Why Does Cinema Makes Us So Obsessed?

Cinema’s dirtiest little secret is that it’s designed to make you want something you can never have.

In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, host Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms — LAB111’s Head of Cinema — talk about what cinema’s fixations have done to them. Laura learned to write in Elvish because of The Lord of the Rings. Tom is still working out how much of his idea of relationships comes from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). We have all spent more time thinking about actors and characters we will never meet than is probably reasonable. Parasocial attachment used to be the strange edge of fandom. Now it’s the default condition of watching.

The conversation moves through 60 years of films about obsession — Vertigo, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), and what they made possible: Misery, Perfect Blue, La Pianiste, Whiplash, Babygirl — but the question underneath is the one cinema doesn’t like to answer. What does this kind of looking do to the people being looked at? The actor engineered into someone else’s ideal. The face that turns into a brand. And whether cinema knows what it’s done to us, or is still pretending it doesn’t.

A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam’s arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Programmed alongside the Can’t Get You Out Of My Head season. Produced by Elliot Bloom. Tickets at lab111.nl/obsession.