Dog Tooth
Film
Comment Vol.46 No.2, New York, 2010
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
From the cultic narratives of Homer and Thesiod, to their dramatic embellishment in Hellenistic and Roman poetry, Greek mythology constitutes an anti-body to fundamentalism. The latter takes a sacred text ‘at its word’ to be truth; the former accepts ‘what is said’ as lies. The embrace of mythical meaning over the subscription to religious belief entails an acceptance of the fabrication of myth – of the malleable way in which it can resemble situations and occurrences if one so desires. No wonder cinema born of Hollywood’s dream machinery so salaciously declares its ‘mythical’ origins of narrative. Equally obvious is how hollow are those films which make the greatest claims to mythological lineage in their tale-spinning.
But maybe the tales of the Gods and the mortals with whom they toyed ring hollow for a reason. Maybe they are nothing but lies engineered out of paranoia and maintained out of desperation. Zeus might simply be an impotent patriarch living in a manicured paradise within which his family are programmed to play their part in his megalomaniac theatre of possession. If so, then the grandest Greek mythological film might be Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009).
