The Rule and the Animal: The Lobster

The chapter frames The Lobster’s formal administration of sexuality through the concept of sexual citizenship, Sade’s biopolitics of jouissance, and incel ideology. In this film, Lanthimos’s characteristic discipline of gestures is articulated into a strict principle of correspondence, which I compare with the erotic psychology of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love. The animalisation that already appeared in Dogtooth takes here the form of a secret operation of “metamorphosis,” by which power decides absolutely over the relation between bare life and its forms. Marking Lanthimos’s transition to English-language cinema, this film can also be criticised for presenting a more superficial and chauvinistic framing of patriarchy, resulting from the marginalisation of the perspectives of women and racialised characters on the dystopian universe that the film constructs.