How ‘Possessor’ Explores the Final Frontier of Fantasy Filth: Sexual Surrogacy

In the history of human ingenuity, it has been our species’ tendency that whenever a game-changing new technology is devised, the first order of business is figuring out how to use it to bring ourselves to orgasm. The advent of the moving picture falls somewhere around 1873, with the earliest works from short-form narrative cinema pioneer Georges Méliès coming in 1896 — the same year that trailblazing horndogs Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner debuted the seven-minute striptease flick Le Coucher de la Mariée. Before the internet was even capable of transmitting images from one computer to another, users got their rocks off by sending each other hyphens and backslashes in the shape of boobs and butts, known as ASCII porn. As wi-fi has proliferated the “internet of things,” we’ve gotten vibrating underwear and penis-encasing chastity cages that we can control via smartphone. Light BDSM, now on the go!

As an arena of socially sanctioned imagination, science fiction has extended this impulse evident in the nature of homo sapiens to wild, uncharted horizons of deviancy. We’ve done sex with aliens, sex with monsters, sex with lots and lots of robots — you name it, somebody’s gotten frisky with it. (Even a Splice!) Having exhausted its supply of beasts, things, abstract entities, and other nouns with which to fornicate, sci-fi has turned its attentions to the metaphysical. The final frontier of fantasy filth is not a question of what we have sex with, but rather what we have sex as. After every kink has been played out, all that’s left is to be someone or something else, a forbidden plane of experience that cinema has explored as a channel for intimacy, actualization, and alienation alike.

The movies have long been entranced by the concept of the “sexual surrogate,” a term used here to mean a literal intermediary body between two partners, instead of a therapist trained in hands-on assistance for the erotically dysfunctional. (Like in that movie where Helen Hunt does it with John Hawkes.) Whenever a creative premise makes the opportunity available, there’s something inevitable about a character transcending the limits of their own physical form in search of truer or more novel pleasures. When Earth-dweller Jake Sully gets stuffed into a nine-foot azure feline alien in Avatar, it’s only a matter of time until he gives the species’ mating-by-ponytail-tendril a whirl. In John Frankenheimer’s classic Seconds, an oldster sees his restarted life with the strapping physique of Rock Hudson primarily as an avenue to sexual liberation. Consider something as seemingly anodyne as the kid-geared Scooby-Doo live-action treatment from 2002; magical tomfoolery switches Fred and Daphne’s brains at one point, and he immediately concludes, “I can look at myself naked!” His behavior is informed by a natural, immutable curiosity that only grows more complex and outré in maturer films.

The matter was raised most recently by Possessor, the high-concept psychothriller from genre royalty Brandon Cronenberg. The big hook concerns a novel method of assassination in which an expert seizes control of a mark’s movements using futuristic equipment and forces them to carry out a hit, ditching the vessel once the job’s completed. That’s what Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) has planned for unsuspecting Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), only to find that he’s not so easily controlled. As he puts up a mental fight, their consciousnesses start to bleed into one another, never more memorably than in the sex scene that places her head on his neck-down as a hallucinatory delirium hits its peak. The first thing a viewer notices is her penis, a striking prosthesis that Riseborough insisted on and Cronenberg fought the censors to keep (hence the Possessor Uncut label). The second thing a viewer notices is that this marks the only time that Tasya, already established as a closed-off personality having trouble relating to her husband and child, has looked truly alive. Afterward, she returns to a withdrawn demeanor, visibly lost in her own skin.

She’s responding to some latent facet of her identity that she’s never tapped into before, a freshly awakened side of herself that invites a trans reading. Many films that engage with sexual surrogacy treat it as a method through which an individual can move within and beyond gender to access either side of the binary or to leave it behind entirely. Being John Malkovich puts this in explicit terms, as Cameron Diaz’s Lotte realizes she can use the portal into John Malkovich’s head to realize her long-dormant urges for sex as a man. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s detractors have dinged this approach as overly simplistic, failing to account for nuance in its fixation on a fetishistic lust. Under the Skin, the 2014 film that begins with an extraterrestrial coming to Earth and slipping into the flesh of Scottish sex worker Scarlett Johansson, has inspired insightful scholarship on more empathetic parallels to the transgender experience and how elements of carnality figure into it.

Critics Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner exchanged thoughts on how the protagonist, a creature getting acclimated to an unfamiliar womanhood not always compatible with their own biology, reflects the distinct anxiety of dysphoria. “She takes this lamp and peers down between her legs and when she raises her head back up she has a look of grief on her face,” Maclay writes. “That look of grief has stuck with me in a major way ever since first viewing the movie. Her body will not allow her to do what she wants it to do, and furthermore she’s locked out of a sexual encounter that she wanted to experience. She can’t have pleasure. She can’t have kids.” More than sexual tourism at the deepest level, this surrogacy and the intercourse it enables can feel like validation or nullification for the very notion of being. For the unnamed organism as with Tasya, the revelatory sense of discovery that comes from bodily autonomy also includes a painful realization of its limitations.

The lines demarcating what’s possible and what isn’t get bolder when the mechanical takes the place of the personal. The unwritten rule that mankind will get the hots for anything that moves extends occasionally to the non-corporeal, necessitating an innovative workaround. When a human being develops feelings for a computer program, tender contact can only be achieved through a human volunteer standing in. Both 2013’s Her and 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 feature sequences that introduce a surrogate to bond a lonely, isolated man with the artificial intelligence he loves, and both encounters redefine the insurmountable distance separating the carbon-based life forms from non-. Awkward romantic Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) can’t bring himself to make his move on the willing participant (Portia Doubleday) with the voice of AI Samantha (also Scarlett Johansson) in an earpiece. Future private eye K (Ryan Gosling) goes through with it, but in the morning, shares an uncomfortable tension with the girl-for-hire (Mackenzie Davis) that the hologram Joi (Ana de Armas) superimposed herself onto.

These scenes suggest an equal and opposite corollary to the self-affirming potential theorized by the films mentioned earlier: that having a body doesn’t make a “false” person more meaningfully “real.” This process illustrates the difference between being close and closeness, countering that something may in fact be lost by assuming solid form. Samantha and Joi being untouchable proves integral to their essence; it bears mentioning that both films provide a sexual conduit to a tertiary female character in service of the main male one. To these stunted men, to be intangible is to be pure, and what was meant to take their relationship to the next level may sully it in practice. Sex through a surrogate — sometimes a channel, sometimes a barrier — can distance the connected as easily as it connects the distanced.

In that respect, surrogacy proves as wondrously complicated as sex itself, a highly subjective and sensitive experience made all the more so by the addition of a new variable. At a time when it appears that America’s mainstream film industry has largely abandoned the sex scene, a select handful of films have pushed its boundaries forward to a logical conclusion. We can fuck anything, we can fuck as anything, and yet we cannot elude the nagging fundamental flaws hardwired into existence as a thinking, feeling life form. We’re all still susceptible to insecurity, to miscommunication, to the hazards of self-perception. We can unshackle sex from its material bonds, we can’t fine-tune the act itself.
Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.