Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Lobster
2015 · Yorgos Lanthimos · The Lobster on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for actors stating feelings in a flat monotone. (performance)
Everyone delivers lines the way people recite from a manual, including the sentences about love and loss. Farrell mentions which animal his brother became with no change in tone at all.
Payoff: The flatness is not an absence of feeling. It is feeling under pressure, surfacing only in hairline cracks.
Watch how guests are arranged in the lobbies and ballrooms. (staging)
Lanthimos blocks bodies frontally, in stiffened rows, like furniture. Couples pair off by one shared trait: a limp, nosebleeds, short-sightedness. The courtship is a posture you adopt and then have to keep holding.
Payoff: The social contract of the couple gets held up as a pose with the feeling drained out of it. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls these gests: a body held in a way that lays bare the rule it is living under.
Listen for swelling strings over people saying nothing warm. (sound)
The soundtrack is pre-existing classical music with real romantic intensity in it. It plays over flat dialogue and sudden violence and never matches the register of what is on screen.
Payoff: The music carries the yearning the characters are forbidden, so the feeling lives on a separate track from the bodies. In the reading: heautonomy / audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this heautonomy: sound and image telling different stories instead of illustrating each other.
Notice how rarely the camera gives you a close-up. (camera)
Thimios Bakatakis holds faces at a slight remove, off-center, inside wide and medium frames with slow zooms. You are kept back from the usual invitation to identify with anyone.
Payoff: With no face to gather the feeling, the emotion has to go somewhere else, and it does.
Watch for grays, slate blues, and wet green woods. (light)
The hotel interiors are lit with chilly institutional uniformity and the forest is damp and drained.
Payoff: Two settings that are supposed to be opposites share one temperature.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how people stand. Everyone in this world is holding a posture the rules require of them.