#obsession 1976

Let us sit and tell sad tales about deserted daughters and lonely husbands.

Bernard Hermann’s score for Obsession just has to be one of the highlights of his career and I always love sharing pieces of it on this blog.

I usually avoid YouTube comments like the plague, but sometimes insightful, non-confrontational, intelligent people do contribute to them. I’d like to share a comment from user Greg Freeman (or “GREG FREEMAN” rather, since his chosen name is in all caps), who pays homage both to this score and the talents of Bernard Hermann throughout his long cinematic career:

I am not a fan of the DePalma film but the music is exquisitely haunting and I love those vocal choirs. It is great music to listen to while walking around or performing some mundane task. It is unfortunate Hitchcock and Herrmann never mended their differences because I think Frenzy needed that Herrmann touch of menace. To call his music "old fashion" or "out of date" was very shortsighted on Hitch's part. Luckily for cinema (and us fans) he was embraced by the young turks like DePalma, Trauffaut, Scorcese, and (to a lesser extent) Larry Cohen. With over five  hundred Herrmann tracks on my Ipod I'd consider myself a fairly great admirer. I really don't care for his scorces for the epic and adventures movies. They are very loud and heavy on brass. I press the quiet menace of the plucked strings, muted horns, the vibraphone, and the vocal choirs. His score for Fahrenheit 451 is magnificent (even if the film itself is a bit bland) as well his work on It's Alive. Even if the film was a low budget affair he still maintained his standards and did not cheep out. When I heard that he would scoring Carrie it just felt we were cheated of another great score. The Pino Donaggio score is good but one can clearly hear the Herrmann influence all over it.  As modern music scores get more and more indistinguishable from one another I appreciate more the great composers of the past and what they contribut to the film. It does not just act as an element to manipulate the audience but (when used correctly) almost becomes a character unto itself.

In the “wedding night” dream, Michael hears Sandra say, “Now I am your wife. I am Elizabeth.” But whose dream is this, his or hers? If the deluded Michael sees Sandra as Elizabeth, it’s important to note that, increasingly, she sees herself the same way. If Michael wants to have Elizabeth again and not just someone like her, Sandra wants to be Elizabeth, not just to grow up to be like her. The script describes Michael as “a man possessed,” so driven is he to find in Sandra the reincarnation of his dead wife, while Sandra herself is “as if compelled by forces beyond her control” when she approaches and communes with the funeral monument he built to her mother. “Now Sandra is obsessed with the idea of Elizabeth,” a psychiatrist tells Michael. “She’s caught up in your fantasy.” The psychiatrist in the script calls it “the most unique case of folie à deux I have ever seen” and warns that “the two of you are going crazy together.”