Blinded by (Desire for) Love

The Lobster, dating apps, and the dystopia of modern relationships

Dating has become, in many ways, both easier and more difficult. With the rise of the internet came the inevitable use of it to find “the one”. We now have access to other singles anywhere in the world looking for romantic connection at the touch of a button. 

According to a February report from the Pew Research Center, the majority of people aged 18-29 use dating apps or websites. The normalization of online dating platforms has completely overhauled how society views dating and relationships. 

Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2015 absurdist black comedy The Lobster guides us through a bleak and dystopian society where being single causes you to be exiled from society. The beginning of the film introduces us to David, our protagonist, portrayed by Colin Farrell. In the aftermath of his wife leaving him for another man, David is admitted into a hotel for singles. In the hotel, singles have 45 days to find a partner or are punished for their loneliness by being transformed into an animal of their choice. 

In a video essay detailing the single-hating philosophy The Lobster embodies, YouTuber I Watch More Movies Than You references an extremely influential dystopian text when he says that “Huxley would have[...] been proud, somehow, of this movie.” 

A reference to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World reveals a striking resemblance between the legendary mass-production-inspired dystopia and the world Lanthimos has illustrated in The Lobster.

Splitting the film into two parts, David inhabits first the Coupled world and then the Loner world. While in Huxley’s dystopia, the divide is between the Fordists and the Savages and what the human relationship to technology should be, in Lanthimos’s dystopia the split is between the Couples and the Loners and how to police themselves in terms of socialization, affection, and sexual desire. In Lanthimos’s vision, however, both the Couples and the Loners are the Fordists.

Rachel Weisz, who plays the film’s narrator and David’s eventual lover, says in an interview with The Guardian that the film is “about the way in which we live sheeplike and follow rules and ideologies without questioning them.” Both the Couples and the Loners have their own twisted, nonsensical rulesets that make each society resemble something of an emotionless fascist dictatorship. Each society has painful punishments for defiance, such as your hand being held in a toaster or something sinister called “The Red Intercourse”. You either fall into one of these societies or you cease to exist at all, either being transformed into an animal like David’s brother was, or killing yourself like Biscuit Woman (Ashley Jensen).

In Huxley’s vision, the title “brave new world” is a criticism of the evil nature of the industrial revolution and how mass production has increased our consumption of disposable products and therefore has irreparably damaged our society. For Lanthimos, it means something similar, but in place of the industrial revolution is the dating revolution.

The introduction of online dating platforms such as Tinder, Bumble, and Match.com has completely overhauled how singles view dating and relationships. Now, to find a “perfect” partner, singles have to present themselves properly in the eyes of an algorithm to maximize their chances of getting a match.

In an article on the design functions of dating apps, Liz Gorny writes that “In 2023, dating is a public affair, which means the face users put forward is often an extension of a personal brand.” Singles must construct a brand centered around a few distinct traits their potential perfect match might share.

But what is a perfect match, really? If you are shortsighted, is it absolutely necessary that your partner be shortsighted as well? Italian philosopher Franco Berardi suggests in Breathing: Chaos and Poetry that with dating apps, singles are looking less for someone truly well suited for them and are more “often looking for a mirror.”

In an interview following the release of The Lobster, star Colin Farrell ponders the idea of trying to find love through sameness, saying “the idea of choosing someone based on them being the exact same as you, which is kind of proffered in this film, is a rather narcissistic approach to things and yet, that's what a lot of the internet dating is predicated upon is: these are my interests, do you have the same interests, well let’s share interests together.”

Most of the twisted humor of the film comes from David and the motley crew of other singles we meet in the hotel trying to share the exact same interests or traits together. Early on, Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) slowly mutilates himself by continuously slamming his face against surfaces to make his nose bleed so he can have a commonality with Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden). We see this and wonder if it is worth it – repeatedly smashing your nose looks quite painful – until Limping Man has an outburst where he exclaims that giving himself a painful nosebleed every day could not possibly be worse than the alternative of being turned into an animal.

In the world of the film, the hotel acts as a physical manifestation of a dating app. Inhabitants boil themselves down to “defining characteristics”, such as a lisp, being shortsighted, or frequently getting nosebleeds, in hopes that someone else might share these traits and be their perfect match. Instead of constructing a public profile like one would on OkCupid or Grindr, new inhabitants of the singles hotel are forced to get up on stage in front of everyone and say their name, why they’ve come to the hotel, and what their defining characteristic is. 

Liz Gorny details a conversation one contributor had on a dating app. “Our conversation was dry – I asked if she liked cheese, she replied no, but said she didn’t mind mild cheese. She asked me what my dad did for a job, I said he was a civil servant, she asked if he liked it, I said I think he did.” This is eerily reminiscent of a conversation that would take place in The Lobster’s singles hotel: blunt and mundane, inhabitants try and find something, anything to relate over. If they can’t, they move on quickly to the next person to find out if their dad is a civil servant, or if they like cheese as well.

Dating apps more or less force users to commodify themselves. In her article on the neoliberal capitalist influence hovering above the entirety of The Lobster, Dr. Katya Krylova, a film and visual culture professor at the University of Aberdeen, states that “social media and digital dating platforms offer effective instruments for transforming the self into a dematerialized commodity. They allow remodelling of the self into a shallow image of a commonly desired product that performs and promotes itself publicly through specific texts and visuals. In parallel, we are exposed to an escalating flux of visual stimuli represented by other commodified bodies – smooth, athletic, hairless, eroticized flesh.”

Krylova argues that there is “obsessive self-categorization” taking place in both The Lobster and online in the real world and that this is a product of “our everyday lives under neo-liberalism. To function within this sociopolitical regime, we categorize ourselves on several interconnected levels, such as gender, career and romantic relationships.” With the majority of young people looking online for a partner, their dating experience is more or less dictated by an algorithm. This obsessive self-categorization feeds into a life built by algorithm – the more we categorize ourselves, the more specific the computer program can be with matching us with others it deems a “match”. Computers pair users together based on selected interests hand-picked for viewing on your profile – the real-life equivalent of David getting on stage and telling the hotel that he is shortsighted and that his wife left him, but in this case, it’s your top Spotify artist, your interest in rock climbing, or a photo of you holding a fish.

In the algorithm of The Lobster, you either have the same defining characteristic or you don’t. You can lie about it, but don’t get caught, or you’ll be turned in to the hotel authorities. This leaves the audience to ponder the terrifying thought of whether or not we are lying about our defining characteristics. Are those that say they love us forcing themselves into molds not meant for them to avoid the persecution of singledom? Even more terrifying, are we ourselves doing that? Is there even a way to tell? Maybe we’re not so different from David, after all.