Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster
by Cristóbal Escobar *
The hell of the living is not something that will be: if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and learning: seek and be able to recognize who and what, in the midst of the hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space. – Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities (1972)
The film The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), a surreal comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of romantic and political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure, used to present a dystopic parody of the notion of coupledom, is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space, all of which form an oppressive program that varies ideologically according to the specific rules of each of the spaces.
First, following the film’s itinerary, the city appears as the dominant structuring space, not so much because it is in here that the story opens and ends, but also because it is from here that the whole action of the film is dominated and shaped. Early on in The Lobster, we discover that an urban edict enforces David (Collin Farrell) to move to a policed hotel in the countryside; a reformatory-like institution set up exclusively for matchmaking and to punish single individuals (that is, all of those who are single, widowed, or divorced). Like David, a middle-aged man who has recently been abandoned by his wife in the city, Singles are obliged to look for a partner in the hotel within 45 days or be turned into an animal of their own choosing. The rules are set as follows: 1. Individuals who appear without a partner must be policed until successfully matching someone; and 2. The partner must be someone who shares a key characteristic as oneself, such as a nosebleed or a passion for skiing or studying social sciences. Coupledom thus conceived becomes juridically determined by the urban edict and administered by the fortress-like resort. Last, the third space to be discussed, the forest (a term that comes from the Latin word foris, meaning outside of the city walls) works as an outlaw communal area run by fugitive Loners. This space indicates a political detour from the previous metropolitan-hotel ensemble by imposing an opposite yet equally despotic prohibition – that placed on romantic relationships of any kind.
Unfortunately, for David, who escapes from the hotel to the wilderness after failing to stay up to date with the villa’s regulations (that is, once his concubinage with the heartless woman [Angeliki Papoulia] comes to a bloody end), he falls in love with a Loner (Rachel Weisz) in the forest where everything is permitted except a loving sexual relationship. His destiny, once again, will put him at odds with the oppressive practices of an alternative, fugitive regime. Rachel Weisz, who plays the role of David’s short-sighted lover in the forest and who also delivers the film’s voiceover commentary, summarises this sense of ideological oppression in a similar way:
I think the movie is about the way we live sheep-like following rules and ideologies without questioning them, and even the people in this story who rebel against the dominant ideology end up building their own rules, so I think it asks the question how do you live originally, how do you live thinking outside of the rules that are prescribed to us?[1]
The geopolitics of the film are thus determined via three interconnected spaces: the city at the centre of the story, the hotel in one axis, and the forest in its opposite; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. This is also the Pythagorean triple that Javier Zoro develops in his reading of the film to envision an emancipatory ‘politics of love’ through the act of resistance:
[T]he spatial architecture of The Lobster is based on the figure of the triangle: the city is the hypotenuse while the hotel and the forest are its adjacent sides. The action of the film takes place entirely within these confines (…) [But] is it possible to create a fourth love dimension? Is it possible to think of other topologies for the contemporary city?[2]
For Zoro, the question of love becomes eminently political; it cuts across the spaces of The Lobster to open up new and invisible cartographies. The act of loving, of blindly loving someone, enacts a disproportion that destabilises the entire Pythagorean schemata. As we will see later in regard to the film’s main short-sighted couple, love becomes for them a reciprocal law that questions and goes beyond any other contract. Such a political alliance will be understood in two complementary ways, or as a twofold movement of resistance: it will stand for the unknown destination of the two main lovers as well as for the potentiality of an image that remains blinded for the look of both characters and spectators. As director Yorgos Lanthimos declares in regard to the film’s opening sequence (it is a rainy day in a rural environment and we see a woman shooting a donkey from the windshield of her car), this is an image that signals some of the unresolved actions of the story to come:
I like starting the film like that – you set the tone, but you don’t explain or go back to it. When the film finishes, the viewer can return to the beginning (…) and give their own sense or interpretation.[3]
Just after this uncanny moment where an equine creature lies dead on the ground, The Lobster opens with a back shot of David who is sitting on a sofa next to Bob, his dog-brother who years ago did not make it at the resort. Off-screen, his wife tells him that she is leaving him for another man: ‘Does he wear glasses or contact lenses?’, the short-sighted husband asks. The doorbell rings and there is a cut to a frame of the city where David and Bob walk escorted by two guards in the direction of a white minibus. Here, we listen to Beethoven’s Il adagio affettuoso ed appassionato. The score plays over an as yet unidentified female voice who informs us that David has been left by his wife in the city and thus removed to the hotel where Singles are obliged to find a new partner. The woman’s voice, as Sarah Cooper observes, is that of David’s short-sighted lover ‘who exists in excess (…) albeit in the wrong place and at the wrong time according to the laws of the different spaces he inhabits’.[4] Additionally, Beethoven’s adagio, which is inspired by the burial-vault-scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo is exiled from the city and put to death by the authorities, also anticipates the love story to unfold later in the forest, when the two lovers finally meet and the spectator realises that ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.[5] And it is also here, next to Beethoven’s musical piece, that the first displacement of the tripartite map comes to fruition; a change of physical location (David’s transition from the city-centre to the hotel-axis) imposed by the metropolitan command. So, by extending the polis’ rule to the rural territory, the hotel will now display its programmatic agenda to correct and normalise the structure of relations of its guests.
A coercive-administrative ensemble
In the manner in which Michel Foucault depicts the treatment of delinquency, madness, and sexuality in modern regimes of surveillance, the hotel is a disciplinary institution that polices and controls the conduct of its guests. On arrival, the conditions are explicitly set for David, who can stay no longer than 45 days in a single room. If everything goes well and he finds a partner within this time frame, he will be transferred to a double room for two weeks, then to a yacht for another two (honeymoon) weeks, and finally brought back to the city in the company of his new partner. Coupledom thus becomes the villa’s main institutional aim, and the staff will do everything in their power to achieve and safeguard the romantic quest of its guests.
Such is, for example, the rationale behind the coercive mechanisms employed by the manager who, after handcuffing David in his room 101 (the same room number as in George Orwell’s 1984, a prison chamber in which citizens’ worst fears are manifested and used against them) says to him: ‘This is to show you how easy life is when there are two rather than just one’; or when, in the middle of the cafeteria, she burns the hands of lisping Robert (John C. Reilly) with a toaster to show everyone in the hotel the consequences of engaging in compulsive acts of masturbation. It is a visible mechanism of torture – a physically-localised relation of power – that represents the archetypical monarch of Foucault’s classical period. The villa’s manager stands for the sovereign Queen[6] who has ‘the right to take your life or let you live’ but whose physical authority, nonetheless, is largely dependent upon ‘what is seen, what is shown, and what is manifested [in the public sphere]’.[7] Hence, since the manager incarnates the Law in the society in the film, to violate her orders is taken as a direct attack on the city-state.
However, as Foucault mentions in Discipline and Punish, such a public punishment aiming to create fear and restore order among the population is highly reliant on the visibility of the monarch’s body, so that its effects on the whole of society are rather limited, dependent on the presence of the sovereign. That is why, as Foucault argues, to truly achieve an omnipresent controlling gaze, the modern State – emerging in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe – sets off to replace the previous ‘horrifying spectacles of public torture’[8] for a more sophisticated disciplinary technique. This is a policing method that substitutes the presence of, and fear towards, the classical ruler for the more invisible procedures of modernity’s panoptical ensemble.
The panopticon, as defined by the philosopher, becomes a disciplinary gaze based on Jeremy Bentham’s architectural prison; a space designed to watch the convicts in confinement without them knowing that they are being watched. More generally, panopticism becomes for Foucault the surveillant apparatus which goes beyond the prison’s walls in order to inhabit and normalise the entire functioning of a modern disciplinary society:
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The Cerebral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalising power.[9]
To a fictionalised and dystopic degree, one could also speak of the villa’s administrative ensemble as a panoptical system that supervises, regulates, and modifies the conduct of its guests. By exploring ‘the things that [visitors] take for granted, the rules that [they] follow and nobody questions’,[10] as Lanthimos reflects in one interview, there is a similar disciplinary procedure at play in the film. Certainly, it is the hotel’s staff who normalises the behaviour of its visitors and habituates them into a system of punishment and self-control: ‘a type of power that presupposes a closely meshed grid of material coercion rather than the physical existence of a sovereign’.[11] This is, on the whole, Foucault’s hyper-administrative network operating behind the daily activities run by the resort’s managers. ‘Man eats alone’ (where a man chokes on something and dies) and ‘woman walks alone’ (where a woman is raped at night) theatrically display the horrors of being single, while ‘man eats with woman’ (the same man is helped by his wife and survives) and ‘woman walks with man’ (the same woman walks peacefully next to her lover) reinforce the benefits of being a couple. Nightly dances and sexual intercourse with the villa’s maid are also organised by the staff members to motivate their guests’ search for a new partner, and since their match must be based on the principle of resemblance, the hotel will do everything it can to help them identify similar characteristics in others that they could match (for example, by running public events such as biographical speech sessions). Finally, a whole list of benefits is outlined (from exclusive hotel facilities to special couple therapies) for those who have successfully paired. This being the case of the limping man (Ben Whishaw) and his nose-bleeding wife (Jessica Barden) who, after facing some ‘marital problems’, are given a child in adoption to help them relieve their stress.
In navigating such an ideological structure – a space of daily routines producing docile individuals – it becomes clear, as the film reviewer Yonca Talu suggests, ‘that this is no ordinary Holiday Inn but a severely administrated open prison’.[12] The fact that upon arrival visitors are stripped of all their personal belongings and given a uniform set of garments clearly echoes a place where personal expression is not only denied (they all dress the same) but also measured and objectified under the careful watch of the vigilant sentinel. This time, however, the hotel epitomises not only Foucault’s modern State as a space of confinement but more broadly integrates his other policing institutions – such as the hospital, the school, and the family unit – to effectively flesh out the structure of panopticism. ‘The clinic’ says Foucault, ‘owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in-depth, not only of medical discourse but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.’[13] The same separation between the norm/al and what deviates from it is examined under the conjugal family site and its Christian discourses on sexuality, what Foucault sees as the formative locus of heterosexual desire and the very ‘framework of modern European sexual morality’.[14]
At the level of sexual administration, what truly threatens the hotel’s regulations and procedures is not so much the dichotomous trajectory of a homosexual/heterosexual body as it is the polymorphism located on its bisexual queerness. When requested upon arrival to specify his sexual preference, David indicates he likes women. Although, after recalling a homosexual experience he once had in college, David asks whether there is a bisexual option to mark. Straightforwardly, the receptionist replies: ‘I’m afraid you have to decide right now whether you want to be registered as a homosexual or heterosexual.’ Forced to answer within the limits of the hotel’s ‘either/or’ structure, David finally checks-in as a heterosexual. Then again, minutes after registration, when asked about his shoe size, he is made to realise that queer, indeterminate states of being are not to be tolerated. Being 44 1/2, David must decide whether to wear shoes sizing 44 or 45, because, as the villa’s maid (Ariane Labed) informs him: ‘There are no half sizes in the hotel.’
Whereas for film critic Zoro this rejection of David’s ‘amorphous body’ fits perfectly in the Platonic myth of Aristophanes – whose split identity finds its missing half in the couple/other; for Cooper, on the contrary, the hotel’s dual structuring ‘being either/or rather than both/and’[15] corresponds to the learned functioning of gendered behaviour, one that is imposed upon us by normative heterosexuality. Such is, precisely, what Judith Butler questions through her performative sexual body: ‘Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.’[16] Interestingly for Butler, who draws on Foucault’s juridical systems to suggest the normalisation of a sexual desire that subsequently individuals ‘come to represent in society’,[17] the queering of a body-complex getstroublesome as soon as the fluidity of its gender emancipates from those heteronormative frameworks imposed by the Law. In short, as represented in The Lobster, it is the ab/normal corpus that must be supervised and ‘brought back’ into the norm.
Put differently, it is sameness that becomes the basic principle for the normative functioning of Lanthimos’ and Foucault’s society. This means that matching, the general rule that citizens must obey and follow, necessitates likeness as its specific feature to legitimise any romantic endeavour. Hence, whether characters share a love for skiing or a similar passion for the social sciences; whether they have a nice voice or a nose bleed, all that matters is to find a suitable partner to bind conjugality in its dominant ancient scheme – that of sameness or Aristophanist familiarity, to some degree: ‘If, then, you two are friendly to each other, by some tie of nature’, Plato writes in Lysis, ‘you belong to each other.’[18] Because ‘for the man who keeps his eye on a true friend’, as Cicero proclaims in Laelius de Amicitia, ‘keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself’.[19]
Such a self-image contained in the being of the other, predominant among the ancient Greeks, is also what motivates Cooper to link ‘Narcissus and The Lobster’ in her article of the same name. Derrida, who more broadly examines this mythological Greek gaze in his Politics of Friendship, similarly deconstructs the philosophical premises of a western ‘true relationship’ based on the social bonding between male friends. For Derrida, the fact that in most discourses about friendship – and by extension love – the idea of brotherhood is what informs our filiation with the polis (e.g. the oligarch male citizens of the Greek Republic) or with the Modern State (e.g. the Declaration of the Rights of Man) not only signals the reciprocal union between male political friends but also, and for the same reason, it is what excludes the female-other from dominant society:
Fraternity requires a law and names, symbols, a language, engagements, oaths, speech, family and nation (…) Do you not think, dear friend, that the brother is always a brother of alliance, a brother-in-law or an adoptive brother, a foster brother? – And the sister? Would she be in the same situation? Would she be a case of fraternity?[20]
In the same token, it could be suggested that Lanthimos’ tale operates according to a similar code of patriarchal associations; one that by requiring ‘a law and names’ creates a network of homo-political filiations. This is, however, a difficult hypothesis to sustain, and there are at least two reasons for the latter claim. On the one hand, and following the Greek phallogocentric model, one rapidly observes that it is mostly men, and not women, who acquire a proper name in the film. It is David, and not his short-sighted partner, his heartless woman, or his city-wife, who bears a name. There is even a name for his dog-brother, Bob, his lisping mate, Robert, or his limping friend, John, but no names for their mothers, lovers, and female friends. Although, and however marginal to the story this may be, there is at least one female name to acknowledge there – that of little girl, Elisabeth, John and nosebleed woman’s daughter who happens to appear fleetingly in the film twice. So, properly speaking, the hegemony of the name remains on the side of men. And naming, as Derrida maintains, prevails as an important political oath in the Greek ‘democracy of [male] friends’.[21] It is naming then that enacts the minimum condition to perform what he calls a speech – that is, to have a voice in the public sphere; it is the symbol of equality among the citizens-brothers of both Lanthimos’ dystopic society and Derrida’s Greek polis. Not naming would thus signify the exclusion from such a politics of friendship, like his ‘sister-other’ as the excluded friend from the ancient polis-state.
Here is where the modern Greek filmmaker complicates the political alliance of the traditional friend. Let us pretend, for the sake of the argument, that the female character is indeed someone who remains excluded from the film’s political relations – thus, in Lanthimos’ society, by not naming the sister, the male character remains faithful to the Greek model of the canonical friend. But if that were the case, and the sisters were omitted among the citizen-brothers, how come women, and not men, personify the ruler in the film’s regimes? Why is it the female character, and not the male, who plays the role of political leader in this seemingly European Empire: one being British (the manager in the hotel) and the other being French (the Loners’ leader in the forest)? Or could this perhaps signify another form of women’s patriarchisation – a kind of ‘toxic femininity’ – dominating Lanthimos’ political filiations? A non-becoming woman of women? A female subject internalised into Foucault’s official-judges or Derrida’s male-regulated democracy?
The internal resonance of resistance
The dissymmetry of this operation expresses an aporia of relations that Lanthimos develops in classical/modern terms. Here, by not cohering its pieces under a firm logical schema, The Lobster proposes an internal opposition that questions the political filiations described under the motto ‘only men are brothers in the West’ and also the very politics of the film’s narrative based on likeness as the principle for love and fraternity. This means that if the basic premise of the storyline is that of matchmaking via resemblance, then what Lanthimos does is to set a counter-movement, or an act of resistance, that is internal to itself. This is what Giorgio Agamben defines as a virtual image that, in itself, contains a power to resist: ‘If the potentiality that the act liberates is internal to the act, [then] in the same way, resistance must be internal to the act of creation.’[22] The word resistere, which in its Latin etymology stands for the act of withstanding or standing still, expresses for Agamben the capacity of images to not-be, or to remain inoperative in their virtuality or ‘impotence’ – that is to say, as the potentiality of a movement that does not become in actuality. The act of creation, therefore, rather than just reacting to an external force or action, is understood by Agamben as the capacity of images to not be linked to other images, hence to resist, to arrest or to restrain from something. Likewise, what Lanthimos does in his film is to create visuals that never really activate stable relations with future scenarios but pure gestural moments that remain suspended in their potentiality to not-be:
In the potentiality to be, potentiality has as its object a certain act, in the sense that for it energhein, being-in-act, can only mean passing to a determinate activity [this is why, by the way, Schelling defines the potentiality that cannot pass into action as blind]; as for the potentiality to not-be, on the other hand, the act can never consist of a simple transition de potentia ad actum: It is, in other words, a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself, a potential potentiae.[23]
Agamben’s potential to not-be, however, does not always assume an absolute suspension in The Lobster. At times, images also anticipate themselves in future events. For example, towards the second half, we finally get to see the short-sighted woman who has been narrating the story; or when, already in the forest, we realise that punishment may descend upon her and her lover (after the Loner’s leader finds out about their prohibited romance). In both cases, as in other episodes of the film, the passage from perception to action revokes, in all its indeterminacy, the internal resonance of Agamben’s poetic act.
At other moments, however, the temporal instability introduced by the image remains virtual in all its inoperativeness. This sense of unactualised potentiality can be seen, for example, in the film’s overture and closure. In the first act, when the story opens, there is a woman who shoots a donkey that we do not see again in the film; we also do not know why she killed that animal in particular and not the others of the same kind: Was the donkey her ex-husband? Did she get the right animal? Was she, by any chance, David’s city-wife who in the next shot we hear but not see? Such a beginning represents an image that remains inconclusive throughout the entire fable. Likewise, at the end of the story, in the restaurant’s scene, the whole situation remains quite uncertain. Here, after we see David holding a steak knife in the toilet next to his right eye, the frame cuts to a visual of the restaurant where his now blinded (ex-short-sighted) partner awaits. Right after, the final credits appear over the black screen and the viewer does not know whether this is the end of the story or, hypothetically, the next shot in which David has already taken out his eyes on screen – hence, a completely blinded image (the black screen) produced by David’s subjective point of view.
The external resonance of resistance
In addition to Agamben’s comments, and more in line with Lanthimos’ story of blind lovers, I also take the resonance of resistance to be an external political act. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terminology, this can be read as a set of tactics that some of the film’s characters employ to mock the ‘order-words’[24] imposed by their sovereigns. Such is the initial and most elemental meaning of the notion of resistance that Agamben derives from Deleuze’s lecture on ‘What is the Creative Act?’: ‘Resistance as opposition to an external force (…) resistance to the society of control and the paradigm of information.’[25] Resistance, in short, as the refusal to comply with a system of directions or communiqués.
As Deleuze mentions, quoting Foucault, such a control-society is no longer defined by the physical presence of the classical sovereign, neither by the confined spaces of disciplinary modernity, but by a new system of information organised under the logic of ‘order-words’: ‘When you are informed, you are told what you are supposed to believe (…) Informing means circulating an order-word’.[26] In The Lobster, such a modality of subjection is contained in both of Foucault’s epochs, the classical sovereign and the modern disciplinary, so that besides the public tortures enacted by the traditional Queen/administrator in the villa, or the tyrant-leader in the forest, there is a panoptical ensemble effectively put at play by the city-hotel ensemble. However, in Lanthimos’ society, there is an added informational network that can no longer pass through Foucault’s classical punishment or modern confinement exclusively, but through a broader system of communications that Deleuze defines, quoting William Burroughs, as ‘control-society’:
[Foucault] clearly thought that we were entering a new type of society. He clearly said that disciplinary societies were not eternal (…) Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control.[27]
This is what Foucault calls, in his late lectures at College de France, ‘biopolitics’ – the interiorisation of an external command into the very body of individuals. Here, as Deleuze remarks, any person can now move ‘infinitely and freely without being confined while being perfectly controlled’.[28] And this is, as we know, the juridical sentence that goes unquestioned, reproduced, and internalised in the society in the film; an effectively surreal form of communication that can transform the body of individuals from citizens to convicts, or more oddly, from human to non-human animals. This means, in the film, that to pose the question about external resistance is less a matter of escaping from the city-Law as it is to find the zones less striated in it; less a matter of becoming ‘outlaw’ (as the Singles do in the forest) as to avoid the impact of the Law in the very body of individuals. Resistance, in short, as the ‘practice of the weak’,[29] as represented in all those screen characters who mock ‘order-words’ in order to find ‘pass-words’ lying underneath. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view:
Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere (…) There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages (…) It is necessary [therefore] to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.[30]
Tactics, pass-words, resistance. The tactic is a pass-word performing resistance to an external command. Resistance to what, though? To the hell of a situation that the film’s characters are trapped in. This means, as in Calvino’s epigraph, to dissemble within the rules and not follow the orders imposed by the metropolis. It is, in short, to struggle against the systemic interiorisation of the Law, for as Foucault suggests: ‘Where there is [dominant] power, there is also [subaltern] resistance.’[31] I will explain how the characters of the film enact such external political struggle.
At a basic level, resistance represents a purely instrumental act; a tactic that pretends to follow the commands imposed by the city-Law while disobeying its premises. Visitors in the hotel assume different coping strategies, all of which thwart the juridical order by faking its matchmaking principle. John, for example, who declares to prefer a nosebleed from time to time rather than be converted into an animal that will, later on, get eaten by a bigger animal, beats himself over the head to pair with a nosebleed woman and, in this way, remain human, all too human. Or David, who thought that it was more difficult to pretend to have feelings when you do not than to pretend not to have feelings when you do, mistakenly chooses to match with a partner whose coldness of heart he cannot put up with: after having suspicions about David’s emotional character, she kills his dog-brother Bob and confirms, once she spots David crying in the toilet, that he has built their relationship on a lie. When David weeps next to his dead brother lying on the floor, he is reminded of the hotel’s punishment for such misconduct – a severe penalty that he will try to avoid at all costs. Threatened by his partner’s accusation to the manager, David rebels against her betrayal and, in an act of desperation, takes justice into his own hands; he shoots the heartless woman in the back and turns her, in his words, into ‘the animal that no one wants to be’. Also, the villa’s maid who has helped David to accomplish the crime, and whose loyalty (as we are now starting to realise) belongs not to the hotel’s manager but to the forest’s leader, marks a passage that replaces the previous form of instrumental resistance (one coping with the hotel’s orders while cheating its premises) to a more subversive act that refuses to follow the hotel’s commands. In this capacity, David’s escape to the forest, unlike those characters who prefer to survive in the hotel, enacts a more active counter-attack. He transforms ‘order-words’ into components of a passage.
The transition from the hotel to the woods is marked cinematographically by the door device as threshold space. After David stuns the villa’s maid with a tranquilliser gun in the abdomen (to feign that she was not part of his escape) he drags the cold-blooded body of his ex-partner to the room where the animal transformation will take place. Once we see the door closing with both of them on the inside, David reappears in the next shot running towards a destination that is yet unknown to him. The short-sighted woman who narrates the episode, scored again to Beethoven’s adagio, indicates David’s second change of geo-political location. This time, however, by employing the metaphor of the door, David’s transition from the hotel to the woods not only marks his entrance into a new physical realm but also, as Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener suggest, into a new ideological and ontological space: ‘The door [in cinema] not only signals the crossing from one physical space into another but also (…) the transport from one ontological realm to another.’[32]
After having slept beside a tree in the forest, David is found by a Loner who takes him where the runaway Singles live. At first, the new space seems to open a brighter future for him. Framed from a relatively high angle shot, with a tender voice, a poncho, and a messianic look, the leader of the Loners (Léa Seydoux) informs David that he can stay indefinitely in the woods, asks him if he is a doctor who could help around in the commune, and invites him to live there peacefully and happily as a Single individual. David feels thankful, and the new ruler hugs him wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, though, this is also the moment when the door to heaven turns into another despotic inferno for him: ‘By the way’, she adds, ‘any romantic or sexual relations between Loners are not permitted and any such acts are punished. Is that clear?’ David is once again confined by an authoritarian sovereign who, although permissive in appearance, is as oppressive as the previous manager in the villa. Or to paraphrase Hannah Ardent, even when the Loners seem to be a group of ‘radical revolutionaries’, in reality, and after their revolution against the hotel has been achieved, they become nothing but a bunch of ‘conservative individuals’.[33]
The forest’s ideological mandate is therefore understood as an opposite repressive program to that of the film’s canonical society:[34] if masturbation was prohibited in the hotel, such an act is now allowed; if the villa’s manager hosted ballroom dances to form couples, Loners will perform solitary dances with earphones in the woods; if the hotel’s administration rewarded and gave extra days to those who hunted Loners, Singles will party every time they conspire against couples. In short, if the issue back in the hotel was about an intimacy with the self, the problem in the forest is about an intimacy with the other. Taken to an extreme, this is also why Singles must dig their own graves and the reason why they receive cruel punishments for their romantic offences (e.g. the red kiss for flirting and, what is worse, the red intercourse for sex). David, once again, runs the risk of defying the norms of the new space: by desiring to match with someone he loves and whose astigmatism he perfectly matches, he decides to transgress the order-words of the forest where neither sex nor love-alliances are allowed.
David’s drive to resist – a displacing movement that unsettles the organisation of dominant regimes – clearly manifests the deterritorialising forces of the work of art by interrogating what is commonly accepted in the public sphere. Being an architect himself – thus a creator of spatial habitation – David is someone who enacts an unsettling political power ‘capable of overturning orders (…) in order to affirm difference in a state of permanent revolution’.[35] Quite contrary to the sovereigns of the society, whose missions are those of Arendt’s ‘conservation’ or Deleuze’s ‘prolongation [of] an established historical order’,[36] David represents an ‘artist-stranger’[37] who defies the rules of the different spaces he inhabits. That is arguably the reason why he and his short-sighted partner decide to move away from the forest and live secretly together at the riverside. As Weisz’s voice-over commentary tells us, it is next to this open territory where they create a hidden language of gestures that can only be encrypted through their bodies:
We developed a code so that we can communicate with each other even in front of the others without them knowing what we’re saying. When we turn our heads to the left, it means ‘I love you more than anything in the world’, and when we turn our heads to the right, it means ‘watch out, we’re in danger’ (…) The code grew and grew as time went by, and within a few weeks, we could talk about almost anything without even opening our mouths.
‘Gesture’, the key element of modern cinema,[38] stands in Lanthimos’ fable as the non-legible component of the lovers’ language. It is a hidden code that rejects the forest’s official mandates and which they develop in proximity to the sea, by the riverside. Here is where, among other things, they practice a dance together as to develop their body language; where they kiss each other and realise they’re a perfect match; or after she has been blinded by the forest’s ruler, where they prepare their escape to the city in a coded language that no one (not even spectators) can understand: ‘I raise my left foot’ says David to her, ‘I bring my elbow to my knee and tap it twice. I bring my foot to my knee, and tap it three times…’ David is determined to go ahead with this secret plan, but by the expression of his partner’s face, and the dubious tone of her answer, the spectator senses, rather than foresees, the dreadful actions to come: ‘Are you sure you’re prepared to do that?’
The potentiality of this gesture – no longer a visible sign – thus expresses the internal resistance of an image that remains unactualised: Was David suggesting in the above sentence to take his eyes out so that they could perform a ‘sightless match’ in the city? If so, why not claim their common passion towards the ocean instead of going blind? Or is this perhaps a case of Shakespearean love becoming where passionate lovers can no longer see? Put differently, is their wild and fiery love just another way to signify that true lovers, as Cooper observes, must confront the trial of death?[39] In The Lobster, as we saw, most characters fake their romance with one another, thus couples avoid death by showing more concern for their own private lives than for the lives of their loving others. Personal death is thus denied by at least two operations in the film: by faking resemblance (as in the case of the limping man who lies to his nose-bleeding partner to stay human); or by killing your partner before dying for him/her (as in the case of the hotel manager’s husband who decides to shoot her instead of killing himself first). This means that to think about death with an open heart – that is, beyond any measures or rationale – the loving presence of the other must take complete possession of one’s self. Or conversely, passionate death can occur from despair in the absence of a loving partner, meaning a person’s soul has never had the experience of loving another or of having had a love-affair. The latter case is illustrated in the film by the biscuit woman who ends up throwing herself out of the window in the absence of a suitable partner to love and to have sex with. Her song, if any, would be that of the first hunt scene in slow motion, when Danae Strategopoulou’s ‘Apo Mesa Pethamenos’ (Dead Inside) evokes a similar solitary lament, one of suffering, renunciation, and despair: ‘You wonder, they tell me, how my heart still goes on. But aren’t there lots of people like me – dead inside and alive on the outside?’
Lastly, in regard to the main two lovers, which is the converse image of a life inside and (potential) death outside, affection ‘seems to consist more in loving than in being loved’, as Aristotle once proclaimed. For example, in their first trip to the city, just after David realises his partner is also short-sighted, they feign matrimony in the apartment of their leader’s parents. Here, David kisses his wife and publicly declares his love to her: ‘I love my wife so much [that] I could die for her. That’s how much I love her…’ Previously in the forest, the short-sighted woman had already saved his life (while putting her own at risk) by sticking a knife in the lisping man’s leg before shooting him. Grateful for her heroic action, David will hunt and marinate rabbits for her to eat, or as it happens at the end of the film, kill the forest-ruler who has impeded the fulfillment of their astigmatic love romance. Death, in all of these expressions, becomes the true trial for the two lover-friends. Or as Derrida would say:
In all good sense, what you hear above all is loving; you must hear loving (…) it is, therefore, an act before being a situation; rather, the act of loving, before being the state of being loved. An action before a passion (…) Someone must love in order to know what loving means, then, and only then, can one know what being loved means.[40]
An action before a passion. Better still, an action that is driven by a blind passion. That is how much the main couple love each other and the reason why they do not find any other suitable match while preparing their escape to the city: ‘Do you like berries? Can you play the piano? Do you speak German?’ David asks her persistently: ‘No, no, no!’ She replies, without any hope of finding feasible criteria to pair. How about: Do you like the sea? Why don’t we stay together forever in the beach…? No, as for the lovers who do not see, the zeal of passion demands a certain disproportion.
That night, when I watched The Lobster at one of Melbourne’s cinemas, I was waiting for one last image to come, waiting perhaps for that moment of certainties and answers through which the eye, so rejoicing and expectant, transforms the potentiality of an image into a fully readable sign. Such an episode, however, never arrived – the visuals were not actualised. Remember, said the forest’s leader to the short-sighted woman in the forest: ‘When someone goes blind the other senses are heightened.’ The same words were pronounced to David before taking out his eyes, and there I was, too, experiencing a similar blindness in-sight, looking at this vanishing sequence that no light could clarify – for in that moment in the movie theatre, when the screen went black, I was also already blind.[41]
*An expanded version of this article will be featuring in my book The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in November 2023.
Author
Cristóbal Escobar is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of Melbourne and Film Programmer at the Santiago International Documentary Film Festival (FIDOCS). His publications include The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy (2023), an edited collection on Cine Cartográfico (2017), and a co-edited dossier with Barbara Creed on ‘Film and the Nonhuman’ (2024). Cristóbal is also the co-founder of the Screening Ideas program and member of the Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM)
References
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Arendt, H. ‘Reflections Civil Disobedience’, The New Yorker, 12 September 1970: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1970/09/12/reflections-civil-disobedience
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Butler, J. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40, 4, 1988: 519-531
_____. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
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_____. Difference and repetition, translated by P. Patton. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 (orig. in 1968).
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Johnston, T. ‘Animal Instincts’, Sight and Sound, 25, 11, 2015: 81-83.
Karalis, V. A history of Greek cinema. London: Continuum, 2012.
Lenoir, R. and Duschinsky, R. ‘Foucault and the Family’ in Foucault, the family and politics, edited by R. Duschinsky and L.A. Rocha. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012: 19-38.
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[1] Weisz quoted in Bradshaw 2015.
[2] Zoro 2017, p. 3. My translation.
[3] Lanthimos quoted in Strickland 2016.
[4] Cooper 2016, p. 164.
[5] Shakespeare 2000, Act 2, Scene 6.
[6] Olivia Colman will literally become the queen of England in Lanthimos’ later film The Favourite (2018). She was celebrated for her remarkable performance.
[7] Foucault 2007, p. 55.
[8] Ibid., p. 9
[9] Ibid., p. 304.
[10] Lanthimos quoted in Johnston 2015.
[11] Foucault 2004, p. 36.
[12] Talu 2016, p. 69.
[13] Foucault 2003, p. xix.
[14] Foucault quoted in R. Lenoir & R. Duschinsky 2012, p. 20.
[15] Cooper 2016, p. 166.
[16] Butler 1988, p. 522.
[17] Butler 1990, p. 2.
[18] Plato quoted in Derrida 2005, p. 138.
[19] Cicero quoted in Derrida 2005, p. 5.
[20] Derrida 2005, p. 149.
[21] Ibid., p. 306.
[22] Agamben 2014.
[23] Agamben 2007, pp. 35-36.
[24] Deleuze & Guattari 2005, p. 126.
[25] Agamben 2014.
[26] Deleuze 2007, p. 327.
[27] Ibid., pp. 326-327.
[28] Deleuze 2004, p. 327.
[29] De Certeau 1984, p. 17.
[30] Deleuze & Guattari 2005, pp. 126; 128.
[31] Foucault 1990, p. 95.
[32] Elsaesser & Hagener 2010, p. 50.
[33] Arendt 1970.
[34] Zoro 2017.
[35] Deleuze 2014, p. 67.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Karalis 2012
[38] Agamben 2000, p. 54.
[39] Cooper 2015, p. 172.
[40] Derrida 2005, p. 8.
[41] Thanks to the editors and the anonymous reader for their helpful suggestions.