This tongue is not my own: Dogtooth, phobia and the paternal metaphor

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) exists in the shadow of certain real life cases and, as a film about a dictatorial Greek patriarch, is open to readings of political allegory; aesthetically, it is a post-Haneke minimal-realist piece, of fixed shots and cramped framing, and it employs an amalgam of professional and non-professional actors; it is also a reflection on the transgressive and liberating possibilities of the cinema itself; but what is most interesting about the film, from a Lacanian perspective, is what it suggests about language and family structure. And so, through concepts such as phobia and the paternal metaphor, as well as alienation and the uncanny – as they are theorized by Lacanian psychoanalysis – this chapter will explore the constitution of the Subject, in and through language, in Dogtooth to reveal – in a properly psychoanalytic manner – what the “pathological” instance here can tell us about the general condition.