The Biopolitical Family: (Miss) Violence, Discipline, Allegory, Dogteeth

Abstract

Why do the films of the Greek Weird Wave return so obsessively to the theme of the family? The chapter answers this recurring question by analysing the family as a molecule of biopolitical ordering. What films like Miss Violence (2013; dir. Avranas) and Dogtooth (2009; dir. Lanthimos) show is that the biopolitical aspects of family life relate, often painfully, to aspects of our contemporary socio-political ordering. As they become proponents of biopolitical realism, the films of the Weird Wave focus on the family’s biopolitical role, and how allegory is used, even in the family, as a tool, for the training, shaping, and registering of people’s bodies, beliefs and reactions. Returning to Dogtooth’s final scenes, the chapter ends with an open question: ‘how does one dismantle the grammar and syntax of allegory as a biopolitical tool’?