can a woman without a toothache be in love?

thoughts on Yorgos Lanthimos and Freud

         There is a quote, sometimes attributed to Freud, that goes “a man with a toothache cannot fall in love.” The rough idea being that physical pain turns your focus inward rather than outward. You can’t properly behold the beloved if you are tonguing your canine and wincing. You can’t properly forget yourself.

         I’m not sure if Freud actually said that; I can’t find the source. I first heard this line in an acting class I took in college. The professor gave us a handout titled “Can a woman with a toothache be in love?” I neglected to complete my reading, though, so I never actually learned the answer. It’s one of those lines that lives at the back of my head and probably always will.

         I’ve always been a fidgeter, a compulsive mover-of-my-body. When I was younger, I’d squint really hard and roll my eyes into my head. I’d flex my lips up and down. I knew this was odd behavior, so mostly I did it when I was by myself, reading or playing Gameboy. But sometimes I’d do it in front of people – it was compulsive after all. As I got older, I understood that I was running the risk of being seen as strange or off-putting, so I trained myself to keep my facial muscles still. I managed to force the tic out of sight. Instead, I cracked each of my finger knuckles in a quick rhythm. I pushed my big toes underneath my pointers toe, pressing on the edge between nail and skin, then reversed toes. I tensed my calves. I still do this constantly. Part of my ritual going to bed is convincing myself to stop the tensing. I can’t sleep if I keep moving my toes.

         At a certain point, I learned that this behavior is called “stimming” in the autistic community. This isn’t a self-diagnosis essay – I’m sure plenty of non-autistic people stim too. For me, stimming isn’t a means to distract me from other sensory input, or to calm myself, or any of the other common explanations I find on the internet. I do it simply because I – whoever ‘I’ is – have a whole nervous system at my disposal, and I guess I can’t be trusted to not use that power. When I stim, it’s like a tiny confirmation – I exist. I exist. I exist.  I’m doing it right now.

         Does love mean forgetting that you exist? Is it possible to love another person so intensely that you forget that you have a body? Sometimes, it seems to me that the closer I am to someone else, the stronger the abrupt compulsion to tense my muscles is. My body keeps that drumbeat – I exist. I exist.

         The movie The Lobster proposes a world in which you must find love and find love quickly. If you don’t, you’ll be turned into an animal. You can’t just say that you are in love, either – you have to be able to prove it, and that proof must come in the form of an equivalence: “we both have nice hair,” or “we both suffer from nose bleeds.” Love not only exists in relation to the body, it can’t exist without it. A woman with chronic toothaches and a man with chronic toothaches could fall in love. This match would be condoned by the Lobster Universe.

         The film has an ambivalent relationship with this state of affairs. Characters exploit this system to avoid being turned into animals. Protagonist David (Colin Farrell) smashes his nose on purpose so he can match with the aforementioned nosebleed girl. Most people just want to survive. David escapes his singles-only retreat to join a faction of rebels, among whom celibacy and bachelorhood is not punished but in fact enforced. In this reversed context, David meets and falls in love with a woman (Rachel Weisz), though their relationship must be clandestine. The basis of their love is their common near-sightedness, and their courtship plays out along the familiar terrain of shared interests. At the silent dance party in the woods, they agree to secretly dance to the same music. Is there a more suitable allegory for love?

         A few weeks ago, I was swimming in Lake Michigan. It was a perfect summer day, with a mildly sweltering sun above the cerulean waves. My friend and I decided to try to touch the bottom of the lake, and on the count of three, we exhaled and pushed downward. I spun through the water quicker than I expected – a few yards away from the edge of the harbor, the lake was already quite deep. My ears popped, but I kept going, until my foot alighted on something razor sharp. I’d touched the bottom and paid the price. I surfaced quickly, swam to the ladder, and investigated my foot. I found dozens of small cuts, and within an instant my toes were covered in blood. Zebra Mussels, someone informed me.

         Yorgos Lanthimos is the director of The Lobster, and his movies often feel like that plunge to the bottom of the lake. Each film combines elements of horror and farce. Sometimes, the two even become indistinguishable. What might seem like an innocent, giddy quest above the waves quickly becomes something much more gruesome. I biked home that day dripping blood from my Chacos, my right ear throbbing from the quick change in pressure I’d subjected it too. The lake is at least 25 feet deep where I made my attempt.

         Lanthimos’ most recent film, Kinds of Kindness, is a triptych – three loosely related stories, each with different characters played by the same cast. The second story, “R.M.F. is Flying” deals with similar themes as The Lobster. Daniel’s (Jesse Plemmons) shipwrecked wife Liz (Emma Stone) returns from sea, but he suspects she is an imposter. His reasons: that she used to hate chocolate but now loves it. That her feet no longer fit her shoes. As Daniel grows increasingly paranoid, he demands that Liz mutilate herself to prove her love. He asks her to cut off her thumb and cook it for him. Liz obliges. He asks her to cut out her liver. Let’s just say Yorgos doesn’t shy away from the gory details.

         But rather than proving her love, Liz’s obedience represents, to Daniel, proof that there is something wrong with her. This is a sort of ‘King Solomon’ response to the situation: cutting the baby in half is, actually, bad. It disqualifies the love of the mother. And even when another Liz (the real Liz?) walks through the doorway as the ‘false’ Liz bleeds out, the audience is left without a clear resolution. Can we believe Daniel’s interpretation? When a woman cuts out her own liver, does that prove or disprove her love?

         There is a concept in philosophy (and this for sure stems from Freudian psychoanalysis) called “the death drive.” I find this difficult to wrap my head around, in part because different people will define it differently, and philosophers are quicker to denigrate ‘wrong’ definitions than to provide a clear correct one. As far as I understand, at its most fundamental level, it contrasts with the pleasure principle, which is the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain. The death drive is the yen for obliteration, the longing for non-being. It’s the reason why we might seek to recreate past traumas, might even do so instinctively without realizing it. More abstractly, though, I understand the pleasure principle as that which confirms the ego (I exist), and the death drive as that which negates it (I’d rather not).

         Maybe we can think of our toothache-less woman as an avatar of the Death Drive. In her totalizing love for her beloved, she ceases to have pain, to have a body, to even exist. When Liz inflicts progressive levels of pain on herself (and Daniel might also be harming her – that too is contested), she disqualifies her love through her own suffering. It is not the mutilated form bleeding out on the carpet that Daniel loves, but the idealized, glowing Liz that walks through the front door, whose shoes fit perfectly, who hates chocolate.

         In the final scene of The Lobster, David and his partner (Rachel Weisz) sit in a diner. Weisz is newly blind. The malicious rebel leader sought to sabotage their love - which, you’ll remember, was founded on their mutual myopia - by performing a surgery that injures her eyesight irrevocably. To continue their relationship, David must blind himself, too. He requests a steak knife, and he leaves for the restroom. We see David in silhouette, trying unsuccessfully to bring the tip of the knife to his cornea, stuffing paper towels in his mouth to muffle his screams. We cut to Weisz, sitting patiently in the booth, traffic rolling by outside the window. They are each, in this moment, totally alone. Will they manage to be unified by a common pain? Or is such a goal impossible? Maybe David will leave her waiting there, forever.

         Can a woman without a toothache be in love? Does there exist a love that does not account for the body and all its pains and deficiencies? Isn’t it true that, despite our best efforts, the body insists on itself? I exist. I exist. I exist. It occurs to me that only a woman with a toothache can be in love. The characters in a Lanthimos film seem to think so. They maim and murder their way out of loneliness. The price for love, it seems, is always heavy.   

What strikes me most about that closing scene of The Lobster are the details. They aren’t in some private, sterile space. They are in a diner – traditionally one of cinema’s richest, most evocative settings. Farrell’s character asks specifically for a steak knife. We see him in the shitty little bathroom, trying to make the most of a desperate situation. And that long shot on Weisz, waiting patiently, the waiter refilling her water, and a horrible tableau of traffic and construction behind her, taking up most of the frame. The King Solomon story, and all like such stories, lies by omission. It scrubs the details, and in doing so, makes the scene unreal. Who were those two women? In which ways were they in pain? It’s never just a knife, but always a specific type. Here, a steak knife. There is a setting, often a not very nice one. It is not clear if mutilation will bring love or dispel it. The details rear up. They insist upon themselves. They dictate the direction and character of two people’s love, like a broken bone that’s been poorly set.

What differentiates the death drive from a lesser ‘death desire’ is that drives are deeper compulsions. Each failed attempt at self-annihilation deposits you where you started, amongst the stubborn details of existence, longing once more for oblivion. If there is one thing that unifies Lanthimos’ films, it’s the profound loneliness of his characters. It cuts through the farce and the horror, the earnest core around which irony swirls like a nebula. From that lonely vantage, the call of the abyss is that much more compelling. But the lake is always deeper than we think. There are sharp things at the bottom. And for all of our competing drives, our yens and longings, we are, ultimately, creatures of flesh and blood.