Episode Transcript
I owe everyone an apology this week because last week I hinted toward talking about a new movie called “Men”. Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to actually go and see this movie this weekend, so I can assure you I will talk about that one as soon as I possibly can. But I have a real treat for you this week anyway, because I am going to be talking to you about 2015 Yorgos Lanthimos film The Lobster.
The first I watched this movie, I was scrolling through Netflix in college with my roommates and looking for something to watch. It was around midnight and so I was looking for something unique and easy to follow, which obviously is tough criteria to meet. I happened upon this movie and was like “Okay, fuck it” and we clicked on it. Boy, everyone was made at me for days. I am still mad at myself for subjecting my friends to this movie, especially blindly.
Written and directed by Yorgos, of course we are in for a real treat. Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden, and John C Reilly, we have a true cast of characters here. iMDB description: In a dystopian near future, according to the laws of The City, single people are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in 45 days or they're transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.
The tagline for the movie says that it is “An unconventional love story by Yorgos Lanthimos.” If you have seen this before or are going to watch it, you will find that to be hilariously funny.
Our movie opens with a woman driving in the countryside. She stops on the side of the road to get out of her car, walk over to a field with donkeys in it, and shoots one of them until it is dead. Cut to the title screen. What a fantastic opening to a movie this is. Then we meet David (played by Collin Farrell), sitting on his couch looking at his dog and talking to his wife. He is asking if someone wears contact lenses or glasses, and she says glasses. Then someone rings the doorbell and she tells him to hurry up.
Then, two men walk in front of and behind David and lead him to a bus. All he has is a suitcase and his dog. A voiceover from his wife tells the audience that she did not love him anymore and that the he did not cry like normal people do when he found out this information. He arrives at The Hotel finally and is interviewed by a woman who asks him questions regarding his sexual preferences and food allergies and stuff. She then explains the amenities like a squash court. David moves on to a new room where he is being formally checked in with other guests. The hotel employees are searching through his clothes and he is provided with shoes and has to relinquish his jewelry. In their underwear, the new guests in the intake room are being told that they need to call the reception at least one day in advance if they would like a haircut and that they cannot smoke because they need to be able to breath for long enough to enjoy hunting and their breath wont smell bad when they kiss.
In his room, David and his dog look around and notice a rifle on the wall and 20 tranq darts on the desk, along with cologone, and sunglasses. In the closet, he is provided with 4 identical sets of the same suits and a bathrobe. On the ground outside his window, there are the bodies of those single hotel members who were caught in the hunt and are being wrapped up in body bags. After some rest, the manager and her partner greet him and explain to him that it should not upset him that he will be turned into an animal if he does not find a partner during his hotel stay and to select an animal that best fits his personality. He selects a lobster because they live for over 100 years, are blue blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile their whole lives. The manager commends him for this choice and says that most people choose dogs, which is why the world is full of dogs and other animals are going extinct. Then, to remind him that two things are better than one, they handcuff one of his hands behind his back and told him they will remove it tomorrow.
The next morning, David eats breakfast alone and admires the other women that sit around him. One gets nose bleeds often, one he will later find out is heartless, and a beautiful woman he will never actually get the chance to meet. A man named John asks David if he would like to go for a walk with him and his new friend Robert (Reilly). They go for a walk and talk about John’s leg, which we as the audience cannot really tell anything is wrong with it, but David acknowledges it. Later, at a conference, John explains that he has a limp because his mother came into the hotel and did not find a partner and was turned into a wolf. She was then taken to a zoo and John visited her often to feed her red meat. One day, he wanted a hug so he entered the enclosure and was mauled by some of the wolves and two of them stayed back and didn’t do anything, and he imagines one of them was his mother. He explains that his wife, that also had a limp, died 6 days previously.
At a dance later that night, the three amigos sit together and chat about dancing. A pretty woman asks the heartless woman if she can sit next to her. The heartless woman looks at her but never responds. The woman walks over to other younger and nicer looking women that explain that the woman she just approached is considered the best hunter in the hotel and has captured 192 captives. David approaches the 3 women and asks the woman who keeps getting bloody noses to dance. She gets blood on his shirt and tells him how to get it out. Robert dances with the heartless woman. When the dance is over, an alarm goes off and the managers wishes everyone good luck on their hunt.
On the bus on the way to the hunt, John talks to David about his leg and about how to not let that get him down. David does not collect any captors, but the heartless woman does. Every time you get a captive, you get to stay at the hotel an extra day. The hotel guests are not allowed to masturbate. They are only allowed to be sexually stimulated by the maids of the hotel, but are not allowed to orgasm. Robert is approached at breakfast because he has been caught masturbating and so the manager puts Robert’s fingers in a hot toaster. This is all cut with scenes of random skits that the hotel workers are putting on for the guests in which a man eats alone and chokes and dies because no one else in there is help him. But then he dines with a woman, and chokes, and she is there to help him. The second skit is of a woman walking alone who is approached and assaulted by a man because she was alone, but then she walks with a man and is not assaulted because she has a partner.
Over cocktails that night, John describes the process in which the guests are turned into animals. They are first washed really really well and then skinned, vital organs removed and the bodies divied up depending on what type of animal they want to turn into. Body parts that are not being used and the excess blood is donated to the hospitals in the area. On the bus going to hunt, the biscuit woman asks if she can take a walk with David and his dog, but David explains that the dog is not allowed out of the room. She then tells David that she is down to hook up with him if he wants and would like to come to his room for a chat and some biscuits. She says she wants to catch some loners because she has not been catching any and she plans to kill herself but jumping out of a window if she does not find a suitable partner soon.
The next day at target practice, Robert tells his pals that he wants to be turned into a parrot and John tells him how stupid that is because he has a lisp. Why would he want to be one of the only talking animals with a speech impediment? He then snaps at David about the lobster too and says he is not going to be an animal but will come visit them with his partner. Then Robert starts to push him and they never fully fight before it breaks up.
In the pool, the nosebleed girl is swimming and John approaches her to ask her about her favorite strokes. When she swims another lap, he smashes his face against the ground and makes his nose bleed. She says how she gets them all the time too. John visits David in his room later that night and David tells him how he saw what he did and how it must have hurt. John starts to hit his face against David’s desk to make it bleed again, but it doesn’t work. 2 days later, the manager introduces John and the nosebleed girl together as a couple and explains that they will get a bigger bedroom and more clothes. She also explains that if they encounter any problems that they cannot resolve on their own, they will be assigned children because “that usually helps. A lot.”
The next time we see David, he only has 7 days left. He plays with the dog in his room and then heads out to the pool/spa. He tells a woman she has beautiful hair and she tells him that his hair looks dry but the most important thing is that he is not bald. He asks her how she will be spending her final night. She meets with the manager and they discuss final plans. The pretty blonde woman has her best friend there with her, and the friend reads her a note that makes the blonde woman slap the shit out of her and stare blankly at the manager to let her know that she has decided she wants to watch Stand By Me alone on her final night. The woman is turned into a pony.
The biscuit woman keeps calling David and leaving him voicemails that he doesn’t answer. David plays golf and decides that he will follow the heartless woman into the woods at the hunt and tell her how much he wishes they had real guns and that she could kill the loner right away with her bare hands. On his way back from golf, David finds the heartless woman watching the biscuit woman die after she jumped out of her bedroom window. The heartless woman tells David she cannot hear him over the screaming while David tells her that he wants her to suffer quite a bit but not so much because he wants to take a nap. Later, in the hot tubs, David joins the heartless woman who pretends to choke on an olive from her martini. When David doesn’t help her, she says she thinks they are a match. They are presented with their double room keys that night.
In their room, the heartless woman does the sexual stimulation thing and go to bed. The next day, John and the nosebleed girl, who have been given a child, meet the heartless woman and David. The child approaches David and David tells her that the last thing he wants is a kiss from a little girl, and kicks her so that she can have a limp like her dad. That night, the heartless woman and David have sex. She keeps checking to see if his face makes any sort of expression, so she asks him to face her and keep the lights on. The next morning, she wakes David to let him know that she kicked the dog so many times and for so long that he is likely dead, but may still be alive. Her entire leg is covered in blood. He does not react. He tells her he is going to brush his teeth and wash his face before they get coffee together. When he sees the dog in the bathroom on the floor covered in its own blood, he starts to cry. She tells him she knew he was lying and that a relationship cannot be built on a lie, so they are going to go talk to the hotel manager and the punishment for this is that he will be turned into the animal no one wants to be. We never find out what that animal actually is.
So David and the heartless woman run around the hotel in a little hunt of their own. She encounters a maid who tells her that she saw David running down the hall and that he looked frantic. After she starts to run down the hall, David appears with a tranq gun and shoots her in the back. The maid is complicit in this. He wanted to kick her and stab her in the stomach over and over again just like she did to his brother the dog. But since she was under tranquilizer effects, she wouldn’t really feel it. the maid helps him carry her to the transformation room and the maid types in the code for him. He shoots her too so it wont look like she helped him and he drags the heartless woman into the room. He never says what animal he turned her into.
He takes off running into the woods and encounters a group of loners that accept him literally with open arms. The rules are that they cannot flirt or have any sexual relationships with one another and even on their dance nights, they each must dance separately. He approaches a man in the group with his mouth medically taped shut. He was given a punishment called the Red Kiss, which is when two people who are caught flirting have their lips slashed with a razor and are made to kiss each other. The narrator goes on to describe the punishment she is the most afraid of is the Red Intercourse, so we can pretty much determine what that entails.
The Loner Leader has the loners practice drills where they run and hide. It is during this that we find out who our narrator is. She is one of the loners – the short-sighted woman. She details how she had a dream about her and David being together in a beautiful house in which they have sex in the kitchen and during their intercourse, their house is broken into, and they are murdered with knives from their own kitchen drawers. During their drill, one man is caught in a trap where he is left by the loners because they need to keep moving.
During their movement, there is a hunt going on. A woman staff member of the hotel tells the other monitoring the hunt she is going to go look for truffles. Robert finds David in the woods and tells David he thought what happened to the heartless woman was dreadful. He tells Robert he would have done the exact same thing if it were Robert that had been murdered. Robert makes a comment about how John and his wife and kid are preparing to go on the yacht soon and that the kid will fix their problems. Robert tells David that he only has two days left so he is afraid he is going to have to shoot him. David stalls long enough for the short-sighted woman to come up behind Robert and slash his leg. David then shoots Robert and takes all his clothes and his gun. The woman tells David to never tell anyone she helped him and that to repay her, he should find her a rabbit to eat.
The Loner Leader meets with the woman hotel staff member, who provides the leader with a gun and a bunch of room keys for the hotel rooms. The staff member tells the leader that she suggests that the loners attack on Saturday after the dance because everyone will be tired and most staff take weekends off. She tells the leader that this will be her last mission because she hates living with her dentist husband that makes her brush her teeth after any food consumption of any kind and is constantly asking her about her flossing habits. The leader tells her to be patient for a few more days and to remember to take her birth control.
David lays a trap for rabbits and catches two for the short-sighted woman and lays them by her while she sleeps. Later, the SSW and David and the LL and her partner pretend to be partners and put on super nice suits and go shopping at a mall for things like pain cream and deodorant and they all eat a cake together. The LL notices some chemistry between the SSW and David. While David is waiting for the SSW to get out of a store, he watches a police officer interrogate a woman by asking her for her marriage certificate which has apparently expired 3 months ago because her husband is away in Bath. The officer inspects the woman’s shoes and clothes and nails to make sure she is actually married and is not another loner.
While David watches, a police officer approaches him and asks him for his marriage certificate. David tells the officer that his wife carries it in her purse because he loses it always. The SSW finally appears to greet David and the officer lets them go without showing them anything. Then they go to the LL’s parent’s house and she tells them she is going to be going back that same day because she has to leave on a business trip the following day and that they all work together. Her parents get invested in a story that David tells them about how they have 4 kids and if they didn’t, they would travel to all these random European destinations.
That night, the loners go to the hotel for their plans. David goes out to the yacht and tells the nosebleed girl about how John’s nose doesn’t really bleed on its own. John throw him out. The LL, her partner, and the SSW go into the hotel manager’s room and tie her up and tape her mouth shut while they ask her husband if he would be better living alone or her. He says he would, so the LL gives him her gun and tells him to shoot the manager. He pulls the trigger, but nothing comes out. Then, the loners leave and have a dance party in the woods.
The next day, David sits with the newly single maid as she details to him how she murdered her dentist husband by stabbing him with his drill. David tells her that he must be going because he thinks he left some batteries by a tree and wants to make sure he grabs them, but really he just noticed that the SSW was talking to the second in command man because he brought her a rabbit. David tells her that she does not need to accept any rabbits from anyone else and that the next time she is hungry, she should just ask him and he will get her a rabbit. Then, the SSW details to the audience the secret language that she and David had made up to communicate in front of everyone without raising suspicion.
Soon, the LL starts to get really pissed because she notices that during an afternoon at her parents’ house, the SSW and David start to full on make out on the couch while her parents are playing guitar for everyone. the LL obviously gets uncomfortable and tells them to stop. On their walk back to the woods, the LL does not let David and the SSW walk next to one another. Later, the maid who is now a loner reads the LL a journal she found near the water. It is the SSW’s journal. She had written many explicit plans regarding her escape from the loner group in the woods with David. They were going to leave during the hunt that night when everyone was hiding. So the LL asks David to meet her at a really private part of the woods and watches him dig his grave. She then asks him to get in it, cover himself with dirt, and not to forget to cover his face because he doesn’t want dogs to eat it.
Then, the LL takes the maid and the SSW to the city to go to the eye doctor. She tells the SSW that the doctor is going to make her vision perfect, but the SSW is scared to be there and wants to have time to think about. The LL explains that it is better to have perfect site than to be SS and that she made the appointment months ago. She finally agrees to go through with it after explaining that she was actually nervous that three women came together and no men and that the doctor would be suspicious. When the SSW wakes up, she is blind and can no longer see at all, and the doctor confirms that with the LL before they leave. The maid helps her walk out of the mall and back into the woods. Then, the SSW pulls a knife on the maid and the LL, and the LL maneuvers the maid in front of her and the SSW kills the maid thinking she killed the LL. Then, the LL presents herself to the SSW again and says to calm down because she is going to help her get back to camp.
