Obsession is such an unattractive word. It suggests damp basements and unwashed teacups. Yet dress it in silk, give it a title, a camera crew, a ballot paper, and suddenly it passes for destiny.
“We don’t just follow power. We fixate on it”
Take a prince. Not the purple one – though he understood obsession better than most-but Prince Andrew Mountbatten, Duke of York: a man who once moved through drawing rooms with naval posture and inherited assurance. What fascinates is not the scandal (history has already made its notations), but the spectacle of proximity to power. We are obsessed not merely with royalty, but with adjacency. Titles cling. They glitter. Even when tarnished, we cannot quite look away. The Duchesses-of Kent, of anywhere- understand the choreography of retreat. A well-timed withdrawal can be as compelling as an entrance. The monarchy survives not on relevance, but on ritualised fixation.
“Titles fade. Obsession lingers.”
And then there are the Momagers. The modern matriarchal impresarios of cheekbone and commerce. The fascination with a facelift-whose, how much, how often-is less about dermatology and more about immortality. To refashion the face is to wage war against time, and in Hollywood, time is the only true enemy. We watch the before and after as though studying Renaissance restoration. Has the fresco been improved? Or merely preserved? The camera, pitiless and devotional, keeps its own ledger.
“Proximity to power is its own addiction.”
Melania, meanwhile, prepares a documentary. I find that irresistible. The quietest figure in the room choosing, at last, to narrate it. Obsession thrives on silence; we fill in what is not said. A documentary promises revelation but often delivers something subtler: curation. To control the frame is to control the myth. America has always adored reinvention, and the First Lady-former, future, or otherwise-remains one of its most polished canvases.
“Control the frame. Control the myth.”
Closer to home, our own theatre of fixation plays nightly. Luxon versus Hipkins versus Seymour and Peters: a quartet performing democracy with varying degrees of fervour. New Zealand pretends to dislike spectacle, yet we dissect polling numbers with the intensity of racing odds. We speak of policy, but we obsess over posture. Who hesitated. Who smirked. Who won the room. Politics is personality in a sensible suit. The debates are less about legislation than about narrative control. And narrative, like obsession, is a creature that must be fed.
“Elections aren’t just won on numbers but narrative.”
Rialto View, obsession finds more intimate quarters.
On Rialto Film
The Hounds of Love is a study in suffocation – the kind that seeps into wallpaper. It observes how fixation can curdle into possession, and possession into something unspeakable. The film does not shout; it stares. And we, unsettled, stare back.
“Some fixations whisper.”
The Killing of Two Lovers turns obsession inward. A man circling the wreckage of his marriage like a sentry who has forgotten what he guards. The stillness is the point. The quiet is the scream. Love, when wounded, becomes a hall of mirrors.
“The beautiful kind of obsession is called discipline.”
In Crock of Gold, Shane MacGowan is both poet and casualty-obsessed with language, with Ireland, with the glorious ruin of excess. The documentary frames him as relic and revolutionary. To be consumed by art is romantic; to survive it is rarer.
“Art demands surrender.”
Rialto Arts offers devotion of another order. Pene Pati in recital-here obsession is discipline, breath harnessed into beauty. Opera is the most respectable of fixations; it demands surrender. Mama Africa sings with the gravity of inheritance, every note tethered to memory. Joyce DiDonato’s Eden reaches toward something elemental, as though the planet itself were a score to be interpreted. These are obsessions that elevate rather than erode.
Perhaps that is the distinction. There is the obsession that diminishes-the endless scroll of faces, titles, rivalries. And then there is the obsession that refines: the rehearsal, the revision, the relentless pursuit of a perfect phrase.
“Don’t just read about obsession. Watch it.”
Prince or prime minister, diva or documentarian, we are all chasing permanence in a world that insists on evaporation. Obsession is merely the evidence of desire that refuses moderation.
“Curated. Intentional. On demand.”
The question is not whether we are obsessed.
“Read it. Then stream it.”
It is whether what we choose to obsess over will leave us smaller-
or sublime.
Roger Wyllie, View Mag