Dystopia-En-Abyme: Analysis of "The Lobster"’s Narrative

Abstract

The paper analyzes the dystopian narrative of the film The Lobster (2015, dir. Y. Lanthimos) as a political act. Rather than strictly focusing on what the film exposes as problematic (romantic and sexual relationships, emotional intelligence, and love in general), the analysis examines how this problem is presented through its dystopian vision, its narrative’s trajectory and characters’ actions, with what kind of critical potential these are endowed and consequently, what kind of political message the film communicates. It does so by looking more closely at three important narrative elements of the textual dystopia: the space of the film, the protagonists, and the language. Lastly, it examines the interpretative possibilities of its open-ended structure. The analysis aims to show that the film resembles abysmally looping narrative structures through which it acquires an enclosed mythological quality that debilitates any agential potentials of the narrative, fails to provide a utopian impulse, and consequently ends up supporting status quo.

Keywords

• dystopia
• utopia
• narrative
• counter-narrative
• abyme
• resistance