For our second movie night, we watched
The Lobster at the
GoggleWorks art theater in downtown Reading. We followed this with dessert and discussion at
Dolce de Zabala in West Reading.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this movie, despite the fact that it had some great moments throughout that were laugh-out-loud and darkly funny. I think the disappointment came from my expectations, based on some reviews, that had me anticipating an insightful social satire about modern dating and relationships. Although the film comically exaggerates the "compulsiveness" of pairing off, in order to form the nuclei of the bourgeois family unit, as well as the extremes to which states sometimes attempt to police the sexual lives of their citizens, I found the "social satire" to be lacking in depth or insight. Maybe my dating / relationship experience has been atypical, but most of the scenes--bizarre and captivating though they were--didn't really resonate with my sense of what it feels like to look for, long for, or give up on love.
This made me wonder if there was, perhaps, a better way to unpack what the film is up to. My hunch is that the film is actually more absurdist than satirical--more Samuel Beckett than Mark Twain. And perhaps "the point" (not that there is only one) is more existential than social. In other words, maybe it's not so much (or at least not only) a critique of modern relationships, but a deeper, darker, more cynical critique of the willful blindness and fakery that goes into human companionship. If Waiting for Godot dramatizes the absurdity of waiting for some mythical figure, who probably doesn't exist, to swoop in and give life meaning, perhaps The Lobster attempts to dramatize the absurdity of thinking that one can transcend one's mortality or one's isolated consciousness through "coupling."
The Loners appear absurd as well, in their opposite, anti-hegemonic taboos (no sex, no flirting, no intimacy), but there is perhaps something "more authentic" about their way of life, at least in their approach to death. Digging their own graves is an important reminder of that bleak existential truth--that we all must face death alone, no matter what love (real or imagined) we find in life.
As for the love story, I found it to be more pathetic than moving. The conventional belief in the film, that a good match must be cemented by a shared impairment (nose-bleeding, limping, sociopathy, myopia) seems significant. If an impairment marks one as "different", and potentially isolates one, then this coupling is a fantasy of finding someone who completely understands your difference--who knows what it is to be you, can completely empathize, and thus restore your alienation. The Lobster relentlessly shows us what a naively adolescent fantasy that is, and moreover, the surprising degree of self-harm we're willing to endure in order to pursue it. It is "short sighted", if not "blind", to think that any form of companionship can help one escape one's "animality" or one's mortality. Yet we rush toward that fantasy with steak knives drawn.
I'm not sure if this makes me like the film more, but it gives me a stronger framework with which to understand it. (Three years into a marriage that has transformed and enriched my life on so many levels, I'm not quite so cynical about love myself--though, on the other hand, I have been in relationships, in the past, where blinding myself seemed like the only way forward.)
