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.

This is a Author Accepted Manuscript that has been published in Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present edited by Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou in the series New Studies in European Cinema, Volume 21