DOGTOOTH: REVISITED
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009
A dark satire with a sharp barb on its tail, DOGTOOTH isn’t a film for those with a low tolerance for confrontational, pitch-black absurdism. The outrage informing this allegorical portrait of submission to socio-political manipulation will not be for everyone, but, like Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST, one can appreciate the ideas and inferences in Yorgos Lanthimos's dark wee film without necessarily liking it.
I write with the assumption that you’ve seen this film, so if you haven’t and don’t want to know more, go no further. My intention is to unpack the allegorical implications of the film from my personal point of view, so apologies in advance for soapboxing.
The implicit fascism depicted in DOGTOOTH — controlling the young and impressionable through language and social conditioning — is not only more evident today but more disturbing. The punishment for non-compliance to behavioural mores, for using the wrong words or having the wrong thoughts, is unfathomably draconian. By comparison, this film is almost a quaint and naïve farce, made at a time when one’s genotype (XX or XY) determined one’s gender rather than how one elects to identify. If you ever thought that language is just words, think again. Words are weapons, and language is a framework for power and privilege. Spend one day on a university campus, and you’ll see what I mean.
The key point to understand from the get-go is that Lanthimos is working with metaphor. The family is an allegorical microcosm. We are not supposed to identify them or their situation (or anything that happens to them) as in any way "real". There is no need for "suspension of disbelief" because Mr Lanthimos expects us to "read" his film: to dig out his critical subtext.
Those who know the film will recall that the plot follows a privileged family of three late teens or early twenty-year-olds (one XY, two XXs) who live with Mum and Dad in a large fenced-in property on the outskirts of an unidentified town. Brought up to fear the world beyond the perimeter of their home, no one leaves the premises but Dad, an executive at a security-protected factory. We never learn what the factory produces, but its blue canisters look ominous against the bleached industrial background (colours that mirror the Greek flag). The grim factory architecture suggests an indiscriminate, conscience-free enterprise dedicated to profit and power, designed with no thought to environmental, visual or psychic pollution. Ugly is as ugly does.
The only telephone in the house, hidden in the parent’s bedroom, is strictly for Mum to speak to Dad when he’s at work. This alludes to privileged channels of communication, restricted access, and corporate or state-controlled communications technologies. The parents shape their children’s understanding of the world by ascribing false meanings to objects and concepts: 'strong wind' is a motorway; 'vagina' is a keyboard; 'excursion' is flooring material, etc. Realty is defined by those who design the framework. Disinformation — usually framed as necessary for purposes of security but essentially a mechanism of control — produces and maintains ignorance, dependence, division, confusion, uncertainty and powerlessness. As they listen to their pre-recorded lessons, there are hints that they may, on some level, suspect they are being lied to, alluding to “controlling the discourse” as the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove-Wolfowitz-Rice-Powell tag team did in the years prior to DOGTOOTH coming out.
The children have no friends or wider family, although we learn that a fourth child, a boy, left home before he was ‘properly prepared’ and now lives unhappily beyond the fence line. He serves as an effective deterrent against disobedience. The question is, did he ever exist? The children seem to have memories of him, but this could reflect the effectiveness of the lie. It’s likely he did exist, and something unspeakable happened to him, or maybe he just got lucky. Yorgos isn’t saying, although if the final moments of the film are anything to go by…
In any event, the parents use him to reinforce fear and the “safety” of their protection. The children believe, as Mummy and Daddy have told them, that dangerous child-eating cats killed their brother, so they obligingly bark like dogs to scare cats away. This mirrors the way enemies are created (by fanning xenophobia or superstition or simply inventing bullshit) in order to justify violent actions in the pursuit of political and economic agendas or to increase tighter security and control. “If you stay inside,” Daddy says, “you will be protected.” Or, to put it another way, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”
The children have no contact with (or experience of) the world beyond their high-fenced boundary, except for Christina, a security guard at Dad’s factory who is brought in once a week to service the sexual needs of the boy (after which she procures a little sexual attention for herself from his older sister). Apart from Rex (the family dog, currently away at “guard-dog school”), Christina is the only character with a name. The fact that family members are nameless signals Lanthimos’s allegorical intentions. It might be a stretch, but as Christina is the only non-family member we see within the ‘compound’, it’s tempting to read a touch of metaphor into her name (Christ-In), particularly as she brings ‘truth’ into the house in the form of subversive art. While films like Rocky and Jaws are hardly subversive to us, their potential to reveal “the lie” makes them destabilising. As a result, Christina is relieved of her duties with swift and violent precision, forcing the parents to elect a 'safer option' for the boy’s needs. One of his sisters is duly prepared.
When the family watch videos, it’s their own home movies. Mouthing the dialogue as they watch, they’re obviously familiar with the content and enjoy it. This scene is a caustic swipe at the social engineering power of movies, especially the emotionally reassuring, intellectually nullifying nature of populist cinema: formulaic, repetitive, non-threatening, diverting but primarily affirming instructions on how to be compliant, productive, and responsible. This idea is emphasised later in the film when Dad goes to see if Rex is ready to resume his position as their guard dog. The trainer tells him that it takes time to prepare a dog. “Every dog is waiting”, he says, “for us to show him how to behave.” On the walls of the dog school, there are portraits of dogs in poses of vigilance, loyalty and obedient submission. “Dogs must do whatever we ask of them without hesitation. You understand?” The question is directed towards Dad, but the inference — with its Guantanamo overtones — is directed at us.
The boy likes to paint, so he’s working on a portrait of Dad that takes shape over the course of the film. It reflects the extent to which Dad is pivotal to the family’s worldview, but of course, it recalls those cheesy portraits of fascist political leaders. Eventually, the eldest (most inquisitive) daughter starts to come undone. Her new knowledge of the world (via Christina’s videos) unlocked something in her that compels her to act. According to her parent’s theory of everything, a child is ready to leave home when the ‘dogtooth’ (or eye-tooth) loosens and falls out, so she decides to speed up the process. It isn’t pretty, but it earns her a passkey to freedom. Or maybe not, as we remember the long-lost brother.
DOGTOOTH is ostensibly about totalitarianism but more broadly about the mechanisms of control in the West, too, religious, political, economic, social, etc. It’s a blunt depiction of ignorant acquiescence that recalls works by Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke, although it has to be said that Lanthimos’s 'transgressive' ambitions feel calculated by comparison. There’s no need for allegory in Ulrich Seidl’s films. He doesn’t allude; he shows. His films confront us with 'the real', even at their most fictitious, so one can see why some criticise DOGTOOTH as hyperbolic.
But for me, there’s enough meat on the bones to give Yorgos the benefit of the doubt. His work is obviously influenced by the “Theatre of the Absurd”, a term that describes literary and theatrical works that aim to shock audiences out of complacency by ridiculing the orthodoxies behind hierarchical constructs of power and control: family, religion, the state, authoritarian institutions, and the overwhelming proliferation of comforting assumptions that encourage compliance through consumerism via television, cinema, and the media. The absurdist allegories of Yorgos Lanthimos are intended to focus attention on a distracted world, a world in an intoxicated slumber, pacified by lies, the world of ‘known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns’, the world Mr Orwell saw coming — our world now.