, and he can't resist his fantasy.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: He's just so in love with and attached to his fantasy idea of how she fits into his world.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, he is just so married to that idea.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so then, you know, she's actually off that day.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to work, she had duct tape the door shut.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna completely ignore that too.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: She stands watching him, starts pissing herself because now she can't do anything without him.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then we cut to work where she had packed him a lunch, and we find out that she had put his dead cat in the sandwich, and so he had a cat sandwich.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And but that's not enough for him to give up on his beautiful house.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, he he realizes it's cat because she wrote a little note in his lunchbox because they had talked about him being a food critic, and she writes on there, What's the verdict, cat?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So he knows it's a cat, it's his cat that's in the sandwich.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then Ian invites him to a boy's night.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you know, trying to avoid conflict there as well.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he calls because he's starting to get kind of spooked because you know, things are getting more and like progressively more intense, and he practices a conversation about telling her you can't cook the cat.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's insane.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's insane.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he opens his one wish willow, you know, gets the box out.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's looking at the phone number on the back for customer service, and he calls it.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he this is this is the last stop, I would say, of him.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually not quite, but pretty close to the last stop, but he's still really trying.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: The motherfucker doesn't call to cancel the wish.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: He initially calls to alter the wish.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So he still wants to hang on to his beautiful house fantasy.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: He still wants control over her, he still wants her to be bound to him, he still wants her to, you know, like he says later, he kind of exclaims later in frustration, just be Nikki.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he she can't be you dumb fuck because you took her autonomy from her, you took her free will from her.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I sound passionate about this because I am, because I think that this is a really good movie to kind of show the really sick and twisted, you know, patriarchal influence of women, how they're kind of trained to center what men want.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like a lot of men, as long as she acted normal and wasn't doing all this crazy shit, they really wouldn't even care that she doesn't have the free will because she's actually just there to serve them and make them happy.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this movie has a lot of things in it that if you know you are seeing the motivations of him and what is driving the sick stuff that he's doing should piss anyone off.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: But he so he calls and you know they tell him, well, you know, the wish can go away if you die.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's you know, we're kind of given a sneak preview here of what's gonna what potentially could happen for this wish to go away, this curse to go away.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then the customer service representative says, you know, well, we actually can't cancel a wish.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like a joke that, like, you know, they have this whole number, but you can't actually do anything once you've done something.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he asks Bear, do you want to speak to her?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then he's like, Who?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Nikki.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Nikki is screaming, and that's where the screaming basement really takes over the story.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: She's screaming in the background, and the little bitch coward that he is, he just hangs up the phone, you know, because he doesn't know how to deal with the reality that he created this screaming basement by building this beautiful house over it because he didn't excavate the pain inside of him.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So his beautiful house is built over a screaming basement, and he drags Nikki into that same situation.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, on my TikTok post, I just want to point this out.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I strategically chose the images that I did is because if you look at Nikki in the top left where it says beautiful house, she's a beautiful house by herself.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: She has dreams, she has aspirations, she wants to go on with her life, she wants to move on to bigger and better things, she wants to be a writer.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think partially that was also his motivation because she didn't want to stay at the music store anymore.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like she wanted to go on and do other things, and he wanted her to stay in a place that was comfortable for where he was.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so he, you know, cursed her.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: That you can look at it that way.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I chose the pictures because top left, Nikki is by herself.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's in a beautiful house by herself.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Top right is Bear and Nikki in that infatuation stage where they're kissing at work, and he only has a beautiful house because of her.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: She has a beautiful house without him, and then bottom left is Bear when he considers, you know, swallowing the pills at a lethal dose to, you know, end the wish and end his life.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then bottom right is Bear and Nikki after she has also cursed him at the very end.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that on purpose because Nikki by herself is a beautiful house.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Bear and Nikki together is a temporary beautiful house because he needs her to have a beautiful house because he refuses to do any work on himself.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Bottom left is Bear in the screaming basement by himself because ultimately Bear by himself without doing any healing and any work and any acknowledgement of his, you know, healing that he has to do to actually have a real beautiful house.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's over.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: In a screaming basement when he's alone.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then them together at the bottom right, he had dragged her into his screaming basement by the end.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of why I chose those pictures and put the text where I did, because I thought that they were really good visuals to explain kind of what I'm going with as I approach this movie to interpret it.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, he where was I with the wish?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he tries to alter it initially.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then he's like, okay, I want to cancel it.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Then he hangs up the phone because he can't handle hearing the truth, which is she's screaming because you took her free will away.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: So she's literally trapped in this vessel that's not hers.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you are, you know, still trying to maintain this facade, this image, this look of things.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we start seeing more and more because he's not, again, as infatuated with her as he was, that this these cracks in the foundation of this very poorly constructed, beautiful house are really starting to show the screaming basement underneath it.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, he comes home.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's planning this whole conversation about talking to her about the cat.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: She is standing there in her own mess because she can't do anything without him.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they end up going together to the boys' night because she does her blood curdling scream again when he says, I'm just gonna go by myself.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he takes her with her, or takes her with him, and then so there's one more, one more scene, I would say, the beautiful house that he tries to hold on to, and that is after because I'm gonna cover some of this other stuff more in detail for the screaming basement part.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the beautiful house, they come back home because there's an incident where Nikki flips out of this cursed state and into her real state, and so it's a very scary incident, which I'll go into in the next episode.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: But they come home, she is sitting at the table, he's sitting at the table, he gets up to go to the bathroom, and he's you know, frustrated at this point because she's acting, she's acting in a way that is disturbing his fantasy, and he doesn't like it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's really what he's upset about.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's not at all upset about, you know, her.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's upset about he doesn't, he's not getting the image and the look that he wants, and so he's having a really hard time with that.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean he doesn't know what to do because you know he says he he says some very important things here that shows he's still very much unaware of what he's done.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's like, everything was normal, I don't understand like what's going on here, you know, why are you acting this way?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's like, everything was normal, everything was good.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then he apologizes, you know, because she's starting to get upset, and then he's like, you know, you're beautiful and you are normal, but this like the what you're doing now is not okay.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he's trying to get her to behave in a way that maintains his beautiful house.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then he asks her, and this is like the first, and keep in mind now, because I'm kind of scrolling through this movie to refresh myself a bit as I'm talking, but we're an hour and 16 minutes into the movie.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's only 35 minutes left at this point.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is his first question of actually seeking truth in this movie.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't even count calling one wish willow because he you know called to initially, he wanted to just change the wish.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: He still wanted to keep her in prison, but he just wanted to change it because she was acting too freaky for his own liking.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So he asks her, Do you even like me?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And she says, What, Bear of I love you, like of course I love you.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then he's like, No, no, no, no, no.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Do you like me?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you like me at all?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then he asks, Is Nikki happy?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because he knows that he's dealing with something that is not Nikki, like she's not acting like Nikki.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And probably this, you know, cursed version of her says yes, and then she smiles all creepy and she says, I'm your freaky Nikki.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he knows, you know, like, yeah, because she hates that being called that.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really sad because, you know, this poor girl, she's like trapped in his beautiful house fantasy, which is actually her screaming basement, which she doesn't care as long as it's beautiful enough on the outside.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, you know, he's trying to negotiate with her now.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you know, we need to take space, but she can't take space.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of goes back to that tethered thing I was saying about like if it's a dog like tied to a leash or tied to a pole in the yard, and I don't mean to refer to her as a dog, but I'm just trying to use a visual to explain how I kind of see this is like she can't move past a certain point.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: She's tethered to him very specifically on a certain frequency, and the frequency is obsession and uh just enmeshment.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, I really do think at the beginning of the move or of the of their you know, quote-unquote relationship, even though it's not a relationship, he is infatuated with her, and that is close enough to her curse that she isn't scared or isn't like worried that he's withdrawing and he's you know not as interested anymore.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't trigger her fear of him pulling away.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that works for a little while, but you know, then he's telling her, and it it can't be, so he's still trying to negotiate because you know, he wants to take some space, she doesn't want to leave, and then she's on her knees begging, like, you know, I'll be anything you want me to be, and he says, just be Nikki, you know, and or he says, I want you to act like Nikki.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like he's still trying to get her to act like the Nikki that he has this fantasy version of, like, and you know, he she can't because he literally destroyed the real Nikki, like placed this overlay curse over her.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like, she's not the actual Nikki that you want because you destroyed the actual Nikki by cursing her, like she can't be Nikki.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this is when I think he really we're at about 95.5 screaming basement to beautiful house.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think in his mind, he's he's really starting to see, like, yeah, I fucked up here.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: But then we get another scene that I'm going to talk about here, where they're in bed later because she kind of guilts him into, you know, just going to bed.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he gets up and she catches him.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not actually freaky Nikki, it's regular Nikki.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, she begs him to kill her.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, kill me, please.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: She's sleeping, it's me.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Please kill me.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because Nikki knows she's had flashes where she comes back to herself and she knows that she's no longer driving anymore.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: She's it kind of reminded me actually of Get Out, like she's in the sunken place, she's not in charge of her body anymore.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So she just wants to be put out of her misery.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Bear says, What would be so bad?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's so bad about being with me?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he's still trying to negotiate the beautiful house because you know, he's he's basically like, remember, like, we were happy before, you know, like what's so bad about being with me?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, don't you still want to be with me?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it was so great before we can get back there, you know.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he's still trying to negotiate this beautiful house after everything he's seen, after she has physically attacked herself, stood in the house with her mess, walked around all creepy in the night, you know, flashes in and out, like everyone thinks she's acting unlike her.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's still trying to negotiate with it.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I would actually say what happens to his beautiful house is he transfers it to Sarah very briefly.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: We see this because, you know, she's begging for him to kill her.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: He just sneaks out the house like a fucking coward, goes and meets Sarah because Sarah was texting him while they were in bed, and she wants to open her last letter to see if she got into like a college she's trying to get into.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a confession, and you can see.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's maybe not obvious if you're just listening, but if you watch the movie, like you can see because she basically tells him, like, you know, it's a shame because I think you should be with someone more chill, and she's basically inviting him to let him know that, like, yeah, I like you, you know, like I've liked you the whole time, and we should be together because I'm way less high maintenance than Nikki is.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see that he's entertaining it.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's looking at her almost like, well, gee, this this Nikki situation has really not been a beautiful house as of late.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: How about I just pick up my beautiful house like it's a fucking mobile home and move it over here to you?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like that's that's kind of what I see as like he wanted he he ultimately just wanted a woman to fulfill his fantasies.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and that that's kind of a not kind of that that's a focal point of I would say our patriarchal system is men expect women to fulfill their fantasies.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why can't you just be the way I want you to be?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Men women are like, yeah, fuck you, we don't need this anymore because we have our own money and property and autonomy.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need this crap from you.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I really think that that's kind of a very important, you know, because because there's this a lot of talk about, you know, like the nice guy trope and like kind of the incel type guy, and it's like underneath that is a very insidious, passive, cowardly desire to control because they don't want to evolve and elevate themselves, they want to bring a woman down into their screaming basement and pretend it's a beautiful house.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about this movie in those terms because I really see that threaded throughout the whole movie.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the only time we see I guess what you could say is a beautiful house, it's almost like in math where you multiply two negatives and get a positive, you kind of see that at the end where Bear is gonna kill himself because he can't take the pressure anymore, and he's backed himself into a corner, and by this point, both Sarah and Ian are dead, and Nikki is getting more unhinged, and so he just decides to kill himself because he tries to undo the wish he can't.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: He tries to get Ian to undo the wish, and Ian just wishes for a billion dollars, and so and he actually gets it, and so Bear is just like, fuck this, like I'm just gonna end it, you know.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so he takes the pills, but even then he is almost too cowardly.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he is actually because it snaps him out of it when she curses him.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna throw him up, so he still couldn't even follow through with that.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: He still, you know, can't handle the discomfort.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: He can't handle I mean, you know, and he created so much discomfort for himself, like he can't handle it.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so she curses him because she sees the one wish willow, and he's about to throw up the pills, but then he stops because now he is activated to be obsessed with her.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of like the last little gasp of a beautiful house because and it's so twisted, but it's like, yeah, I think that that would have actually worked, like in terms of I mean, they would have killed anybody who came near them or looked at them the wrong way, but I feel like because they were equally bound in that frequency, as sick as that is, that would actually work.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, since he swallowed the pills, like he dies, and then she snaps out of it, poor thing, and sees this wreckage around her, and it's like then we get the real screaming basement, because then she's like, you know, crying and screaming, like, what did you do?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know, and we'll get into that more in the second episode.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I kind of just wanted to run through the movie and talk about the beautiful house.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: But and the reason I kind of want to talk about this as well is because I've talked about like my love addiction struggles on this show a little bit, especially with the mirror of Ira said.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I can say, and I don't think it's actually a bad thing in the right placement and in the right in the way that you, you know, approach things.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can have a deeply like hopeless romantic side, and it doesn't have to be toxic.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think it absolutely can be toxic.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think any trait can be twisted into toxicity, depending on what's driving it.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I think a hopeless romantic can be a really nice feature.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I can say I was definitely in my 20s in love with love more than the women I was in love with.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: I can say that for sure because I was able to jump from relationship to relationship, and I I kept looking for that beautiful house.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now I never violated anybody to get that.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: I never did anything despicable like what Bear does.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as being attached to that beautiful house idea of like, you know, I wanted it to look like this, I can understand that because when, especially for those of us, I think, that have experienced like trauma where love is very fleeting or non-existent, or I guess if it's fleeting, it's probably non-existent, but it feels like unstable.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: You you can get really good at constructing fantasies to fulfill what you never got in reality.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't know like Bear's backstory except for the fact that like he inherited his grandmother's house and you know, she died and then his cat died.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: We don't really know his upbringing or anything like that.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: We just know that he's a very like low confidence, very stereotypical, like, oh, he's just like a really, you know, a shy, reserved, nice guy is kind of what we're shown about him, like pretty lacking in confidence, very easily suggestible, but we don't know his upbringing.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say that if, you know, maybe for him this was his way of trying to get the love and connection that maybe he was lacking when he was a kid, like so he developed like a fantasy because I definitely think I did the same thing as far as like because in in a fantasy, like you are loved, like your mind can conjure that up, and it's not something that someone can disappoint you because the fantasy is yours, so you can make it whatever you want it to be, and then you can kind of project that onto someone that you like, and I think that we do that to a degree because when we're falling in love with somebody, we might not.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's obviously pieces of the picture that we don't have, so it's easy for our brains to kind of like slot in things that make up the picture we want, but I do think some of us work with more incomplete pictures than others, and I think some of us are better at kind of ignoring pieces that obviously shouldn't be there, or trying to force pieces in there, or not recognizing the pieces that are actually in there.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the beautiful house danger, like I said, from a personal mirror, I can say in my 20s I absolutely was chasing the beautiful house because I had a screaming basement that I didn't want to deal with.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this movie does a really good job of showing how disastrous a screaming basement can be that's unhealed, and instead of going into the basement and healing it and facing the darkness and you know, rebuilding the foundation in a stable way, you just build this rickety, beautiful house over it, how disastrous that can be.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I wanted to go ahead and spend the Halloween season here these two days covering obsession.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that will go ahead and be part one.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for the divine dialogue question, though, I wanted to ask you guys if you thought that.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, an obvious question is by the end, do you, you know, see Bear as redeemable at all?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I personally don't at the end of this movie.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like at every single turn he takes the coward's way out, like he has an opportunity to, you know, stop sleeping with her after that first lie.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then he goes home and, like I said, I would say, essays her in his own bed because she's not actually there to consent to that.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't try to cancel the wish, he tries to alter the wish, he doesn't even react when she stabs herself with the bottle at the party.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: He entertains Sarah, and then he also helps Nikki move Sarah's body.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like he takes the pills and then tries to throw them up because he's too cowardly to kill himself so that she can be freed, even though at this point he's completely ruined her life because presumably she's gonna go to jail for his death, Ian's death, and Sarah's death.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or at the very least, like, I mean, well, you know, we know she killed Sarah, so that's evidence.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And Ian she did shoot him, but Bear killed himself, so like she's probably gonna be locked away for at least two murders, you know, by the time he he conjures enough courage to at least attempt to take himself out.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: But even that he reverses, so I kind of find it hard to see anything redeemable about him.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I guess a deeper divine dialogue question I would ask is what, like, if you were to look at your life, do you like what's in your basement?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: What's are there any screams going on in your basement that you've built a beautiful house over?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever struggled to let go of the image of something in exchange for the truth of something?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what kind of consequences did that produce?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: And how did you, I guess, if you have done screaming basement healing, what have you done to go into the basement and heal it?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be curious to hear your guys' personal journey on that.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: But thank you so much for hanging out with me on this part one of two of Obsession for Halloween.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: I will be dropping part two, which will be the screaming basement.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna be darker probably than the beautiful house.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a little bit longer too, since most of the movie is the screaming basement, but we're gonna talk about that in depth, basically the opposite of this tomorrow.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: So please stay tuned.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Both episodes will be dropping at the same time, 9 a.m., just a day apart from each other.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh the next episode after that will be the 5th of November, V for Vendetta, and then another episode the day after as well, since I do drop every Friday.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we will be getting into V for Vendetta after this.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have any comments, suggestions for content, feedback, please don't hesitate to reach out to me in my email that's in the show notes or on my social media channels.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: Please engage with the content and you know, share it with anybody who might be interested in deep dives into kind of the spirituality of movies.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for joining me, and I will catch you tomorrow.