The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos by Eddie Falvey;

Author:Eddie Falvey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

FIGURE 9.3a and b Communication and sacrifice in The Lobster.

Even after they have established genuine closeness, as well as a new language system, the couple cannot escape the absurdity of the world they live in. At the end of the film, having left the Loners in the woods, the couple chooses to rest at a roadside diner. It is the sort of place that Marc Augé might describe as a “non-place,” a place that “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”27 David leaves Short Sighted (now Blind) Woman at the table as he decides whether or not to take his own eyesight with a steak knife in the restroom (see Figure 9.3b). Absorbed in the relationship-based ideology of the society at large, David fears that he still must fulfill the social dogma of sharing a defining characteristic (short-sightedness, now blindness) in order to form a couple. They have escaped society, and yet they still adhere to its rules, the necessity of a mutual attribute to validate their union. This final scene crystallizes the absurdity of the human condition that is the target of much of Lanthimos’s cinema. As in the theater of the absurd, which “is trying to present a sense of being,”28 Lanthimos’s films do not present specific moral resolutions; they do not provide closure, catharsis, or suggest some kind of rational way of understanding the irrational situations they present. Instead, by immersing his film worlds in the absurd, the irrational becomes a new normal through which to observe, in close proximity, the strangeness of human behavior.

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