The Office of Being: Alps

In Alps, Lanthimos presents the position of the actor as the paradigm of spectacular biopower, a system of power in which life as such is submitted entirely to the scripted roles that people are required to play. Reducing life to its imitation, identity to an office, and being to character, the chapter argues, the film develops the politics of replaceability, mimesis, and performative power already addressed in Kinetta into a reflection on metacinema, acting, and desire, which can be understood as an ironic generalisation of Hitchcock’s fetishistic economy of appearances. Like in the previous films, gender violence, and patriarchal authority structure the system of performances in the film, both making women characters more vulnerable and identifying them as the prime subjects, alternatively, of complicity and resistance.