Evaluation of Object-Oriented Ontology`s Symbiosis in the Film Dance with me!

Graham Harman, an American contemporary philosopher, is the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO). In his 2016 book, Immaterialism, he offeres a theoretical framework for studying social phenomena using OOO. According to this theory, the traditional distinction between subject and object is eliminated in favor of a more realistic vision, in which everything from human beings to animals and artificial entities are 'objects' as far as they have similar stages of living: birth, maturity, decadence, and death. We tried to examine this theoretical framework in film studies by taking the film Dance with Me!, (2019, Persian: "Jahan, ba man beraghs!") as a study case. The methodology of this article is a description-analysis based on observations and library resources. In this paper, we try to sketch out how the film's protagonist, Jahan, as an object in his last stage of living, undertakes! actions and reactions to other objects (characters, animals, properties, etc.) to make sense of his life as a symbiosis.
Immaterialism provides a framework to analyze things as they are, as well as their effects on other things. Unlike other theoretical frameworks used in film studies, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, OOO’s main goal is that the critic does not need to find events, accidents, or actions in the films to apply prior knowledge to them. In other words, while other methodologies try to confirm their own limits by abstracting them from the narrative, immaterialism lets audiences see what is deliberately conveyed in the narrative, even if it does not contribute to or amount to the level of dialectical progress of the narration.
Dance with Me!, unlike "art movies" that are produced for global or western audiences, is a film that targets local cinemagoers in Iran. Its director, Soroush Sehat (1965), has a long experience in script-writing, direction, and acting in Iranian TV and cinema. In this paper, we take the characters as objects that interact in order to create momentum in the narration. Jahan (a Persian name meaning 'world', dropped out of the film's English name), is regarded as a thing at its last stage of life that has some important interactions with other things, from his family and friends to his domestic animals and properties. But, as its name suggests, the film is not simply a biographical drama about someone dying but instead it is trying to portray an improvised cinematic dance.
Dormant objects, which according to immaterialism are things present before any interaction with other things, are considered in this paper to have great importance. Instead of trying to prove something or confirm some psychoanalytic realities, here we simply try to address dormant things that may have or not have obvious effects on the plot or the protagonist's consciousness but make a difference, provoke curiosity, and provide a spot in which metaphor becomes possible. So, while we care about what happens and how the narration goes on, we also have an eye on what remains dormant and escapes from the normative restrictions of cinematic narration in Iran.