The point isn’t that he didn’t word the wish perfectly, the movie is very explicitly not trying to do a monkey’s paw thing.
The whole point is that he wished for something that entirely ignored Nikki’s agency and personhood, as if loving someone (more than anything in the whole fucking world!) is a switch that can be flipped. You can’t just arbitrarily suppress a fundamental aspect of someone’s personhood and expect them to be the same person, which is the contradiction at the core of his wish and at the core of misogyny’s obsession with women.
The way he words the wish and his reactions throughout are characterization to help drive home the theme of the movie. Nikki already loves him non-romantically. But he doesn’t want to be loved by Nikki, he wants to own her (mirroring how men in patriarchal society view women). But by doing so she loses the essence of self that he wants to control. It’s a fundamental contradiction of patriarchy.
The point isn’t that he didn’t word the wish perfectly, the movie is very explicitly not trying to do a monkey’s paw thing.
The whole point is that he wished for something that entirely ignored Nikki’s agency and personhood, as if loving someone (more than anything in the whole fucking world!) is a switch that can be flipped. You can’t just arbitrarily suppress a fundamental aspect of someone’s personhood and expect them to be the same person, which is the contradiction at the core of his wish and at the core of misogyny’s obsession with women.
The way he words the wish and his reactions throughout are characterization to help drive home the theme of the movie. Nikki already loves him non-romantically. But he doesn’t want to be loved by Nikki, he wants to own her (mirroring how men in patriarchal society view women). But by doing so she loses the essence of self that he wants to control. It’s a fundamental contradiction of patriarchy.