If you're like me, you saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster because your brain automatically referenced David Foster Wallace’s essay "Consider the Lobster," which didn’t disappoint, you were not let down.
But for different reasons.
In Lanthimos’s film, it wasn’t the minutiae of the lobster’s sensory neurons and pain receptors being captured as it’s inserted into boiling water to please palettes. As a matter of fact, you don’t find out much about lobsters, unlike Wallace’s near exhaustive essay on lobsters.
What you do discover is how much people can endure, especially the marital crestfallen under new and strange circumstances. Almost everything the protagonist, who is coincidentally named David says and does as he accepts to abide by the hotel’s preposterous code of rules, depriving himself of physical and emotional needs makes your heart pound. The feeling is akin to that of what crustaceans might endure in a tank on their way to the dinner table . But here, if one doesn’t meet the demands of the hotel and find a mate in 45 days one risks getting turned into an animal.
The movie shows a dystopia, which in many ways reminds us of another, ours, suggesting that things could one day go there. But the one-line description of the film says little about the world of the movie—and the possibility of becoming an animal is the skeleton of the movie, and only the focus in the first part.
To me, the film screams financial crisis and the financial crisis now being synonymous with Greece. It is no wonder the film was both directed and written by Greeks, Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou.
Though in the New Yorker review Richard Brody writes that “…Greece is in slightly deeper shit because its leading younger filmmaker [Lanthimos] makes movies that shed no light whatsoever on the country’s troubles, and that in no way suggest that artistic practice develops in concert with and in response to practical circumstances [the financial crisis],” I beg to disagree.
Indeed, I think it would be difficult for someone who didn’t experience the crisis in its fullest to conceive this story—a view of presumably what was capitalism and what it is probably capable of leaving behind—a bureaucracy that heeds no psychological needs and continues to force established ways on people.
There is a conspicuous absence of money, but this world has been touched by it. And further by its institutions-- the hotel, police force, shopping malls, consumer goods, are some. The number 45 may not be such an arbitrary number. It brings to mind the 30 days when payments are due and 15 more allotted for late payment, and here people have 45 days to find a mate. Nature does not afford anyone that kind of a time-line, but in most Western countries in 45 days, you can very well lose your home, your life savings, business, your partner, etc. And maybe it isn’t that people are “forbidden” from being single, but that they can’t financially get by.
But then again one can escape all these by winning the relationship lottery, finding a suitable partner, or someone exactly matching you. One has to start looking immediately and the pressure is high in the hotel’s meet-market functions. Quick desperately-formed friendships are made to look cool and aid in the mate search. And prolonged empty nests lead to sudden, pleading propositions, which when unanswered bring on suicide attempts. But the shrieks from nearby suicides do little to spoil others’ tete-a-tetes.
While courting the coldest woman at the hotel David’s tries to seem more impervious to people tumbling down to complement her own lack of empathy. That culminates in further intimacy between them, but only to ineluctably bring about the death of his dog, to which David unfortunately reacts, damaging the freshly made bonds.
The film manages to show it’s nearly impossible to find the perfect mate without lying to them or yourself. Only David’s friend who subdues mental and physical anguish for the warmth of companionship, kin (not sure how where they are gotten from), and a yacht succeeds and gloats in them. But perhaps the one couple getting paired represents the upper one percent?
For those like David who don’t make it and don’t want to turn into the animal, the only option is escaping to the forest where another absurd system awaits. One has to hunt, avoid intimacy, dig his own grave, all enforced by an armed leader. It is refreshing that the movie takes the side of the downtrodden. Being in the forest brings to mind being homeless, from where getting back on your feet, partnering and creating a home is not possible. The city is forbidden if you don’t get coupled at the hotel.
Though at various times one has to sneak to the city to get shampoo so they can stay looking fresh. But one feels like an immigrant there, without the legal paperwork to be there. The city sort of resembles Germany or other European Union countries, in their austerity, old and new buildings, large shopping malls, police officers, friendly but vigilant, but gullible as well. They are the closest we get to the bureaucrats or higher ups. It’s an image of hopelessness and powerlessness which we’ve created and now have almost no access to.
Maybe the movie is a warning about where we’re headed, but if it is so, it’s not exclusive, it doesn’t deal with climate change in its black humor way of course, but I would be curious to see Filippou write that script. But the movie is successful in tackling the main thing that has become a culprit in the world, the economy which few movies have tried, getting censored, but maybe it got the chance to do so by blending futuristic, deadpan, drama, romance, science-fiction and becoming a game-changer. Perhaps the movie overdoes it, but it’s mostly because of its time-lapse lens that things are taken to the extreme, removing the time one takes to recover from shocks. It definitely does more than the last movie it reminded me of that took that kind of leap Run Lola Run. But a better title might’ve been not The Lobster but The Humans and more appropriate for what it deals with than Stephen Karam’s recent Broadway play, about one family’s struggles.
