Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

Escobar, Cristóbal

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/21734

Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

Authors :

Abstract

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure ⎯ a Pythagorean theorem ⎯ is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. By mapping this system of relations, I seek to connect the normalising powers of society in the film with the issue of surveillance as developed by both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary modernity and Gilles Deleuze’s subsequent paradigm of information. In a second section, and thinking about the tactics that the film’s characters employ to mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations, I draw on the notion of resistance as an act that defies the city-Law as well as on the politics of love as a reciprocal law that goes beyond any other law; one that remains hidden, or blinded, for characters to see, for as Shakespeare suggests: ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.