Considering The Lobster (2015)
or: Poor Things? More like good things! Let's talk Yorgos Lanthimos!
“Because lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. I also like the sea very much.”
This is how David (Colin Farrell) explains his choice to transform into a lobster should he not succeed in finding a mate within the allotted time. See, David lives in a strange world where adults are compelling to be in a relationship. The couple must share some (usually superficial) trait, and should they break up, the newly single are loaded into buses and shipped off to a countryside hotel where they must find themselves a new companion or face undergoing a pretty gruesome sounding procedure where they are turned into an animal of their choice and released into the wild. Yeah, it’s safe to say Yorgos Lanthimos’ English language debut did not sacrifice the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic tendencies one bit.
Along with being Lanthimos’ English language debut, The Lobster was also my first exposure to his work. Having been made in Ireland, the film had a more mainstream release here than in other territories, there was plenty of advertisements on the sides of buses and interviews on local tv. Indeed, the film became a bit of a poster boy for the Irish Film Board who was quite boastful of the film’s status not just as a pan European co-production (it was funded with Greek, British, French and Dutch money, as well as Irish) but also as a distinctly “non-Irish” Irish film. Sure, Ireland had already been used as a stand-in location for other parts of the world (it famously doubled for Scotland in Braveheart and Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan) but something about The Lobster was different. The film is not just not set in Ireland, it’s almost set anywhere—using both rural and urban locations, the film is at most vaguely European, it could conceivably have been shot in any of the countries which funded it and it is that generic property the Irish Film Board was most proud of, The Lobster was postnational—a product of globalisation.
As a viewer, I must admit it was thrilling to see Ireland utilised on screen in this manner. I remember thinking during my first viewing, while watching one of the city scenes shot in Dublin, about the famous quote Akira Kurosawa gave Sidney Lumet when he asked about the specific framing of one of his shots in RAN “If I panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if I’d panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport.”
Lanthimos wasn’t subject to such tight constraints but it was enjoyable for me to consider how real life locations I was deeply familiar with affected his framing. Such as the shot below of Farrell and Weisz entering Joel’s Restaurant on the Naas Road in south Dublin. Had Lanthimos opted for a wider shot, the frame may have included the petrol station next door (the courtyard roof is still visible, reflected in the restaurant’s front window). Or had he wished for a flatter, straight on establishing shot, this was impossible due to a small wall and various visual clutter blocking the shot.
Similarly, the scenes shot on Lazer Lane and Hibernian Road in Dublin’s docklands were also fascinating to me . The neighbouring roads serve as both modern and nondescript, implying an entire city with only the clever, resourceful use of two streets. And the environment way well have again informed the final result,. For example, is it possible the below shot’s oddly high framing was devised to conceal the poor state of the road surface? It could be argued that a badly maintained road would detract from the film’s otherwise austere, almost clinical setting.
But besides being a fun curios for a budding Irish film fanatic, The Lobster is also just a rock solid film from an exciting auteur. The deadpan acting and rigidly composed blocking which I’ve seen others dismiss as pretentious artifice, to me serve as manifestations of a society strictly ruled by systems, making the film a thrilling marriage of form and function.
Not only is David subject to mandatory coupledom but when he flees the hotel and finds a band of loners to align himself with, he finds that these rebels are themselves zealots beholden under the threat of extreme violence to draconian rules of singledom.
It is these societal pressures that I believe truly motivate David’s desire to become a lobster. Not the longevity, the fertility or the aristocratic blood (which, by the way, is actually a little incorrect, a lobster’s blood is clear during its life, it is only during the cooking process that the lobster’s blood takes on a bluish hue).
If he truly desired to live a long, fertile life by the water, a tortoise would be a much more straightforward choice. A tortoise after all still has a brain, unlike a lobster who has a decentralised nervous system with several independent ganglia spread throughout their body.
The sensory experience of a tortoise is also much more akin to that of humans, largely relying on their sense of sight and smell, whereas a lobster’s eyes are far less sophisticated, they instead use their antennae to detect chemical changes in water to hunt and navigate.
A human transposed into a tortoise body would largely get by just fine, their experience wouldn’t be a millions miles away from crawling around in their previous body—just very slowly. A human transformed into a lobster however would have nearly no reference point on which to compare. It would be an utterly unique experience, akin to seeing new colours, feeling new feelings and sensing new stimuli. David’s choice of lobster is practically a disownment of his current biology. A more drastic decision is difficult to imagine.
As such, David’s preference to be turned into a lobster can be read as an utter rejection of humanity. It is clear the modern societal pressures have instilled in David a distaste for human laws and relationships. While most people choose to be dogs (the animal probably most anthropomorphised and widely integrated into human society), David’s low opinion of humans leads him to imagine a new life far away from them, the downright alien experience of a lobster alone in the deep, dark trenches of the sea.
This informs my reading of the film as it suggests David is already dissatisfied with the world he lives in and the rules he must follow before ever visiting the hotel.
Understanding his choice to be a lobster telegraphs the entire films’ story. He enters the hotel a nonbeliever, the seminars and role plays the hotel puts on to demonstrate the benefits of mandatory coupledom have no effect on him, he already sees the laws as the stifling, oppressive force they are. And when he flees the hotel, he is destined to turn his back on the loners once we learn their society is just as stringent.
The relationship he strikes up with Rachel Weisz (credited as Short Sighted Woman)—a connection which is formed when she saves his life, long before he learns of her short sightedness (a trait he shares) is transgressive to both ways of life. As such, he submits to the demands of couple society, blinding himself in the film’s final scene but in doing so he reverses his circumstances. From once operating in a system pretending to be in love, he is now in love, pretending to operate under the same rules as everyone else.
Lanthimos has a new film out right now and I’m eager to see it. He’s someone whose career I’ll follow for as long as he makes movies. But The Lobster will always be special to me. It showed me my own city through new eyes. It’s confounding and comedic, with a emotional core worth chewing over. Thanks for reading and affording me a space to blabber on about it ❤️.
Howdy folks, I did things a little differently this time, I’ve had this essay bouncing around my brain for months now but I never found the time to put down on paper— I decided today I’d hammer it out and publish something to you all before I went to bed. As such, it’s a little more scattershot than usual but I think it’s pretty alright and communicates the main points I wanted to share. I might do this a bit more in the weeks and months ahead. As always I devour feedback, hit me up Twitter or anonymously on NGL with any thoughts or questions or feelings or whatever. Thanks as always for reading.