Why Are Greek Films Like That?

We’re in the cinema, they’re showing the trailers. Sandwiched between a documentary about the evils of cheese production and a musical about a peasant uprising in 19th century Hungary, there is a Greek film. It looks interesting. Static shots frame bashful actors. Stilted dialogue, wooden delivery, an awkward dance sequence and a birthday cake. A pause. A splash of europop, then a broken tooth or a suicide.

You’ll have seen Dogtooth (2009)? And The Lobster (2015) and The Favourite (2018) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)? To be fair, they look the same because they were directed by the one man. How about Pity (2018), L (2011), Chevalier (2015), Alps (2011), Attenberg (2010) and Apples (2020)? Seemingly every key grip and camera operator who worked for Yorgos Lanthimos has a film or two in the works.

The time period will be carefully blurred. It could be the seventies, or the early two-thousands or the near future. We’ll see tape players and VCRs, typewriters and old cathode ray tellys. All the men will have tucked in their shirts and shined their shoes, standing in empty rooms like eight-year-old’s at a funeral. These Greeks, they’ve taken the twee aesthetic of Wes Anderson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet and made it bleak.

History is running at a higher clip in that part of the world. Political events arrive a year or two early. After the 2008 financial crisis, the collapse of reigning political party Pasok, inspired a vogueish term Pasokification, to describe the gutting of centre-left parties all across Europe. The move from extra-parliamentary protest into the hope of a revived socialist party, which failed in the UK and US in 2019 and 2020 respectively, had already floundered in Greece by 2015. Turning to the far left, with our copies of The Coming Insurrection (2007) and Introduction to Civil War (2006), we can see the anarchists embroiled in a series of bank robberies and bombings. Probably entertaining enough for those involved, but unlikely to lead to anything for the average Greek.

Turning to the right would also be senseless. Where the AfD in Germany, or National Front in France have managed to obscure their ideological commitments and compete electorally, Golden Dawn fell from the third largest party in the Greek parliament in 2015, into utter collapse and imprisonment of its leadership. (Implicated in murder, attempted murder, etc.) Parties representing the entire spectrum of twentieth century political thought have appeared, flourished briefly and died again. All of them failing to alter the trajectory of the country. In the meantime, austerity proceeded apace, and the Greek people, like the rest of us, got used to it. Forced to live with parents and grandparents. To train and retrain, all for jobs that disappear overseas, and wages that mysteriously, buy less and less, week after week.

In that context, Lanthimos and his collaborators write characters so radically disempowered that their own speech and movement becomes alien. Their names and bodies are changed without their say so. Family structures and friendships are brief alliances against bizarre and hostile forces which control their lives. Even their coping mechanisms dehumanize. They stifle their desires, not to attain some higher goal, but because it’s easier. They pretend to be animals. They long to get beyond longing. Untethered from politics, religion and tradition, these characters flail, and regress to childhood. Their lives are so inhibited that brief pleasures of overeating, dancing or kissing are experienced as great moments of rebellion and transcendence.

Obviously, some, and actually, probably most, Greek films aren’t like that. And some of the Greek films that are like that, aren’t Greek. Evolution (2015) comes to mind, and it’s French. Undine (2020) also comes to mind, and it’s German! Going further, some of the Greek films, while being Greek (well, Greco-Roman, close enough), aren’t films. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (158 BC), follows a man named Lucius who begs a witch to turn him into a bird, (presumably to escape the people around him. They have framed him for murder. Then, they reveal it was all a joke. His victims were mannikins.) Of course, the poor man doesn’t become a bird, he is accidentally turned into a donkey, and led by the nose through the whole strata of ancient Greek society. Bought and sold, imprisoned and freed, he is only turned back into a man by falling to his knees and begging the Queen of Heaven. When praying, he uses the name of every goddess he can think of. When she appears to grant his wish, is she Venus, or Diana, or Ceres, or Proserpine? The Greco-Roman’s wouldn’t have cared. They were confused by Jewish and Christian fixations on the one God. Why not hedge your bets, and butter up a few of the others too? In exchange, Lucius becomes a devotee of the goddess’s cult. But she visits him again and again, asking more and more of him. Seemingly, some debts aren’t designed to be repaid.

Lucius, and the characters from these films share a resignation to fate. The gods will fight, and if you’re lucky, you might be turned into a bird. If you’re not, you might spend your life trying to return to the way you used to be. But for us, still living a year or two behind the Greeks, we are still guided by the offcuts of God’s divine plan. Divided like the map of a crumbling empire, it’s parts labelled Whig history (1932), invisible hand of the market (1759), historical dialectic (1837, or 1867?). Now that the ink has worn off these fragments, now that it’s hard to tell what’s a river and what’s a hill, what’s a fold or a tear in the map, maybe we’re back with Lucius in the unmapped regions, back in the hands of the contending, lowercase gods.

My neighbour starts moving furniture at 5 am, and I wake from a dream in which I am piercing my Grandfather’s ears. The sun has been up for an hour or two, I drink some water and turn on my laptop. Sit in front of this document to fret over the ending. Do I believe what I’ve written? Is there a niche of arthouse cinema which has intuited what lies beyond the breakdown of the political process?

I brush my teeth.

And I wonder if we are witnessing a reversal of the process described in The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (1976), as components of our identity are outsourced to technologies and state apparatuses, and returned in the guise of gods, demons and angels.

I sit back down with mint-flavoured teeth and stare at the laptop, wondering if this, my inability to settle on a conclusion, might not be my lack of insight or commitment, but rather a symptom of the exact confusion I’ve been trying to describe? I walk to the window and scratch my head. Crows and squirrels spar through a horse chestnut tree that shields me from the flat’s opposite.  

Back to the laptop, I google Jean-Luc Godard, knowing that back in 2012, he said that the Greek sovereign debt should be forgiven, seeing as they gave us philosophy. When I find it, the quote is even sillier.

‘The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big ‘therefore’. As in, ‘You don’t love me anymore, therefore …’ Or, ‘I found you in bed with another man, therefore …’ We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It’s about time we started paying for it. If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans. We have the technology to track down all those therefores on Google. We can even bill people by iPhone.’

The rest of the interview has been paywalled. You might not have to pay the Greeks to use ‘therefore’, but you will have to pay the Guardian to read Godard.  

What if he’s right. When the word ‘therefore’, is monetized, bound to the Greek government, will simple cause and effect become a luxury good?

Back to Godard, in Contempt (1963).

‘First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.’

Although he’s describing Bridget Bardot here, he must mean Apuleius.

Prepare yourself, in a year or two, for The Age of The Golden Ass.