Controlverse

I’m almost positive I’d never wanna be friends with Yorgos Lanthimos. Of course, it’d be positively cool to meet and mingle and converse some with someone of his talent and accomplishments. But it’s so very clear to me that it would be maximally unpleasant and uncomfortable to be around someone who sees the world the way he does: as lobsters controlling each other per the dominance hierarchies and what they hold against each other to make ‘em dance.

Sort of a disclaimer, I too got interested in this type of human behavior at some point. I was fascinated by it because I wasn’t able to understand it. When I saw people exchanging dishonesty for positive affect, it felt way too foreign to the inner voice I had lived my entire life with. So I did get into a bender for about half a decade where I banged my head against walls and books to get a sense of it. Fascinating journey. Painful too. But, looking back, above all, breathtaking. And once I “got” it, once I understood that thing that was so foreign to me, it immediately lost its draw. So I moved on, to things that appealed more to my innate nature. After all, I didn’t belong in that other place.

However, Yorgos Lanthimos has been talking about that place as a film director for three decades at this point. It doesn’t seem like he is getting bored of it. More than anything, it sounds like that is his inner voice, that is the way he sees the world. Unlike I was, he is not a visitor in that world—“I merely adopted the dark (for a hot sec). He was (probably) born in it, molded by it. He (likely) didn’t even see light until he was a man.”

I went back and now have watched all (but one) of his movies. Three decades of dark, empty people who are running on an algorithm to connect to merely feel okay with existence. He does an incredible (truly incredible) job of enlarging truths about humanity until it is beyond absurd and comfortably comedic (in some of his movies). But, that’s kinda, all he does. My first watch was The Favourite. I guess it makes sense, in the palaces, there is, well, ”palace intrigue”. It’s all about who rules over whom. And who Olivia Colman wants going down on her. He chose his material well and executed to perfection. The next one, several months later, was Lobster. It was probably my most hypnotic movie watching experience. The 2 hour flick simultaneously felt like 20 minutes and 20 hours. Funny thing is that at the time I had this terrible injury and I was in absurd amounts of pain. You know it’s absurd when it’s so sad that it starts to get funny. So I guess it was thematically appropriate. Also, with the hypnosis, I was literally distracted from the pain. Normally, for someone in the situation I was at the time, a lot of mental energy goes to pain management. During Lobster, I had to allocate almost no mental energy there. For two hours, I was somewhere else. Not even inside my painful body. I was grateful for the out of body experience elicited in me by a movie that talks about a society that throws people to the wolves if they fail to couple up and mate, soon after I had wrapped up the relationship that covered most of my twenties in real life.

Then slowly came the others. It was, unfortunately, more of the same. Sometimes less of the same. But the same. He was talking about the same thing. I have incredible amounts of respect for someone who dedicates their life to convey to masses what he sees and feels about the world and the human condition. Maybe I’lll spend the rest of my life doing the same thing and since I’ll be talking about butterflies and flowers and joy and laughter, I’m going to annoy people who have darkness in them—that is very much fair. But….he can’t seem to move on from how people are ostensibly all sickly dependent on each other and they’ll do despicable things to get the feelings they desire from other humans in the most selfish, self-serving, self-absorbed ways possible. Humans with even a shred of empathy hardly exist in his movies. It’s rare. And even when they seem to be there as foils, they are not very well written. The twistedly deranged characters come off five dimensional let alone three, while the decent humans in his stories seem more like wallpaper with bland designs.

Now this sort of tracks, when you think about the psychology of it all. Since people who lack empathy are unable to do perspective taking and imagine people who are capable of operating in a way they never have before. It’s akin to explaining colors to someone who’s born blind. A psychopath exclusively sees people who are also, just like him, manipulative and self-serving in the world. And when someone’s behavior doesn’t seem self-serving, they first get confused, then they get paranoid and suspect a deeper game, and eventually decide that the person is weak and pathetic and is not worth their time. But that is also the exact kind of person they can control, and they want control. Hence they end up coupled up with or surrounded by people they don’t respect or care about. It’s the typical curse of cult leaders.

So when Lanthimos’ characters live in a world exclusively comprised of other unhinged transactional people, that is a good representation of how such dark people would perceive and narrate the world around them. The only problem is that this is accurate not by design, but by accident. I think Lanthimos sees nothing but this when he looks at the world.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a monster in real life or anything. I’ve met daywalkers in life who are able to exist in both worlds. A variety of “both worlds” actually. Worlds you usually think as disparate and antipodal to another, where existing in both of them should, in theory, cause cognitive dissonance—maybe even an aneurysm.

But it’s possible. I’m thinking of this one person who was extremely vain and image conscious and consequently incredibly insecure, but they really did not have even a shred of the capacity to hurt or harm other people—which was actually the main source of their suffering. Nature builds up systems where if you’re born with emptiness in yourself, you also have the capacity to be a selfish asshole so you can get good feelings from that source. This person couldn’t even do that. But they also didn’t have the comfort and security most benevolent people feel. So they existed in both worlds, although to their detriment. An anti-daywalker I suppose, with both of the weaknesses and neither of the strengths.

Similarly, I fondly remember a client who clearly had psychopathic tendencies, but they also had some sort of a (very strong) moral compass and they were able to tap into real emotions when it came to certain subjects. The guy was routinely fantasizing about shooting his wife’s annoying dog in the head, but the thought of not being a good enough father to his children would bring him to tears. I fucking loved that guy.

It doesn’t seem like Lanthimos had any outsize childhood trauma. There was an absent father (who gave him half of his genetic material, obviously) and the mother died when he was seventeen. He had to fend for himself, and fend for himself he did. Apparently he said that once he was all alone in the world “it was very unconscious—[he] had to find work, [he] had to pay rent, [he] had to study”. There is a sort of detached, sometimes even depersonalized autopilot that happens in situations like these. Trauma responses also work like this sometimes. But it’s also how the survival mechanism would operate in emergency situations—nothing too out of the ordinary. And Lanthimos’ flat-affect characters (especially the ones in The Alps) present in that sort of depersonalized, almost not recognizably human manner. A simple little algorithm who is chasing after one particular feeling, unable to be cognizant of anything outside of themselves.

On aggregate, is the world like this? Well, sort of. The world used to be like this for most of humanity. Still, even today, many places in the world is like this. Some more civilized parts of the world is only vaguely, underneath so much nuance and culture and civility, is somewhat like this. Is Greece like this? I’d say less than world average. But it doesn’t really matter. That’s how he sees the world, obsessively so I suppose. He’s been telling the same story from the same point of view. He can’t look away, and he doesn’t seem to know anything else to tell the world about. I don’t think he could if he tried. He is probably going to keep changing the methods of execution and tell the same thing about the same aspects of the human condition from different angles the rest of his life. Will I watch the new ones as they come out? Possibly, but I don’t expect to be in a rush. Eighteen months after it comes out, if I have a flight that is at least two and a half hours long I guess. Actually, maybe I won’t even. I really might not.

Ari Aster makes even more disgusting versions of these movies. Beau is Afraid was incredible because I was blown away by the visceral cinematic depiction of anxiety and paranoia (and I had a bunch of clients at the time of watching it who dealt with that, and the movie helped me understand them better). But then almost no one would ever (hopefully!) watch any of his movies a second time. I did know one person at some point who had Hereditary as their favourite movie of all time and they would routinely revisit it. At the time all I thought was “huh, that’s unusual”, but now I understand that that is deranged serial killer behavior.

If I wouldn’t rewatch a type of a movie, does that somehow nullify a valid reason to watch it for the first time? Actually, yes. Yes, if the director keeps making essentially the same movie with a bigger budget with different actors (and for Lanthimos, it’s not even different actors). I think I’m gonna stop. I’m sure he has enough customers who also see the world the same way he does, and want to repeatedly watch these types of twisted movies to feel less alone in their twisted nature. He’ll be fine. And all I get out of these types of experiences is “well, the execution was great. Oh well, it makes me sad again that the world is full of emotionally blank NPC people who lack self-awareness and cause harm innocent bystanders around them”. I think it’s in my best interest to avoid ending up like Margaret Qualley’s veterinarian twin character from Kinds of Kindness by associating with these kinds of people.

The best Yorgos Lanthimos movie in my opinion was his very first one. The one he co-directed with Lakis Lazopoulos called “My Best Friend”. It had similar themes, but it was humorous—in truly endearing ways. It has 5.2 stars on IMDb. Was it really good, or was I just comparing it to other Lanthimos movies and feeling relief that it was somewhat wholesome instead of uncontrollably bleak? I guess Lakis Lazopoulos is the Dan Harmon of Greece because the types and the frequency of the jokes were resemblant of Community or Rick & Morty. The editing was of the type that I had only ever seen in Edgar Wright before. Dramaturgically, it was a marvel. Actually, I think it was both a good movie, but also left a good taste in my mouth as the last flick by Yorgos that I had consumed. Something he did in 2001 essentially “redeemed” him in my eyes. Clearly, he was very young during it, and it was mostly Lazopoulos who was responsible for the humor and the wholesomeness. And clearly, Lanthimos failed to connect with that language (the way I keep failing to connect with his) so he went out on his own and did non-wholesome and fully deranged versions of similar stories the following twenty-five years to worldwide success and accolades.

Some people will continue to try to control each other for the rest of eternity, and I’m sure there will be entertainment produced solely for their enjoyment as long as humans will be around. Possibly, I may have drawn the luck of genetic and developmental lottery, pried myself away from that herd already. So I think I’m best off taking my leave and doing other things with my free time going forward.

Thank you for the intellectual and aesthetic stimulation Yorgos. I won’t miss you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect you.

Be well,