POSSESSOR (2020) AND THE HONESTY OF ANALOGUE VIOLENCE
Smart devices hide their surveillance and manipulation activities beneath unthreatening curves. How can we reveal their violence? Horror has the answer.
This week I rewatched one of my favourite films: Brandon Cronenberg’s ultra-violent Possessor (2020). And when I say “rewatched”, I mean “nervously fast-forwarded through.” And when I say “one of my favourite films”, I mean “something which I never want to see again, under any circumstances.”
An incredible piece of film-making. Five stars. Now I’m chucking the DVD out the window of my moving car and driving into the sea.
This is about why, despite everything, I was so keen to endure this gruesome film for a second time.
POSSESSOR: THE PROTESTANT DEMONIC WORK ETHIC
In Possessor, protagonist Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) works as a corporate assassin. Her method is simple. She takes over someone else’s body, makes them do the hit, forces them to shoot themselves, and then jumps back into her own body. A clean kill which leaves no evidence.
The “possession” is carried out via a complex assemblage of grubby machines and implants, which look very different from the sleek smart devices we’re accustomed to seeing in tech-based horror.
![Possessor Possessor](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32828c96-93fd-406b-9243-8df035223022_1260x708.jpeg)
In many ways, Tasya is the perfect modern worker: she’s ambitious, accepts life-threatening short-term contracts at a moment’s notice, and will literally kill anyone who gets in her way. This is American Psycho for the Deliveroo generation.
But there’s a problem. Tasya has an inconvenient emotional attachment to her family, and her behaviour when she’s “inside” her hosts is becoming increasingly erratic. Is her sentimental connection getting in the way of her work?
SEVERANCE & THE WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Toxic bleed between home and work is a common theme in horror at the moment, with Apple’s Severance (2022) being a prime example. If you missed it, the show is about workers at a tech corporation who choose to undergo “severance”, a procedure whereby their work-persona (innie) is completely separated from their real-life self (outie). This means the “outie” never remembers anything from work, but it also means that the “innie” has no awareness of their life outside work. Essentially, the innie becomes a separate consciousness imprisoned in the office… at least, for now.
Severance is a brilliant satire about the misery of the constantly surveilled, competitive, target-driven workplace. Although, I did have to pay for Apple TV to watch it, which is a bit like listening to a really great podcast exposing war crimes while doing a drone strike on your own grandma.
Without spoiling too much of Severance, Possessor explores similar themes, but with the added bonus of UNWATCHABLE VIOLENCE.
DELIVER ON THE PROMISE OF THE NEWSLETTER’S TITLE, ZOË! TELL US ABOUT THE HORRIFIC VIOLENCE!
The brutal violence of Tasya’s corporate assassinations is presented coldly, with minimal music. It’s just a fact of life: the cut and thrust of the competitive market. Well, mostly the cut. And a bit of the bludgeoning.
These grisly murders (of both the CEO targets and the disposable host bodies) are the collateral of global capitalism’s hunger for growth at all costs. And yes, while modern jobs are broadly less likely to do you gruesome injury than working in a 19th century mill (excruciating laptop-induced RSI and increasingly specific mental health conditions notwithstanding), Possessor’s extreme bloodiness makes manifest the violence which is still inherent in today’s capitalism. Even if that violence is often unseen, outsourced to a factory in a country with fewer labour laws.
Now, like any girl, I love a horror film which uses hardcore gore to reveal the hidden brutalities of ordinary life. But I wanted to write about Possessor because it takes this one step further. The analogue design of its devices reveals their true ideological heritage.
WIRES: A VISIBLE POWER STRUCTURE
The film opens with an unidentified woman plugging a jack into her skull. She then slowly twists a dial on a device wrapped in leather, rapidly changing her emotional state. We will later learn that Tasya is inside this woman, and is manually “calibrating” her host.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7b5a7f3-b699-4c76-8fdd-f10f8f1ba59f_1920x1080.jpeg)
What I love about this scene, and future references to the “calibration device”, is the demystifying power of showing technological mind control as tactile, mechanical and ultimately crude.
When a glossy, smooth-edged smart device shows us a magic trick (Alexa being able to understand voice commands; eerily accurate targeted advertisement), we forget that there are people on the other end tuning the device, moderating content, and carrying out maintenance. But apps and algorithms aren’t vast, unknowable Gods: they’re shonky, mechanistic and, most importantly: constructed, just like all human systems.
So much of the power of tech is about presenting itself – and the ruthless market logic of “the algorithm that gives you what you want” – as naturally occurring, simply an extension of “how things are.” Making it creaky and dusty strips the technology of this power. It was built. All you need to destroy the modern management system is a Philips head screwdriver and the curiosity of a dad who wants to see how it works.
The anachronism of this machine also encourages us to think about the historical lineage of smart devices. And I’ve got bad news.
A SHORT, NASTY AND BRUTISH HISTORY OF SMART DEVICES
Smart devices were developed by behavioural psychologists to observe, manage and alter people’s behaviour. What?! No! Not my iPhone! I thought the greasy spy obelisk was totally benign!
Alright, let’s not get too paranoid. Behavioural scientists aren’t going to stab a guitar cable into your brain. Okay, actually, if they got you in a room alone, they might. Especially if you were, say, a pigeon or a chimpanzee.
To explain, I’m going to take a whistle-stop tour of some concepts from Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism1 (2019, see my guilty footnote) which is a horrifying read about that endless source of potential profit: spying on you. One of its mind-blowing central ideas (quoted here from an interview with Zuboff) is that:
Capitalism evolves by claiming things that live outside the market dynamics and bringing them into the market dynamic so that they can be turned into commodities for sale and purchase.
Zuboff argues that capitalism is running out of places to colonise, so now it’s seeking to commodify the last available space: our inner lives. Under Surveillance Capitalism, your every move is a rich mine of sellable data, and therefore potential capital.
Yep, this book bangs.
In Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff also discusses how the modern smart device directly evolved out of behavioural psychology, specifically “behaviourism”, and the work of one of its pioneers, B.F. Skinner. According to Zuboff:
What Skinner wanted to accomplish more than anything was the jettisoning of the human mind from psychology.
Basically: Skinner’s ambition was to turn psychology “into a science”. But unfortunately for him, psychologists can never truly present “scientific” empirical data (that is, data which is gathered by observation) about the inner life of humans, because we cannot see or hear the thoughts of others. So to counter this problem, Skinner restricted his studies to what can be observed: outward behaviours. He also viewed all those behaviours as merely responses to observable stimuli in the environment.
In Zuboff’s eyes, this narrow definition of the human being deprives people of their subjectivity: in Skinner’s telling, people are not conscious beings, they are merely objects, whose behaviours can be altered through conditioning. This, she claims, has been hugely influential in the world of big tech.
Skinner also wrote a novel called Walden Two (1948), in which he imagined a technological utopia where citizens are conditioned from birth through positive reinforcement to become altruistic and morally good.
Leaving aside how arrogant it was to call it Walden Two (catch my debut novel War & Peace Two later this year), Zuboff claims that Skinner’s utopia is an essential precursor to surveillance capitalism in one key way: it is non-violent.
In Walden Two, people aren’t terrorised into compliance, instead they are “nudged” and “tuned” gently into behaving in more rational, and morally good ways. Which is exactly what tech companies are doing now, except instead of nudging you into a moral good like helping an old lady cross the road, they’re nudging you to buy a Joker figurine that was probably made by a child prisoner.
The opening scene of Possessor with the radio-dial is a grotesquely literal example of tuning. It reveals what we know about this kind of nudging now the technology exists to exercise it on a massive scale. It’s not benign. It strips us of our freedom and treats us as objects without subjectivity – just as Tasya does to her hosts, and, not to spoil the film, her job is doing to her.
Skinner’s antecedents, most notably Alex Pentland (“the godfather of Google glass”), went on to become big names at tech companies. In fact, Zuboff claims that much of smart device functionality is merely a scaled up version of Pentland’s “Sociometer”, a wearable device which was used in experiments to measure social interactions as they happened, and then to use that dataset to predict what the wearer might be doing at in the future - all for the purpose of business optimisation.
So, for Zuboff, the smartphone isn’t a personal computer which is also incidentally used to collect data and manipulate our actions: “reality mining” is its primary function. These devices are engineered to crudely alter our behaviour for the purposes of creating the ideal businessperson or customer. And with no illusions about closed silver boxes, that’s exactly what we see in Possessor.
CONCLUSION: RUSTY WIRES AGAINST TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM
Cyberspace often claims to be a post-ideological, egalitarian zone liberated from old hierarchies: just look at how El*n M*sk is talking about free speech on Twitter. But we know that instead it is the place of the highest intensity of nudging, surveillance and raw, corporate power.
If we make horror that shows tech how it wants to be shown – as sleek and separate from human bodies – we allow this digital utopianism to survive: “tech is mysterious and sexy and immutable!”. When we show smart devices as tangled with hair and blood and solder we admit that it is a human system designed with a specific purpose in mind: management, surveillance and control.
I love how Possessor makes clear both the violence and the potential fragility of these systems. I will also never watch it again.
THANKS FOR READING. THE NEXT ONE WILL BE SHORTER. FOR REAL THIS TIME. IF YOU LIKED THIS POST PLEASE SHARE IT WITH ONE CLOSE FRIEND.
MISSED THE FIRST ONE?
Read it here: CULT OF THE LAMB AND THE LUXURY OF BOREDOM: Why I love doing domestic chores in video games
CAN’T WAIT UNTIL NEXT WEEK?
Check out season two of my British Podcast Award winning sketch pod SeanceCast. Episodes 1-4 are out now in all the usual places, with a new one released every Monday. Each episode is a mini-sitcom interspersed with comedy-horror sketches by up-and-coming female and non-binary comedy writers. I’d love you to hear it.
AN ADMISSION: I first read the book when it came out, and on the tube in 50 word segments, as I’m sure Zuboff intended it to be consumed. So before I wrote this I took a refresher in the form of great lecture (‘11. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Freedom’) from a series called Posthumanism and Technology. All credit for the summaries and glosses in this section to Dr Patrick O’Connor (on Spotify, the mysterious “Patrick”) from Staffordshire University’s Philosophy department. Thanks for putting your amazing lecture series on Spotify, for some reason.