A Necropolitics of Posthuman Bodies? Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

What is it about?

I argue that Yorgos Lanthimos' films "The Lobster" (2015) and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" (2017) dramatize how cultural practices like matchmaking and medicine lead to unresolved contradictions about 'humanity,' 'personhood,' and 'the body.' Contrary to the discursive claims made by such ostensibly 'technical' or 'scientific' practices, bodies are not simply either ‘living’ or ‘dead’ but sites of complex overlap and remainder. By preserving traces of extra-scientific changes in general and supernatural violence in particular, bodies reveal the arbitrariness of cultural value-judgments between ‘lives’ that are thought ‘worth living’ and others that are marked for ‘(living) death.' When that experience of individual precarity becomes, as it has in modernity, the social rule, society enters into permanent emergency or the 'state of exception': a 'posthumanist necropolitics' that recalls the punishingly indifferent cosmos of Ancient Greek tragedy. For Lanthimos in his films, this situation calls for darkest comedy.

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Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash

Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash