Turned Into a Lobster....

Warning this article contains SPOILERS for the film The Lobster.

“The first day is a day he would never forget...” This is a MGTOW themed review and analysis of the MGTOW themed film: The Lobster which has just received its unofficial internet release, thanks to the servers at Kick Ass Torrents.

The new paradigm of MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way which is merrily consuming You-Tube bandwidth with astonishing alacrity, is a natural human reaction to the ‘war-on-men’ which has been waged for either the last 20 or so years or since Eve’s betrayal of Adam in the garden of Eden. Depends on your politics I guess.
  

It seems to be about 20 years since the Social Justice Marxists started setting-to with real vigour in their mission to destroy society and human civilisation as we know it, in order that it be replaced with an as yet, unknown, New System. 

Ever since Tony Blair was elected in the late 90’s the UK in particular and modern social-reality itself seems to no longer hold any pretence at making sense and there’s clearly something malicious in the corruption, neglect and mismanagement currently fomenting in Britain. I somehow get the impression that since the Iraq war and the death of over a million Iraqis the secret elite rulers of the world have realised they can pretty much do anything they like and noone really has any idea how to stop them.

People’s attitude seems to have changed to resignation as we all just sort of await the next outrage to common-sense and morality to emerge from politics and the media. Whether it’s the murder of David Kelly and Robin Cook for their work trying to prevent the Iraq war or recent revelations about David Cameron having sex with a dead pig’s head. It’s just a catalogue of endless horrors only punctuated by humourless dark absurdities.

There is a sense that anything goes now really, and a possible future where single people are dehumanised and punished until they pair up, marry and contribute taxes and their labour to the monolithic machiney of the state, is probably no more bizarre than anything else which is happening these days.

The film The Lobster won the Jury prize at the 2015 Cannes film festival, a fact which makes me somewhat suspicious as there is always a sense that these prizes and promotions are often used to further the social engineering agenda.

The film presents us with the strange concept of a sort of hotel for singles, like a kind of club 18-30 concentration camp where the male guests are raped, beaten and psychologically abused, and threatened that they will ultimately be transformed into animals if they do not find another partner within 45 days and any escapees are mercilessly hunted down.

Captured singles after a night's hunting in the woods.

The film begins in a shocking manner with a woman shooting a donkey, within the logic of the film this is presumably her ex-husband. Then a cut to Colin Farrell’s character David being thrown out by his wife while her new lover rings impatiently at the doorbell. 

Here we have two of the key concepts of MGTOW being played out. Namely in the first instance, the belief that some women will actively seek to destroy a man once he is of no more use to her, and the behaviour of some women who literally try to destroy their husbands in flagrantly unjust divorce settlements which resemble personal vendettas rather than the amicable termination of a contract; and in the second instance the fact that 80% percent of divorces are instigated by women and in almost all cases it is the man who must move out of the family home, often losing everything he has worked for on the sudden whim of the woman he loved and who he thought loved him.

Whether it is actually true that people are somehow turned into animals within the context of the film is never made clear, except for a bit of dubious exposition from one of the characters. The title of the film is the animal which Colin Farrell’s character had decided he would choose to be turned into (because he says they live for a hundred years and have blue blood like royalty) should his time at the hotel prove unsuccessful.

Upon enrolling into the hotel system he is stripped down to his underwear, has his possessions confiscated and given hotel room 101: a nod to similarly dystopian portrayal of a fascist future George Orwell’s 1984.

What we see in The Lobster may well be a world which exists within the same continuum as 1984. But the film also exists within a sort of post MGTOW world where society has mobilised its forces and human rights have been quashed in an attempt to force apparently reluctant men to pair up with women. The same obligation seems to exist for women, but we observe the film from a masculine viewpoint and it is commonly the men who are punished, humiliated, tortured throughout the duration of the film.

The men in the film show an obvious lack of interest in the opposite sex and a desire to just be left alone to hang out with each-other. It is only through compulsion and the threat of being turned into animals that they force themselves to talk to women, but they seem to have a much better time alone.  

With humorous irony Robert (the fabulous John C Reilly, better known to me as Will Ferrell’s goofy step brother in the film of that name) describes the culminating experience of the hotel “The final ordeal before letting you go and the hardest one.” He is referring to what we would probably know as a honeymoon on a yacht, for many in this day and age something of a romantic ideal but in the post MGTOW world this is described as an ‘ordeal’. And in chilling tones John C Reilly’s character states: 

"15 days of vacation....just a couple alone" as if it were the very worst thing in the world.

Men just wanting to go their own way.

Their interactions with women are forced and the unnatural lengths which they go to in order to show some kind of commonality with the women, including Ben Whishaw’s character John damaging his own nose in order for it to bleed in order to have something in common with and something to talk about with one of the women whose most defining characteristic is that she suffers from nosebleeds.

"What's worse? To die of cold and hunger in the woods. to become an animal that will be killed and eaten by some big animal, or to have a nose-bleed from time to time." 

In another scene Collin Farrell's character desperately tries to strike up a conversation with a female who is coming close to her final day at the hotel. He begins by smiling and commenting that she has nice hair. "I know" she replies simply, then starts revelling in her own hair.

I'm great.

Farrell's character then asks her "How do you like mine?" thinking that he could save her life if only she commented that he too had nice hair and as such they both would have something in common and they could become a couple and she could live. But instead she visibly adjusts her body language, from the obvious happiness and self centred satisfaction at being given a compliment, to folding her arms and looking stern when asked to say something nice about his. She tells him it looks dry but then starts a strange sort of harangue about men with bald hair, and her tone is almost berating and finding fault with him, even though he doesn't have bald hair and will also be unlikely to develop it in later life.

You suck.

The same woman then appears to be on her final day before being transformed into an animal, her 'best friend' reads a letter to her saying she will miss her and when she gets to the city she will never find a friend as faithful and true as she was, the women then slaps her, exposing her all consuming anger and jealousy that she has managed to find a partner while she has not. 

The tragedy is that had this woman merely responded to David with a simple compliment about his own hair then they would have had something in common and as a result would not risk being turned into an animal. In fact she throws herself from her hotel room and dies painfully on the terrace bellow. It simply didn't occur to her even for a second that she could possibly return the compliment to David and she would be saved.

Women... I can't figure them out.

It simply isn't in her nature to do so. And so we see this written on the look of sad confusion on David's face when he offered to give himself to her to save her life if only she could for once not be wholly and so completely self centred. She literally couldn't say something nice to a man to save her own life.

The film explores some of the themes and criticisms of women within the MGTOW world. Their vapidity and the apparent heartlessness with which they treat men who no longer serve their purposes.  One of the women describes her one defining characteristic as ‘her beautiful smile’, seeming to evoke MGTOW’s criticism that women are superficial and obsessed only with appearances. And one of the women is described as ‘having no feelings whatsoever’.

The men are specifically oppressed by women in a variety ways throughout the film. The wonderful Olivia Coleman’s character of gently tyrannical Hotel Commandant accuses Robert of masturbating in his own room and calls him a “A weak and cowardly man.” And threatens that he’d better get used to masturbating not to pictures of naked women but to pictures of horses since he will most likely end up being turned into one for failing to find a partner. He is then brutally punished  having his hand forced into an electric toaster. Presumably so he can longer masturbate.

But that's my wanking hand!

                                                      

"If you encounter any problems, any tensions, any arguing that you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps.."

Colin Farrell’s character David is also apparently, raped on several occasions. He is ordered to remove his trousers despite his protestation: "Can we not do this today, it’s awful."

But he is told that “I’m afraid you have to do it and you have no idea how much it helps you psychologically in the search for a partner.”

After the fact the hotel maid is seen readjusting her clothes after some kind of sexual operation and David is told in a scientific manner: “Today you became erect quicker than on other days”

In another scene, the women in the audience are shown a basic role-play where  women without men are shown as being vulnerable and prone to sexual attack by single predatory males.

Ben Whishaw first appeared on television as Pingu, the abused and much humiliated computer geek in  Chris’ Morris and Charlie Brooker’s satire of Shoreditch wankers: Nathan Barley and watching this film I had to check that it wasn’t written by Chris Morris as it has something of the satirical prescience which Morris is known for. 

However it is getting harder and harder for satire to keep up with just how insane the world is actually becoming and I get the feeling that this film may be less a satire but more a shape of things to come and the decline in men getting married or having any kinds of relationships with women increases causing a potential population decrease and resultant massive socio-economic imbalance within the western world.

"It's no coincidence that the targets are shaped as single people and not couples."

Colin Farrell's character in a desperate attempt to reach one of the women becomes deliberately cold and calous since he has noticed that being nice to women and complimenting them seemed ineffective. As a resut of acting like a callous and sociopathic caveman type of man he manages to ingratiate himself with the woman who has no feelings and thus prevent himself from being turned into an animal. 

It is only when she pretends to be choking to death and he does nothing to save her, that she realises that he has the required Alpha male characteristics and is the right man for her. She then kills his brother (who is a dog) but because he shows emotion she deems him unsuitable and goes to report him to the hotel manager.  

Pyscho-woman...Quest-ce-que-c'est?

The film quickly loses its way after the first 45 minutes however and becomes a disordered mess once the chemistry of Colin Farrel, John C Reilly and Ben Whishaw is broken up. In addition the women's dialogue and the deliberately frozen, stilted performances, which while perhaps appealing to artistic sensibilities, do not really suit story-telling and an enjoyable movie experience. 

I suspect that this effect is deliberate and intended to represent the difficult and alien nature of the male-female relationships and how perhaps, men and women can never really understand each-other, and that the only things we have in common might be the occasional nose bleed after all.