The Lobster: a political satire? (Spoilers)

Looking through the forums for The Lobster, my itch to find a satisfying symbolic interpretation of the film was largely left unscratched. The movie’s plot and setting are so preposterously whimsical that it’s either a pretentious jumble or an elaborate allegory. People subscribing to the latter view often see it as mocking romantic relationship standards and expectations, an explanation which to me seems quite shallow and uninteresting. So I came up with another interpretation.

What if The Lobster is a satirical recount of our geopolitical history since the beginning of the 20th century? Seems far-fetched, I know, but let’s look into some of the basic features of the film.

In The Lobster’s dystopian society single people are sent to the Hotel and obliged to find a romantic partner within 45 days or else face being transformed into an animal. If we take relationships to symbolize love, solidarity, sharing life with others and so on, it can be argued that in the context of the movie the goal of getting into a relationship is a metaphor for the basic objectives of communism as a philosophy. The fact that romantic partnering is imposed by a higher authority in a very superficial way (looking for surface uniformity in external features such as eye sight and speech rather than true solidarity) may be a reference to the Soviet Union’s disastrously misguided application of the communist ideals. Single people who can’t find a partner before the deadline are turned into animals, expelled from human society with its higher values and sent back to the animal kingdom where the guiding force is survival of the fittest. This Rule is enforced in a hotel, where everything is rented rather than owned and everybody gives up their personal belongings upon entry. Members of each gender are made to wear identical clothing.

The Loner society is at the other end of the spectrum – fiercely competitive and individualistic, following the way of the perceived savagery of nature and stubbornly trying to distance itself from every value held by the Hotel society to the point of enforcing rules that rival the absurdity of the ones in the Hotel. The Loners can be taken as a symbol of the West and the US in particular after WWII with its relentless striving to remove from its social fabric anything remotely resembling communism and to uphold the capitalistic values of individualism and meritocracy. The two sides lead a kind of cold war with tranquilizer darts and smear campaigns, in which the Loners ultimately succeed in exposing the deceptive nature of the Hotel’s ideals – the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The story then moves on to life in the Loner society, where the natural impulses for connection between David and the Short Sighted Woman are suppressed and every sign of affection or cooperation is punished. The two lovers’ attempt to escape is sabotaged and their love is put to the test by a forceful removal of their superficial similarity – the blinding of the Short Sighted Woman. The Loner Leader’s tactics are intended to expose the lovers’ ultimate selfishness and dissipate the illusion of their genuine connection. The lovers, however, continue to desire a relationship and when they finally manage to escape, the two devise a plan to restore their surface similarity by David’s act of self-blinding – another step in a sequence of reactionary moves that drive the plot of the film. Instead of trying to find a new way of living together with their differences, the couple applies the old, dysfunctional method of superficially smoothing the differences. The lovers’ desire to live together is genuine but the only method they come up with for achieving this is grounded in the old paradigm, which led to the schism in the first place. The Hotel society deplores the Loners’ individualism, seeing it only as savagery and failing to recognize a true desire for independence behind it. The Loners, on the other hand, despise the Hotel people for their fake togetherness, failing to see it as a misguided attempt to establish genuine connection. David and the Short Sighted Woman are caught between the rivaling forces, unable to find their place.

The fact that the film ends without revealing if David gouges out his eyes or not seems to suggest that this is the point at which our society is right now – where we have to decide whether we continue to only pay attention to the surface divisions or find a way to look deeper into the problem of living together, whether we blind ourselves to our differences in a desperate attempt to survive or look beyond the differences to find our underlying oneness.

There is some support for this interpretation in comments made by director Yorgos Lanthimos. In an article in Financial Times he is cited saying “It’s hard not to be political. Those links are there to be made.” The articles goes on to say "He is less sure his film has much to say about romance itself. When I mention the fakery his characters engage in to seduce each other, he shrugs." Another article in Los Angeles Times cites Lanthimos again deflecting questions on the film’s relationship-specific commentary: “I'm much more interested in the irony of people breaking away from a system and somehow they find themselves creating another similar one. It just seems like a pattern people follow in political or personal life."

I’m pretty sure that the movie’s numerous little details will offer more support for such a theory if one cares to explore it deeper. After all, it seems unlikely that the creator of the film would just randomly come up with so many strange scenes and lines. Can you see any other supportive evidence or do you think I’m looking too much into it?