As chance would have it, the next Montaigne essay tracks to something else I want to convey about the movie “Obsession.” My last essay was perhaps a bit too harsh on the story’s main character. Baron was, no doubt, responsible for everything that happened in the story and his refusal to see this destroys any possible sympathy towards him.

That is unless you consider that he too was living under a spell, just as much as his object of affection Nikki. Instead of his mind being warped by a novelty toy, Bear’s mind was poisoned by the lure of romantic love, and an inescapable belief that this young woman was all that he desired and needed in life.

This leads to a stark choice for Bear — he either remains tethered to this young woman as the unnatural part of her set loose by the spell victimizes everyone, or he takes his own life and breaks the spell. And this is where this Montaigne essay comes in, with the brutalist position that if people become so attached to the luxurious trappings of life — and the misery that inevitably follows — they have a duty to withdraw or die.

When seen in this frame, “Obsession” comes across less as a morality tale and more like a tragedy of human existence: the things that we want most torture us and if we move heaven and earth to acquire them, we risk spreading the misery beyond us. This brings me back to the conclusion of yesterday’s piece, that we need to apply an Eastern asceticism to our lives and know which simple pleasures are enough.

But both “Obsession” and this rather violent version of Montaigne don’t seem to view this as a serious option for most humans. Both argue that we inevitably want more than our lives can hold, and there are unintended consequence of this greed.

I have lived long enough to be on both sides of this romantic equation — to be the one who desired what we could not have and to be the object of an amorous life that I did not really want, and was in turn warped by my various attempts to comply with it. If “Obsession” came in a different genre, with less blood and destruction, and more subtle transformations, I might relate to it more.

That, however, would make it the kind of sparsely watched arthouse film I prefer, rather than the massive box office hit it became. So I am, in a sense, desiring a film that cannot exist and this narrative arc warns me to stay away from such thinking.