By Maria-Nefeli Andredaki,
It was a few weeks ago that my friend group found out I hadn’t watched Dogtooth before. And for context, I was so clueless that I thought the movie was in English! Not being much of a film fan, I usually leave movie night decisions up to my partners, but I do have to say that Lanthimos holds a special place in my heart, as someone who went after his dreams and became extremely successful. Yorgos Lanthimos was born in Pagrati, Greece and at first, studies Business Administration. However, he decided to drop out and pursue his love for film-making, which is why he enrolled in the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos. Since then, he has won a multitude of awards and critical acclaim worldwide for his thought-provoking, peculiar and often perverse films.
Speaking of perverse, Dogtooth was definitely an experience. As mentioned before, I went into it completely blind, which was definitely the best choice, in the sense that, even if you knew some of the plot, you would still be not prepared for what’s to come. Being constantly shocked was just another one of the layers that make the film complex and full of many interpretations.
For the sake of this article, I need to talk about the plot so, if you haven’t watched Dogtooth yet, I’d urge you to do so and come back later. The focuses on a family of five, living in a large family compound in Greece. The strange thing is that the couple’s children, two female and one male, are all adults, in their early 20s. The film shows how the “children’s” reality is warped by their controlling parents, the language, the practices and the stimuli they use in their everyday lives.
One of the most interesting parts of the story for me was the parents’ calculated attempt of manipulating reality by re-assigning meanings to words. As someone who studied a bit of Ferdinand de Saussure in University, this rang a bell. The first scene opens up with the three siblings in the bathroom, sitting away from each other and listening to a recorded tape of their mother listing and explaining the “new words of the day”. This resembles a foreign language-learning experience, which is bizarre, since these adult “children” should certainly be competent speakers of their native language already. On top of that, the meanings of the words are wrong, ranging from “Sea: leather armchair” to “shotgun: a very beautiful white bird”. The mother in the recording goes on to give examples of these words, which sound ridiculous and almost produce laughter for the viewer, were it not for the concentrated and pondering gaze of the “children”.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), language is comprised of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sound image, the “thing” and the signified is its meaning. When we think of a cow, we know that the meaning of the word “cow” is that specific black and white, bovine animal. However, the relationship of the word and its meaning is arbitrary; it is not that the image of a cow is reflected in the word “cow”, but rather, it is the fact that there is a common agreement among language users that the specific word correlates to the specific animal and it is used to express just that. Furthermore, Saussure supported the differential meaning of words, i.e. that words mean one thing because they don’t mean another. We know the word “cow” means “cow” because it doesn’t mean “cat” and vice-versa.
It seems that the mother in the film disrupts this whole agreement and emphasizes the arbitrariness of language by appropriating it, one could say even abusing it, and assigning new meaning to words, by completely breaking down the relationship of signifier-signified. She is the dictator who sets the common agreement of what the language used means and imposes it upon her children. This grants her a lot of power in the closed-off ecosystem of her household, since it manipulates and constructs the “reality” of her adult children, their perception of the world, of themselves and of their lives. The linguistic system that is constructed and imposed on the “children” is also one that shapes their behavior, their socialization with each other and their further compliance with the absurd rules and hierarchy of their household.
To avoid making this article too long, I will be analyzing other aspects of the film in multiple parts. This was just a taste of what Lanthimos has incorporated into his brilliant work and I can’t wait to dive deeper and uncover the rest!
References
- Semiotics and Structuralism-YaleCourses. Youtube. Available here
- Yorgos Lanthimos Biography. IMDb. Available here
- Ferdinand de Saussure. Britannica. Available here
