Kynodontas: Beyond Happy Endings
I am going to explain what I want in a happy ending by talking about a horror movie. What must come to your mind, when I say horror, is a film with a series of relatively flat characters with imminent demises drawn together by whatever circumstances in some locale outside the comfort zone of their ordinary lives, perhaps only tenuously scraping against that other world, perhaps entirely thrown into that uncanny plane, where there is a looming threat of death and violence — a monster, a murderer, or perhaps one another — and the characters are motivated by a primal need to survive. The Greek Kynodontas, translated as Dogtooth (2009), dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, is not one of these. It is a quiet, merciless film, full of a horror that cuts deeper than any wanton display of gore.
The setting is a large walled estate a long distance from any other residence, in which the main characters maintain their daily lives. The perceived antagonists of the story, the parents of the children who in their own shaky ways become the focal point of the narrative, are the owners of the estate. They are not villainous in any traditional sense of a villainous parent. They feed their children and they play with their children and they do not physically abuse their children. Antagonists such as these have no interest in the death of the poor hapless protagonists. In fact, it is a question whether one should even consider them antagonists at all. In a sense, they are a happy family at the start of the film, but not one that any viewer would recognize to be the picture of such.
What draws attention immediately, once the initial defamiliarization fades, is that all three of the children, one boy and two girls, are at least eighteen. These “children” begin the film by planning out a game for which they cannot find a name. These “children” believe that airplanes are toys that drop out of the sky and that Frank Sinatra is their grandfather. They believe that they have a brother who lives just over the wall who they have never seen and who does not talk back to them. The eldest girl tosses him food occasionally. They have never been over the wall. They have never been outside of the estate. Their only contact with the outside world is a woman named Christina who is brought in by the father to serve as a sexual partner for the boy. They have been told that the only way to leave is by the car. They have been told that they will only be mature enough to leave once they have lost a dogtooth. They seem to be at the mental level of five-year olds.
What horrifies then, is not a monster or a serial killer. What horrifies is the slow boiling realization that the film is ostensibly set in a reality a viewer would recognize as their own. Though the children are the focal point, they are not the point of view by which the film displays its reality. It is clear that the father holds an ordinary job at a factory to support his family. That the mother is throwing the toy airplanes into the garden to fool her children. There are people outside the estate, people who could be any one of the viewers, who ask about the father’s wife having to stay at home, who employ and are employed by the father, who sell him dogs. In fact, though it is not recognized as such at first, there is a clear scene of the father and mother plotting the lie that they will tell their children next in order to get them to behave for the arrival of the dog. Twins, the mother says, a boy and a girl. She will give birth to a boy and a girl and a dog, and if the children behave they can prevent the birth of the twins, but she will hear nothing of the dog.
It is a subtle, esoteric horror that brings notions of the uncanny valley away from a character and towards the world which the characters inhabit. The terror it invokes is because the viewer is now the one with one foot in the door to an otherworld, a glimpse of something which is so alien to the recognizable zone of understanding, but still framed in such a way that there is, despite the otherness, comprehension. Though the film might defamiliarize endlessly, from start to end, it is still clear what the conflict is: psychological abuse. The parents are keeping their children ignorant of the world as many parents have and will, seemingly to protect them in that parental way. But it is taken to such an extreme that one cannot feel anything but crawling discomfort as the father teaches his children to get on all fours and bark like dogs to protect themselves.
Now I could go over many aspects of this film, such as its excellent cinematography or its striking feminist tones, but what drives me most about it is the way it chains itself into its final conclusion. Not only because it is a beautifully foreshadowed and well-executed ending, but because I find it to be an extremely satisfying and cathartic ending for what is an otherwise dark, dismaying film.
Though my summary above suggests that the film takes on a kind of episodic quality, there is in fact a very steady building of narrative tension which is backboned primarily by the characterization of the eldest child, who eventually comes to be known by a name of her own choosing, Bruce. There is a happy ending and it belongs to her.
If you, dear reader, have already seen the film, you might already be raising your eyebrows at that. What happens in the end is not what one would call a traditional happy ending. It involves no laughter and no true love, no babies and no song numbers. What happens in the end is the result of a long chain of events that arguably begins when the parents make the “mistake” of allowing the children to have some idea that there is an outside world. What happens in the end is that Bruce takes a small barbell to her face and breaks off a dogtooth in an act of self-inflicted violence which leaves her with a mouth full of blood and a grin that goes ear to ear. She walks out of the house, blood on her dress, and crawls into the trunk of the family car, her father finding the broken dogtooth in the sink after being woken by the youngest licking him like a cat. The family rushes out looking for her, the father breaking his own rules by running on foot out of the estate while the rest of the family gets on their fours at the door and bark at him. The next morning, the father drives to work as usual and the camera closes up on the still unopened trunk. Play credits.
Is the girl dead? Is she going to rise up out of the trunk and face for the first time a world she could never even imagine, the world of the viewer’s everyday existence? This is uncertain. The movie has ended. There is no more to be told. How could I call this a happy ending, you might wonder? Well, I would tell you what I have already said in this essay, that the nature of this film is one where everything is familiar and unfamiliar at once. That the characters are dualistically normal and abnormal, as is the world they inhabit. Why should the ending be any different? Why could it not defamiliarize the viewer so that they might not recognize the cathartic value of what they are seeing in front of them?
I mentioned earlier, this ending results from the parents seemingly making an error in their plan. The children know there is an outside world. They think it is dangerous and impossible for them to traverse, but they are aware of its existence. Their faithfulness to this dogma that their parents have spoon-fed them becomes most obvious in the scene where, in anger, the eldest daughter retakes a toy airplane that the son has stolen and chucks it out of the barrier. The son reports this to the father and the father responds by getting in his car, driving all of maybe a two strides from their gateway, and then opening the car door to pick up the airplane off the road. All while the son stares at him by the opened gate, completely unhindered from escaping at that moment. It is not the walls which are keeping them inside.
When the ending comes to fruition, the eldest is still abiding by the rules of the world her parents have created for her. She breaks her dogtooth because this is what she must do to mature, she gets in the trunk because the car is supposedly the only safe way to leave. That her father breaks the rules at that moment and runs out shows his character’s awareness of the falsity of his own invention and an inability to control it: he has misunderstood the lasting effects his teachings have had on his children. He thinks, foolishly, that she has somehow gained a different set of rules rather than working within the ones he has provided.
Yet this was an inevitable error on their part, though the film takes pains to make it seem not so. The lead up to the ending involves the interference of Christina in their lifestyle, who is an “ordinary” person, a security guard at the factory where the father works. He brings her in to satisfy his son sexually in exchange for money, a torch that the parents later pass on to their daughters in their most callous of acts. Christina, unsatisfied by the son and aware of the ignorant nature of the children, attempts to trade sexual favors with the eldest daughter in exchange objects she is aware that the daughter has never encountered. This backfires on her as the eldest ends up blackmailing her for, of all things, VCR tapes of Rocky IV and Jaws. The metamorphosis she undergoes once exposed to these is again dualistic in both its comic nature and its testament to the liberating value of art, of all art, to expose worlds unknown to those who might need it most.
It seems a mistake for the parents to use an outsider for any purpose, they realize and rectify this in the movie. The same notion is foreshadowed by the “death” of the brother who lives over the wall, the parents tiring of that particular lie and noticing the unwanted effects it was having on their children (that is to say, giving them another outsider who they felt they could communicate with). But close examination shows that if it had not been Christina, if it had not been their “brother,” it might have been something else. Already, to sustain the world they had created, they needed to rewrite the mythology they had enforced, include airplanes and cars to explain away the outside world creeping in on their closed off existence and the father’s need to work at a job to support them.
As a moralistic meditation on the scarring nature of familial insularity, it shows both the futility and the danger of attempting to “protect” children by lying to them. As a political allegory, it shows that keeping people under the tyranny of ignorance does not prevent rebellion. As a drama, it shows that the filmmakers were true to the world they had created, that they thought through the implications of such a reality with immense attention to detail. But I am sticking to my guns and reading it as a horror story, and what it shows as a horror story is that the viewer has spent the entire movie being terrorized by the monster, and here at last, the monster has revealed it has a weakness. But will the protagonists be able to exploit it and do the monster in? Or will they make a ditch effort and fail, leaving the audience to one final scare?
The answer, as you might have guessed, is both. As the film progresses, it shifts gradually to focus more and more on the eldest daughter, Bruce, the seeming “final girl” of the story, who rises out of the precocious sameness that the children have and begins showing ingenuity in her bargaining, empathy in her throwing food out for her “brother,” and most importantly a strong desire for a freedom which she does not fully understand. She becomes, very slowly, the character who the viewer wants to “win.” The zenith of this is her choosing a name for herself, indicative of the naïvety that has been enforced on her because of her unawareness that the name she chooses is traditionally male (and as such is also a jab towards gendering), of her desire to have an identity for herself outside of what her parents have dictated, and as one final stamp on the monstrous behavior of her parents, who are revealed to have not named any of their children. It is a linguistic victory on her part, echoing the beginning of the movie where the children are taught the wrong meanings of words: “sea,” being a chair and “shotgun,” being a bird.
The parents, the antagonists of the story, also reach an apex of terror by forcing their daughters to have sexual relations with their son, with the father physically assaulting their previous choice Christina because he viewed her as a “bad influence.” All shreds of empathy toward them fade away.
So what happens happens. The dogtooth is broken, the daughter escapes. The viewer should celebrate this. Why? Because stories, all stories, are driven by the interplay of desire. The character that we root for, the character who becomes a real person, who becomes worth saving, our “final girl,” Bruce, is at that moment getting exactly what she wants and what she deserves. She gets to leave. Whether or not she dies in the process is irrelevant, though I would like to imagine that indeed, she gets to experience more of life than the slice of dystopia her parents gave her. Similarly, her parents are getting what they deserve for all their actions. They lose a child, their remaining children are more aware than ever of the outside world, and now they must face up to the reality of what they have been doing.
The final scare is the implication that perhaps nothing will change, typified perfectly by the son and the youngest daughter laying in bed, kissing. The son turns the lights off. If this were the final scene rather than the shot of the unopened trunk, one might be justified in saying that the film is nothing but gruesomeness and psychological torture, but there is at the last moment, a light.
For one can imagine the worst thing, one can imagine Bruce suffocating in the trunk. One can imagine the infection she will get from her broken tooth. One can imagine that she is dead, a corpse for her father to discover. Or worse, that she will be discovered alive and brought back to the compound. But one can also imagine that after the credits roll, the trunk opens, she takes a step outside. She sees the world around her, the world that seems dull and ordinary to people like you and me, and she looks at it with the wonder of one seeing something divine.
Her life from that point will be completely different. It is a moment of endless possibilities.
Isn’t that better than happily ever after?
Hello again internet. It’s me, Leland “Bob” Palmer. I was a bit and a way through writing something new for this blog but I’ve been feeling black and blue lately, so I didn’t finish it. Pulled something old out again and dusted it with icing sugar so y’all could sink your grills into it without tasting rancid corpse water. I mean, I guess that’s why I called it “The Pile” after all, so I guess I shouldn’t feel bad about not throwing out a brand new Sony Walkman when I have a Victor Talking Machine that’s perfectly functional and just begging to be hurled into the snarling abyss.
P.S. I haven’t actually seen The Truman Show, so I never thought of this comparison back when I wrote this, but from what I gather, Kynodontas is very similar to that film. Just a point of interest.
