In the surreal world of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ long-anticipated English-language feature, The Lobster, if
you find yourself single for any reason you will be checked into a
stately, if sterile, seaside hotel. There, you have 45 days to find a
romantic partner, or you’ll be turned into an animal of your choice and
released into the woods.
If your dread of a gruesome-sounding transplant surgery or the slim odds of surviving in the wild aren’t enough to lay on the pressure at a dancehall meet-cute, consider too that guests at this hotel must declare and seek out a partner based on one “defining characteristic.” These range from good, to bad, to arbitrary:
One guest has great hair, one gets chronic nosebleeds, another loves butter cookies. Colin Farrell’s everyman David, the hotel’s newest tenant, is nearsighted. Hotel staff put on crude educational skits that warn against the dangers of living alone ,and they also provide simulated, unfulfilling clothes-on sex to encourage guests to couple off. (A no-masturbation policy is strictly enforced.) Lanthimos’ binary-bound police state is an apt satire of our algorithm-obsessed, swipe-right dating era—where romantic prospects are collapsed, at long last, into a single, compulsory bullet point.
It’s easy to read The Lobster’s animal-transformation premise as a parable for society’s oppressive belief in the civilizing function of marriage. After John C. Reilly’s hapless, lisping character is caught with a picture of a naked woman on a horse, the hotel manager (a hilariously stern Olivia Colman) tells him that he ought to have been ogling not the woman but the horse, who was once “a lonely man” just like him. But I thought of one colleague’s investigation into online identity culture—“spirit animals,” curated listicles, personality quizzes, and the narcissistic escapism we seek (as in romance) when we project ourselves onto some fantastical hypothetical.
No comments:
Post a Comment