But with their maternal obsessions, both films are clearly on to something.
Against the cold modern reality he creates in "The Czar's Bride," Mr. Tcherniakov places a stirring Shakespearean tale of power and passion, of obsessions both requited and rejected.
Talbot's pioneering images which the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library is currently in the process of digitizing are a window into his obsessions, both alchemical and aesthetic.
For me it was the moment that sparked a life-long obsession, both with The Smiths and pop music in general.
In fact, Korean parents' famed zeal for educating their children — an obsession both praised as the source of the country's rapid economic development and criticized for the ills associated with high-pressure school life — is often traced back to seowon.
Getting it right has been a near-obsession both for Mr. Ayer, who grew up about two miles from here, on West Adams Boulevard, when it was discovering crack cocaine in the 1980s, and for a pair of actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, who are not from the neighborhood but decided to learn it on a quest for purity in the dirtiest of film genres: the L.A. cop drama.
Lest anyone should doubt the pedigree of their obscure obsession, both men are quick to mention their hobby's most distinguished member, now a late member: Frank Sinatra, whose house in Rancho Mirage, Calif., had a room filled with model trains, among them five very expensive cars of the type of train that first ran on the A line. "Of course," Mr. Gerstein said, "Frank had to have the A train".
Others who share my unhealthy obsessions with both politics and language may know of an earlier usage of that now famous label and fighting word; at any rate, it has proved protean and mutable over these 55 years.
The novel reads like a manifesto for his obsessions: London, both everyday and arcane; a radical political sensibility; and a determination to resist the standard tropes of fantasy whereby quests are followed, chosen ones fulfil their destiny and evil is vanquished.
And it involves America's obsessions with both celebrity and guns -- and the deadly connection between the two; what does it mean when alienated, angry young men who want to be famous know people will read their websites if they pick up a gun?
These writers knew they were sacrificing their lives to obsession, but they accepted the price and others lionised them for it.And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal.
