Sigmund Freud describes the ego is the balance between the impractical hedonism of the
id and the equally self righteous moralism of the superego. In fact, he describes the ego as the chariot racers pulling the reins on the id. The id provides the velocity and horsepower while the ego is the navigator. In this feature film, the character of Easton Caldwell instructs his idolaters to forgo any inhibitions they have to hold out and repress their pleasure principle. In fact, Caldwell exploits the pleasure principle as a means to kill society’s conditioned defer gratification in order to regress our impulsive to that of the infant and child who live under the law of immediate gratification, the aim to satisfy cravings such as hunger, thirst, and sex. In Obscura, the core idea of the story is to feed the ego, thus allowing the masks and alternate personalities that we have created for ourselves be consumed. In Caldwell’s social experiment for his performance art film, he wants to expose the truest form of being in his torture of the Quinns— the form before their conditioned personas.
Obscura biggest ally is that society is awakening and feels inundated by the visceral images of media and crowd manipulation through subliminal stimuli. Seeping through the mainstream films from the 60’s, films like A Clockwork Orange, Lost Highway, and Inception depict the subliminal messages realities of mind control, altered states, and the exploitation of psychological manipulation. This film explores the mind bending realities of sexual repression and pent up aggression caused by society influence and exposed by brandishing anger towards his victims.
Obscura is an 99 minute psychological character study of breaking through the id, the ego, and the super-ego apex for Patrick, Gemma, and Easton. It is a veiled surrealist dystopian that at its core, it is a striped down portrayal of two relationships bonded by abuse and manipulation. It is simply about a bad romance severed by the ties and bonds of two lovers determined not to fall victims anymore. It discusses that violent, intrusive, vilified relationship under the guise of love is powerfully addictive like a love drug.
Obscura, set in the subversive underbelly of Hollywood, is a dramatic thriller about Hollywood power players and moguls scheming to uncover the truth about the secret lives of Hollywood’s reigning movie couple, The Quinns. When Patrick and Gemma Quinn’s marriage begins to unravel, their friend and Hollywood agent, Alpi Klein, invites them to Easton Caldwell’s erotic masquerade party. Gemma, the studio system’s most famous actress, is a staunch opposer to the old manuscript but is convinced by her husband to attend the soiree in hopes to reinvigorate their volatile relationship. The game takes a dangerous and unsuspecting turn and soon the Quinns, Caldwell, and Klein find themselves entangled inside the script’s real life madness when Paloma Diamond turns up dead. The objective of the game is to break free from the social conditioning while staying alive.
The potential longevity for this independent feature is much like that of David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive literature Fight Club. In fact, Obscura follow the same trajectory as films like A Clockwork Orange, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, Fight Club, American Psycho, which follows the pathology of the characters who feel trapped by confined of societal norms and break the boundaries through illicit and brutally violent ways. The topics of extramarital affairs, highly dysfunctional relationships, partners swapping, indulgent sexual fetishes, drugs, urban violence, and violence against women all under the accordance that the knowledge they acquire is at the edge of their experiences.
Obscura 