A World Where Nobody Fits:
The Lobster and Human Dignity
by Elif Yaren Candan

The Lobster directed by Yorgos Lanthimos presents the audience with two choices of surviving in the peculiar dystopic world that it depicts. Either one goes to a hotel and officially registers there with the hopes of finding an equivalent partner or goes to the woods to resist against this programmed institute of partnership. The first option may not sound bad at all since there is the hope of meeting another single person and coupling up till their last day on earth. Unfortunately, no matter how pleasing the prospect of finding a single person might sound, there is no place for the person that chooses to be a single person there. The society that built on the partnerships naturally does not accept any loner, who has no one holding the other’s hand or tagging along in their arms. To be accepted by this society of couples, the hotel, represented as an official arm of the government, is the perfect place to be “trained” for and before gaining the right to join the society. This is a training, or rather an exam in which one learns to be a couple: one must learn to control themselves and their wants and needs, must be as similar as possible to each other as couples, and must successfully perform the requirements of their position in the partnership. As much as there is a possibility of success, in the end, there is also the possibility of failure. What happens to the person who fails the training is devastating. The punishment of failing results in the annihilation of the human. Right before the completion of registering to the hotel, the management asks the residents to choose an animal for the possibility of failure after their training at the hotel. It is ambiguous whether people choose their animal having reasons and motivations in their minds, but it is not important at the end of the day as long as they fail to be a part of the coupling. What is important is that they are given no option to renounce the enforcement because this is the only way to be accepted by society. There is no other way of mixing between singles and couples. Thus, either one successfully finds a partner at the end of the training or is turned into the animal of their choice by the hotel management. For those who want to resist against, there is another community in the woods called the loners; however, they put different limitations over humans as well. People in The Lobster must fit the standards that are imposed on them by these two different communities. Their value is only recognized as long as they obey the rules and do not violate them. Moreover, the punishment of turning people into animals and injuring them violates the very dignity of a human being. Eventually, the norms of these separate societies do nothing but wipe away the value of the human and the humanity.