Dogtooth: The Family Syndrome
Author(s): Mark Fisher
Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 64, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 22-27
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2011.64.4.22
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Film Quarterly
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Walled garden
Dogtooth. Courtesy of Verve Pictures.
ence can be risked, and, in a chillingly clinical phrase, he
tells the mother that he had “been considering assigning the
task [of meeting the son’s sexual needs] to the elder one,”
before concluding that it would be better if the son seemed
to come to this decision himself. The son does so but, once
more, the ensuing sex between the siblings lacks any transgressive charge.
While Fritzl was an horrific example of what Jacques
Lacan calls Père Jouissance, the perverse Father who enjoys
without limits, the obscene obverse of the Law, the father in
Dogtooth is a rather different figure. He is not so much Père
Jouissance as Papa Dada. Dadaism delighted in exaggerating the pompous absurdity of the ceremonies that authority
needs in order to legitimate itself, and Lanthimos’s anatomization of patriarchal power in Dogtooth partakes of the
same spirit of coldly savage caricature. The father in the film
is not the underside of the Law so much as its parodic extension. Everything in the family’s world—from sex to language
to the use of mouthwash—becomes subject to a precise ritualized control that becomes all the more ludicrous the more
solemnly its arbitrary diktats are observed.
One can only speculate about the father’s motives, since
he is never called upon to give an account of them: the children naturally take for granted the bizarre situation in which
they find themselves, because they have always lived inside
it; while, apart from Christina, the outside world remains
unaware of their predicament. Alone in the family, it is the
father who moves between the private and the public world,
traveling from his familial despotism to his job in a factory.
Unlike someone like serial killer Ed Gein (a psychotic almost entirely detached from any kind of consensual reality),
but like Fritzl, the father in Dogtooth can move easily between his abuse den of horrors and the public realm of work.
The Fritzl case reminds us that the generic distinctions between “realism” and “horror” do not necessarily differentiate
the plausible from the impossible; nor do such divisions belong only to cultural modes. Part of what was traumatic about
the Fritzl case, in fact, was that it breached the shared social
fiction we use to make sense of the world. What erupted here
was the obscene proximity of the unthinkable—a proximity
not only in physical terms (a house of horrors on an everyday
street) but in terms of the structure of the social (incest and
murder in the heart of the family).
This is underscored in the tension between Dogtooth’s
formal naturalism and its (apparently) Dada-like content.
The camera lingers impassively, unobtrusively, as if it is performing a merely documentary function. There is neither a
score nor any incidental music; all of the music is diegetically embedded. The actors are deadpan, undemonstrative.
(At times, there is almost a feeling of reality TV—and after
all, in their isolation, in their submission to a cruel and
arbitrary regime, what do the children resemble if not Big
FI L M Q UARTERLY
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
23
possess no particular erotic or pathological charge for them,
no associations of guilt or dirt, the act of licking is easily transferred to another part of the body—when the eldest daughter
attempts to copy Christina’s sexual advances, she licks her
sister’s shoulder. Unharmed by furtive sexual experimentation, the siblings cannot survive their exposure to Jaws and
Rocky. Previously, the family VCR has been used only for
watching home movies: one of the many closed feedback
loops which had kept the children locked into obedient participation in the domestic rituals. After the eldest daughter
secretly watches the films, she starts to act out scenes and
repeat dialogue, its alien idioms soon interrupting the controlled language that the parents have imposed. When the
father learns of the transgression, his punishment is brutal
and sudden—he fastens one of the video cassettes to his
hand and beats the eldest daughter about the head with it.
He then visits Christina in her home and, after a moment
of banal conversation, he unplugs her VCR from the wall
and attacks her with it. Yet there is no returning to the sealed
conditions which the films have contaminated. The children
had been told that the only time it would be safe for them to
leave the house would be when a “dogtooth” (canine) falls
out. Perhaps inspired by the violence of Rocky, one night
the eldest daughter smashes out some of her teeth using a
dumb-bell, before hiding in the trunk of her father’s car. She
remains undiscovered next morning, and the film ends with
a close-up of the trunk—with the suggestion that she may be
on the brink of freedom in a world unlike anything she has
ever known.
“It’s very striking to see that, as the century draws to a
close,” Alain Badiou writes in The Century (Polity, 2007),
“the family has once more become a consensual and practically unassailable value. The young love the family, in
which, moreover, they now dwell until later and later. The
German Green Party . . . at one time contemplated calling
itself the ‘party of the family’. Even homosexuals . . . nowadays demand insertion within the framework of the family,
inheritance and ‘citizenship’” (66). It is possible, despite all
the parental cruelty, to read Dogtooth as a satire on the sociological tendency of the young to “dwell within the family
until later and later.” But the significance of the film, particularly in the decade of Fritzl, is to highlight what Badiou calls
the “pathogenic” qualities of the family. For Badiou, the consolidation of the family has been part of a massive restoration
of power and authority; instead of debating alternatives to the
family as revolutionaries did during the radical moments of
the twentieth century, the family has once again assumed a
totally dominant ideological position, a position that the actual collapse of the nuclear family in western societies and
the challenges to heterosexual normativity have done little
to upset. “The overwhelming majority of child murders are
carried out, not by sleazy unmarried paedophiles,” Badiou
reminds us, “but by parents, especially mothers. And the
overwhelming majority of sexual abuse is incestuous, in this
instance courtesy of fathers or stepfathers. But about this, seal
your lips! Murderous mothers and incestuous fathers, who
are infinitely more widespread than paedophile killers, are
an unsettling intrusion into the idyllic portrait of the family,
which depicts the delightful relationship between our citizen
parents and their angelic offspring” (76).
There is, however, something perversely angelic about
the “children” in Dogtooth. They appear angelic in part
because they can engage in sexual activity without being
corrupted by it. They have the state of radical innocence attributed to Adam and Eve before the Fall—they can have
sex, but it is of no more significance than scattering seed.
(Perhaps the parents’ passionless sex is an attempt to return to
this purely functional sexual activity.) “If you stay inside, you
are protected,” says the father, echoing the God of Genesis
and his warnings about the dangers of eating from the Tree
of Knowledge. But the high cost of this protection is evident: “protected” from the traumatic dimensions of sexuality¸ the children are also deprived of subjectivity and agency;
“protected” from outside influence, the family collapses into
incestuous involution. From the perspective of the patriarch
who has so assiduously preserved the children’s innocence,
it is Christina who is the serpent, the bringer of knowledge
and therefore of evil. We do not have to accept this contorted logic in order to regard Christina as somewhat cruel.
We do now know what the father has told her, and, although
Christina is blindfolded when she is taken to the house, she
is still able to interact with the three children sufficiently to
see that something is seriously amiss here. Whether it is motivated by boredom, malice, or simply a desire to revenge
herself on the boss, Christina’s behavior toward the eldest
daughter is casually manipulative and not a little callous.
She destroys the eldest daughter’s world without assisting her
to escape from it.
What disturbed some about Natascha Kampusch was
her moral conservatism; soon after her release, she spoke of
the benefits of being kept hostage—it meant, she said, that
she could not smoke or fall into bad company. “I hope your
kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities,” the
father spits at Christina, just after he has savagely beaten her.
If you stay inside, you are protected is the slogan of social
conservatism, and it is as if Lanthimos is demonstrating
what the ideal conditions for such conservatism would actually need to be. The outside must be totally pathologized:
FI L M Q UARTERLY
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
25
the children have to become literally xenophobic, terrified
of everything that lies beyond the limits of their “protected”
enclave. Dogtooth’s study of the pathogenic family is also,
then, a study of the psychology of captivity.
The children are not physically restrained from escaping the house. They are always tentatively testing the limits
of their world, throwing objects over the hedges, but until
the eldest’s escape attempt, made possible by the forbidden
fruit of the videotapes, they are neither able nor willing to
step into the outside. What is it that prevents them? Dogtooth
sometimes plays like the feral cousin of The Truman Show
(1998), and like Truman (Jim Carrey), the children are kept
captive by an elaborate mythology which plays upon their
insecurities and anxieties. Reference is repeatedly made to
a disappeared brother—did this brother ever exist? Has the
father killed him? We are in no position to know, yet the fact
that it seems perfectly plausible that a child murder may have
taken place suggests how corrupted this weird Eden already
is. In one of the most grotesquely comic scenes in the film,
the father tears his suit and covers himself in fake blood, before telling the children that this lost brother has been killed
by a house cat, “the most dangerous animal there is.” (In an
earlier, horrific scene, the son killed a cat which strayed onto
the lawn with a pair of pinking shears.) The father, then, is
engaged in a kind of ongoing extemporized Dadaist theater,
like an inverted version of Guido (Robert Benigni) in Life
Is Beautiful (1997). Whereas Guido attempts to protect his
child by pretending that terrifying threats are just a game, the
father in Dogtooth converts the mundane stuff of domestic
life into something terrifying. The element of absurd theatricality here should not, however, distract us from the extent
to which Dogtooth presents in an extreme form the ordinary
gestures and habits, the storytelling and tricks of discipline, of
so-called normal family life.
Control of language is of course crucial to the father’s
scheme, and, once again, there is something Dadaist about
the way that the two parents manipulate words. But this is a
paradoxically familial Dadaism which does violence to the
consensually accepted meaning of words not to open up
random juxtapositions or the asignifying material–sonorous
power of the senseless word itself, but to contain the world
within a solipsistic interiority. In the film’s opening scene,
the three children listen intently to a cassette player telling
them that “a sea is a leather armchair with wooden arms like
the one we have in our living room.” Here is the strategy in
a nutshell: the outside (the ocean) is always converted into
the inside (a leather armchair). The inside can be frightening (pet cats become dangerous predators), but its meaning is
established in advance, fixed by the father and mother’s linguistic micro-despotism, even if sometimes they are forced
into improvisations, as in this conversation:
eldest daughter: What’s a pussy?
mother: Where have you seen that word?
eldest daughter: I saw it on a video case, on top of
the VCR.
mother: It means a light . . .
There is humor in such exchanges, but it is not of the
kind that will provoke much laughter. Dogtooth’s funny
moments—and there are many of them—instead induce
a queasy discomfort that bears some resemblance to the
humor analyzed by Adam Kotsko in his book, Awkwardness
(Zero Books, 2010). But where the comedy that Kotsko describes—in the films of Judd Apatow, or the television series The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm—ought only to
produce squirms of embarrassment but ends up making us
laugh, the scenes in Dogtooth solicit uneasy half-smiles at
best. Toward the end of the film, we see the children perform a routine for their parents; the son plays acoustic guitar while the daughters dance. The son can actually play
pretty competently, but the daughters’ dancing is painfully
gauche. They shuffle out of time like TV talent-show contestants whose performance is only broadcast to invite ridicule;
they move like aliens who are familiar with the concept of
dancing but have never actually seen it done; they throw
themselves about like rag dolls, then the elder daughter—
who could be reenacting scenes from Rocky—starts running
on the spot. It is as unbearable as the famous Ricky Gervais
dancing scene from The Office, but we are denied the release of laughter: the abusive situation and the genuinely pathetic quality of the two daughters prevent it. Besides, we are
denied any point of identification, denied anyone on screen
who could laugh with us—or whom we would want to share
our laughter with. We move instead toward the profoundly
discomfiting comedy of someone like Todd Solondz, before,
mercifully, the mother says, “enough.”
MARK FISHER is author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books,
2010).
ABSTRACT An analysis of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, in which parents create a
totally insular, weirdly theatrical, and sometimes brutal world for their children. To what
extent does this blackly comic, almost Dadaist horror show show reveal wider truths
about what Badiou calls today’s “pathogenic” families?
KEYWORDS Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos, cinema and family, horror, psychoanalysis
and cinema
FI L M Q UARTERLY
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.143 on Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:45:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
27