Taking a gamble on assuming that anyone could ever forget Mariah Carey has a signature song called “Obsessed,” Olivia Rodrigo has opted to release a single of the same name from the Guts (Spilled) edition of her sophomore album. Although she’s already been performing it on her Guts World Tour, the official release of the track has also been heralded by an accompanying music video directed by Mitch Ryan (known mainly for his Rosalía videos). Though, clearly, Rodrigo is still stuck in her Petra Collins phase here, complete with the prom queen aesthetic that Courtney Love already ripped Rodrigo a new asshole for when she used it during her Sour Prom era. Indeed, “Obsessed” feels like Rodrigo can’t quite leave her high school days behind, swapping out a prom for an “exes ball” (or “gala”) instead so as to be able to still wield her prom queen look.
While that might not include any tiaras this time, it does involve gowns and sashes—and trophies…oh my! Thus, the event is seemingly equal parts beauty pageant and cotillion. A parade of all his exes branded with different labels on their sashes, including Miss Focus on My Career, Miss Put Him in Therapy, Miss Summer Camp 8 Years Ago, Miss Thought She Was the One, Miss Long Distance, Miss Freshman Year and Miss 2 Summers Ago, among others. (Olivia herself is, naturally, Miss Right Now.) Obviously, the guy Olivia is with is both much older (a seemingly new fetish of Rodrigo’s after her Joshua Bassett debacle) and a total himbo. However, despite the video’s plot in terms of featuring many, many exes for Rodrigo to obsess over, it still channels the season one episode of Sex and the City called “Three’s A Crowd.”
As the title suggests, it’s all about when one, as the current girlfriend, feels like the odd person out in her relationship thanks to the looming, spectral presence of the ex. In Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) case, that looming presence is Barbara (Noelle Beck), Mr. Big’s (Chris Noth) ex-wife. As episode eight (featured, funnily enough, right after the episode titled “The Monogamists”), it was to serve as a turning point for whether or not the Carrie and Big relationship would endure or crumble under the pressure of Carrie’s expectations for such an emotionally unavailable man (to be sure, that does sound a lot like Rodrigo). So emotionally unavailable, in fact, that he only thought to tell her he was previously married when she happens to ask if he’s ever done a threesome. To which he replies, 1) “Sure, who hasn’t?” and 2) that the person he did it with was his wife.
Needless to say, this sends Carrie into a tailspin as she assumes that they were probably always having “wild sex” together while, now, he and Carrie are only having “sweet sex” ever since settling into comfortableness with each other. This presumption about Barbara being more adventurous in the boudoir plays right into the bridge of “Obsessed” that goes, “Is she friends with your friends?/Is she good in bed?/Do you think about her?/No, I’m fine, it doesn’t matter, tell me/Is she easy-going?/Never controlling?/Well-traveled? Well-read?/Oh God, she makes me so upset.”
As Barbara does Carrie. Even more so after the latter actually meets her, arranging a sitdown with “Barb” after finding out that she works in publishing. This kind of obsessing, indeed, puts Rodrigo’s to shame. For, in the modern era, all a Miss Right Now has to do is stalk an ex-girlfriend’s social media from the safety of her own bedroom rather than actually meet up with her in real life under false pretenses. That level of obsession is far more suited to the verse, “If I told you how much I think about her/You’d think I was in love/And if you knew how much I looked at her pictures/You would think we’re best friends.” Carrie, however, is much too narcissistic to lay claim to the following declarations in “Obsessed”: “‘Cause I know her star sign, I know her blood type/I’ve seen every movie she’s been in, and, oh god, she’s beautiful/And I know you loved her, and I know I’m butthurt/But I can’t help it, no, I can’t help it.”
And what Carrie can’t help is being irritated by Barbara’s good looks and ostensible good taste when she immediately tells Carrie, “I’m a huge fan of your work.” This speaks automatically to Rodrigo’s vexed tone when she sings, “She’s talented, she’s good with kids/She even speaks kindly about me.” Having come face to face with “the enemy,” Carrie tries to remove the encounter from her thoughts, giving the voiceover, “That night, I thought I could put the whole Barbara thing out of my mind. After all, Mr. Big was with me now.” That he is, as Carrie lies in bed with him trying to get into some hanky panky before she imagines Barbara “supervising” the whole thing and berating, “Nibbling his earlobes? How sweet. Let me show you how it’s really done.”
This makes Carrie feel hopeless and “lesser than” anew as she instantly recoils from Big and turns to face the other way, musing inwardly, “So I guess you couldn’t avoid a threesome. Because even if you’re the only person in the bed, someone has always been there before you.” Such an assessment is in line with Rodrigo’s chorus, “I’m so obsessed with your ex/I know she’s been asleep on my side of your bed, and I can feel it/I’m starin’ at her like I wanna get hurt/And I remember every detail you have ever told me, so be careful, baby.”
Big, not so clueless as to ignore her strange mood, prods, “Hey, what just happened? Where’d you go?” She shrugs, “I was preoccupied.” “No kidding. About what?” Carrie’s internal voice then replies, “Your ex-wife’s breasts, your ex-wife’s lips, your ex-wife’s long legs.” Damn, talk about obsessed. In such a way that also applies to Rodrigo’s self-referential lament, “She’s got those lips, she’s got those hips/The life of every fuckin’ party.” These two lines giving a nod to both “all-american bitch” (sarcastically announcing, “I’m a perfect all-american bitch/With perfect all-american lips/And perfect all-american hips”) and “ballad of a homeschooled girl” (“the party’s done and I’m no fun”—hence, she herself is no life of the party). Rodrigo adds to that, “And I know you love me, and I know it’s crazy/But every time you call my name, I think you mistake me for her.” This being an inverse allusion to her role in “deja vu.” Like Carrie, Olivia knows that, technically, “You both have moved on, you don’t even talk/But I can’t help it, I got issues, I can’t help it, baby.”
When Carrie manages to get a few more details out of Big, he quickly closes the “ex file” (a term Carrie will later use on Jack Berger [Ron Livingston] in the season six episode, “The Perfect Present”) by saying, “Let’s not talk about the past, please.” Carrie then allows herself to be held by him, but still imagines Barbara in bed right next to her as she narrates, “What Mr. Big didn’t realize was the past was sleeping right next to me.” Rodrigo clearly has some of those same sentiments.
Co-written with St. Vincent a.k.a. Anne “Annie” Clark and Dan Nigro, one has to wonder if either of the three parties watched “Three’s A Crowd” at any point during the song’s creation. For it so perfectly sums up Carrie’s dilemma in this episode. And now, Rodrigo’s in “Obsessed.” However, the takeaway that Rodrigo doesn’t seem to glean is the one Carrie comes up with by the end: “I realized the real appeal of the threesome: it was easy. It’s intimacy that’s the bitch.” Of course, this reinforces the monogamous heteronormative belief that a person can only have “true intimacy” with one other person. A philosophy that Rodrigo, in her bid to graft 90s and 00s-era pop culture for everything she does, is only too ready to perpetuate.
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[…] over her endlessly and all the ways in which she’s probably superior. Hence, the song title: “obsessed” (which, it bears repeating, Mariah Carey has a monopoly on as much as she does […]