From everyone who has made the Netflix series Obsession – the writer, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, the leads, Richard Armitage and Charlie “Happy Valley” Murphy – I want to know the following: when did they read the book on which it is based, Damage, by Josephine Hart; have they seen the film, starring Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons; and did they spend the whole early 90s talking about it? Lloyd Malcolm loves the book and has never seen the film. Neither appeared on Armitage’s radar at the time. And Murphy, well, she was only three when it was published in 1991.
Damage was the 50 Shades of its day – propulsive, original and extremely widely read. It had a similar lightning-rod impact to 50 Shades, as a breezy, middlebrow way in to quite a big conversation about sex. The plot centres on a respected surgeon – a rounded, well-liked man, yada yada – who meets his son’s girlfriend and immediately starts having an affair with her, with appalling consequences. It was distinctly of its time: a world still suffused with HIV anxiety, trying to build back taboos around sexual transgression that previous decades had destroyed with their permissiveness, by creating situations so unforgivable, and imagining punishments so radically disproportionate, that somehow Old Testament values might be restored.
Think Fatal Attraction, remove the boiled rabbit, and still the consequences for the surgeon are way worse. It always felt to me like the fever dream of the wronged wife, awake at 4am, trying to think of the worst possible person her husband could be having an affair with, then the direst imaginable comeuppance. Lloyd Malcolm agrees, carefully: “I don’t want to speak too much on what Josephine intended because she’s not around to defend anything any more. But I do feel like this is one of her more personal books, and she was working through a lot.” Hart died in 2011, happily married to Maurice Saatchi, but her previous marriage – well, it wasn’t quite so successful.
The thrust of Obsession is broadly as Armitage describes: “Has anybody ever stepped into your life who has given you that sense of overwhelming, indescribable physical obsession? If they have, did you end up in a relationship with them or did you choose to walk away? If they haven’t, I pity you. Because everyone should feel that.” But as Lloyd Malcolm says, “The book is so particular about the kind of sex they’re having and the way they do it and how that feeds into their relationship.” That’s a dominant-submissive relationship, which the original film didn’t have a clue what to do with. Louis Malle, the director, swapped out all the momentum and subversiveness of the BDSM dynamic for a broad-brush sexual urgency that relied pretty heavily on the magnetism of Jeremy Irons.
Obsession has sought to restore that. “It was really important to me to not be saying anything like: ‘BDSM sex is bad sex,’” says Lloyd Malcolm. Yet it has to be quite a vanilla version of kink, because it’s mainstream TV – much like the film of 50 Shades, in fact, it’s a lot of ribbon and restraint and blindfolding, unlike “the porn version of things”, Lloyd Malcolm says, “which would be very intense, very dark, lots of leather. There’s a certain kind of costume that you’re expecting.” Representing BDSM with Japanese silk ropes is almost metaphorical; it’s such a niche part of the kink. It works because this is not a how-to, but ultimately about their relationship and “who is in control of it”, says Lloyd Malcolm. “For me, it was always Anna [the girlfriend]. Every single scenario. These two aliens from another planet have found each other and they both have this need in them that they can meet in each other.” From the moment the two meet, Charlie Murphy says, “she is completely in control. This is physically her world. She is the architect of every single rule. She is the dominant submissive, and the power she gives to him is a very cathartic experience for her.”
It’s probably only now, when intimacy coaches on set are routine, that you could even make a drama in which the sex is a driving part of the plot, rather than something decorative. Armitage describes the before-world with comic haplessness: “The director would say: ‘I’ll put the camera on. I won’t call cut, you just do your thing.’ They’d close the set and then they’d leave. So then you have to do all of that work with your scene partner. You’re like: OK, what are we gonna do? We can’t have sex because that’s a whole other industry, that’s porn. Some people did as a badge of honour, I just really disliked that. In the same way that when I climbed over a table and glued a man on to a wheelchair and bit his face off in Hannibal, I wanted some choreography. They’d never do a fight scene by saying: ‘Just punch each other. Just beat each other up.’” Besides, as Murphy says: “I don’t want to draw on my own sexual experience. I want to feel like I’m coming at it from Anna’s perspective, and feel protected by that.”
Murphy was filming this simultaneously with the celebrated third season of Happy Valley, and while she didn’t choose it deliberately as a counterpoint, the characters could not be more different if she had, and there are obvious career upsides: “There might be opportunities outside police force work now,” she says drily. She is, of course, Ann Gallagher, the kidnap victim turned plucky police recruit; resilient, wholesome everywoman. The roles are pretty different.
Culture has also done a bit of work on itself in terms of gaze: is it always a male gaze? Is the male character more fully drawn? Can you even figure out what the female character is playing at, or is she too beautiful to need a motivation? This was a massive flaw in the book, which is entirely told from the perspective of the surgeon. Books are allowed to have narrators and some of them have to be male, but Anna is “such a slight version of herself, she’s almost this spectre that slips into the family and blows everything up,” says Lloyd Malcolm. “I wanted to make sure we filled her out more, understood her more. That doesn’t mean we have to like her and all the things she does. I mean, I ended up with a huge amount of love for her. I just wanted to give her a massive hug.”
The script has without question stepped up to fix the deficiencies of the book, but it’s testament to Murphy’s incredible screen presence that you find yourself allying with her ages before her backstory emerges to give you any good reason to. Armitage, too, hands in a remarkably convincing performance as dominant; in real life he’s very submissive. If he starts on a thought and decides not to follow through, you just have to tell him to, then he does. For instance: “Some people will watch this and think: ‘I hope to God that person never walks into my field of vision.’ And some people will feel like: ‘I want to feel that.’ It’s a bit like … oh, I’d better not go there.” “You have to.” “Well, I’m sure there are people in the world who have never had an all-consuming orgasm. You’re missing a large part of being human.”
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But if TV has largely evolved so female characters can’t be ciphers any more, and kink doesn’t have to be etched out of a plot to which it is actually central, there is also more contention around BDSM, more people who would challenge it as a legitimate preference and say that it’s women internalising male violence. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to a point of consensus around it,” says Lloyd Malcolm. “What I hope we’ve done is show a relationship that is, in essence, destructive, but that’s not related to the kind of sex they’re having.”
“It’s not even gender reversal, where she’s calling the shots and giving him the permission to dominate her,” says Armitage. “It’s beyond that: a push and pull between two adults, exploring what their kinks are. He doesn’t even know, and that’s part of the attraction. It’s not about props. It’s about freedom.” Murphy calls Armitage’s character a frog in the water, “slowly boiling, until there’s no getting out of it”. Of her own, she says: “I like to think of her as ink. Anything she touches, anything she’s been around, there’s this bleed of her, this inkiness. That’s the kind of substance she is.”
The funny thing is, the whole show retains the appeal of the original 90s morality sex fable, which is an intense melodrama, with baroque detailing, the sense of an authorial subconscious gaping open, and the central question: what’s the worst that could happen if you let your appetites overwhelm you? You unleash the apocalypse, idiot! It’s just that it took another 30 years before the screen could shed its squeamishness and try to tell it.
Obsession is on Netflix on 13 April.
