The Lobster

Lobster is on my list of favorite foods, but I doubt I would ever want to become one. Oscar-nominated Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (‘Dogtooth’) casts Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Lea Seydoux in a surreal parable about a future world where people are forced to couple up or be turned into animals. David (Colin Farrell) whose wife just left him, has been thrust into the dreaded single status. According to law he has 45 days to find a suitable mate or be turned into the animal of his choice. The animal David chooses, should he not succeed in finding a partner, is the lobster.

I will admit, this movie was weird. My husband found it too weird and wondered why the heck we went to see it. However, it was that very weirdness that made me absolutely love this film. I watch a lot of movies, and I particularly appreciate movies that don’t fit the usual predictable formulas, and I especially love movies that have something important to say. The Lobster is a commentary about the pressures our society puts on finding one’s soulmate.

I grew up in a culture that touted marriage as the preferred state. Single women, especially, were looked down upon and labeled spinsters. I guess I could be grateful that at least being single wasn’t illegal. Yet I somehow felt like a total failure for being unable to find the right and perfect partner.

In The Lobster, the right and perfect partner takes on a whole different meaning. It wasn’t just that each single person had to find a partner…that person had to have the same defining characteristic. In fact, except for David, none of the other characters had names. They were known for their specific physical trait. There was the man who limped, the woman who had constant nose bleeds and the man with a lisp. What were the odds of finding someone with those exact traits? The pressures were so great that one man deliberately smashed his nose so that he too would be a nose bleeder.

I wouldn’t call the film a comedy and yet I found it to be quite funny. It is told in a serious deadpan manner that kept me engaged throughout. The first part of the film is about this alternate society and its rules and logic and is filmed in the hotel where the singles are imprisoned. The second part of the film is in the surrounding forest where a ban of renegades called the Loners live. The Loners have rejected the society’s rules, and yet have rather strict rules of their own. Here coupledom is shunned. One has to remain alone and celibate or they are severely punished and even maimed. No form of intimacy is allowed. David escapes into the forest and joins these Loners and there ends up finding a woman (Rachel Weisz) he finds attractive. I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say….it gets more interesting and even ‘weirder’, if that is possible.

If you like films that do not fit the normal formulaic and predictable patterns then you will love this film. I did!

Communication: Learning the Code

I’m learning to play bridge. I’ve always loved cards, and have been pretty good at it too. I’ve played Rummy, Spades, Hearts, Whist, and Pinochle, just to name a few. Bridge, however, is another story altogether. Bridge is a complex game that depends highly on proper communication. It doesn’t matter how powerful your hand, if you don’t receive the proper communication from your partner or give the proper information to your partner, you will both be at a major disadvantage.

What’s also interesting in Bridge is that sometimes you have to lie.

Well, not lie exactly…more like speak in code. For instance, you might open at 1 club, even if you don’t want clubs as trump. It’s a signal to your partner that you have opening points and you want to know what she has in her hand. So then your partner has to respond telling you how many points she has and what her best suit is in. But of course, she doesn’t just say, “I have 10 points and I’d like to play it in hearts.” No, that would be too easy and would give your opponents too much information. A response of 1 heart to an opening of 1 club tells your partner that you have a minimum of 6 points and at least four hearts. While speaking in code is a bit tricky to learn, once you understand it, you can communicate fairly well with your partner.

While speaking clearly is certainly preferred in regular day-to-day communication, the truth is all of us speak in code at times, and it would behoove us to remember that and learn how to recognize when someone is saying something other than what they mean.

Children, especially, cannot always tell us what they are feeling, so we must learn to decipher what is really going on with them. I used to be a nanny and I quickly learned that if I didn’t pay attention there would be a ‘failure to communicate’. Charlie (age four) once acted up when I was trying to get him and his brother out the door to go to their first swimming lesson. He insisted he wasn’t finished playing his game and couldn’t leave yet. He screamed and resisted, and nothing I did or said would convince him to leave. Had I not understood his code, this could have been a much more frustrating morning. What I realized was his disobedience was really about his fear of swimming. When he was three he had a frightening experience with water, and so now with that memory still intact, he was afraid to go to his lesson. I was able to discern his code and reassure him that he would not have to go into the water if he didn’t want to, but that we still had to leave so his brother Will could go to his lesson. We went to the lesson and the teacher, also very understanding, was able to reassure him, and Charlie, eventually, not only went into the water, but learned to become a great swimmer!

Our children, our mates and our friends sometimes speak to us in code. It sure would be nice if we all said what we meant, but sometimes we aren’t even clear about what we are feeling. I’m reading “The Idiot’s Guide to Bridge”, which is helping me learn the code language of Bridge. Too bad there isn’t such a manual for relationships; that would sure be helpful! This isn’t to say we are all idiots when it comes to communication (or Bridge), but that we want to learn the basics in an easy to understand format.

The book “The I of the Storm” by Gary Simmons is sort of a manual about learning to communicate in conflict. Simmons tells us that when people lash out at you, it is more about them than about you. There is something missing in their relationship with you, and they haven’t figured out how to communicate what is missing for them, so they make it about you. Once you understand this code, you can say to them, “Tell me more”, so you can get more information about what is really bothering them. While I’ve read this book, I still sometimes forget the ‘code’ when someone lashes out at me, but I’m determined to remember to not get defensive, and to ask for more information.

I’m going to keep practicing Bridge, because the more committed I am to learning the code, the better I will get at communicating with my partner. The same could be said for communicating in normal life: the more we practice understanding what the other person needs from us, but isn’t able to say, the better we will be able to communicate effectively in return.

Wow! Compared to relationships, Bridge is beginning to look easier and easier!