Abstract
In Dogtooth’s final scene the father drives his car to work as usual. The old Mercedes crosses Lanthimos’s extreme long shot left to right and stops in the middle of the frame and in front of the big factory. The father gets out of the car and enters the building. The film then cuts to a closer shot of the Mercedes’s boot and lingers on that frame for about half a minute. A disconcerting quietness pervades the film’s final shot. It is a moment of suspension, of suspense, the agonizing silence of anticipation, during which the viewer’s desire to see the boot opened grows. For Dogtooth’s final shot is haunted by the preceding sequence, in which the audience have witnessed the older daughter breaking her dogtooth with one of her brother’s dumbbells and then hiding herself in the car-boot in an attempt to escape the oppressive contours of her totalitarian familial space. However, Lanthimos once more disappoints our expectations. The film cuts to black before the end credits appear. The film’s denouement acquires a resonance that is both tragic and enigmatic. For, rather than offering a meaningful closure, Lanthimos’s film dissolves in yet another meaningless foreclosure; indeed, in the foreclosure of meaning. As the Mercedes’s boot remains firmly closed denying any access to the older daughter’s fate, the film itself opens a gap, a void in the realm of meaning. One might wonder what this gesture is all about. I would call it an ethical one.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Deleuze, Gilles (2009 [1985]) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta (London: Continuum).
Edelman, Lee (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Galt, Rosalind (2013) ‘Default Cinema: Queering Economic Crisis in Argentina and Beyond’, Screen, 54/1, 62–81.
Harbord, Janet (2007) Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Muñoz, Jose Esteban (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press).
Schoonover, Karl (2012) ‘Wastrels of Time: Slower Cinema and its Labouring Subjects’, Framework, 53/1, 65–78.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Psaras, M. (2016). Epilogue. In: The Queer Greek Weird Wave. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40310-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40310-6_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40309-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40310-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)