Dogtooth (Greece, 2009, Giorgos Lanthimos)
For a change of pace, Dan begins:
In Dogtooth, Giorgos Lanthimos’s third feature film, the Greek director employs some of the chilly mis-en-scene of his Austrian contemporary, Michael Haneke, often placing the camera at a comfortable distance from his actors throughout the film’s most uncomfortable passages. However, it is when Lanthimos taps into his inner Kubrick in the movie’s darkly comic moments, where violence and cruelty slam up against naivete and ignorance, that Dogtooth moves beyond the merely clinical and approaches something closer to art. Ultimately, the film’s barbed and darkly comic commentary on human folly achieves a ruthlessness that is almost punishing.
On the surface, and who knows, maybe that’s all there is in this picture, Dogtooth shows how an upper middle class father (while their are two parents, papa runs this show) manipulates his three twenty-ish children into believing that the world outside of their home is a malevolent place, one that only he dare venture into, one that only he can navigate in order to provide for their safety within the familial compound. In his quest to insulate his children from the evils that lurk out there, he lies and schemes, manipulating his children’s worldview until they are so twisted and warped by his machinations, there is only one place they will ever be able to inhabit. Home.
This is a post-9/11 world, full of the sort of apocalyptic fears that leave the children passing the time by waiting for planes to crash, as well as menacing warnings (the cat eats child flesh) intended to keep the children at arm’s length from a reality that threatens to corrupt them. A mythic older brother lives in purgatorial limbo on the other side of the family compound’s fence because of some undisclosed sin. The parents even go so far as to mangle their children’s understanding of the language, manipulating any curiosity they may have about the “real world” by perverting their perceptions of it. Even the biological function of reproduction is presented as a threat they can proffer or withdraw at will, as they raise the possibility of the mother giving birth to more children (and a dog!), with the decision dependent on whether or not the children comply to the house rules and routines. As the children don’t want to share space with anyone else, they are told that if the are good, perhaps the mother won’t “have to” give birth.
Dogtooth boasts astonishing and almost painfully understated performances by its young cast. Aggeliki Papoulia as the elder daughter has the most memorable role of the three, but no less capable are Mary Tsoni as the unnamed younger daughter and Hristos Passalis as the number one son. These three are asked to convey a childlike level of subservience and innocence in the face of their father’s cruel manipulations, then to perpetrate dreadful acts of cruelty and absurd acts of foolishness, all while maintaining the audience’s sympathy. It is great fun to watch these fine your actors pull it off. Meanwhile, playing the father of this most dysfunctional clan, Christos Sterngioglou controls the family with an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Sterngioglou may not be a physically imposing figure, but he is not afraid to use every weapon in his arsenal, including some surprising acts of violence, to insure the obeisance of those under his roof. It is a performance that is rooted in the sort of stolid moral certainty that marks much of the very worst of the “father knows best” philosophical arrogance.
In the end, it is the basic procreative urge that is sex, as well as the global pandemic that is America pop culture that prove to be the undoing of the father’s single minded quest to keep his children insulated from the Outside World of Uncontrollable Dangers. It turns out that for all the work the father does to insulate his children from outside influences, and no matter how hard he tries to arrest their emotional development, his is ultimately doomed by the inevitability of biology and the innate urge to break free from suffocating restraint and the incestuous intensity of familial bonds. When the elder daughter smuggles in two Hollywood films, Rocky and Flashdance, their content feature prominently in the unraveling of at least one child’s understanding of reality, and proves to be the destructive force introduced into this hermetically sealed world.
The movie’s allegorical overtones invite speculation about a deeper social and political application. Perhaps Lanthimos is using the paternalism of the father to critique the big brother attitude of the state to its citizenry. Those in charge know best. Leave it up to us. Furthermore, the film’s fear and loathing of “the others” beyond the familial gates that is reminiscent of the sort of xenophobia that is all too prevalent in so many parts of the developed world. We don’t want to share our privileged space with the less fortunate. However, whether or not Dogtooth is intended to be taken literally as an indictment of overprotective parenting, or as a multi-level allegory attacking the nature of home schooling, the evils of patriarchy or our terrorist-era obsession with safety and comfort over freedom and curiousity, the film packs one helluva wallop. Shifting effortlessly from moments of dark comedy and horrifying violence, Dogtooth has an undeniable visceral charge, while simultaneously delivering an intense intellectual slap to the cerebral cortex. The film challenges, and rewards those who take it up. Dogtooth is, in a word, unforgettable.
Then Ben:
Monica asked going in if Dogtooth was going to be another Dogville and I mistakenly told her it would not. I also thought of that creepy British film from the 60s, The Collector, which I believe may have been remade recently; the wacko catches and keeps a woman just as he does butterfly specimens. Another film that came to mind was The Music of Chance, which I recall having mentioned to you in the past; insofar as it too features bizarre incarceration. As disparate as all these films may otherwise be, what they have in common is that the men doing the imprisoning are not raping their victims. If Dogtooth was a standard horror movie, the father would be doing just that. But apparently he loves his family and wants what is best for them. Apparently.
For me this is the weak link in the chain that is holding the film back from being simply perverse and sensationalistic. The motivation of the father is easy enough to infer. What is missing is the social context outside of the family home that is determining this motivation. What is it about the outside world that is making this man trap his family inside the palace of cruelty? The film is realistic enough to address the fact that he must go to work, garner an income and cart in every resource required to sustain the family. Yet, absolutely no information is provided that pertains to his dealings with other people and without even the slightest data about his own experience beyond the walls of the bunker, it is impossible to formulate any interpretation of what the story means on a deeper thematic level.
The exception might seem to be the female security guard that serves as a "resource" for the erotic discharges of the children (who are actually adults, of course). But this character is fundamentally a plot device. There is nothing about her as a unique individual that embodies the bad other-ness the father means to keep at bay. She doesn't represent anything. That she is a security guard at the factory where the father works at most signals that she is a person who is professional about protecting private property and will respect the father's residential lock-down procedures. When it turns out that she half-heartedly facilitates a breach in the mortar of the fortress, again, this is as a plot device, not as a social force of any kind.
Hence, your speculations about the allegorical overtones of Dogtooth strike me as, well, speculations without textual evidence to support them. Please understand that I am not criticizing the film for failing to be realistic. Quite the contrary. I am frustrated by the film because it's premise is more or less plausible enough - crazy shit like this really is happening in the world - but the degree to which this premise is pursued in the narrative is obviously entering the level of demented fantasy and I just don't see the fiction as having much of anything to say. It's not a purely formal exercise like Day Night Day Night. But it's not clear to me what I am supposed to take away from all of the twisted suspense, disturbing arrested personality development, psycho-sexual crisis and grotesque humour.
Monica says she can barely tolerate it as bleakly satiric but contra your enthusiasm about Dogtooth being unforgettable, she is already trying to forget it. As for me, I do not doubt that I will remember it. But what will I be remembering?
And Dan:
The film has enough context for me. The father is a privileged man in an affluent society living in a self-made gated 'community' who wants to guard his children from the corrosive effect of contact with the "outside world." Sounds like a LOT of people in our neck of the world, no? Many of the home schoolers, right wingers amd religious nuts who are making a name for themselves in the States right now fit this description.
Even so, the film does provide other contextual clues, though they are open to interpretation and hence necessarily ambiguous. Still, they do provide some clues as to why the father has trapped his family in this compound. The most obvious of these clues is the "airplanes" falling from the sky, a 9/11 reference that taps into the anti-terrorist paranoia that has swept much of the western world. Just as citizens have seemingly willingly surrendered their individual rights and freedoms in order to feel more safe and secure in a dangerous world, so too have the children here been cowed into obesiance.
A second clue could be found in the Hollywood films (Rocky and Flashdance) that the security smuggles into the family home. Tthe father's doomed desire to protect his children from the pandemic threat of American cultural colonialism marks the beginning of the end of his ability to control his elder daughter, who grows quite smitten with their seductive imagery, imitating scenes from both films to (mostly) comic effect.
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Then Ben:
I should confess that I was confused about the videos that make their way into the house. I thought they were pornography until I read your proper identification of them. Prior to this, I grasped that the eldest daughter was "acting out" but I did not grasp that she was actually "acting in," so to speak, copying dialogue and dance moves from Rocky and Flashdance. Monica was completely up to speed, however, and noted that Jaws is also replicated by the girl in the swimming pool at one point. Speaking of the pool and speaking of Monica speaking of things that you see as contextual clues, she was also aware of the class circumstance of the family - both in general in Greece and relative to the security guard in particular - and like you, she felt that this was contextually meaningful; whereas I just took this as merely indicative of a family that would necessarily have the means to hunker down in upper middle-class privacy As for the airplanes, I will come back to them in a moment.
Let me take a different tack now. I realize the way I phrased it before compelled you to defend your interpretation of the film. But my intention was not really to question your interpretation. It was to indicate why I don't have one. Even if you are convincingly reading the contextual clues on which you focus, for me, all of this taken together is just too little to narratively explain the freak show. I said before that the film is not a purely formal exercise and I meant it. Yet, the power of the film has nothing to do with the motivation of the father which is easy enough to infer. It's a Jim Jones control camp on the reduced scale of the nuclear family. Fine. Whatever his reasons, he has established what amounts to a human laboratory experiment. The guy is a kind of Dr. Frankenstein of behavioural conditioning. It's this behavioural conditioning in its own right that screams out for interpretation.
What are we to make of this terribly inhumane isolationism? The linguistic manipulation alone is off the chart. It surpases even the most dystopian scenario about Big Brother style thought control. And now let's look at those airplaines again. Nevermind, what they may symbolize about the real world in the context of recent history. The "children" are so cognitively truncated, the most elementary understanding about binocular visual perspective - which actual kids acquire well before the onset of puberty - is not in their command. They believe that the toy planes their parents toss for them to find around the yard are the same tiny planes they saw flying overhead minutes earlier.
And speaking of puberty, you are right that the hitherto repressed sexuality of the "children" proves to be the major factor in the undoing of the situation. But notice how the father is the Aladdin who must let that genie out of the bottle in the first place. The premise of the film is so fantastically unfolded, the basic bodily drives of the physically mature "children" have not emerged naturally and their sexuality is entirely induced by the introduction of an external stimulus by the father. This is patently absurd. And while I am prepared to have you tell me that this absurdity is darkly comedic and have Monica allow that it may very well be bleakly satiric, I remain unable to come up with an interpretation of it because it is so off the chart.
I get the joke of seeing three fully-grown people down on their hands and knees, barking like guard dogs at the edge of the property. And everybody knows what it means to fight "like cats and dogs." But when the son murders the lost kitty with the garden shears, it's as if he has been educated by the wizard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who teaches the lads just how fierce a bunny can be. Never mind whether or not Dogtooth provides enough social context. What are we to make of it's own content?
And Dan:
Now it is my turn to confess something. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking me when you say 'what are we to make if (the film's) own content?' You mean on a literal, non-interpretative, non-allegorical, scene by scene basis?
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Then Ben:
In switching tacks from context to content, I don't mean non-interpretative. I've said more than once now that I am unable to interpret the film, not that it should not be interpreted. But I do mean non-allegorical insofar as your interpretation on this level is too pat for me, whereas I am finding the film more absurd when I focus less on what might be causing the situtation and more on the situation itself. So I guess I mean literal. But I have no position either way that this should be on a scene by scene basis.
Let's not get bogged down in semantics, though. Dogtooth is entirely intelligible for you. For me, it's just too intensely committed to its premise to not be weird in the way that, say, Ed Copeland felt about Dwarves. Not that Dogtooth is any where near that weird in my view. Just trying to provide an analogy to communicate how it sits with me.
Here's the trailer, so you can make up your own mind:
In Dogtooth, Giorgos Lanthimos’s third feature film, the Greek director employs some of the chilly mis-en-scene of his Austrian contemporary, Michael Haneke, often placing the camera at a comfortable distance from his actors throughout the film’s most uncomfortable passages. However, it is when Lanthimos taps into his inner Kubrick in the movie’s darkly comic moments, where violence and cruelty slam up against naivete and ignorance, that Dogtooth moves beyond the merely clinical and approaches something closer to art. Ultimately, the film’s barbed and darkly comic commentary on human folly achieves a ruthlessness that is almost punishing.
On the surface, and who knows, maybe that’s all there is in this picture, Dogtooth shows how an upper middle class father (while their are two parents, papa runs this show) manipulates his three twenty-ish children into believing that the world outside of their home is a malevolent place, one that only he dare venture into, one that only he can navigate in order to provide for their safety within the familial compound. In his quest to insulate his children from the evils that lurk out there, he lies and schemes, manipulating his children’s worldview until they are so twisted and warped by his machinations, there is only one place they will ever be able to inhabit. Home.
This is a post-9/11 world, full of the sort of apocalyptic fears that leave the children passing the time by waiting for planes to crash, as well as menacing warnings (the cat eats child flesh) intended to keep the children at arm’s length from a reality that threatens to corrupt them. A mythic older brother lives in purgatorial limbo on the other side of the family compound’s fence because of some undisclosed sin. The parents even go so far as to mangle their children’s understanding of the language, manipulating any curiosity they may have about the “real world” by perverting their perceptions of it. Even the biological function of reproduction is presented as a threat they can proffer or withdraw at will, as they raise the possibility of the mother giving birth to more children (and a dog!), with the decision dependent on whether or not the children comply to the house rules and routines. As the children don’t want to share space with anyone else, they are told that if the are good, perhaps the mother won’t “have to” give birth.
Dogtooth boasts astonishing and almost painfully understated performances by its young cast. Aggeliki Papoulia as the elder daughter has the most memorable role of the three, but no less capable are Mary Tsoni as the unnamed younger daughter and Hristos Passalis as the number one son. These three are asked to convey a childlike level of subservience and innocence in the face of their father’s cruel manipulations, then to perpetrate dreadful acts of cruelty and absurd acts of foolishness, all while maintaining the audience’s sympathy. It is great fun to watch these fine your actors pull it off. Meanwhile, playing the father of this most dysfunctional clan, Christos Sterngioglou controls the family with an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Sterngioglou may not be a physically imposing figure, but he is not afraid to use every weapon in his arsenal, including some surprising acts of violence, to insure the obeisance of those under his roof. It is a performance that is rooted in the sort of stolid moral certainty that marks much of the very worst of the “father knows best” philosophical arrogance.
In the end, it is the basic procreative urge that is sex, as well as the global pandemic that is America pop culture that prove to be the undoing of the father’s single minded quest to keep his children insulated from the Outside World of Uncontrollable Dangers. It turns out that for all the work the father does to insulate his children from outside influences, and no matter how hard he tries to arrest their emotional development, his is ultimately doomed by the inevitability of biology and the innate urge to break free from suffocating restraint and the incestuous intensity of familial bonds. When the elder daughter smuggles in two Hollywood films, Rocky and Flashdance, their content feature prominently in the unraveling of at least one child’s understanding of reality, and proves to be the destructive force introduced into this hermetically sealed world.
Then Ben:
Monica asked going in if Dogtooth was going to be another Dogville and I mistakenly told her it would not. I also thought of that creepy British film from the 60s, The Collector, which I believe may have been remade recently; the wacko catches and keeps a woman just as he does butterfly specimens. Another film that came to mind was The Music of Chance, which I recall having mentioned to you in the past; insofar as it too features bizarre incarceration. As disparate as all these films may otherwise be, what they have in common is that the men doing the imprisoning are not raping their victims. If Dogtooth was a standard horror movie, the father would be doing just that. But apparently he loves his family and wants what is best for them. Apparently.
For me this is the weak link in the chain that is holding the film back from being simply perverse and sensationalistic. The motivation of the father is easy enough to infer. What is missing is the social context outside of the family home that is determining this motivation. What is it about the outside world that is making this man trap his family inside the palace of cruelty? The film is realistic enough to address the fact that he must go to work, garner an income and cart in every resource required to sustain the family. Yet, absolutely no information is provided that pertains to his dealings with other people and without even the slightest data about his own experience beyond the walls of the bunker, it is impossible to formulate any interpretation of what the story means on a deeper thematic level.
The exception might seem to be the female security guard that serves as a "resource" for the erotic discharges of the children (who are actually adults, of course). But this character is fundamentally a plot device. There is nothing about her as a unique individual that embodies the bad other-ness the father means to keep at bay. She doesn't represent anything. That she is a security guard at the factory where the father works at most signals that she is a person who is professional about protecting private property and will respect the father's residential lock-down procedures. When it turns out that she half-heartedly facilitates a breach in the mortar of the fortress, again, this is as a plot device, not as a social force of any kind.
Monica says she can barely tolerate it as bleakly satiric but contra your enthusiasm about Dogtooth being unforgettable, she is already trying to forget it. As for me, I do not doubt that I will remember it. But what will I be remembering?
And Dan:
The film has enough context for me. The father is a privileged man in an affluent society living in a self-made gated 'community' who wants to guard his children from the corrosive effect of contact with the "outside world." Sounds like a LOT of people in our neck of the world, no? Many of the home schoolers, right wingers amd religious nuts who are making a name for themselves in the States right now fit this description.
Even so, the film does provide other contextual clues, though they are open to interpretation and hence necessarily ambiguous. Still, they do provide some clues as to why the father has trapped his family in this compound. The most obvious of these clues is the "airplanes" falling from the sky, a 9/11 reference that taps into the anti-terrorist paranoia that has swept much of the western world. Just as citizens have seemingly willingly surrendered their individual rights and freedoms in order to feel more safe and secure in a dangerous world, so too have the children here been cowed into obesiance.
A second clue could be found in the Hollywood films (Rocky and Flashdance) that the security smuggles into the family home. Tthe father's doomed desire to protect his children from the pandemic threat of American cultural colonialism marks the beginning of the end of his ability to control his elder daughter, who grows quite smitten with their seductive imagery, imitating scenes from both films to (mostly) comic effect.
.jpg)
I should confess that I was confused about the videos that make their way into the house. I thought they were pornography until I read your proper identification of them. Prior to this, I grasped that the eldest daughter was "acting out" but I did not grasp that she was actually "acting in," so to speak, copying dialogue and dance moves from Rocky and Flashdance. Monica was completely up to speed, however, and noted that Jaws is also replicated by the girl in the swimming pool at one point. Speaking of the pool and speaking of Monica speaking of things that you see as contextual clues, she was also aware of the class circumstance of the family - both in general in Greece and relative to the security guard in particular - and like you, she felt that this was contextually meaningful; whereas I just took this as merely indicative of a family that would necessarily have the means to hunker down in upper middle-class privacy As for the airplanes, I will come back to them in a moment.
Let me take a different tack now. I realize the way I phrased it before compelled you to defend your interpretation of the film. But my intention was not really to question your interpretation. It was to indicate why I don't have one. Even if you are convincingly reading the contextual clues on which you focus, for me, all of this taken together is just too little to narratively explain the freak show. I said before that the film is not a purely formal exercise and I meant it. Yet, the power of the film has nothing to do with the motivation of the father which is easy enough to infer. It's a Jim Jones control camp on the reduced scale of the nuclear family. Fine. Whatever his reasons, he has established what amounts to a human laboratory experiment. The guy is a kind of Dr. Frankenstein of behavioural conditioning. It's this behavioural conditioning in its own right that screams out for interpretation.
What are we to make of this terribly inhumane isolationism? The linguistic manipulation alone is off the chart. It surpases even the most dystopian scenario about Big Brother style thought control. And now let's look at those airplaines again. Nevermind, what they may symbolize about the real world in the context of recent history. The "children" are so cognitively truncated, the most elementary understanding about binocular visual perspective - which actual kids acquire well before the onset of puberty - is not in their command. They believe that the toy planes their parents toss for them to find around the yard are the same tiny planes they saw flying overhead minutes earlier.
And speaking of puberty, you are right that the hitherto repressed sexuality of the "children" proves to be the major factor in the undoing of the situation. But notice how the father is the Aladdin who must let that genie out of the bottle in the first place. The premise of the film is so fantastically unfolded, the basic bodily drives of the physically mature "children" have not emerged naturally and their sexuality is entirely induced by the introduction of an external stimulus by the father. This is patently absurd. And while I am prepared to have you tell me that this absurdity is darkly comedic and have Monica allow that it may very well be bleakly satiric, I remain unable to come up with an interpretation of it because it is so off the chart.
I get the joke of seeing three fully-grown people down on their hands and knees, barking like guard dogs at the edge of the property. And everybody knows what it means to fight "like cats and dogs." But when the son murders the lost kitty with the garden shears, it's as if he has been educated by the wizard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who teaches the lads just how fierce a bunny can be. Never mind whether or not Dogtooth provides enough social context. What are we to make of it's own content?
And Dan:
Now it is my turn to confess something. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking me when you say 'what are we to make if (the film's) own content?' You mean on a literal, non-interpretative, non-allegorical, scene by scene basis?
.jpg)
Then Ben:
In switching tacks from context to content, I don't mean non-interpretative. I've said more than once now that I am unable to interpret the film, not that it should not be interpreted. But I do mean non-allegorical insofar as your interpretation on this level is too pat for me, whereas I am finding the film more absurd when I focus less on what might be causing the situtation and more on the situation itself. So I guess I mean literal. But I have no position either way that this should be on a scene by scene basis.
Let's not get bogged down in semantics, though. Dogtooth is entirely intelligible for you. For me, it's just too intensely committed to its premise to not be weird in the way that, say, Ed Copeland felt about Dwarves. Not that Dogtooth is any where near that weird in my view. Just trying to provide an analogy to communicate how it sits with me.
Here's the trailer, so you can make up your own mind:
