The Alienating Doldrums of ATTENBERG and DOGTOOTH

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) presents a main character at once limited and intricate. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) presents three children entrapped within an authoritarian, patriarchal regime, thus molding them to be the limited yet intricate subjects of their controlling father. Both of these Greek Weird Wave films deal with the oblivion, or that which wedges itself between two people when they cannot naturally relate or communicate. Furthermore, each film displays the alienating effects of this decisive detachment from reality. Confronting oblivion is a daily occurrence for Marina, a woman who is simply unable to connect to the people she meets. This is also the case for the two daughters and the son in Dogtooth who have been forced to exist in a twilight state. Their lifestyles are suspended in a constant state of unreality––moreover, because they do not realize how profound their disconnect is from the truth, their alienation is particularly acute. Though Dogtooth’s unreality is imposed by a totalitarian father, and Attenberg’s unreality is accessed by harnessing nonhuman, animalistic choreographies, I argue that both films showcase characters whose lives have been deactivated by their perpetual detachment from the real and the human.

Tsangari’s sterile gaze upon the bodies featured in Attenberg registers their curious movements and animal imitations. This demonstration of queer choreographies––especially the ones danced with her friend Bella, in which the two appear as capering puppets amidst shrill squaks and high kicks––operate as rehearsals against stale social norms, or proof that Marina refuses to fit in because she does not know how. Marios Psaras gets to the crux of the matter in his book The Queer Greek Weird Wave; Ethics, Politics, and the Crisis of Meaning, stating in regards to this motif of animal mimicry that “filmic space can emerge as a space generative of possibilities… this state of spatiotemporal excess, of unproductive expenditure, ‘allows us to conceive of the body in motion, and not simply as movement but as an entity through which differential forms of energy flow’” (Psaras 136). Spotlighting the site of the corporal where “differential forms of energy flow” should excite the eye and soul of any viewer, certainly for what it supplies to the film’s suppressed Marina: the possibility for something else.

Marina (Ariane Labed) is a 23-year-old virgin living in a rusty, defunct factory town called Aspra Spitia. Over the course of the film, she spends time with her dying father and immerses herself in the wildlife documentaries of British broadcaster David Attenborough––which devises a life imbued with death and distraction. In the film, to an enraptured Marina, Attenborough speaks of the potential of “escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature’s world,” and then we immediately cut to Marina and her friend Bella jumping along just as birds would, splaying their hands out behind them to look like tailfeathers. This decisive turn to the animal world becomes Marina’s way of choosing alienation as a mode of experience. Countless sequences of her and Bella’s synchronized attempts to be nonhuman reiterate this. When it comes to Marina’s effort to assimilate, she is aware of what people generally experience by her age, and is fledgling to grow. But, her striving results in the misshapen effort of compulsory heteronormativity. She works toward gaining sexual experience with a man, in spite of her seeming asexuality. This fails to bring her any fulfillment or sense of human connection that people typically derive from intercourse, because not only is she neglecting her true desire, but she is unaware of what it is. She even admits that the thought of her father’s naked body does not repulse her. In this way, we see how her estranging rehearsals against social norms through animal dancing has led her to be alienated from herself, too.

In Dogtooth, there is a consistent demand for unconditional submission to the patriarch. As Marina is wheeling her father around the hospital, enjoying her last moments with him, the children of the Dogtooth family are in competition with one another to win the most stickers so that their father lets them choose the video to watch for the evening. This film dramatizes the quotidian time and space of this Greek family, and mires the viewer in their misinformed, isolated experience. The children have no conception of the outside world, so their sequestered lives are characterized by boredom and repetition: they invent their own games, perform staged song-and-dance routines to their taciturn parents, and when they ask the meaning of a word, are given an entirely different definition from the truth. To the son, a zombie is a dandelion, the small yellow flower growing in the yard. Also to the children, a cat is a monster of evil, and they must bark like dogs to scare it away. The film claims realism, and the viewer understands that their home is simply secluded from the real world, but the “familiar familial space” is completely undermined, “thus ultimately damaging both the affective as well as the representational value of the family home,” and spurning it out as a very “hostile and unproductive place for the subject” (Psaras 66). The patriarch has deactivated his childrens’ autonomy, and chosen to keep him at their mercy for as long as he can. This is why incest becomes the son’s prescribed purpose, since his parents think sex is a necessary step for his male personhood. The following incestuous tableau wholly undermines the domestic space most viewers know and appreciate: Lanthimos positions the siblings in an extremely deglamorized sex act, which deconstructs sex’s meaning, proving that it is device of the patriarch and definitively not a result of desire on behalf of either of the siblings. This alienated sex is punishing to watch, as the two siblings are naked, sweating on top of one another, and breathing arduously to the physical and mental pains inflicted by their father.

On this topic of sex, for Marina, “sex is foregrounded as a necessary means for the body’s alignment with the lines of the social, the space where the subject’s consummation of its quintessential relational contracts occurs,” and yet, she is ironically too social when she is in the sexual act, and her partner begs her to be quiet (Psaras 141). She cannot assimilate, her body is not meant to fulfill those relational contracts. In Dogtooth, we see this again, with the parents’ ardent belief that their son should copulate, and the ultimate decision that it has to be done with one of his sisters, for the sake of keeping their private world contained. Both of these unique coming-of-age stories cast sympathy on their protagonists, by displaying bouts of twisted, misunderstood sex and leaving each character in a certain void by the end of the film. In Marina’s case, her father is dead, and she is consigned to live amidst the stagnant industrial tarnish of her town. In the children's case, the oldest daughter has broken free on her own terms, but when all is said and done, is left trapped in her father’s trunk, with no clue of where to go or what she can really do to escape. The consequences of her alienated mode of experience have effectively ruined her life. And so, two sets of limited yet intricate characters seemingly share a similar experience with a life disconnected from reality and from themselves. For Marina, she chooses to detach in preference for animalistic play. For the children, they are at the receiving end of countless commands, and their lives have been consigned to regulation and disorientation. The consequences of overt alienation runs rampant throughout each film, coaxing Marina to scratch her underarms like a monkey, and forcing two siblings to hop into the sac with one another.

Works Cited

Lanthimos, Yorgos. Dogtooth. 2009.

Psaras, Marios. The Queer Greek Weird Wave; Ethics, Politics, and the Crisis of Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Tsangari, Athina Rachel. Attenberg. 2010.