So yesterday's entry in my "13 Needles of Halloween" series -- Reminder: Get Vaccinated! -- dealt with the final shot of Halloween 6 having a needle in it, for some inexplicable reason. And so today it only felt right to move on to the opposite tactic -- to a film that actually begins with the sight of a needle! In this case a needle being self-jabbed directly into a person's own scalp, which is how we are greeted in the very first moment of Brandon Cronenberg's masterful 2020 flick Possessor. Leave it to a Cronenberg, am I right? And of course leave it to a Cronenberg...
... to then immediately zoom in for a closer look. I actually think Brandon, even more than his father, prefers abstracting close-ups of the sort seen above, where materials we don't entirely understand are explored in minute grotesque detail -- he loves to zoom right in on wounds, rivulets of gore, et cetera. It seems like the further step in the Cronenberg project of abstracting humanity past the point of human -- we are not people under their lenses, but foreign objects where the pressure of the camera itself seems to split our skin right open. (Possessor is streaming on Hulu right now! Here is my review.)
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