An interpretation of the movie Obsession that I hate is “Oh, Nikki actually did like Bear back, and if he had just asked her out properly he could’ve gotten what he wanted!”
No. The whole point of the movie is Bear cannot handle rejection, and constantly feels like he deserves a ‘reward’. And the reward is Nikki. He is too selfish to consider the idea that if he asked her out, she would’ve said no, and then he would have to move on with his life, and she would move on with hers outside of the box he has mentally forced her into.
There is no right choice he could’ve made to ‘earn’ his reward. This isn’t a video game where the trophy was sitting right there and if he made the right dialogue choices and pressed the right buttons he would’ve ‘won’ Nikki. Nikki wasn’t something to be won. Bear treats her like an object he is only being deprived of for bad behaviour, and the idea that she liked him back treats her this way too.
Nikki is a person who is fully capable of seeing exactly what Bear presents himself as. There is no version of him she’s seeing that we’re not. A woman can exist in a movie, and even be crushed on by a male character, without having her role in the movie be narrowed down to ‘love interest’. They can exist outside of their proximity to a man.
Nikki is not a love interest. Nikki was never going to be a love interest. There was nothing Bear could’ve done to stop that, it was so out of the realm of reality that Nikki as a whole was destroyed and built from the ground up to force her into that box.
