As
has been widely reported and well documented, Greece’s economy experienced a
collapse in 2010 after years of unpaid debts and rising inflation eventually
became too much to bear. Indeed, in 2000, almost a decade prior, Greece was
allowed to join the European Union, converting to the Euro, a move that many
economists believe only exacerbated Greece’s debts, when the move was
originally thought to help erase them.[1]
In fact, “there were suspicions at the time that Greece was operating a
"limbo dance" – squeezing its figures to hit the stringent euro
criteria…indeed many believe Greece simply lied about its figures to gain
entry.”[2]
In effect, aspirations of integration and the self-stripping of economic
autonomy and/or cultural identity led to bankruptcy and disintegration, the
severity of which has yet to be resolved, as pundits and analysts continually debate
whether or not Greece should withdraw from the Euro.[3]
It
is the intention of this essay to evaluate Dogtooth
(2009) and Alps (2012), with
these issues in mind, and draw parallels between the EU and Hollywood, in terms
of Global dominance, inescapable influence, and a loss of identity via the
mimetic impulse. These are the two most recent films from Giorgos Lanthimos,
one of Greece’s most prominent, contemporary filmmakers, even though he only
has three films under his belt.[4]
Though neither film outwardly discusses or even seems to be concerned with the
real-word economic woes in Greece, Lanthimos uses the guise of pop cultural
discussion, with its Greek characters immersed-in and learning from American
culture for their primary means of expression, as a way to align Global Capitalism
with what Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi have termed “The Cultures of
Globalization.”[5] In
a sense, though finance and capital barely factor into Lanthimos’s films, on a
textual level, the subtext emerges, as does a consistent, rigid, and clinical mise-en-scene
that implicitly denigrates conventional logic, the sort of rational cognition
that leads to Global Capitalism (the erasure of sovereignty, the emergence of
cultural totalitarianism). Ultimately, Lanthimos seeks to venture away from
this sort of cultural (and thus narrative) logic and more towards a “logic of
sensation,” to borrow a term from Deleuze – it is my intention to argue that it
is not individual scenes, themselves, that evoke sensation in the work of
Lanthimos, but the films as a whole. Thus, it will be difficult to point to
individual scenes that engage sensation, because Lanthimos’s style is clinical,
detached. At least – it appears this way outwardly. Inwardly, the projection is
filled with sensation, affect, and echoes Deleuze’s claim that:
There are no longer grounds for talking
about a real or possible extension capable of constituting an external world:
we have ceased to believe in it and the image is cut off from the external
world. But the internalization or integration of self-awareness in a whole…has
no less disappeared…the relinkage takes place through parceling…this is why
thought, as power which has not always existed, is born from an outside more
distant than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts
an inside, an unthinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world.[6]
The
use of Deleuze here is an attempt to link the internal world of Lanthimos’
films and their refusal to simply adhere to one “meaning,” to a larger,
cognitive sensation of meaning that does indeed find distinct parallels in the
external world. Deleuze is correct in positing an internalization of
self-awareness, but his suggestion that it has become incapable to constitute
an external world is disproven by Lanthimos’ auto-dialectic, which does not
ascribe particular sensational meaning to individual scenes, themselves, but
employs enough recurring themes, images, and technique to achieve a collective
sensation that eventually forms a coherent synthesis of the dialectical and the
sensorial.[7]
Thus,
these qualities are not readily identifiable in either film, though a
consistency exists that directly points to such implicit analysis/formal
rigidity. Dogtooth is, in many ways,
about the construction of identity via cultural forms. On a very basic
narrative level, the film concerns a family of five, secluded away from the
rest of society. The Father (Christos Stergioglou) manages a factory of some
sort, while the Mother (Michele Valley) stays at home with their three, adult
children, a Son (Hristos Passalis), an Older Daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) and a
Younger Daughter (Mary Tsoni), all of whom have no knowledge of an outside
world, other than the altered, redacted stories they hear from their parents.
They learn new words every day, but with changed meanings, as to erase any
concept of movement or migration from their minds. In a very Kubrickian manner,
the framing of characters operates under the internal logic of the film,
itself: stable, observant, and devoid of attempts to heighten the
emotion/content of the scene by a negation of conventional
filmmaking/continuity editing. Often, characters heads will be just out of
frame when talking, or some other sort of metonymic device is used to unsettle
a screen-space that is all about uniformity and stability. The unsettling
effect comes not through quick editing or canted angles; in fact, much of the
film is shot in long takes and with little movement. Nevertheless, the effect
is highly contrapuntal and serves as auto-critique of a fascistic, patriarchal
construction of society. The content is so absurd that the clinical observance
of it creates the film’s heavily ironic, comedic undertones.
These
qualities are fairly obvious and, not surprisingly, the ones most critics have
latched onto. What has been less discussed in Dogtooth is how innocence becomes disrupted via the infiltration of
technology and outside cultural construction. Certainly, the sexual “lessons”
taught by Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a worker from the Father’s factory used
as a prostitute for his Son, to the Older Daughter, such as erogenous zones and
cunnilingus, serve as a conventional starting point for the deterioration of
the heavily ordered, ritualized space. Nevertheless, as the sex becomes a means
of exchange, often trading sexual favors for something trivial like a headband,
it ultimately is something not so trivial: a VHS tape. The sex (although influential) is
not what ultimately drives the Older Daughter’s decision to flee the domestic
space (the children are told they may leave when the “Dogtooth” falls out, an
event which obviously, will never naturally occur); it is her mimetic desire,
her capacity for imitation, after viewing pop cultural heavies like Jaws, Rocky, Flashdance, and Enter
the Dragon that drives her towards rebellion. We might say she finds her
“double bind,” what René Girard calls “a contradictory double imperative, or
rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives…it is so common that it
might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.”[8]
The desire to be self-sufficient, but to also imitate (or, perhaps better
stated) and play “follow-the-leader.” In Dogtooth,
the leader is not ultimately the most literal form of patriarchy (Father), but
the figurative presence of Cultural hegemony via pop art (films), that, devoid
of context, provide the Oldest Daughter with nothing to do but carry out empty
mimesis – in other terms, not only what contemporary Hollywood cinema is often
denigrated for engaging in, but also, in more specific terms as related to
Greece, their imitative double-bind of belonging to the EU, at all costs,
including their own disintegration.
Some
will likely find the claim that the integration of popular Hollywood films from
the late-1970’s through early 1980’s can hardly be seen as a means for bridging
a gap as allegory for Greece’s current financial crisis. These worries would be
reductive in-and-of themselves, however, since the intent is not to simply
posit their presence as directly correlative, but more an intimation towards
these underlying political and financial problems, which align nicely with
contemporary Hollywood’s ethos of imitation over context and product over
sensation or emotion. Were Dogtooth
an isolated incident, one might be inclined to write these similarities off, as
incidental. However, in Alps,
Lanthimos takes this relatively tangential facet of Dogtooth and brings it to the fore. Essentially, Alps involves a quartet of amateur
actors who decide to begin a business: they will act as replacements for
deceased loved ones, “auditioning” and hiring themselves out for live,
often-reenacted moments from the past. For instance, Aggeliki Papoiulia plays a
hospital worker who fills-in for a young female tennis player killed in a
traffic accident. Rather than interacting with the parents for “new”
experiences, they request that she look, dress, and act like their daughter in
scenarios past; for instance, as if she just finished a tennis match or, later
on, being caught getting a little too close with her boyfriend. The hospital
worker (no character name) eventually begins to confuse reality (original) from
fantasy (imitation), and the film, itself, begins to blur the lines between
actual living and performance, again driving towards the double bind that comes
to define Lanthimos’s previous film.
Like
Dogtooth, there is a key patriarchal
figure in Alps, who dons himself
“Mont Blanc,” because, “it is the biggest of all mountains.” Monikers and
linguistic exchange/confusion play a significant role in both films, especially
in the latter’s concern with pop cultural influence. The film’s recurring joke
is that people, of any sort, are often defined by their favorite actors or
musicians. Riding in the back of an ambulance with a dieing girl, Mont Blanc
squeezes her hand: “Who is your favorite actor? Brad Pitt? Johnny Depp…what,
not Johnny Depp?” Likewise, another deceased person is said to have been “a big
fan of Morgan Freeman. He saw every single one of his films.” Characters openly
and often discuss their favorite pop cultural figures as if it were akin to
personal experience: in Alps, it is
the most essential question anyone can be asked.
In
many respects, the integration of pop cultural discussions into feature films
has existed for decades. Tracing back to American films like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992),
and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996),
directors began to define not just their own parameters through influence, but
their character identities through pop cultural savvy, often in discussing the
meaning of specific films and songs, rather than the contents of their own personal
lives and themselves.[9]
Indeed, one might say these films prompted an excessive obsession and immersion
with the past for the past decade: "Instead of being about itself, the
2000s has been about every other previous decade happening all at once: a
simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the
present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and
feel."[10]
Moreover, in the ninth annual “State of Cinema” address given at the 55th
San Francisco International Film Festival, author Jonathan Lethem detailed what
he calls recent “ecstasies of influence” in cinema, where B-movie ethos can
often burrow their way into the subconscious of contemporary popular culture.
He notices a recent trend in filmmakers emphasizing a performative nature in
the art form, itself, and that their characters are often trapped between
personalities, uncertain of what or who they really are.[11]
Alps, in particular, embodies exactly
what Lethem is talking about, detaching its characters from any singular
identity – more a multiplicity, but none that are particularly genuine, honest,
or, perhaps worst of all, satisfactory. Moreover, it’s particularly noteworthy
that in many of the American films interested in pop cultural influence,
characters are often discussing American figures. In Dogtooth and Alps, every
single influential figure is American – never is a single Greek or, even,
European influence noted amongst the characters. Such an inclusion (or
exclusion, as it were), speaks to the crux of Lanthimos’s imitative, mimetic
crisis, where not only is identity being constructed outside of the self, but
it’s coming from another cultural referent entirely – the pop cultural
equivalent of the EU, if you will: Hollywood. That Lanthimos refuses to give
nearly any of his characters names (unless they are self-ascribed monikers)
further solidifies his aims at revealing identity crisis.
Lanthimos
intimates these absences not only through pop culture interests as the primary
identity for a person’s lived life, but also through more subtle inclusions
within the diegesis. Sticking to Alps,
Mont Blanc drinks from a coffee mug that reads “Los Angeles,” a further
suggestion of the film’s implicit critique of, shall we say, the Hollywood
Industrial Complex. Naturally, the mug becomes a source of trauma later in the
film. In another instance, while sitting in for the killed tennis player, the
nurse asks the boyfriend: ‘I saw this film. It is about a cop who is going to
retire, but on his last day, he must go on one final assignment.” The boy
responds, dryly: “I think I’ve seen that one.” The irony of this exchange
seemingly defines Lanthimos’s attitudes on performance and repetition. Being
the premise for likely hundreds of films, the bland description of plot and
meaning could in no way determine the film being discussed – implicitly,
Lanthimos is asking us to remember Roger Ebert’s old adage: “It’s not what it’s
about, but how it’s about it.” What
masks and troubles Lanthimos’s films so vividly is the sense that neither the what
or how can be readily identified. The
referents are lost, not just for characters, but for everything – form and content, with Lanthimos’s, always seem in medias res, having no sense of a
beginning and, ultimately, little sense of an end.
When
asked to describe how he came up with the idea for Dogtooth, Lanthimos responded: “[My] original inspiration was
almost science-fiction…it’s a thought about the future. What if there were no
more families anymore? Do we actually need them?”[12]
By questioning the family unit and larger super-structures, his films get to
many contemporary issues of identity crisis, be they financial, individual
personality, or cultural. To conclude, in February 2010, it was widely reported
that Goldman Sachs, the now infamous American investment firm, helped mask
Greece’s debt in order to increase profits on a (legal) derivatives deal.[13]
Taking into account both Lanthimos films, as a whole, the broad, sometimes
surreal and murky strokes of “meaning” are juxtaposed to instances of minutia
that lack affect or sensation, but retain an empty specificity. Indeed,
Lanthimos might be offering his characters’ (and his country’s) posterior mask – the intrusion of American capital
and culture at the expense of comprehensive autonomy.
[1] Harry Wallop, “Greece: Why Did
It’s Economy Fall So Hard?” The Telegraph,
April 28, 2010, accessed May 20, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/7646320/Greece-why-did-its-economy-fall-so-hard.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gary Becker and Richard Posner,
“Should Greece Exit the Euro Zone?” The
Becker-Posner Blog, May 20, 2012, accessed May 21, 2012. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
[4] His first feature, Kinetta (2005) screened at festivals
like Berlinale, but never had a North
American release. His second film, Dogtooth,
was the first Greek film since Iphigenia (Michael
Cacoyannis, 1977) to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film. It, unsurprisingly, did not win.
[5] Fredric Jameson
& Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
[6] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 277-8.
[7] For further discussion on this
matter, the link between cognition and sensation, there is no greater book
than: Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, Putnam, 1994).
[8]
René
Girard. Violence and the Sacred
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 156.
[9] The lineage can certainly be
traced back further, to Godard and Fellini, but the above examples are the most
notable from an emerging Hollywood obsession with the past, not just with
directors, but actual characters in the films, as well.
[10] Simon Reynolds. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its
Own Past. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), x-xi.
[11] Jonathan Lethem, “Jonathan
Lethem’s State of Cinema Address at San Francisco Int’l Film Festival,” Indirewire, April 26, 2012, accessed May
23, 2012. http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/jonathan-lethams-state-of-cinema-address-at-san-francisco-intl-film-festival#
[12] Larry Rother: “Dogtooth: No
Indifference Allowed,” The New York Times,
February 4, 2011, accessed May 20, 2012. http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/dogtooth-no-indifference-allowed/
[13] Beat Balzli, “How Goldman Sachs
Helped Greece to Mask it’s True Debt,” Spiegel
Online International. February 8, 2010, accessed May 20, 2012. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html
Nice work
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