ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) as a critical reflection on how modern regimes regulate intimacy and produce subjects through normative power. Set in a dystopian near-future, the film reconstructs love not as a natural emotion but as a status granted within institutional procedures. The “hotel” and the “woods,” though opposed in appearance, operate as parallel disciplinary formations that reorganize desire, delimit possible forms of living, and classify individuals according to their compliance with specific relational norms. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and biopolitics, the article shows how the film visualizes the fabrication of subjectivity through surveillance, normalization, and the management of life itself. The threat of transformation into an animal functions as a biopolitical mechanism that redistributes the hierarchy of beings and binds survival to the successful performance of a sanctioned relationship. At the same time, the woods reveal a reversed but structurally similar regime that prohibits attachment and codifies solitude as a rule. Neither space provides a genuine outside to normativity; both extend the same logic of regulating affect and reorganizing existence. By tracing David’s movement across these domains, the film exposes the structural closure of normative systems and the impossibility of sustaining intimacy beyond them. Ultimately, The Lobster serves as a political-philosophical meditation on the conditions under which emotions become socially legible and on the fragility of human identity within regimes that script how we may desire, relate, and remain human.

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