"Sick of Myself," a dark comedy film homage to our narcissistic age
When real life is the stuff of pathological parody
Sick of Myself, a Norwegian film by Kristoffer Borgli, released in the United States mid-April of this year, is a story that revolves around a self-obsessed couple, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a barista, and her conceptual artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), located in Oslo, Norway.
The film is a piercing satire/black comedy about the age of narcissism and the lengths people will go to get attention, i.e. narcissistic supply. Themes explored include image obsession and that perception is more important than reality. Signe notes early on in the film that narcissists get ahead in life and that the only reason she hadn't gotten ahead is because she was not a narcissist.
Signe and Thomas are a deeply competitive couple with copious amounts of pathological envy-driven public belittlement and humiliation, that they perversely reframe as antagonistic grist for the mill of self improvement.
This toxic race to the bottom of attention-addled “self improvement” festers like the monstrous sores that will soon be on Signe’s face. In an effort to get attention and compete with her boyfriend’s newfound fame as an art scene’s darling, Signe secretly resorts to taking a (fictional) drug, Lidexol, known for producing disfiguring and grotesque facial sores, that she obtains on the black market/dark web from Russia.
In a spectacularly psychopathic move, that is to say, goal oriented, Signe exploits herself for the value she (and society) holds most dear, attention/narcissistic supply, her real drug of choice, through her "mystery" skin disease. Even though the plentiful consumption of this pharmaceutical drug meant to treat anxiety, ironically enough, makes her extraordinarily sick to the point of vomiting blood, producing oozing sores of blood from her scalp and losing much of her hair, her sickness doesn't matter to her in the face of the much vaulted and venerated sympathies of others, as based on her own Munchausen syndrome victimization. She laments after her hospital visit, owing to this pharmaceutical abuse, that she only got 56 messages and two hospital visits.
With the cementing of her victimhood status over her pitiable lack of diagnosis for her “mystery” disease, however, Signe scores enough attention as to obtain some degree of media coverage. This self-imposed medical crisis of self-aggrandizement reminds me of Tom Ripley’s famous line from the movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, "I always thought it'd be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody”.
Signe may not be a supermodel, however, her facial deformations land her, in a dark comedic way, an "inclusive" modeling contract, because, of course it does in our flatteningly egalitarian and disingenuous postmodern age, where ugly is the new beautiful, rounding out our upside down world. Modeling a shapeless oversized T-shirt and mid-calf skirt for “all genders”, her inclusive modeling agency pairs her with the fictional brand "Regardless" where her nonsensical tagline is “Regardless means it fits me. Regardless”.
Above all, narcissists desire to be unique, not necessarily a beauty contest winner in Signe’s case. Even being the biggest loser of ill health, is sufficiently unique.
Woven throughout the movie are disorienting fantasy sequences of Signe’s unbridled attention-based success, which as a viewer, you are momentarily left unsure if the scenes are playing out in actuality or if they are a figment of Signe’s imagination. These fantasy sequences reveal her troubling loose grip on reality.
Narcissism is a death cult, nihilistic and the reification of destrudo/death drive. Libido is the force of life. Narcissists have no access to this life force energy, libido. Signe leverages self-destructiveness to get attention. Her kleptomaniacal boyfriend, cut from the same cloth, Thomas, goes to prison.
Nothing ends well for the downward spiral that is narcissism.
Oh wow, I just read the first three paragraphs and told my bf I want to watch this film. Will not read this review properly until after that...