“The Lobster” and the Absurd Demonization of Singlehood

Funny how when we learn that a couple gets engaged or married, we tend to offer them congratulations. That implies that consummating a relationship in such a way is an accomplishment, something that one can achieve through deliberate effort, like a college degree. I believed this at one point in my life, and it led me to treat my interactions with my girl crushes as exams with specific right and wrong answers—as projects that involved contriving both my and the girls’ actions towards a preferred end goal. You can guess how that turned out. I’ve had dating experience since, and learned a critical lesson from it: love is a total crapshoot. It depends far less on what you do and don’t do than on chance, circumstance and coincidence—right place, right time. It happens by itself, and if you think you have to convince someone to love you, it’s not going to happen and you need to move on. It sounds cruel—but is the alternative really better? Our culture perpetuates an idea of singlehood and virginity as evidence of something off, when most would prefer the excitement of romance’s unpredictability to a situation ending in tears and divorce. The wait for The One is more worthwhile than the rush into marriage.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, like many of the great dystopian texts, is set in a society copied from ours, then taken to an extreme logical end. We’d like to insist that this world only exists in the film and we never have to worry about it—until we realize that the world’s social values and contracts mimic our own reality, and we are hypocrites to deny it. Set in an unnamed city-state (shot in Ireland), the story turns around a hotel where the powers that be send single persons and assign them forty-five days to find a spouse, after which those who are still single are transmogrified into animals. They individually get the solace of deciding which animal. No, wait—the attitude towards singles is even more insidious than that. In the forest beyond the hotel, there’s a rebel force called the Loners who commit to celibacy and suppress all sexual interest, and who the city’s unseen poobahs try to decimate by granting the singles one extra day at the hotel for each Loner they hunt down and shoot with a tranquilizer gun. David, played by a chubbier version of Colin Farrell, is our guide through this world. In the film’s first half, he searches for a mate in the hotel and (hilariously) makes little if any progress. In the second half, he is forced to escape the hotel and join the Loners, one of whom is Rachel Weisz, with whom he falls in love. This double irony anchors the film within a theme of reverse psychology. Coercion breeds rebellion, and no dictatorial apparatus, it seems, is too infallible for David to not fuck up just by being in it.

In The Lobster’s universe, first impressions are sacrosanct. Forty-five days go by fast, and the singles are half-encouraged by the careerist hotel manager (Olivia Colman) to not waste time thinking too hard and search for someone that shares just one distinct trait. It helps that most of the characters are boiled down to one definitive, physical aspect. One ostensible friend of David’s (Ben Whishaw) walks with a limp. He spots a girl (Jessica Barden) who looks hot doing a backstroke in a pool, strikes up a chat, and learns that she has a nosebleed issue. He proceeds to induce nosebleeds on himself with ridiculous masochism. She buys it; they elope. David fails to escape this need for cursory connectivity even while he’s with the Loners: his romance with Weisz (David is the film’s only named character) is based on their mutual nearsightedness, and that leads them into trouble. Lanthimos’ direction serves to call even more attention to the stifling, unreadable one-dimensionality of this ensemble. Everyone delivers their lines as if they’re doing a blind first reading of the script: the words come out as blank, monotonous filler, and the people seem to have no present knowledge of who they are and what they’re doing—instinct without introspection. Indeed, Weisz’ literary voiceover narration prompts us to read the film very much as a written text. At one point, she repeats the characters’ dialogue as a novelist would.

This, mind you, is not a weakness of the film but rather a calculated aesthetic choice that pays off in spades, as it reflects how we often perceive others through knee-jerk reactions and snap judgments. As The Lobster filters our intrusive obsession with marital unity through a surrealist smokescreen, its inhabitants are reduced to what they’re like when we first see them, or perhaps to how we’d like to see them for our own conveniences. There’s a pervasive sense of unreliability—a sense that Lanthimos is withholding stuff, and we’re not seeing the full story or its characters for who they really are. And still, we must spend two hours with these people, as married persons must spend time with each other, even if they’ve acted on impulse. (The lush, Villeneuve-like wide-angle photography of Thimios Bakatakis is the one refreshing counterpoint to this minimalist illegibility.) Such an approach relies less on keen acting than on keen (type)casting. The narrative rides roughshod on Farrell’s blasé Irish humor, Weisz’ decisive economy, Whishaw’s bluff British youth, Colman’s officious slime, and Barden’s self-deceptive charm—to say nothing of John C. Reilly’s under-the-radar physicality, and the feminine French steel of Léa Seydoux as the purely diabolical head honcho of the Loners. To see such a motley, unlikely ensemble come together game as they are for this cinematic challenge and pull it off as they do is stunning.

Lanthimos is the Greek auteur behind Dogtooth, an absurdist riff on homeschooling in which two evil parents keep their three children imprisoned in a lifelong farrago of indiscriminate, inaccurate linguistic associations. The Lobster intensifies that film’s mediation of potential real-world interpersonal situations through an uncanny surrealist bent. It is worth noting that Dogtooth had incest, unsimulated fellatio, and a climactic scene of dental gore that puts Marathon Man and Cast Away to shame—and it was nominated for an Oscar. Rest assured, he has not toned down the content for this film, his first major foray into the ultra-consumerist English language frontier. The violence done to human and animal alike is brutal, and the sex is cringe-worthy, and only more so when sterility is attempted. But none of this is gratuitous; all of it has a point—and that Lanthimos successfully plays this as a black comedy throughout vaults it over the top. Fellow hardcore cinema buffs: think Kaurismäki meets Samuel Beckett, but not as glacial. (The film’s funniest set pieces include Whishaw’s nosebleeds, a bullshit farewell letter read by Barden to an old chum who’s reached her last day, a solipsistic dance to electronica held by the Loners, a ludicrously stupid and sexist pro-marriage skit staged by the hotel staff, Farrell’s anti-reaction to a spectacularly failed suicide attempt, one moment where he and Weisz get a tad too cozy, and one moment where a man is asked to rate his wife “on a scale of one to fifteen” and gives the completely wrong answer.) That Lanthimos has gotten so much support from such acting heavyweights on merit alone, despite his serious anti-commerciality, is a testament to his artistic integrity and will to commit to his vision, yet also to his tact and his understanding of human perception and conditioning. Fact: Farrell has already signed onto his next film. This critic can’t wait.

Grade: A+

52 Weeks of Literature, Book Nine: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce

NB: Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m way behind. That’s because of two reasons: 1) there’s been a lot of hectic stuff going on in my life in the past few months, and 2) I was derailed by one particularly godawful novel, which I’ll get to in due time. To make this project easier, I am abandoning my original schedule, and while I intend to commit to the fifty novels I listed, I am reviewing this in lieu of Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs, because that book is mostly pulp, a solid English translation of it is wanting (astonishingly), and there’s more I have to discuss about Joyce.

Representative quote: “The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins: ‘I was not wearier where I lay.'”

The oeuvre of James Joyce is one of a handful in literature that focuses on chronicling the trajectory of a lifetime. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man depicts Stephen Dedalus’ childhood, from infancy to coming-of-age; Ulysses contrasts and connects Dedalus in his twenties with Leopold Bloom deeper into adulthood; Finnegan’s Wake (from what I imagine) is firmly in the realm of night, dreams, senility and death—the end of all cohesion. As this body of work develops, an ironic transition occurs: as the scope broadens, the length of time depicted dwindles. Portrait is a regularly paced novel spanning a decade a half; Ulysses is an epic covering 24 hours; Wake is an epic that may well be about the evening and the dreams thereafter, which may well last mere seconds. Perhaps Joyce perceived that as we age, until we reach our twilight, our memory and concentration sharpen, and we start to appreciate the constancy of the day as opposed to the vicissitudes of the year. As our fundamental units of time shift, we pay more attention to the infinitude within the second. Time is a spatial dimension that is continuously expanding, and as it proceeds, the universe’s entropy increases; the complexity of a minute of adulthood matches that of a month of childhood, so there’s no need to dwell on as much time. This is why Portrait is straightforward, where Ulysses begins as readable before the narrative gradually subsumes into a linguistic chaos, to which Wake forfeits completely. It is a credit to Joyce that he was keen enough to offer readers a template for this progression in his volume of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, which lengthen from a few pages to a novella as they cover adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and old age, before wrapping up fittingly with “The Dead”.

This is part of why I think Joyce remains a scepter haunting the world of literature, famous and well read despite his serious anti-commercial aspects—revered for the merits of his prose and technique while reviled for the alienating difficulties of most of Ulysses and all of Wake. For all his indulgences, he is well attuned to the harmonies innate in time—the rising action, climax and falling action that map out a day as well as they do a life (a day and a life each working as synecdoche for each other), and that have served as the foundation for almost all fictional narrative this side of Aristotle. We may not understand where we’re going, but at least we have an inkling of how we’re getting there. In an era in which academia is growing narrower and further from the common man’s pop culture, the best conduit into Joyce’s body of work—and it is a very rewarding and worthwhile body—is Portrait, even more so than Dubliners. The first of the novel’s five chapters, while in third-person, is mediated by the limited language and knowledge of Dedalus’ nine-year-old self and is thus easy to follow. As Dedalus grows older, the prose takes on more maturity and creativity, and the details are conveyed with greater aesthetic effort, until, by the final chapter, we delve beyond the concrete and tactile into Dedalus’ burgeoning, gutsy philosophies. And we are ready for it, because Joyce has prepared us for it and eased us into it with pitch-perfect pacing—so contrary to what some readers may believe, he does give a shit about the reader. This makes Portrait more relatable than Ulysses, which is mired on occasion by overblown parodies of archaic literary forms that no longer really matter.

As a quintessential Künstlerroman—namely, an artwork depicting an artist’s (perhaps its artist’s) development, as the title would tell us—Portrait is less a narrative than it is a meditation on a theme, which in this case is youth’s interaction with adult authority. We all trust at the beginning of life that the authority apparatus is right, even when it damages us, in which event it convinces us that we are to blame. We grow out of this phase. We realize that this authority is not the only world there is. There are other modes of thought outside the spheres of our childhoods that can be brought into dialogue with and used to challenge the typical third-rate bureaucrats who have held sway over our formative years. Hence, the push and pull against the system begins. Some fall for the system, some are defeated by it for good, some vow to have their revenge later, some escape it and stake it out on their own, and a charismatic few rise above it to build a new, more effective culture. Dedalus (read: Joyce) does all of those things at different points, and it’s a breathtaking journey. The clash between old and young generations is a pertinent theme in today’s political domain, and one that I connect with personally on a deep level. Reading this, I could feel that I was with Dedalus as he approached the rector’s office to protest Father Dolan’s unfair punishment of him. I was with him as Heron beat him with a cane for naming Byron, not Tennyson, as the greatest Romantic poet. I was with him as he went to lose his virginity to a prostitute, and as a series of typical Irish priests brainwashed him with their eloquent fear-mongering bullshit theological lectures on Hell and damnation, and moved him to confess his lust and become a pious Catholic. I was with him as he wrestled with the choice of whether to cross the Rubicon and enter the priesthood or abandon religion and embrace some other, more aesthetic form of spirituality. And when he made his decision, I cheered.

This, more so than Ulysses, has become one of my favorite novels. I usually recoil from critics and academics who say that the most challenging of an author’s works should be read last because otherwise, a reader won’t be “ready” or “mature” enough for them. I’m more of the go-for-broke type. I must say, however, that Portrait is very much in a series preceding Ulysses and ought to be read first, preferably during high school when one is wont to relate to Dedalus and his dilemmas, which are universal and apply far beyond the medium of religion. Key to Joyce’s legend is his prose, which is superlative. There’s a reason the Irish are known for their “gift of gab.” Their musical accent, their unique vernacular structures, and their pitch-dark sense of humor constitute the best representation of the English language in the world. As far as Irish literature goes, one could do a lot worse than Joyce. The historical parallels and allegories that pepper Portrait, Dubliners and Ulysses can lean on the side of schematic—single characters standing in for entire nationalities and political parties, competing against each other in sports and cards and the like. When you have writing on this level, though, such shortcomings are easy to forgive. Joyce particularly excels in his descriptions of the weather’s effect on environment, and in using details of physical sensations (some stemming from the weather) as metaphors for psychological states. Where lesser writers resort to cliché, Joyce innovates. There is no instance in Portrait of structural contrivance; no effort is made to impress the reader with stream of consciousness and pandering pretension. Much of what makes the Joyce of Portrait a modernist is what he does merely with Hamlet’s “words, words, words.” There is a case to write his name in gold not for his aggressive revolutionism, but simply for his being a great writer.

Grade: A+

Next up: An equally masterful work of literature from the other I*ELAND nation.

Great Film: “The Commitments”, The Perfect Introduction to Ireland

Happy belated Bloomsday.

If you know me well, you know my love of all things Irish, and The Commitments is the Alpha and Omega of that love. My appreciation for the prose of Joyce, the plays of Beckett and the poetry of Yeats traces directly back to the ten-piece band that thought it’d be a good idea to bring soul music to Dublin.

The Irish are among the most vocal of people. They have the lushest accent in all of English and, thus, the strongest singing culture of any nation in the world. Their “gift of gab” is a yardstick for English rhetoric that all writers and orators would do their best to study with discipline. Their sense of humor—mostly black humor, refined by a brutal history of colonialism and terror—is unflinching and unfailing. The magic of The Commitments is its exploitation of all of these elements to excess, and to perfection.

Based on—and improving on—a novella by Roddy Doyle, and directed by Alan Parker, Commitments gains much of its power from the clash of African-American soul and the Irish working class. Trying to introduce soul to Dublin may sound like the mother of bad ideas, at first, but our protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) steadfastly disagrees with that notion. He sees soul as the perfect conduit for the downtrodden to express their hopes, chutzpah and (often erotic) desires. The Irish are expressive, and their way with language indeed matches the blunt and deft qualities of the Motown classics, yet soul still offers a fresh perspective. Jimmy’s a dreamer. Like my last Great Film selection, Heat, this film does a masterful job of setting up an ensemble of distinct characterizations, quickly, with few if any false notes. That’s not easy, and Parker shows wisdom and patience in his decision to withhold the high comedy for the film’s opening minutes in favor of fleshing out Jimmy. Before a single laugh, we see him navigating a flea market—vibrant with kids, goats, smoke and color—pawning cassettes and fantasizing about an interview with radio jockey Terry Wogan. A hero we can root for has been established.

In forming and managing the first Irish Motown band, Jimmy has a formidable task ahead of him. The script, Parker’s direction and Arkins’ acting work in beautiful harmony to display this fundamental cultural conflict—namely, of searching for decent soul musicians in a nation unfamiliar with the genre—with satire, but without any hint of snark. To the extent that all Irish are endowed with musical and comedic talents, Arkins—a versatile musician who, astonishingly, does not perform at all in the film—displays his talents with subtle aplomb. When you’re getting the most kidney-aggravating laughs of your life out of seeing a guy asking the errant musicians knocking at his door “Who are your influences?” and slamming his door in frustration at every answer he gets, and out of seeing his reactions at the musicians he does let into his house to audition, you know you’re watching a classic. (Observe what he does with his cigarette.) Before then, at the breakfast table, Jimmy’s father (the great Colm Meaney) tries to turn him on to Elvis, a man he considers “God.” So it’s only inevitable that the script would then have the father walk in on a bathroom full of Pogues wannabes singing “Elvis Was a Cajun” and give him the opportunity to accuse that band of “fuckin’ blasphemy.”

Arguably even more so than Heat, Commitments demands to be studied for the skill with which it introduces and delineates character. Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), the bouncer who will by a twist of fate become the band’s drummer, is accused of being a “savage” when his name is first brought up. In the next scene, the audience meets him on a stage, testing two microphones by banging them against his head. You really don’t need much more. This simple moment tells you most of what you need to know about Mickah: he’s tough, undaunted, a madman, but also uncannily likable. He turns out to be a charmer with elderly ladies. He’s Heaven when you’re on his side and Hell when you’re against him. His charisma is one of the film’s highlights.

Also a joy to watch throughout is Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy, one of the film’s few pro actors), the band’s trumpeter. Moved to respond to Jimmy’s call for auditions by “Godsend,” he amazes the band with tales of sessions he claims to have played with such artists as Otis Redding, Elvis and Joe Tex that sound absolutely convincing, but that just can’t be true. He backs his stories up with physical evidence and his own ethos and integrity; even his mother is persuaded by them. Is Joey a con man? A madman? A ghost from the past? Is he having hallucinations? It doesn’t matter, and the triumph of Murphy’s performance is that we can never tell what’s up with Fagan. All we can do is go with what we’re given, crazy as it is. Even the film’s most clichéd presence—the singer Deco Cuffe (Andrew Strong, all of sixteen years during filming), a vulgar oaf who just happens to have the singing voice of a Detroit-bred hunk—is executed with winning bravado.

I’ve brought up some of the similarities shared by Ireland and soul, so let’s discuss their differences. The Irish dialogue of Commitments is thick, profane, brutal; soul is more accessible, just as carnal, but more romanticized. The linkage between the two takes some contrivance on Jimmy’s part, though there is a historical connection between the Irish and African-Americans. Both were enslaved by their respective imperialist goons; when the Irish came to America in spades to escape the potato famine, they were alternately in competition and in solidarity with the blacks, free and otherwise, over dirty grudge work. There is a debate in the literary world—the nuances of which I won’t bother with here—as to whether Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is black, and the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has made a case for him being Irish. So Jimmy’s case for soul being perfect for his homeland at once has precedent and demands a bit of a stretch. Showing film of James Brown doing what he did best, Jimmy lectures his band (one of whom is a young Glen Hansard, who went on to another solid Irish musical, Once) on his interpretation of their race: “Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.” I’ll leave you to discover the facial reactions to that.

You can see that Doyle’s Irish is rather minimalist, more Beckett than Joyce, but it is never banal. As with the best minimalism, there is an iceberg theory at work here—an undercurrent of passion that assures that every word is le mot juste and rings with eloquence, that wastes not a second of the film’s two sprawling hours. Listen to this one snatch from Jimmy’s speech to the band on a train ride: “I want a strict diet of James Brown for the growls, Otis Redding for the moans, Smokey Robinson for the whines, and Aretha for the whole lot put together.” Crisp, succinct, well-paced, delivered with gusto. Jimmy proceeds to break into a monologue about the rhythm of soul, and its significance, so lively that it prompts the band to sing along to The Marvelettes’ “Destination Anywhere”. In a lesser film, this would’ve come off as a routine and a gimmick; this film earns it.

Then, there’s the comedy, which ranges from punchy one- and two-liners (“There’s a band around called Free Beer; always draws a big crowd”) to gnarly absurdist setups that still make me laugh with every viewing. On my DVD, there is talk in the retrospective interviews with the actors about how tough Irish humor is to understand for foreigners. Like the New Yorker’s cartoons, it takes thought and intellect, and it rewards. The interviews refer to the scene when Steve Clifford (Michael Aherne), the pianist and the band’s most puritan presence, goes to confession to state that he has forsaken his hymns for “‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ by Marvin Gaye”; the priest corrects him on the singer. A better example is when the saxophonist, Dean Fay (Félim Gormley), under Joey’s wing, improves his skills by fantasizing about sucking on Kim Basinger’s nipple. The joke is that as his talents grow, the whole time he’s playing the sax, he’s thinking about Basinger.

Of course, amidst the riot (the “HEROIN KILLS” sign, the outrageous first rehearsals and performances, a love scene set to the Shaft theme, Dean’s flirtations with jazz, and the chaos that ensues in that Mr. Chippy van are also among my most treasured gags), there are more serious, tender moments. I’ll take this time to, at last, focus on “The Commitmentettes,” the three ladies in the band who serve as backup vocalists. Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the blonde whom the men lust over the most, has a family and a boyfriend who disagree with her choice of career, and who attempt to lure her away on a ferry on the eve of the band’s debut, in a tense scene. Bernie McGloughin (played with great ferocity by the Northern Irish actress Bronagh Gallagher) has a large family to look after and scant time for rehearsal, and Jimmy has to confront her in her apartment to learn about that. With two of their three women—and more members—on the rocks, the band finds itself held together by nebulous fibers, and we root for them to pull something off throughout. More characters means more conflict, and the film manages all the conflict in it with riveting economy. Rounding out the backup trio is Natalie Murphy (Maria Doyle, later a regular on The Tudors and Orphan Black), who develops feelings for Jimmy that he is forced to reject because of his work ethic, and because Joey’s wooing of all three women causes enough trouble. Her rendition of Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man”, aimed at Jimmy, could well be the film’s emotional climax.

The ending has been criticized. The film culminates in a Big Event, a barroom concert that Wilson Pickett is scheduled to show up at for a jam session. The band’s blue-eyed versions of “Try a Little Tenderness”, “Chain of Fools”, “Mustang Sally” and Pickett’s own “In the Midnight Hour”, it ought to go without saying, are superb, and they conclude a magnificent arc spearheaded by the tumult of the band’s origins. Here, a keen chiasmus occurs: as the band’s music gets better, the backstage crises grow worse, and the long wait for Pickett becomes more beleaguering. Am I giving too much away by saying the band doesn’t survive the insanity? No, I don’t think I am because the film couldn’t have ended any other way. The higher you go, the harder your crash landing; the harder you work, the greater the pressure. There’s an honesty to that approach, and it buttresses the truth that permeates every word of Joey’s final talk with Jimmy, which I encourage every first-time viewer to listen to with care. As for Pickett, the film’s way of wrapping that up is different from Doyle’s book, and it’s the better and more heartbreaking outcome. One motif in the film is the debate as to the meaning—if there is one—of the opening lyrics of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. In case you forget, they go like this:

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
But the crowd called out for more

As Americans may struggle with Irish humor, so the Irish struggle to figure that out, but I think I got the message: the more “seasick” you feel, the more the “crowd” will “call out.” Those lyrics are the focus of the film’s justly famous final scene, which sees Jimmy back where he started, in his bathroom, putting on his Terry Wogan act. It’s a perfect closer, and Jimmy’s last line before the cut to black is one of cinema’s finest. When you have a small island nation’s worth of great singers, musicians, talkers, arguers, humorists and personalities collaborating and duking it out, you’re not likely to get a lasting musical act, but you’ll have plenty to get one of the best black comedies ever put on film.

This review is dedicated to the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.