Dead Inside/Outside Alive:

The Lobster's Inescapable Contexts

Well into Yorgos Lanthimos's first transnational and English-speaking production, The Lobster (2015), people start moving in slow motion. Splatter, war scenes and B-horror films all come to mind as a group of people goes into the woods in order to hunt – other people. The group hunting consists of the ‘guests’ of a hotel, which is as austere as a totalitarian state summer camp and as hilarious as an outdated tourist resort, both tinged with an element of fear. The hunted group had previously been at the hotel, too, but they have run away to live in a semi-organised guerrilla community in the woods.

In the dystopian world of the film, people are required to check into this particular facility if they have become single – for example, left by their partner (as is the case with the protagonist David, played by Colin Farrell), or widowed. They have only forty-five days to acquire a plausible new partner among the other hotel guests in order to regain their freedom. Otherwise, they will be medically/technologically transformed into an animal of their choice. The hotel guests, however, do have one way to gain time: They can go hunting in the woods, where a number of escapees from the hotel are still lurking, as we learn. And here comes the main sequence of hunting on which I am focusing. The group of hotel detainees are seen first being assembled outside the hotel, given guns, loaded onto a bus and getting ready to hunt – those last action scenes appear in slow motion. The spectacular ‘chase’ that ensues is slowed down in an overtly self-conscious mockery of classical cinema slow-motion scenes, and the full length of the chase sequence is taken up by the duration of a whole song. As we see the ‘hotel inmates’ slowly moving and shooting their prey in the woods, their faces in awkward grimaces, we listen in full to a 1925 song by the Greek singer-songwriter Attik, titled ‘Από μέσα πϵθαμένος’ (‘Dead on the Inside’), performed in Greek by the legendary singer Danae in a later recording.

How Lives Matter:

Mom, I’m back and the Killing of Zak Kostopoulos

The camera in Dimitris Katsimiris's Mom, I’m back (2017) closely follows a woman's figure from behind as she walks first outside and then into a cemetery in order to attend a funeral procession. She moves closer to the assembled group of people. They start coming towards her, with some of the men in the group eventually attacking her and beating her to the ground. She falls, her wig drops to the ground, and her shaven head can now be seen, covered in blood. The shot is still from behind, but as the woman falls, the camera falls with her, too – maintaining the single take through which we have been watching the entire scene. Beating and spitting continue for some time, the spectator now sharing the viewpoint of the victim.

At some point the men stop – and this will be the only cut in this fourminute film which, therefore, is comprised of only two shots. When the viewpoint changes, we cut to a medium-long shot of the whole of the funeral assembly, standing opposite their wounded and bloodied victim. She stands up with some effort, while some of the men are holding back the one man who has been beating her most aggressively, looks at all of them, then turns and goes away. She is the son, now a trans woman, who has come back to attend her mother's funeral; they are the extended family and the community who have shown her how they respond to difference, with the brother who wants to impose his moral code most visibly being the most violent. Finally, this is a short film mediated by a camera which has already made a point on empathy. Falling, sharing the violence and the meaning of these blows, and witnessing the victim stand up again, the camera has assumed an ethical position: It has taken sides.

The ‘Oral Text’ – Criticism and Interpretation

Because analysis and interpretation are key components of this book, it is crucial that the primary source material be made as transparent and accessible as possible. To achieve this, this study approaches oral storytelling in the same way that a literary critic would approach printed literature. Niles advocates this approach, citing the ‘often irrelevant oppositions of orality versus literacy’ (1999: 200) when trying to understand the narrative expressions of any given culture or society. By dissolving differentiations between oral and printed media, oral narratives become open to the same formal textual analysis that amounts to close readings of any given ‘text’. These close readings are then used in tandem with contextual factors – such as the cultural identity of the narrator, and/or any metanarrative provided by them – to infer meanings from the narrative. Additionally, close readings can be augmented through the consideration of other contextual factors. These include, but are not limited to: intertextuality, both with printed literature and other recognised narratives, such as Märchen [fairy tales] and international tales; local legends; biographical and autobiographical details; and historical incidents that are woven into the narrative and are verifiable by independent corroborative evidence.

This chapter expands on the concept that the Travellers’ storytelling traditions function as negotiations of their marginalisation. First, it takes a close look at stories about place, then by returning to the story of Geordie McPhee introduced in Chapter 3. It provides further detailed examples of how super-empirical story spaces function as quintessential ideological locations. Throughout this chapter, we retain the term ‘supernatural’ in keeping with the literature with which we engage and to describe certain characters. The term super-empirical is reserved for the definition of the story spaces as a genre. Citing Degh, Braid notes that legends function to challenge listeners’ understanding of the world and invite them to modify their beliefs and worldviews (2002: 74). This chapter expands upon such conceptualisations of legends – this expansion is necessary because although the examples provided conform to ideas around ‘legends’, they also display characteristics that set them apart. For instance, the stories have alignments with ATU magic tales, take place in liminal story spaces, or have direct relationships with place-names. From this perspective, the narratives under examination in this chapter inhabit a particular ‘story space’ that does not necessarily require a label for the stories to be investigable. It is not that these stories defy classification, only that the present study's questions can be sufficiently addressed without engaging in it. At the same time, as we have seen in previous chapters, this study continues to draw comparisons between the Travellers’ stories and other cultural expressions to better understand the former.