As a special inaugural posting on ParsingHaus, we bring you the point-counterpoint that started it all.
Dogtooth is a curious little Greek film about an insular family. Really insular. The kids — who look to be about in their early twenties — have never left their house and its surrounding garden. Only the father ventures out. At home, he runs a tight ship, and a very weird one. Each night, the kids listen to audiotapes he prepares that “define” common words in strange ways. A female security guard is occasionally blindfolded and imported into this world to satisfy the son’s sexual urges. The dad occasionally plants live fish in the swimming pool for the kids to catch. The kids have no conception of life outside their hedged walls. Needless to say, they’re all a bit wiggy.
We saw Dogtooth not too long ago. Afterwards we e-mailed about it. What follows is my e-mail to Haus, in reply to his apologia.
SPOILERS ABOUND. If you plan to see Dogtooth, you might prefer to revisit this afterwards.
Dogtooth: So, I agree with some of what you say. I actually like the way it challenged norms. I think it does question how we experience and know the world.
I also think the film deserves praise for the cinematography and the mood it sets. The way the film was washed out made the film feel like a living Polaroid. The director did a great job of adding and removing sound and music which enhance the mood of the film.
Three problems loom large: (1) the need to be overtly offensive, as you mention; (2) the lack of coherence; and (3) the lack of character development.
First, I just thought too much of the story was driven by an attempt to shock the audience. There was little to no other motivation. The messages you read into the film could have easily been expressed without all of the obvious attempts to shock.
Second, the story lacked coherence. For example, in one of the opening shots the younger daughter is cutting the feet off of a Barbie doll and then cuts out the face. Why does she have a Barbie? If the family wants to protect her from the evils of the outside world or exact control on her world view why would they give her a very strong symbol of the outside world. The director also does nothing with that fairly powerful scene. Why is she cutting off the feet? Why does she remove the face? How does it give us a glimpse into who the character is? Why does she not do anything else remotely related to the Barbie doll scene? The scene may be some form of critique on contemporary views of beauty. But this is a theme that is played out, particularly when it comes to the iconic Barbie image. Every aspiring cereal box feminist or modern day Marshall McLuhan has shredded Barbie more thoroughly. In a later scene the oldest cuts the brother. If the oldest was the one who cut the Barbie maybe there would be some sort of link. I guess later on the youngest hits the brother with a hammer, who knows why. But this has nothing to do with cutting up a doll.
The language training the children receive also illustrates the incoherence of the message. The words that are given alternative definitions are random. The children are very literate and eloquent. They express themselves effectively. The words that they receive alternate definitions for do not appear to be systematically removed. So there are two words that are redefined because they are introduced by Christina, but there are plenty of words that appear to be redefined that do not come from the outside. A couple of the words that are redefined appear to be salacious or disturbing, but they also have a new word for salt.
The film also relies on mores that are associated with the socialized rather than the unsocialized world. The children develop in a manner that comports with a traditional Western view of sexuality — men are by there nature sexual beings and women are devoid of sexual urges. Why does the son have a sex drive that needs to be dealt with while the daughters have absolutely no sex drive whatsoever? Christina bribes the oldest one into licking her for Christina’s sexual satisfaction. But the oldest one does not associate the act with sexual satisfaction. Even when she introduces licking to her sister she does not obtain any pleasure from the act. The daughters are so devoid of a sex drive that they see licking any one body part as equivalent to licking any other.
Third, I also think the characters really lack an arc and are not compelling. The oldest sees Rocky and Jaws and for some unknown reason that drives her to want to leave. Why? Her father is controlling in every way, his reaction to her watching these films is non-unique. She does a crazy dance and some how she decides she wants to leave the house. But, why? What is she seeking? Why is she willing to abandon part of her world view and not another? She knocks out her canine because she is told that she cannot leave the house until she loses her dog tooth. She buys into the world her father has built. If she buys into the world view, why would she sneak into the trunk of the car? If her world view is that coherent to her why doesn’t she just go to her parents and say “I lost my canine, now I get to leave.” If she does not buy into the world view, she would just get in the trunk or walk out of the gate to the house. At the end of the movie, I was curious what would happen to the girl only because we are conditioned to have a conclusion. I did not care if she was dead or alive. I knew she would be dead the moment she crawled into the trunk. It did not matter. I left the theater and did not wonder what happened to the other children or Christina or the family, I just did not find any of them compelling. The characters never really developed outside of a forced and unmotivated manner.
The film reads like a freshman year film, made by a student just introduced to Foucault and art house films. There are elements that are interesting but the coherence is not there and the film absurdly forces shocking material — incest, graphic sex, brutal violence, etc. — with no real motivation other than to shock.
By the by, we are in the age of post post-modernism. So the author may be dead but the reader may be as well. Besides, in your view the Tigger movie is great, it had pretty colors, it was good.
PARSI VERDICT: Dogtooth. Do not want.
Read what the other half thinks: Haus’s View.