Customer Reviews

Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies (Limelight)

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Cinema of Obsession is little more than a series of short summaries of films, padded out with obvious and unnecessary statements, extraneous information, and quotes culled from other sources. There is very little by way of original thought, and what is original often starts with weaselly qualifiers such as "it seems."

The padding is tedious and is usually found within parentheses, which makes this book unbearably tiresome to read. Nearly every person, character, and author mentioned in this book gets a parenthetical note after their name listing some extraneous information, even if it was mentioned before or has no bearing on the topic at hand. There are many qualifying phrases such as "to name only a few" that are placed in parentheses for absolutely no reason. It's already an unnecessary qualifying phrase, made more unnecessary by slapping it into a parenthetical aside.

All the descriptions of the films are basic without even a hint of insight, and the writing style is clumsy and boring. Example: "Nancy seems more attracted to Sid for his celebrity status and generosity (she uses his money to buy drugs)." The section on Broken Blossoms (1919) has another laughable example, also written in a parenthetical aside: "The title of the movie is redolent with several meanings." Unbelievable. Telling us that the title of a film has more than one meaning doesn't merit even a mention in a film book that promises analysis and critique as this one does. The section on Lolita, which should have been one of the most in-depth sections in a book on sexual obsession, is nothing but a shallow checklist comparison between the Kubrick and Adrian Lyne versions.

Even when information is important, it's placed in those horrible parentheses. In the section on Mizoguchi's Dolls, 50 of the 400 words are in parenthetical asides. That's 12% of the entire content, and that is not including the parenthetical additions of translations or years of release.

The book is organized (their word, not mine) into five sections, the first being the "seminal films" on obsessive love. The second chapter is on "amour fou" in post-war cinema, the third on fugitive couples, and the fourth and fifth on male and female gaze respectively. Each chapter begins with a very brief introduction then immediately goes into the summaries. The summaries begin with the title and a quote from the film, and each section is anywhere from three to eight paragraphs long. The summaries in each chapter are placed mostly chronologically.

The photos are sub-par. In the previously-mentioned Lolita section, a photo of Sue Lyons has lines through the bottom third. The full-page photo of Dominique Swain was blown up so much that the lines of her hair and the blades of grass are all jagged and pixelated. The iconic Sue Lyons heart-shaped sunglasses photo was cropped so poorly that the left side has a black border while the other sides do not. Oh, and for a laugh, check out the author's photo on the back. It's one of those horrible self-portraits used on tacky MySpace pages.

This book is only helpful if you happen to need something with summaries to refresh your memory, or if you want to wade through nearly 400 pages of uselessness just to find the references they quoted so you can read something of substance. The entire book feels all the world like a rough draft that was gussied up with some photos and a quick glance-through by a bored editor. Not only will I be avoiding these authors in the future, I will be avoiding Limelight Editions in the future.

Filmmaker Dominique Mainon and film journalist James Ursini present Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies, an in-depth discussion and analysis of modern cinema that revolves around the dark side of human attraction, from erotic obsession to heartbreak and jealousy to deception and even murder in the name of love. Black-and-white photographs illustrate Cinema of Obsession throughout, and the text offers commentary on numerous specific films including "Fatal Attraction", "Basic Instinct", "The Killers", "Wild at Heart", "Last Tango in Paris", "Vertigo", and many more. Accessible to lay readers and cinema scholars alike, Cinema of Obsession lives up to its title and is indispensable for connoisseurs of movies that deconstruct human romantic bonds.