Reading Lanthimos’s The Lobster through the sociology of emotions
The Lobster brings postmodernism’s questioning of how identities and social norms are constructed together with the central concern of the sociology of emotions. It shows the viewer that the film’s real tragedy lies not in people obeying oppressive rules without protest, but in their living out the emotional needs those rules dictate as if they were their own desires. David’s personal tragedy is that although he flees the hotel for the forest, he takes the hotel’s “rules of love” with him.
Let us begin with a question: “How can we answer the questions that postmodernism asked but failed to answer itself?”
We know that one of postmodernism’s most important contributions to society is its questioning of the grand narratives that modernity built on reason, progress, universality and objective truth. Lyotard opens up the legitimacy of knowledge to debate, Foucault the relationship between power and truth, and Derrida the way language produces meaning yet never leaves it fixed, keeping it in constant motion. Yet all this questioning brings another important question to the fore:
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