Recently, I watched a movie called Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos. In this movie, Lanthimos explores a what-if scenario. What if your understanding of social relations could be shaped through isolation? Lanthimos invites the viewer into a fictional world where he entertains an unnatural, rather grim idea. It presents a strange household where the children have been permitted to ever leave. The parents construct a fake reality within the walls of the house, yet everything is made to appear natural. The director uses a family story to suggest that in societies there is a common level of control that is capable of changing people’s understanding of the world – ‘the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable truths.’ (Bradshaw, 2010). The children are raised to believe multiple myths their parents have created, molding their view of social relations, the world, linguistics and so on affecting the children’s interactions (Dunne and Raby, 2013, p.86).

Thoughts:

The use of film to communicate societal issues is portrayed Dogtooth. In this case, my interpretation of this film is that Lanthimos is communicating the extent to which controlled vision can affect behaviours in the widest sense of this concept – he could be referring to the medias control over our vision, for instance. The metaphor he uses through using a family can be applied to so many other issues of control in our society. I really enjoyed this aspect of the film and it open new concept avenues in my mind. I am a designer, not a writer so I would love to build objects or things that instigate a similar level of critical reflection and pleasure through design.

This movie exposed an idea. I have introduced a few provisional project ideas in this blog post. If I were to select the fictional toys that condition children into developing a specific personality (refer to Blog Post 3 or 17), it would be interesting to produce these toys and then create a short film to animate them. The film could speak a similar language to Lanthimos, but instead, the children are only exposed to toys with the aim of these character traits developing through them. This would be interesting because it could reveal the theories embedded into the complex and rather ambiguous toys through the characters that develop through them.

Keywords/themes: short film to animate fictional products, dark design, design fiction, design futures, critical design, prop design.

 

References in main text:

Bradshaw, P. (2010). Dogtooth. [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/

film/2010/apr/22/dogtooth-review [Accessed: 9 November 2016].

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything. 1st ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.

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