"The Lobster" has only just begun, and within the first ten minutes, the seamless fusion of dystopian ambiance and dark comedy has already left me internally sighing in appreciation.
Black Humor, Mechanical Feeling, and Dystopian Social Machinery
This is the power of black humor that can overcome anything with just a few punches. I believe the core of black humor lies in absurdity, which usually stems from the grotesque rigidity and mechanical feel of human behaviour, like how the entire country follows every rumour without exception like a spinning top. When Henri Bergson theorized comedy and humor using a philosophical framework, he pointed out that it is when people become machines like machines themselves that it becomes the most amusing.
It's easy for us to grasp that a touch of stiffness and mechanization often gives rise to clumsy and humorous scenes commonly found in comedies. We often perceive this rigidity and mechanistic quality as trivial or inconsequential, assuming it can be rectified – a pattern frequently observed in sitcoms. In these shows, characters' awkward predicaments are usually resolved to some extent, allowing our laughter to be more carefree and relaxed.
However, it must be acknowledged that the interpretation of humor itself is quite "dark" due to the complete loss of human softness and vitality when people become fully machines. The emptiness of machines can be terrifying even after being funny.
From this perspective, the internal logic of black comedy is completely consistent with the social darkness that dystopian-ism aims to expose. By criticizing all highly uniform value systems, all societal mechanisms that suppress individuality and are absurd, anti-utopianism seeks to expose the dark side of society.
In "The Lobster," the value system of society believes that the only standard for happiness is to become single, as only those who are single have worth as human beings. Hotels are just one example of a social mechanism that enforces this value norm. Hotels may seem cruel and cold, but paradoxically, they also contain a lot of comedic moments. There are many jokes about the hotel manager couple, such as their synchronized movements while singing love songs, which are mechanical and amusing, making me feel like Sheldon and Amy from The Big Bang Theory dancing together at one point.
In fact, in the futuristic world of "The Lobster," there is another aspect of "humor" that has a mechanical feel: the obsessive pursuit of neat classification. For instance, when the protagonist checks into the hotel, he notices that there is no option for bisexual guests. Shoe sizes cannot exist in half sizes. This kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior towards things that blur the boundaries between categories, an either-or worldview where nothing exists between black and white, also reflects on the movie's overarching narrative framework: the conflict between societal people in hotels and rebellious singletons in the forest is insurmountable and cannot be reconciled.
Who or What is the Antagonist
Now we can pose a seemingly simple but complex question: What does the dark humor and dystopian world of "The Lobster" reflect, satirize, or subvert?
Many people will think of the various intolerances towards single people in real life due to societal breeding anxiety. However, interestingly, the society in "The Lobster" does not seem to have breeding anxiety, or if it does, the reason why this society is intolerant of singletons is not because they need them to bear children:
Firstly, this society has no problem with homosexuality as long as they form a one-to-one relationship, but homosexuality obviously cannot reproduce. Thus, it is obvious that reproduction is not the ultimate goal of this value system. Secondly, when the female hotel manager announces the marriage of one couple, she says that if they quarrel, she will give you a child, which usually helps the marital relationship.
This joke conveys two crucial messages. Firstly, it suggests that the society in question is not lacking in children. Secondly, it emphasizes that the essential aspect is not merely procreation, but rather the significance lies in fostering a harmonious, joyful, and conflict-free marriage. This mandatory happiness within marriage means that you are not allowed to express discontent or reflect on your situation. It is a manifestation of the mechanical nature of this (anti) utopian society. The punishment of enslaved Africans described in Toni Morrison's "Beloved", where they are forced to keep a perpetual smile by putting a tool on their mouth is somewhat similar to the forced happiness required for marriage in "The Lobster." "Mandatory happiness" is a typical feature of anti-intellectualism utopianism: Don't be unhappy and don't think too much.
However, if there is no reproductive anxiety, the focus of marriage should be forced happiness. Why is society still so intolerant towards single people and want to downgrade them to animals?
The interesting thing about this question is that the movie gives an extremely trivial and ridiculous answer: The staff of the hotel used highly exaggerated and demonized sitcoms to demonstrate the disadvantages of being single, such as a man-eating alone and getting stuck. However, ironically, the protagonist first escapes from being single and forms a couple with that cold-blooded woman by intentionally choosing not to help her when she gets stuck eating, thereby pretending to be as cold-blooded as her to meet the conditions for being together.
In "The Lobster," discrimination against being single is absurd from beginning to end, or even without reason. Society forces people into one-to-one relationships because it simply has rules and values that say people cannot be single. However, even behind this rule and these one-size-fits-all values, there is infinite emptiness. It also prohibits people's questions and reflections. Projected into real life, this absurdity prompts us to consider how much, in reality, our admiration for marriage stems from following a tradition that has not been carefully considered.
Is “The Lobster” just satirizing blind admiration for the institution of marriage? I still think it's not that simple. As a revolutionary figure in the jungle, the singletons in the movie still receive a portrait like the pig in George Orwell's Animal Farm. Blind admiration for being single/individualism is also satirized in the movie.
Therefore, instead of saying that this movie is satirizing specific values such as marriage or individualism, it might be more accurate to say that the movie doubts and criticizes an abstract social structure. This social structure is unavoidable as long as people still believe that there is only one standard of "beauty" and "goodness" in the world, and this standard should apply universally to everyone; those who don't fit must be marginalized as evil.
This type of criticism is precisely the right form of Anti-Utopian theme: In an Anti-Utopia, any specific revolution is unlikely to succeed easily, or even if it does, it won't make much difference because the dominant-dominated power structure hasn't changed; it just shifted its dominant value from forced marriage to forced celibacy. The oppression of individuals will never cease.
Utopia and Violence
The lobster is filled with various cold displays of violence. Ironically, a lot of this violence appears precisely in the pursuit of utopian "beauty" and "happiness." Even if the heartless woman kicks her husband's brother to death and turns him into a dog in a cruel way, nominally for the sake of exposing the hypocrisy of "marriage," such a grandiose reason.
How do you view the relationship between violence and utopia? Here we have to mention "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," which most people probably associate when watching “The Lobster”. In both “The Lobster” and the masterpiece of Marquis de Sade, there are various enforced rules and violence imposed on sexual relations. The only difference may be that in the movie, the utopia is striving to reach "beauty", while Sade just wants to degenerate to the limit of being able to degenerate.
Lacan's essay on Kant and Sade suggests that the universal principles upheld by reason itself are inherently violent. To maintain the universality of this principle, it must be imposed upon individuals, and any differences must be brutally excluded. Just as in a lobster, those who do not meet societal standards or human criteria are relegated to being animals.
In reality, the dialogues between the three male lodgers in the film, including the protagonist, suggest that so-called downgrading to animals is merely a false lie. In the transformation room, only a small portion of the victims are transplanted into animals, and most of their bodies are discarded. This exclusionary action aimed at achieving a "beautiful society" is essentially no different from the torture and persecution of victims under the drive of decadent desires described in Marquis de Sade's book: it is just that the former is wrapped in a false sense of justice.
Lacan even hints that those in power, as they pursue the sole criterion of "beauty" and purge all deviants, will experience a sadist pleasure. Lacan even hinted that when those in power pursue the "beautiful" standard and clean up all deviations, they will experience a Satyr-like pleasure. The clearest interpretation of this analogy is undoubtedly the inhuman behaviour carried out by fascists during World War II in the name of justice and science: on the surface, they are purifying human bloodlines to create a more "beautiful" world, but in fact, what is the difference between so-called dystopian creators and sadism?
Love and Belief
Does “The Lobster” not believe in human nature, nor does it believe in love, or even friendship, or any genuine emotions that people may have between them? Indeed, in this movie, especially in the hotel part of the first half, it seems like all the emotions are for quite selfish purposes. In this world, people seem to completely lose their ability to establish a relationship and a close bond, leaving only stiff dancing and trying our best to find some trivial and ridiculous common ground.
I am unsure if “only electronic music can let someone dance freely alone" is sarcastic about the experience of individuals in today's digital age. From a world full of various electronic products and completely connected by a virtual network, we have no choice but to gain equal amounts of freedom and loneliness without being able to distinguish between joy and sorrow.
However, I still insist that this movie is not so cynical and does not assume that human nature must be dark and that there cannot be authentic emotions between people. To a large extent, the darkness of these characters and the fragility of their emotions are just choices made under the cruel social machine for survival.
"The Lobster" diverges from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," which thoroughly questions the existence of true love. Instead, this movie seems to harbour distressing and almost hopeless ideals and beliefs regarding true love. While many people might engage in self-abandonment to avoid loneliness or the peculiar scrutiny of society, they find solace in a love that initially deceives and eventually deceives themselves, often through self-hypnosis.
However, in "The Lobster," the love sought after exists beyond the confines of the conventional language system used in daily communication. It can only be expressed through body language. This type of love, communicated through the creation of individual symbols, manages to evade the oppression imposed by harsh leaders over single individuals. Simultaneously, it escapes the conventional norms, traditions, limitations, and absurd rules ingrained in our daily symbolic language imposed by society.
The detached and machine-like voice of the film's narration reads such a journal full of curiosity and emotion. Even in this intimate medium, the individual's supposedly diverse voice is not allowed or taken away, which is such a sorrowful thing. Nevertheless, just as laughing does not erode serious thinking, it makes it easier for people to notice details that they easily overlook in everyday life: contempt will never lead to a loss of faith.
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