FOR MY MOTHER, SISTERS,

AND LUIZ EDUARDO

Published in 2008 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

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In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a

division of St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2008 Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla

The right of Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Design
and Patents Act 1988.

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Copy edited and typeset by Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford
PLATES
___________

1. Poster of Los olvidados (1950). Courtesy of Filmoteca Española.

2. Still from Viridiana (1961). Courtesy of Video Mercury Films, S.A.
3. Still from Viridiana (1961). Courtesy of Video Mercury Films, S.A.
4. Still from El ángel exterminador (1962). Courtesy of Video Mercury
Films, S.A.
5. Still from El ángel exterminador (1962). Courtesy of Video Mercury
Films, S.A.
6. Still from Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Courtesy of Sindicato de
Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de la República
Mexicana.
7. Still from Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Courtesy of Sindicato de
Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de la República
Mexicana.
8. Still from Él (1952). Courtesy of Filmoteca Española.

vi
PREFACE
______________

There are two reasons why I decided to study Luis Buñuel’s cinema. My
own intellectual position within theoretical discourses is one. As a student in
London and Cambridge I was fascinated by the theoretical methodologies
that cultural critics had, since the intellectual revolution of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, been applying to the analysis of visual culture. These
analytical tools presented me with alternative avenues of investigation and
opened up the possibility of articulating a challenge to previous humanist
perspectives. Studying the representation of gender and sexuality made me
aware of a relatively new epistemological framework for enquiring about
cultural texts. More specifically, I became interested in how sexual dissi-
dence could be articulated in visual texts drawn from high art and/or main-
stream culture. Hence, I attempt to question in this book how far the
blurring of the boundaries between academic disciplines may be applied to
the examination of Buñuel’s films by engaging with queer and feminist
theory as a way of revealing the conflict between the surface inscription of
heterosexist and misogynistic discourses and the multiple forms of sexuali-
ties, subjectivities and desires in the textual unconscious of his films.
A second reason to choose the cinema of Luis Buñuel is because his films
are not only formally and thematically interesting, but also because some of
their conflicts and tensions can be understood by considering the kinds of
conflicts and tensions my conscious or unconscious sense of sexual dissi-
dence produced. I had felt alienated and ideologically dislocated from the
social environment in which I spent my childhood in Spain. It took me years
to realize that the constraints of a particular social and cultural grid, among
the many other forces that constitute my subjectivity, had conditioned my
sexual identity. In the 1970s and 1980s, Franco’s repressive political and
cultural legacy still affected Spanish society, especially in rural Spain where

vii
PREFACE

sexual repression was particularly dominant. I was unaware of the growing

visibility of gay communities until I moved to Paris in the late 1980s, which
was where I first saw Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1966), with Catherine Deneuve
starring as a masochist bourgeois housewife. Her glamorous iconic image
and performance in this film compared with her previous role in Jacques
Demy’s ‘camp’ musical, Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), fascinated me. As a
queer spectator, I narcissistically identified with the female star and with the
character’s transgressive sexual fantasies and anxieties, which challenged the
ideological and moral values of the patriarchal French bourgeois society in
which she lived. This seductive attraction to Belle de Jour prompted me to
reconsider Buñuel’s cinema by looking at the conflictive inscriptions of
social, sexual and psychic anxieties, fantasies, traumas and desires that his
cinema reveals in discourses that are sometimes created to conceal them.
Moreover, although some of Buñuel’s films initially had a subversive
intention, they have been institutionalized as examples of the national
cultural heritage of France, Mexico or Spain. Luis Buñuel is studied in
university departments, prestigious language institutes like the Institute
Cervantes, or celebrated in major museums, such as the recent retrospective
exhibit of his life and films at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.1 In Spain,
large corporations, like banks in Zaragoza, have financed research on this
film director. As a queer subject, I am aware of the kinds of restrictions and
exclusions the dominant society has imposed on me. One of the many
restrictions, which concern us in the context of this book, is the deprivation
of being able to enjoy dominant cultural texts, such as Buñuel’s cinema, or
participate in mainstream culture. This book is an attempt to reconcile
theoretical problematics with a reflection of my own personal pre-
occupations. Hence, my theoretical position cannot be detached from the
political and ethical implications that underpin it. If our ‘peripheral’
opinions in society and in culture have in some ways obliged us to question
received opinions, they have also prompted us to try to search for new
theories or forms of expression and perception. Our ideas become,
according to Robert Aldrich, part of a strategic process of self-affirmation.2
The asymmetry and distance produced in the relationship between
dominant or canonical cultural texts, such as Buñuel’s films, and dissident
communities, such as queer communities, is what this book readjusts. An
intellectual strategy to deal with this problematic is to reinterpret this
‘canonical’ cinema from a queer and feminist perspective. This strategy
allows us to represent our own position in relation to different social and
theoretical discourses on gender and sexuality. It also allows us ultimately to

viii
 PREFACE

reappropriate, reincorporate and redefine Buñuel’s cinema, a conventionally

seen compulsory heterosexual cinema, into our queer space of spectatorship.
I would like to express my deepest admiration and thanks to my former
doctoral supervisor at Cambridge University, Paul Julian Smith, for his
intellectual rigour and precious and invaluable help, encouragement,
support, and advice in writing this book. His inspiration and his lessons
about academic research extend far beyond this work. I am grateful to
Alison Sinclair, Dominic Keown, Rosemary Clark, and especially Geoffrey
Kantaris, Peter William Evans and Jo Labanyi for reading and discussing
this book with me. They have greatly helped this book come into being and
they have provided me with invaluable feedback and suggestions. They
cannot be blamed, however, for any mistakes and I assume total responsi-
bility for any error, including all the translations from French and Spanish
into English.
I am indebted to Emilie Bergmann and Jo Labanyi for their lessons about
personal fulfilment and for nurturing my interest in the study of Spanish
cultural and film studies. My very special thanks go to Helen Weston, Tamar
Garb, Briony Fer, Adrian Rifkin, and Sarah Wilson for having contributed
more than they may know to my thinking here. At my former institution,
Virginia Commonwealth University, I would like to express my deepest
thanks to my former colleagues at the School of World Studies and my
students for sharing with me an academic interest in film studies. I am
particularly grateful to McKenna Brown, Mar Martínez Góngora, Jérôme
Cornette and Catherine Ingrassia, dean of academic affairs in the College of
Humanities and Sciences, for their encouragement and support. This book
could not have been published without the financial support from the
College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.
At my current institution, Newcastle University, I thank my colleagues in the
School of Modern Languages for creating a supportive environment.
Parts of Chapter 1 were rewritten as an article for the Cuadernos del Centro
de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación, Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires,
Argentina, in May 2005. I am grateful to the editor, Sylvia Valdés at the
Universidad de Palermo and the Universidad de Buenos Aires for her stimu-
lating and kind support. My thanks to Ralph Penny, editor of the Hispanic
Research Journal, for giving me permission to reproduce material in revised
form that was published as ‘Fictions of reality/documents of the real
encounter: mise-en-abîme and the irruption of the real in Los olvidados’, volume
8, number 4, 2007, pp. 347–57, and to Gill Rye, managing editor of The
Journal of Romance Studies, for allowing me to reproduce material in revised

ix
PREFACE

form that was originally published as ‘Picturing the beggars in Luis Buñuel’s
Viridiana: a perverse appropriation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper’, volume 5,
number 2, 2005, pp. 59–73. A revised form of Chapter 2 was originally
published as ‘Between the phobic object and the dissident subject: abjection
and vampirism in Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana’, in Gender and Spanish Cinema
(Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 13–31. I thank Terry Fisher at Berg Publishers for
giving permission to reproduce this material in revised form and the editors
of this volume, Parvati Nair and Steven Marsh, for being extremely
supportive and for their friendship.
Parts of Chapters 1, 2, and 4 were presented as papers at the Visual
Synergies Conference: Fiction and Documentary Film in Latin America held at
the Royal Holloway, University of London and Cambridge University in
2006, at the Imágenes del Cine. Segundo Simposio Internacional, Universi-
dad de Buenos Aires and Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires,
Argentina in 2005, and at the Cambridge Hispanic research seminars and at
the modern languages postgraduate research forum, Queen Mary, University
of London in 2003. I am grateful to all the organizers and participants for
their helpful suggestions.
I would like to express my gratitude to my editor at I.B.Tauris, Elizabeth
Munns, for her unconditional support and guidance and to Selina Cohen for
copy-editing this book. Finally, I thank my beloved family and friends,
Leovigilda Albilla, María Jesús Gutiérrez, Marián Gutiérrez, Eugenia
Natividad López, Luiz Eduardo Leonardi, Ute Baron, and Leticia García for
their emotional support, for sharing with me my passion for cinema, for our
conversations about politics, and for their faith in my academic vocation. I
dedicate this book to them and to my late father, Mr Julián Gutiérrez, whose
absence is felt as an irrevocable loss.

x
INTRODUCTION
__________________________

Those who refuse to reread force themselves to read everywhere the same story.1

Psychoanalysis and Sexual Dissidence

In this book I reread five of Buñuel’s Spanish-language films, which have
most often been read through the reductive lens of male heterosexuality,
from a queer subject position. I argue that a queer rereading of his films
allows us to reveal and to be seduced by the conflict between the apparent
inscription of heterosexist and misogynistic discourses and the multiple
forms of sexualities, subjectivities and desires in the textual unconscious of
his films.2 As is well known, the institutional practices of psychoanalysis
have a long and ignominious history of the oppression of non-normative
subjectivities. As Michel Foucault formulates, power has been exercised
upon subjects through the internalization of different shared values and
conventions. In Foucauldian theory, power-knowledge always requires a
speaking position from which a spoken subject is exercised upon. Foucault
does recognize, however, the possibility of a dialectical (bifocal nature)
operation of power, which he defines as a ‘reverse discourse’. An important
example of this ‘reverse discourse’ manifestation in these ‘discursive
fellowships’ relations is formulated in his book, The History of Sexuality
(1978). Foucault argues that, during the Victorian era, there was a
compulsion to talk about sex, which was manifested in the institutionalized
regulation of sexual discourses. New sexual categories, such as
homosexuality, were coined within the medical and legal discourses of late
nineteenth-century Western, bourgeois and patriarchal societies. The new
sexual categories allowed the state to legitimize its homophobic or
misogynist laws in scientific terms. These medical discourses, on the other
hand, allowed homosexuals, for instance, to become self-conscious of their

1
QUEERING BUÑUEL

identity, starting, thus, to give a voice to sexual dissidence. As Foucault puts

it, ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its
legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary,
using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.’3
Following Foucault’s notion of ‘reverse discourse’, in this book I draw
mainly on psychoanalytic criticism in order to argue that a rereading of
Buñuel’s films from a queer subject position implies less a specific definition
of identity than a rearticulation of notions of desire, identity, and subjectivity
that moves from the pathological to the ethics and politics of queerness in
Buñuel’s films. This association of perversion with sexual dissidence4 in my
queer rereading subverts a narrative of psychosexual development, achieved
through sublimation and a successful Oedipal trajectory, which serves to
organize the social and symbolic order.5 Furthermore, if the political
imperative that is at the core of the self-definition of the dominant
heterosexist culture rejects and eliminates the queer subject, by defining the
latter as a debased and debasing other, its self-definition as non-other
powerfully and unpredictably coexists with a desire for this other. Hence, if
the dominant heterosexist culture usually includes its other symbolically as a
primary eroticized constituent of the dominant heterosexist culture’s own
fantasy life, a fusion of aversion and desire is frequently integral to the
construction of that heterosexist culture’s subjectivity.6 This book is thus an
exploration of the extent to which the queer subject can appropriate and
resignify the terms that have previously relegated him or her to the socially
and psychically stigmatized state of abjection.
In this book I ask whether the different manifestations of abjection in
Buñuel’s films could lead to an ethical and political strategy of presenting
queerness in the condition of visibility. We might think that the visibility of
queerness, occupying a social and psychic position that is relegated to the
abject,7 is part of the homophobia inscribed in and conventionally attributed
to hegemonic heteronormative ideology in general and to Buñuel’s cinema
in particular. Indeed, as I shall explain in Chapter 1, some queer theor-
eticians, such as Judith Butler, have argued that a psychic subjectivity prior
or beyond patriarchal and heterosexist systems of thought might contribute
to a psychotic dissolution of the self, which stands for a phobic abjection of
those subjects who do not identify with the principles of heteronormativity,
thereby enforcing the hegemonic position of the latter. On the other hand,
my queer rereading of Buñuel’s films reappropriates the notion of abjection
to explore how the ethical and political dimension of the abject can be
associated with a queer theoretical project whose main function is less to

2
 INTRODUCTION

remap linguistically a specific category of identity than to produce a rupture

in the social and symbolic order, even if this rupture can only be provisional
and temporary.
I also ask whether rereading Buñuel’s cinema from a queer perspective
challenges the reassuring image of the ego that is presented in the mirror
stage. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror image or the specular other
disavows the incompleteness of the subject’s self. Throughout this book I
propose that a psychoanalytic account of a queer subjectivity in Buñuel’s
films, which is attractive to anti-normative sexual politics, is linked to
psychical processes and productive unconscious desires that may be aligned
with the Lacanian Real. We disarticulate unconscious desire and a queer
subjectivity from the normalizing implications of an identity politics,
including gay or lesbian identity, based on sexual and gendered object choice
by associating Lacan’s notion of the Real with an ecstatic self loss. The main
argument of this book is to give, thus, a voice to queer identities and subjec-
tivities that function as a resistance to traditional notions of logic and desire
within the dominant symbolic order by reversing the process of imaginary
identification and symbolization.8 I shall now give an overview of recent
critical approaches to Buñuel’s cinema in order to understand how the
theoretical and methodological approach and the argument presented here
attempts to trace the kinds of blind spots in this long and sustained critical
attention to his cinema.

Critical Approaches to the Cinema of Buñuel

Peter Evans acknowledges, for instance, that most scholarly research on
Buñuel’s films has used a narrowly auteurist approach that celebrates what
can be identified in his films as Buñuelian thematic and stylistic motifs.9
Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz argues that, writing from this auteurist critical
perspective, Gwynne Edwards associates Buñuel’s cinema with struggling
and opposing forces in the director’s personality – Catholicism and
surrealism, as if these two opposing forces were exclusive in the constitution
and formation of the personality or subjectivity of the filmmaker.10 For
Edwards, it would appear that Buñuel’s films are direct products of the
personal expression of the director’s creative imagination, vision and
formation. In her book on literary adaptations in Spanish cinema, Sally
Faulkner claims that this unproblematic critical method mystifies and
mythifies the Buñuelian œuvre, thereby perpetuating a patriarchal epistem-
ology that places the male, genius artist in total control of the meaning of
his work. For Faulkner, these interpretations of Buñuel’s cinema are static

3
QUEERING BUÑUEL

and ahistorical; further, the individualism on which this theory is predicated

is somewhat at odds with the collective nature of the surrealist movement.11
In her critical study of Buñuel, Virginia Higginbotham also applies an
auteurist approach to her discussion of Buñuel’s cinema. Higginbotham
devotes only one chapter to Buñuel’s Mexican films, as these are, she claims,
artistically unimportant. According to Higginbotham, these films allowed
Buñuel to experiment with his surrealist style, as well as with a more
commercial and accessible mode, in order to produce the French art movies
of the 1960s and 1970s that allowed Buñuel to become a commercially and
critically successful director of art cinema. Higginbotham argues that, unlike
the Mexican films, style, authorial independence and clear ideological
positions characterize Buñuel’s later French films. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz
takes a different approach to the auteurist film tradition. To explore how
Buñuel had to work both within and outside the styles and genres of
Mexican national cinema, in his recent book he focuses on the relationship
between Buñuel and the production contexts of the Mexican movies.
Linda Williams developed a new and valuable theory of surrealist film by
taking some of Buñuel’s films as case studies, such as Un chien andalou
(1929), L’Age d’or (1930), Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974) and Cet obscur objet du
désir (1977).12 Acevedo-Muñoz argues that, concerned with the mise-en-scène
of desire, Williams demonstrates that Buñuel’s films are based on dream
structures and their relation to the unconscious. According to Williams,
Buñuel disrupts the viewer’s identification with the diegetic image in order
to foreground the signifier. For Williams, Buñuel’s Mexican films do not
illustrate her theories of surrealist film because they were produced within a
well-organized commercial genre system (Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and
Mexico, p. 2). Focusing also on the French films, Paul Sandro has primarily
concentrated on how Buñuel ‘perverts classical narrative structures through
their violations of the conventions of spectatorship and wish fulfilment’
(Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico, p. 2). Sandro is concerned with how
Buñuel’s films disrupt representation, perturbing the specular position they
had initially determined for the potential viewing subject. Sandro traces a
recurrent theme that is present in most of Buñuel’s films. According to
Sandro, Buñuel’s films deal with the tension between the subject’s goal and
the contingent intrusions that again and again prevent the subject’s project
from realizing itself.13 This central theme parallels the lack of linear, cause–
effect narrative structure, which frustrates the spectator’s desires for
interpretation and foregrounds the constructedness of representation.14
More recently, Gastón Lillo, who is particularly concerned with the issue of

4
 INTRODUCTION

textuality, questions whether Buñuel faithfully reproduces the aesthetic

conventions of commercial Mexican cinema or whether he disarticulates
them by foregrounding those conventions through mechanisms of trans-
gression.15
Marsha Kinder edited a collective volume to commemorate Buñuel’s academy
award winning film Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) in 1999. In this
collection, Harmony H. Wu reconsiders, from a feminist psychoanalytic
perspective, the possibilities of a transgressive narrative and the subversion
of patriarchal structures from within in Buñuel’s Le Charme discret de la
bourgeoisie. To reconsider the emancipatory potential of the self-reflexive
masochistic structures of looking and identification in the film, Wu also
theorizes notions of spectatorship in Buñuel’s Belle de jour.16 Interestingly
enough, Wu argues that Evans tries to reclaim the possibility of a trans-
gression of the frontiers of consciousness in Buñuel’s exploration of sexu-
ality. Wu argues that Evans’s approach recodifies these transgressive desires
as perversions. According to Wu, Evans’s explanation of the female
character’s regressive fantasies does not discuss the potential critique of
normative laws that is at the core of perversion. However, Evans, and
indeed Wu, use psychoanalysis in a much more speculative and productive
way than do most critics of Buñuel’s cinema, thereby moving the scholarly
research on Buñuel beyond auteurist critical perspectives or the exhaustive
focus on the discursive disruptions of his avant-garde or French films.
Evans and Wu expand conceptions of representation, desire, subjectivity
and sexual difference in Buñuel’s cinema. In this book, I rethink these
questions as a way of exploring how we can reread Buñuel’s films from a
queer subject position by engaging with contemporary queer and feminist
theories and psychoanalytic criticism. I shall also create synergies between
the films studied here and surrealist-informed visual arts as a way of illus-
trating some of the proposed theoretical issues propounded here. By bring-
ing, or working across, the fields of Hispanism, film studies, psychoanalysis,
feminist and queer theory, and art theory, this book reconceptualizes
Buñuel’s Spanish-Mexican films beyond geographical, historical and disci-
plinary boundaries and reconsiders these five Buñuel films as part of
twentieth-century visual culture.

Surrealism and Transgression

In this book I am also concerned with how a rereading of Buñuel’s films
from a queer subject position identifies with Buñuel’s discursive experimen-
tation that derives from his association with, to use Susan Suleiman’s term,

5
QUEERING BUÑUEL

the ‘subversive intention’ of surrealist aesthetics. These relate to notions of

taboo and of transgression of the social and symbolic order – for instance in
the writings of Georges Bataille17 – and to surrealist representational
strategies that articulate resistant and subaltern identities. To deconstruct
hegemonic systems of thought, surrealism maintained an open dialogue with
diverse cultural discourses. In her association of the notion of écriture with a
subversive intent in French avant-garde art and literature, Suleiman argues
that:

Écriture exceeds the traditional boundaries of meaning, of unity, or

representation, and just as for Bataille the experience of transgression
was indissociable from a consciousness of the boundaries it violated,
so the practice of écriture was indissociable from a consciousness of
the discursive and logical rules, the system of prohibitions and
exclusions that made meaning, unity and representation possible but
that the play of écriture constantly subverted.18

Hence, transgression and subversion retain an ambivalent relationship with

prohibition and reproduction. The definition of transgression takes into
account that ‘although laws are made to be broken, prohibitions to be trans-
gressed, through its very violability the law simply binds us closer to it.’19
Or, as Georges Bataille puts it, ‘transgression does not deny the taboo, but
transcends and completes it.’20 Transgression thus cannot be rethought ‘as a
rupture produced by a heroic marginality outside the symbolic order but as a
fracture traced by a strategic marginality within the order’.21 Jonathan
Dollimore argues that ‘trangressive reinscription is an oppositional practice
which is also a perspective constantly interpreting and rereading all sections
of a culture including its dominant and subordinate fractions, its con-
ventional as well as deviant identities.’22 Transgression is located at a point
of internal crisis, which shows the symbolic authority in a state of
emergency.23 Our experience of transgression points less to the concept of
the limit, which entails a line that cannot be crossed, than to a fold in which
the stability of the relationship between the inside and outside gives way to a
limit that exists only when it is crossed.

Reading Against the Grain

It is important in relation to feminist and queer film theories that the
rereading of Buñuel’s films from a queer subject position also derives from
the critical reappropriation and performative readings against the grain of

6
 INTRODUCTION

those who do not identify with, or are marginalized by, the dominant
heterosexual and male audience, such as queer subjects. Since the 1970s,
feminist psychoanalytic film theory, which has primarily focused on
heterosexual male subjectivity, has explored the ideological and psychologi-
cal processes of marginalization and exclusion of women who are embedded
in the cinematic apparatus, particularly within the codes and conventions of
classical Hollywood cinema.24 From this perspective, film theory has
understood cinematic identification as a fixed position that is conditioned by
the homogenizing impulse of the film institution, which is governed by
heterosexual symmetry. Revising these early theories of cinematic identifi-
cation, Judith Mayne understands cinematic identification less as a fixed
location than as a series of shifting positions that reveal the fragile and
unstable nature of identity itself. As Mayne puts it:

One of the distinct pleasures of the cinema may well be a ‘safe zone’
in which homosexual as well as heterosexual desires can be fantasized
and acted out. I am not speaking here of an innate capacity to ‘read
against the grain’, but rather of the way in which desire and pleasure
may well function to problematize the categories of heterosexual
versus homosexual.25

Mayne focuses on the multiple, conflicting reading responses to the filmic

apparatus and proposes that these readings do not produce a unified text
with a coherent ideology. Instead, these readings suggest that institutional
and social forces may produce a heterogeneous text. The queer spectator
becomes, in this process of viewing, a site of articulation of the meaning of
the filmic text. The queer spectator is a subjective epistemological position
that intersects with the cinematic apparatus and performs the task of
insertion and rereading.
The queer spectator, who is placed in an active discursive relationship
with the filmic text, opens up the possibilities of meaning in the process of
signification. He or she also transcends the authority of the original author,
in this case Buñuel, and the institutional constraints of the film industry in
the process of viewing. Cinematic spectators are not merely recipients of the
text, but bring to bear different transgressive fantasies, which lie at the inter-
section of desire and image, to the site of reception,26 diversifying rather
than homogenizing the lexicon of images and the realm of desire. Theories
of spectatorship have begun to break down the artificial boundaries between
audiences and subcultures. It is impossible to speak of only one audience at

7
QUEERING BUÑUEL

a time and only in relation to the dominant culture. Although in this book I
am mainly concerned with the queer spectator, I welcome the possibility of
a subcultural constellation and allow for the option of an inter-subjective
fabric that embraces disagreement and difference in my reading of Buñuel’s
cinema.
As is well known, Buñuel’s cinema is always positioned in a kind of liminal
slipzone between Spanish, Mexican and French culture, between sexual and
political discourse, between sound and image, between surrealism and com-
mercial melodramas and between margins and centre. The location of
Buñuel’s cinema in a liminal position encourages us to use interdisciplinary
theories that have been developed in a transnational and transcultural
framework, such as queer theory, thereby working across geographical and
disciplinary boundaries. Hence, in this book I pay attention to the
reconciliation, or productive tension, between French and Anglo-American
critical theories and Spanish-language films, and between different theor-
etical and methodological standpoints. I propose, moreover, that a queer
counter-hegemonic rereading of Buñuel’s Spanish and Mexican films implies
looking beyond the representation of heteronormative desire, subjectivity
and identity.

Reading the Detail

In the context of psychoanalytic clinical therapy, Julia Kristeva has
suggested that the analyst must engage with the depressed patient on the
pre-verbal level and must disarticulate the signifying chain or extract the
hidden meaning in fragments. In addition, in his brilliant study of gay
cinephilia and experimental queer practices, Roger Hallas notes how queer
spectators often rely on film details and fragments, thereby rejecting or
neglecting ‘narrative linearity and trajectory’, to use Hallas’s phrase, as a way
of connecting the experience of film perception and cognition with habits of
touching. According to Hallas, this distinctive way of ‘pausing over peripheral
details’ contributes in great deal to the formation of our queer identities.27
Inspired by Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretative method, and, indeed, a
queer spectatorial practice of engaging with the peripheral detail, as Hallas
remarks, I consider how some of the apparently insignificant details in
Buñuel’s films function as a subtext or counter-text to the manifest level of
dialogue and narrative propounded by the films. Commenting on image
notation in the theatre, Patrice Pavis suggests that:

The images we retain are not necessarily the most important ones in

8
 INTRODUCTION

the performance, but they make up the framework of our perception

and of what we remember, and therefore exert enormous influence
on how we structure the plot and the production of meaning.28

Pavis’s approach works against the Aristotelian plot-based form that

ultimately provides access to ‘reality’ or meaning. My attention to details
through which the unconscious of Buñuel’s films could be read deconstruc-
tively parallels Buñuel’s own reliance on incongruous details that function,
in an inappropriate setting according to Carlos Fuentes, as ‘hot spots’ with
considerable transgressive power.29
Drawing on the hermeneutics of the detail practised by Roland Barthes
and Jacques Derrida, Naomi Schor argues that the valorization of the detail
and the fascination with the insignificant in these French philosophers
dismantles the Idealist metaphysics that looms so large on the agenda of
modernity.30 For Schor, the normative aesthetics that the academy elabor-
ates and disseminates is associated with a classical notion of the Ideal that
requires the absence of all particularity. If the detail has traditionally been
linked to effeminacy and decadence, the censure of the particular in
normative aesthetics reveals, Schor argues, the sexual hierarchies of the
phallocentric cultural order. Hence, the equation of the Ideal with the
absence of the detail is an axiology carried into the field of representation.
From this perspective, the privileging of insignificant details, which others
usually neglect, has traditionally been seen as the practice of a decadent kind
of criticism that attaches great significance to details and makes them the
basis of far-reaching conclusions. In this book, I follow Schor’s critical
method in order to propose that the detail might become the privileged
point of contact between reader and filmic text: the discursive hook onto
which the reader may insert his or her own fantasies. Praising Barthes’s
fascination with the trivial and the restoration of details as the fundamental
aesthetic imperative, Derrida argues that:

It is of a detail that I asked for the revelatory ecstasy, the instan-

taneous access to Roland Barthes (himself, alone), an easy access,
foreign to all labour. I expected it of a detail both highly visible and
dissimulated (too obvious), rather than from the great themes, the
contents, the theorems or the writing strategies that I felt I knew and
would easily recognize after a quarter of a century. … Like him I
searched … like him I searched for the freshness of a reading in one’s
relationship to the detail.31

9
QUEERING BUÑUEL

Deconstructing the Auteur

The auteurist film critical tradition, which the French film magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma epitomized in the 1950s, identified the films I have
selected as among the few of Buñuel’s Mexican period, dating from 1946
to 1965; and these are defined as ‘auteur’ films.32 Maurice Drouzy says that
‘Buñuel agreed to make films of which he had no reason to be proud’.33
André Bazin, a co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, championed Buñuel’s
Mexican films, especially Los olvidados.34 Although Emilio Fernández’s
María Candelaria (1943) had won the Golden Palm award at the first
Cannes Film Festival in 1946,35 by the 1950s Bazin had lost interest in the
nationalist rhetoric and visual and technical style of the Fernández–
Figueroa Mexican films. Bazin manœuvred a shift in French critical
attention away from the classical style of Fernández and Figueroa towards
Buñuel.36 Although Buñuel had to conform to the commercial dictates of
the Mexican film industry, I would contend that French auteurist critics,
such as Bazin, attributed the category of ‘auteur’ cinema to these Spanish-
language films so that they would receive serious critical consideration.
Lillo explains that:

La actitud crítica desarrollada sobre todo desde Francia aunque condena los
filmes mexicanos en su conjunto, intenta salvar o recuperar algunos detalles
‘buñuelianos’. Preocupada por la búsqueda de fuentes que legitimen una obra
denigrada, esta crítica se ha limitado a encontrar en los filmes analizados
planos o secuencias de supuesta procedencia surrealista – por lo tanto recuperables
– que sin embargo no concuerdan con una lógica narrativa más bien lineal en
donde aparecen insertos (Although the critical attitude developed
especially in France condemns Mexican films overall, it tries to save
or recover some ‘Buñuelian’ details. In its search for sources that
may legitimize a denigrated work, this critical attitude has been
confined to finding in the analysed movies certain shots or sequences
of supposed surrealistic origin, which are therefore recoverable.
Where they are inserted, however, such surrealistic shots or
sequences do not tally with the narrative logic, which is rather
linear.)37

I agree with Lillo’s objection to the auteurist critical tradition focusing on

certain isolated details that function as self-quotations from Buñuel’s ‘noble’
œuvre, an œuvre that is already recognized and classified. To counter this, Lillo
emphasizes Buñuel’s films’ intertextual relationship with and transgression

10
 INTRODUCTION

from the dominant, traditional cinematic genres used in the Mexican film
industry in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, such as the melodrama. Unlike Lillo,
however, in this book I concentrate on five films from the aforementioned
Mexican period to account for those details through which Buñuel’s films
can be read less as self-quotations from his ‘noble’ œuvre than within a queer
theoretical framework, for those elements that function as a springboard for
psychoanalytic theoretical speculation and rearticulation crucial for support-
ing the main argument of this book, or for an interpretative process that
derives from the creation of a dialogical relationship between Buñuel’s films
and visual arts practices that were not necessarily produced in the same
socio-historical contexts as Buñuel’s films. In this book I emphasize the
importance of boundary crossing between the fields of Hispanism, film,
visual arts and psychoanalysis for the creation of new methodological prac-
tices in the humanities. If queerness is associated with crossing gender and
sexual boundaries, my own eclectic methodological approach functions,
then, to queer the academic disciplines themselves. Instead of looking else-
where, I focus on these ‘auteur’ films, celebrated by the French auteurist
film critical tradition, to reread Buñuel against his own authorial position by
arguing that there is a deviant principle at work here. I concentrate on a
reduced number of films and exclude others from Buñuel’s Mexican period
to provide the opportunity for detailed film analysis and to devote as much
space to the close reading of these important films in Buñuel’s overall
corpus as to my analysis of pertinent feminist, queer and psychoanalytic
theories and visual arts. I thus open up these films to other fields without
privileging one over the others.
The study of a single author might seem to identify him as the origin of
the meaning of his work and therefore reinscribe a metaphysics of presence,
thereby reproducing patriarchal epistemology, in the same way as the cover
image of this book has created a different visual image of Viridiana out of
the repetition and fragmentation of the original still. A deconstructive
impetus, however, opens up areas of rupture and explores how the
discontinuities in Buñuel’s films that go beyond binary oppositions, such as
those between insiders and outsiders, are relevant for a queer rereading of
his films. From this perspective, my field of enquiry, which uses Buñuel’s
films as a springboard for theoretical speculation and rearticulation,
establishes a continuous process of questioning the socio-cultural space and
attempts to work through desire and analogical identification in unstable and
contradictory spaces. In this book I thus demonstrate that queer theory
makes possible sophisticated analyses of subjectivity. I also reveal the

11
QUEERING BUÑUEL

reductiveness of perpetuating the demarcation lines that have traditionally

separated film genres, commercial and auteur cinema or dominant cinema
and counter-cinema, by avoiding the standard categorization. As David
Vilaseca explains, in the context of gay autobiographical writing, ‘the focus
is not so much on the ways in which texts are examples of discrete
categories, but perhaps more importantly, on the ways in which they differ
from themselves across any conceivable paradigm.’38 My approach is not in
any substantial way historical or empirical, nor is it an exhaustive survey of
the wealth of criticism of Buñuel’s work. In my book I do not focus on the
socio-historical aspects of these films, if by socio-historical we understand
an account of the causal factors, be they social, political, artistic or cultural,
that determined the production of Buñuel’s films. A study of these
contextual factors from a perspective outside a mainstream sexual position
would be a fruitful line of further investigation.

Summary of the Chapters: Buñuel’s Films and the Visual Arts

Each of the five chapters in this book is designed to function as a free-
standing essay devoted to a close reading of one of the selected films
mentioned above, while at the same time constituting an integral part of the
whole. If the narrative of this book is intended to be viewed as a dis-
continuous series of parts, the chapters are united by my continuous
exploration of notions of queer spectatorship and the theorization of
subjectivity in Buñuel’s films as a site of transgression of social and psychic
taboos and boundaries in relation to gender and sexuality. Thus, subjec-
tivity becomes an obsessional site of critical discourse and artistic practice
and this serves to re-enact psychic fantasies and anxieties. While my
methodology is mainly psychoanalytic, I also draw on a wide range of
approaches and theorists from feminism, queer theory and post-
structuralism, as well as psychoanalysis, in order to reinterpret and reorient
these approaches in relation to my own queer reading. I also stage an
intertextual relationship between Buñuel’s films and surrealist-informed
visual artistic practices that point to similar anxieties and fantasies instead
of constructing a single point of meaning. Such a juxtaposition of artistic
practices, which are relocated in a different signifying system, raises the
question of the extent to which intertexts might figure, as a kind of
Freudian lapsus, in representation and interpretation.39 Buñuel’s films
supplement and intersect with other texts, thereby indicating something
that is always in excess of the closure of representation and creating new
representational spaces that encourage transversal, flexible readings that

12
 INTRODUCTION

come and go limitlessly through space and time. Buñuel’s Spanish-language

cinema becomes a theoretical object that thus allows us to imagine new
languages of cultural criticism that disrupt existing boundaries between
disciplines and artistic media, encouraging the spectator to draw his or her
own conclusions.
In Chapter 1, entitled ‘The Encounter with the Real: Social Otherness,
Fragmentation and Mise-en-abîme in Los olvidados’, I draw on Barthes’s notion
of the punctum in order to interpret the representation of the socially
peripheral other, the fragmented body and the implicit homoeroticism in Los
olvidados as punctual details that escape the intentionality of Buñuel. These
punctual details in the film allow us to reread Los olvidados from a queer
subject position. In this chapter I introduce Lacan’s notion of the Real and
its implications for queerness. This is a fundamental aspect upon which the
entire argument of the book depends, and I shall elaborate it throughout the
book through various complex critiques of standard psychoanalytical com-
plexes. I argue that, although the film is concerned with the portrayal of
realistic socio-political issues, for a more complex reading of this film we
should also emphasize its concern with a self-reflexive discourse about
cinematic representation, aesthetic perception and the irruption of what I
shall define as the ‘queer Real’.
In Chapter 2, entitled ‘Pleasure or Punishment? Abjection, the Vampire
Trope and Masochistic Perversions in Viridiana’, I demonstrate how
Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which is manifested in Viridiana’s concern
with the vampire figure, becomes a pleasure for the queer spectator.
Drawing on the Freudian theory of masochism and subsequent readings of
masochism, such as that of Gilles Deleuze, I also focus in Chapter 2 on how
masochism in the film can be reinterpreted as a pre-Oedipal pleasure for the
queer spectator that subverts the Freudian psychopathological definition of
this perversion.
In Chapter 3, entitled ‘The Fall from Grace: Anality, the Horizontal Body
and Anti-Oedipus in El ángel exterminador’, I draw on Freud’s and on
Freudian readings of the anal stage of subjectivity to examine how this film
can be reread as alluding to a punctual detail that is associated with the
heterogeneous stage of anality for non-normative sexual political purposes.
Drawing on interpretations of surrealist aesthetics, using Bataille’s notion of
the informe, and on Lacanian theories of identification, in this chapter I am
also concerned with how regressive identification with the horizontal bodies
of the film’s characters allows us to think of queer subjectivity as reformu-
lating the subject’s relation to the screen in the imaginary in Lacanian

13
QUEERING BUÑUEL

psychoanalytic theory. In this chapter I draw on Deleuze’s and Félix

Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis to reread the film as providing a
productive theory of desire that moves away from heterosexual theories
based on lack and castration.
In Chapter 4, entitled ‘The Invisible Trauma: Violent Fantasies, Repetitions
and Flashbacks in Ensayo de un crimen’, I argue that the film can be
interpreted in terms of a relation between two types of discourse. On the
one hand, there is a psychoanalytic argument, in which theoretical
incompatibilities in relation to a Real/Symbolic, pre-Oedipal/Oedipal
repetition of a sexual trauma in the film are explored. On the other hand, a
self-reflexive discourse repeats and invokes the trauma in the structure of a
flashback narrative. In this chapter I analyse the unsettling force of
repetition and describe its function within psychoanalytic thought in an
attempt to reread the notion of repetition as a symbolic reversal, which
arguably implies the desublimation of language and representation. Such a
reversal, I will argue, gives a voice to non-normative queer subjectivities.
In Chapter 5, entitled ‘The Refusal of Visual Mastery: Paranoia, the
Scream and the Gaze in Él ’, I draw on Freud’s association of paranoia with
a defence against unconscious homosexuality, which projects a paranoid
protection against same-sex desire, in order to reread the film within a
dissident cognitive mode that counteracts normative modes of cognition,
thereby becoming an effective mode of perception. To uncover the arbitrary
distinction between irrationality and rationality in the Western philosophical
tradition, I also pay attention to the film’s mise-en-scène and soundtrack. As in
our rereading of paranoia, disrupting the boundaries between rationality and
irrationality in the film can be helpful in understanding phenomena beyond
the mind and body or cognition and emotion dualisms. I attempt to
challenge the unproblematic way in which visual perception and epistemo-
logical power, which are related to the Cartesian specular economy, have
been linked within apparatus film theory. By exploring approaches to the
relationship between subjective processes and the specular within film and
psychoanalytic theory, which a queer theoretical project may embrace, I
propose a relationship between the queer spectator and the visual field that
is based on the instability and dissolution of the self. I reread Él as
subverting the schematics of inter-subjective differences, such as subject–
object, passive–active, knower–known, or self–other, which are conventionally
established by the command of the look.
To sum up, I re-emphasize, then, the significance of different methodo-
logical and theoretical discourses for allowing us to reappropriate and

14
 INTRODUCTION

redefine these five films in particular, or Buñuel’s cinema in general, into a

space of queer spectatorship. Although I concentrate on five Spanish-
language films, in this book I demonstrate how a queer rereading of these
representative films in Buñuel’s corpus provides us with theoretical and
methodological tools that challenge the conventional criticism of these five
films or other films of Buñuel beyond the scope of this book. Such a
conventional criticism has recognized the subversion of bourgeois values in
his films, but has perpetuated the habitual association of his cinema with
misogynist and homophobic attitudes. Thus, I reread Buñuel’s films from a
queer subject position in order to make possible a movement towards
alterity and to offer the subject the possibility of transforming his or her
apparent extreme subjectivity into an openness to and acceptance of
difference.

15
1. THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL:
SOCIAL OTHERNESS, FRAGMEN-
TATION AND MISE-EN-ABÎME
IN LOS OLVIDADOS
___________________________________________________________

To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them,
encircles them, and digests them in a gigantic consumption of bacteria. It ends by
replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the
boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at
himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space
where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.
He invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession.1

Roger Caillois’s analysis of the behaviour of insects that camouflage

themselves in the environment, thus linking them to schizophrenic forms of
loss of identity, illustrates metaphorically what seems to be the major
concern of a social realist film such as Los olvidados (1950).2 The aim of the
film apparently is to show the effects of environmental factors on the
development of socially marginal subjects. These poor children are excluded
from the modern city, the symbol of social progress, and from the benefits
of being a citizen. These boys thus occupy a territorio inhóspito.3 But how,
from a queer subject position, can we reread a film that is based on a
realistic denunciation of misery in the Mexican historical context of the
traumatic, accelerated push towards a modern industrial economy, as charac-
terized by the administration of Miguel Alemán (1946–52)?
To answer this question, I would like at one level to argue that, in Los
olvidados, the representation of the socially peripheral other against which
bourgeois society defines itself transgresses the hegemonic paradigms of sex,

16
 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

gender and class that structure bourgeois and heteronormative subjectivity. At

another level, reading in a way that goes beyond conventional semiotics, I shall
draw on Lacan’s notion of the Real to propose a critique of realism, or of
what passes for realism within our culture’s hegemonic order. This alternative
approach explores how Los olvidados, through a transgressive exemption from
symbolic meaning, could well be read as a liberation of sexuality. I will attempt
to elucidate the alternative counter-heterosexist understanding of sexuality
and sociality, which may already be implicit in Lacan’s own psychoanalytic
theory,4 thereby bringing psychoanalysis to the point of self-critique.

Roland Barthes’s Punctum

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identifies photography as a realm of pure
haunted spectatorship. He distinguishes between two orders of engagement
with the spectacle of the photograph. The first, less intense, level is that of
the coded studium, which belongs to the order of liking or disliking and
represents a kind of education in terms of knowledge, civility and politeness.
For Barthes, the studium, as a rational and linear way of reading photography,
is an analytic tool for reconciling the dangerous myth of the photograph
with socially accepted practices.5 The studium produces its characteristic
effect by its very lack of pathos, its affective neutrality. It thus does not
appeal to the viewer’s emotions.
The safe and polite interest of the studium contrasts with the intense
pleasure or pain of the uncoded punctum, which breaks or punctuates the
studium.6 The punctum, as an electrifying fragment that seizes and ravishes the
imagination, appeals to the viewer’s emotions by awakening a desire for a
further divestment of the self. The punctum, which is often a detail, and is
subject to some latency, ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow,
and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this
mark made by a pointed instrument. This word suits me all the better in that
it also refers to the notion of penetration’.7 The punctum does not, then,
come under the sway of the will, since it escapes the intentionality of the
photographer. Such a devalorization of the will corresponds to the
valorization of involuntary memory. Barthes argues that:

In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to

me (but perhaps memory sometimes would). … It suffices that the
image be large enough, that I do not have to study it (this would be
of no help at all), that, given right there on the page, I should receive
it here in my eyes.8

17
QUEERING BUÑUEL

For Barthes, the punctum participates in an economy of excess, since it is

always supplementary, marginal and decentred. Indebted here to Bataille,
Barthes associates the punctum with a useless expenditure with no exchange
and with the pleasure of jouissance. From this perspective the photograph
becomes an erotic text that breaches bliss through a process that escapes the
logic of the ego-cogito and in the course of which the subject engages in
other logics that are indifferent to moral and aesthetic categories. The subject
also struggles with meaning and with death. This, for Barthes, is the ultimate
stake and the final catastrophe of the disruptive force of the punctum.
Although every system of artistic representation, such as film, photogra-
phy or the literary text, is endowed with a specific modality of the detail, the
effect of the punctum in the photograph can be directly applied to other
media, including film. For Laura Mulvey, cinema’s relation to mobility is
transcended by the camera, by editing and ultimately by narrative. The
cinematic apparatus, when in projected motion, tends thus to disguise the
materiality of the individual frames that make up the celluloid strip. For
Barthes, the cinema was unable to activate the punctum that, according to
Mulvey, he found so moving in the still photograph. Concerned with an
‘aesthetic of delay’ based on repetition and return, Mulvey notes how new
moving images technologies, the electronic and the digital, have transformed
the way we experience film by means of delaying the image, returning to and
repeating certain moments and breaking down the linearity of narrative
continuity.9 Mulvey argues that halting the flow of film splits apart the
different levels of time that are usually fused together, and details acquire
the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects.10 Fiction
can be delayed and some marginal details, which are associated with spectral
fragments, can take on this kind of unexpected significance, threatening the
body of the film itself and activating in the spectator the disturbing sense of
reality that belongs to Barthes’s concept of the punctum.11 As Raymond
Bellour’s pioneering work with film fragments has shown us, the effect of
the punctum in the photograph can thus be directly applied to film. Jo
Labanyi rightly suggests that photographs, like film stills, play an important
role as images of a fragmentary, discontinuous, spectral past.12 In this
chapter, I shall argue that the representation of Jaibo as a socially marginal
character, the focus of the film on the fragmented body and the latent
homoeroticism in Los olvidados can be defined as punctual details that may or
may not seem to be detached from the semiotic structure of the film.13 I see
these punctual details, which do not guarantee Buñuel’s intentionality, as
specific signifiers that embody queer affirmations and transgressions.14 In

18
 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

the same way as the punctum, these affirmations or transgressions are asso-
ciated with the pleasure of jouissance. Kevin Kopelson argues that:

The erotic, however, is ununary, and even un-binary. The erotic is a

pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured. The erotic fissure is
an unnameable disturbance, an uncoded addition to the porno-
graphic. It is an overwhelming detail with a metonymic power of
expansion. It is an odd contradiction: a floating flash that illuminates
an erotic blind spot.15

This queer pleasure in subjective loss and disorientation punctures the social
and symbolic organization of the order of meaning of the dominant ideol-
ogy for the purpose of social control.16 My reading of punctual details in the
film articulates a fantasy of transgressive strategies that remains indispensable
for gender and queer theory.17 How can this fantasy allow us to imagine or
envision an interconnection between queerness and other categories of
social exclusion that might not be grounded in sexuality, such as the socially
peripheral other?

Social Otherness and the Aesthetic of Social Realism

How can we think of social otherness in Los olvidados in a way that enables
us to propose a positive identification with difference? According to
Althusser’s notion of interpellation, the dominant ideology imposes new
relations of uneven subordination inside the complex of the ideological state
apparatuses by constructing the illusion of individual identity and the
freedom to choose.18 Althusser’s notion helps us think about the processes
of social exclusion and discrimination that occur within institutional
practices. His critique of institutionalized power allows for the possibility of
contestation within those mechanisms of ideological interpellation and
social oppression. Dominic Keown, for instance, has elaborated a Marxist/
Althusserian reading of Buñuel’s œuvre according to which his protagonists
rebel against their acquiescence in ideological dictates. According to Keown,
most of Buñuel’s critics have only considered his ideological position in
terms of his ferocious critique of the bourgeoisie. Keown’s approach
elucidates how Buñuel’s films ‘are concerned with the ontological condition
of the individual in a capitalist system’19 by drawing on Marxist social
philosophy. From this perspective, in Los olvidados, the representation of the
socially peripheral other requires a reconsideration of the problem of social
exclusion in mainly modern bourgeois and capitalist societies. This political

19
QUEERING BUÑUEL

formulation in the film thus encourages us to situate ourselves in a critical

and oppositional ideological and political position.
Could the representation of the socially peripheral other in Los olvidados be
bound up with an objectification of the marginal world, thereby reinscribing
those same ideological preconceptions that the film attempts to subvert?
Does the socially peripheral other present itself as something like Jacques
Lacan’s category of the Real – that which resists symbolization, a gap-in-
knowledge that subverts or defeats the presumption to know it?20 Slavoj
Žižek argues that: ‘The Real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting
somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it.
Rather, the Real is nothing at all, just a void, and emptiness in a symbolic
structure marking some central impossibility.’21
From an orthodox Marxist perspective, the association of the socially peri-
pheral other with Lacan’s notion of the preontological Real could be seen as
a desubjectivization of the marginal subject. Such a relegation of the socially
marginal to a space of non-existence, to the space of the unnameable,
contradicts the Marxist view of the subproletariat as a class that is situated in
the central position of the revolutionary struggle for social change. Apart
from the prologue to the film, which I shall return to later, the film narrative
refuses to engage with social, economic or political explanations, or to offer
solutions to the situation of the subproletariat. Hence, the film could be
seen as offering an exoticized and eroticized view of Third World poverty
and Third World bodies that Buñuel offers to First World audiences.22
However, this orthodox Marxist theory fails to address the heterogeneity of
desire, including perverse desire, in ideology formations.23 The question of
the socially peripheral other could thus be reinterpreted within an epistemo-
logical framework that transgresses the rigid terminology within Marxist
cultural criticism by promoting the politics of perversion and of alterity
pushed to the point of nihilism.24 As we shall see, in the analysis of the repre-
sentation of Jaibo, this emancipatory approach towards alterity subverts the
hegemonic social and symbolic order’s suture of laws in the subject.
With regard to the question of social realism, Los olvidados engages
politically, to some degree, with the social protest against the ideological
values of the institutional revolution in Mexico during the 1950s. The film
also resists the dogmatic nationalist rhetoric and visual conventions of
classical Mexican cinema,25 which evolved out of the tradition of revolution-
ary representation. Functioning as a social documentary, the film seems to
construct a true26 portrayal of the lives of street children as a political
strategy to denounce social injustice, such as poverty, in contemporary

20
 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

Mexican urban society. Serving, thus, as a revisionist approach to the

revolutionary mythology propagated by the melodramatic films during the
golden age of Mexican cinema, such as the films of Emilio Fernández, Los
olvidados has been seen as obliquely anticipating a more auteurist, overtly
militant, left-oriented and formally experimental new cinema in Latin
America, epitomized by the postclassical generation of Mexican film
directors and filmmakers in Cuba, Argentina and Brazil. This new cinema,
which is referred to as New Latin American Cinema, or Third Cinema,
emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s to struggle against the neo-
colonialism that, though still tied to European sources, was increasingly
identified with the United States.27
Influenced by Vittorio de Sica’s Sciuscià (1946), Buñuel drew on Italian
neorealism to achieve this aesthetic and epistemological break with the
visual and moral conventions of classical Mexican and Hollywood cinema.
For instance, apart from some surrealist sequences and elements within the
film, Los olvidados seems to privilege an abrupt realistic concern with the
social problems of the so-called Third World, through a substantial use of
non-professional actors, location shooting and unadorned cinematography.
From this perspective, in Los olvidados Buñuel thus transforms this Italian
aesthetic within a specific Mexican or Latin American context to focus on
political action, thereby acquiring a new aesthetic, moral and political
position from which to raise social consciousness. Buñuel does not return,
however, to the official folklore or national symbols propagated by the
classical cinema. According to him, these national symbols were a product
of political manipulation and a bourgeois aberration.28 As Geoffrey Kantaris
has rightly observed, ‘Buñuel desublimates our potential attachment to
particular icons through the systematic deconstruction and defetishization of
the icons of classical Mexican cinema’.29
Hence, a truly political message may thus be communicated within an
aesthetic of social realism instead of the prefabricated beauty associated with
official artistic practices. Buñuel thus indicates a new direction for Mexican
and Latin American cinema whose aesthetic of social realism can speak
directly of the rationalism of the political models for social change.
Moreover, apart from the use of non-diegetic music, Los olvidados also chal-
lenges the viability of using the romantic aestheticism or sentimental natural-
ism of classical Mexican cinema30 to take on the revolutionary task of
undermining regressive ideological assumptions and criticizing the unfair
distribution of capital in Mexico during the 1950s. Classical Mexican cinema
had become politically alienating because of its association with melodrama

21
QUEERING BUÑUEL

and its imitation of the Hollywood paradigm. Refusing to acknowledge

Mexico’s process of modernization, classical Mexican cinema had thus become
inappropriate and counterproductive for cinematic practices that were seeking
to promote socio-political liberation at the threshold of modernity.
Confronting this process of social modernization, Los olvidados thus declares a
kind of independence from the conventional mainstream realism of classical
Mexican cinema.31 As J. Hoberman explains, ‘Los olvidados does not subscribe
to the sentimental naturalism with which the Mexican movie industry (even its
neorealist wing – the slum dramas of Alejandro Galindo, Ismael Rodríguez’s
Nosotros los pobres), traditionally represented indigenous poverty.’32
However, this aesthetic, political and epistemological approach fails to
address the registers of fantasy in the Buñuelian discourse and does not
recognize the impossibility of a strictly objective form of realism unmediated
by the intrusion of any form of subjectivity. Ana López contends that a claim
to provide a true depiction of reality stands in for what culture sees as authentic
at a particular time. López suggests that this claim would signal ‘a naïve belief
in the camera’s ability to record “truths” to capture a national reality or essence
without any mediation as if a simple inversion of the dominant culture were
sufficient to negate that culture and institute a true one’.33 López’s emphasis on
the issue of mediation to challenge the notion of authenticity in the cinema
makes us think of the effects of conventions, genres, forms and other kinds of
artifice in what might seem like mimetic realism.
Barthes also raises the question of what is real, particularly in his essay
‘The Reality Effect’, where he demystifies the notion of a transparent real at
the core of the mimetic enterprise of realism.34 For Barthes, realism is a lure
or a ‘referential illusion’, whereby the referent stands in as the true signifier
to form an unavowed ‘vraisemblance’.35 When one thinks one is embracing the
real in its concrete materiality, one is in fact in the grip of a ‘reality effect,
where what we are given is a category and not a thing’.36 Dollimore has
argued that ‘for some this is a moment of disappointment in which the real,
the true, and the authentic are surrendered to, or contaminated by, the
factitious and the contrived.’37
The film is inspired by accounts in newspapers of urban squalor, by the
director’s own visits to some of Mexico City’s slums, and it also makes
references to authentic characters. Evans suggests, however, that ‘Los
olvidados moves beyond the prose of documentary into the poetry of the
Mexican Gothic, transforming dross into metaphor, the ordinary into the
fantastic, the known into the unknown and disturbing’.38 From this
perspective, as we shall see throughout this chapter, an emphasis on irony,

22
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artifice and performativity allows the film critic to develop a critical attitude
that involves looking at filmic texts less as reflections of reality than as
constructed sets of words, images and sounds that are at a distance from
reality. García Riera suggests that Buñuel introduces these ‘elementos de
irracionalidad para no seguir al pie de la letra un argumento, una realidad fotográfica’
(elements of irrationality in order not to follow an argument, a photographic
reality, too literally).39
More importantly, on the basis of a psychoanalytic understanding of the
Real extrapolated from readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the kind of
Real I strive to capture in this chapter goes beyond the representation of
real issues and conventions of verisimilitude in the cinema. From this per-
spective, the film recovers the heterogeneous within the homogeneous idea
of reason40 to think of representation as linked to a partial and phantasmatic
engagement with what Lacanian psychoanalysis defines as the Real. Edmond
Cros suggests that ‘la obra filmográfica de Luis Buñuel está dominada por un
realismo radical que no se detiene en las fronteras de lo visible en la medida en que lo real
representado se encuentra siempre convocando lo invisible’ (Buñuel’s filmography is
dominated by a radical realism that does not stop at the frontiers of the
visible, in the sense that the representation of the real is always alluding to
the invisible).41 The emphasis on the Real is a turn within Lacanian theory
away from the symbolic. This association of representation with the
impossibility of seizing the Real seems to open the field of meaning, to
extend it outside culture and, as we shall see, subvert less the content than
the whole practice of meaning. But how can the Real be associated with a
queer representational strategy?

The Real in Lacan

Lacan associates the Real with formlessness, a trace or surplus that resists
symbolization. In other words, the Real is identified as both a traumatic
and a desired otherness that the subject cannot represent or incorporate.
The Real is thus identified with the inexpressible, with what cannot be
spoken about, for it does not belong to language.42 For Lacan, the Real
order is associated with the dimensions of sexuality and death. The Real is
thus the order in which the subject meets both inexpressible enjoyment and
death. Lacan argues that: ‘In other words, behind what is named, there is
the unnameable. It is in fact because it is unnameable, with all the resonance
you can give to this name, that it is akin to the quintessential unnameable,
that is to say to death.’43 But if queerness can only occupy a social and
psychic position that is relegated to the realm of the unrepresentable Real,

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is this part of a homophobic inscription in the film or in Lacanian

psychoanalysis?
According to Butler, in traditional Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is the
paternal function that eventually allows the subject to become a subject of
language and therefore to acquire normative subjectivity. Butler argues that:

In Lacan’s theory, the Paternal law structures all linguistic signification,

termed the ‘Symbolic’, and so becomes a universal organizing principle
of culture itself. This law creates the possibility of meaningful language
and, hence, meaningful experience, through the repression of primary
libidinal drives, including the radical dependency of the child on the
maternal body.44

From Butler’s perspective, the phallus implies a univocal model of desire

insofar as all desiring positions are mapped in relation to a singular term.
Moreover, in her critique of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Butler maps
abjection onto homophobia. According to Butler, these abject anxieties and
pleasures might contribute to a psychotic dissolution of the self, which
stands for a phobic abjection of subjects outside heteronormativity. Butler
identifies the limits of a psychoanalytic theory that installs its version of
signification through the abjection or exclusion of the other. As Butler
argues, ‘the threat of a collapse of the masculine into the abjected feminine
threatens to dissolve the heterosexual desire. It carries the fear of occupying
a site of homosexual abjection.’45 Hence, Butler theorizes heterosexuality as
a principle that needs to position homosexuality in the abject in order to
constitute itself. For Butler, the description of homosexual or lesbian
experience in these terms is effected from the outside, revealing more about
the fantasies or anxieties of heterosexual culture. The latter produces these
fantasies or anxieties to defend itself against its own homosexual possi-
bilities.46 Therefore, the association of homosexuality with the experience of
abjection reproduces, according to Butler, the division between the symbolic
and the Real. This division serves to validate those experiences within the
symbolic that simultaneously permit a manifestation of the borders.47 Butler
suggests that:

There is always an ‘outside’ and, indeed, a ‘constitutive antagonism’

seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that
serves the borders between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of symbolic
intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social and historical analysis

24
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that is required, to conflate into ‘one’ law the effect of a convergence

of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation
of the boundary which is central to the democratic project.48

In her endeavour to clarify the ideology of homophobia, Butler also

grounds the process of differentiation from and identification with the
experience of abjection and the unintelligible in structural as well as material
or referential terms. What Butler does not discuss is that, for Lacan, the
phallus, as the foundational signifier of the symbolic as signifying system,
remains determined by the continuous pressure of an anal formlessness.49
Tim Dean has contended that Butler’s appropriation of psychoanalysis for
feminism and queer theory seems to obscure psychoanalysis’s greatest
potential for a subversive and radical critique of heteronormative sexuality.50
If we associate Lacan’s notion of the Real with multiple forms of sexual
identification and with heterogeneous possibilities for productive uncon-
scious desire, we can show how the political and ethical dimensions of this
theoretical concept can be linked to a queer theoretical project. This
association may be achieved by developing our sense of empathy with
Buñuel’s contradictions and repressions within the film and towards psycho-
analysis. As is well known, queer theory’s critique of heteronormative
identity derives from Lacan’s anti-establishment psychoanalytic critique of
American ego psychology and post-Lacanian critiques of traditional notions
of identity and subjectivity.
If an adequate signifier cannot represent the unintelligible Real, I shall argue
throughout this chapter and throughout the entire book, then the
manifestation of the Real can be held to be achieved through the artifice of
abjection.51 Even if the Real cannot be represented, it can be repeated and it
can be understood in a pre-symbolic and post-symbolic way, which prevents a
closure of the social field.52 According to Robert Miklitsch, the Lacanian Real
of the 1950s differs from the Real of the 1960s and 1970s.53 According to
Miklitsch, in his early seminars Lacan identifies the Real as a pre-symbolic
reality that always returns to the same place, even if all symbolic reality
perishes. In his post-1950s seminars, the Real is less a pre-symbolic reality that
falls outside representation than a kind of excess that emerges as the surplus
effect of representation. The Real is not a matter of natural law. Rather it is an
effect of language that is associated, less chronologically than structurally, with
a remainder or trace in the symbolic. Susan Stewart notes that ‘we must analyse
the Real not as that which resists language because such a possibility is already
weakly reinscribed within the possibilities of language itself.’54

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A return to the Real as trauma implies a shift from ‘reality as an effect of

representation to the Lacanian Real as a thing of trauma’.55 In the same way
as trauma, the Real is relational and oppositional, in a subversive sense, for
it resists assimilation to any imaginary or symbolic universe and incorpor-
ation into the economy of the subject and thus incapacitates that subject. At
this unconscious level, as the epigraph of this chapter suggests, the subject
becomes dispossessed of being. The subject does not find a way of naming
himself or herself, because he or she lacks the fundamental referent, the ‘I
am’. Following Lacan, the notion of identification implies human aggression
and cultural prohibitions. A Lacanian psychoanalytic rereading of Buñuel’s
Los olvidados liberates sexuality from a fixed identity politics agenda. It also
extends the politics of sexuality beyond the civil rights of sexual minorities
by articulating a kind of rhetoric that goes beyond problematic normative
notions of sexual liberation and pushes gay radicalism into contradiction
with its liberal origins. A distinction between sex and gender, or a distinction
between masculine and feminine, thus cannot be drawn.56 What is difficult is
not to liberate sexuality, according to a libertarian project, but to release it
from meaning, including from transgression as meaning. As Rosaria
Champagne argues, ‘queer communities do not share a consensus about
whether coming out is politically progressive, regressive, or neither. Our
meaningful contradictions also explain why visibility does not automatically
translate into liberation and why social change does not happen at the level
of representation.’57 It is to that encounter with queer pleasures and the Real
that this chapter now turns.

The Cosmetic and the Abject: The Body of the City and the Female Body
Los olvidados opens with freeze frames of the slums of a modern city and a
title that proclaims that the film is entirely based on actual incidents and that
all the characters are authentic. The film combines authentic outdoor
settings and stylized studio interiors. The art direction of Edward Fitzgerald
and the photography of Gabriel Figueroa, who collaborated with Buñuel in
several of his films of the Mexican period, visually convey the misery of
these overcrowded and filthy slums. Figueroa’s cinematic style was associ-
ated with the physical formalism of Emilio Fernández’s films. Fernández’s
movies often show Mexico’s beautiful skies and exotic landscapes. In
Fernández’s films, the use of an oblique, as opposed to monocular, per-
spective characterizes Figueroa’s cinematography.58 The latter is peculiarly
characteristic of the Western pictorial tradition. While a monocular per-
spective emphasizes the three-dimensionality of the space within the scene,

26
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as if the picture were a window onto the real world, an oblique perspective
emphasizes the lack of depth of the scene. Figueroa’s different conception
of space from that of the European and North American pictorial tradition
can be read as a representational strategy that was part of the Mexican
nationalist rhetoric, which was at the core of the collaboration between
Fernández and Figueroa.
In his Brazilian film, Cidade de Deus (2002), which could be seen as a
descendant of Los olvidados via Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981), Fernando
Meirelles, who was trained in advertising and music video production,
successfully combines a stylized mise-en-scène and cinematography, fast editing
and fragmented stories with a realist concern with social marginality in the
Brazilian society of the 1960s and 1970s. Meirelles’s recent film demon-
strates how the more hedonistic aesthetics and techniques characteristic of
the world of advertising and music video can be integrated into cinematic
language, and how this hybridization is not incompatible with the film’s
more serious social denunciation of misery and violence. As Paul Julian
Smith suggests, ‘the brilliant stylization here could not be further from the
miserabilist neorealism of earlier Latin American urban cinema.’59 Although
we cannot read Mereilles’s advertisement-influenced aesthetic in Los
olvidados, I shall reread Los olvidados through Meirelles’s representation of
social misery and violence in Brazil by means of a stylized cinematic
language in Cidade de Deus as a way of retrieving the ‘aesthetic of garbage’ in
Los olvidados.60
Unlike Smith, orthodox critics of Latin American cinema have disavowed
the possibility of an aestheticized representation of social misery in Los
olvidados, or any other social realist film. Critics have favoured miserabilist
neorealism – to use Smith’s term – as a more adequate language to create a
socially and politically denunciative film. Contemporary critical reviews of
Los olvidados even condemned the film for containing some heterogeneous
elements that could not be contained within a pure realist aesthetic. For
instance, Bosley Crowther, a film critic for the New York Times, found the
film ‘vicious’ and ‘shocking’. Crowther said that ‘although this “Mexican
semi-documentary” is made with meticulous realism and unquestioned
fidelity to facts, its qualifications as dramatic entertainment – or even social
reportage – are dim. Buñuel has orchestrated another sort of transgression.’61
Against the mimetic enterprise at the core of the defence of social realism
at the expense of, or to the disadvantage of, the ironic artifice of represen-
tation, we could, then, reread the image of the slums in Los olvidados as a
subversive celebration of an aesthetic of trash or garbage. As Meirelles

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demonstrates explicitly in Cidade de Deus, this ‘hedonistic’ celebration of

garbage can also function to subvert the bourgeois social and symbolic
order.62 In Los olvidados, Buñuel attempts to capture the squalid interiors
human beings share with animals, and that are cluttered with detritus, in
order to reflect urban depravity. At the end of the film, Pedro’s dead body
is deposited on a pile of rubbish located in a city slum. The child’s dead
body ends up fulfilling his condition as residue. Pedro’s body is literally
placed in the space that society had previously obliged him to inhabit
symbolically.
If we celebrate an aesthetic of garbage in the film, as a mixed syncretic
site, garbage mingles the rich and the poor, centre and periphery, becoming
a place of buried memories and traces. This place of violent, surprising
juxtapositions explores the space where symbols are not stable, where the
concepts of ‘faeces’ (money, gift), ‘baby’ and ‘penis’ are ill distinguished
from one another and are easily interchangeable.63 The aesthetic of
garbage in Los olvidados captures the sense of marginality, of being
condemned to survive within a condition of scarcity, of being the dumping
ground that distils and ironically reappropriates society’s contradictions.
But the aesthetic of garbage also has a spiritual dimension through the
transformation of worthless objects into something of value. Hence,
garbage becomes an artistic strategy that challenges the bourgeois distri-
bution of space and bourgeois subjective interrelationships64 by celebrating
the scum, leftovers and refuse of all classes. The aesthetic of garbage resists
formal shaping, cultural sublimation and ideological rationalization or
redemption.
The opening image and title of Los olvidados are followed by several shots
of modern metropolitan urban centres, such as New York, Paris and
London, which Buñuel equates with Mexico City because all these modern
cities are motors of industrialization and are inhabited by a vast and
undernourished social class. The camera shows landmark monuments and
buildings that characterize these modern metropolises, such as the Eiffel
Tower in Paris or Big Ben in London. A narrator’s voice-over speaking
directly to the audience about the problem of poverty in these industrialized
cities accompanies these stereotypical postcard-like shots of modern urban
centres. Hence, we understand that poverty does not disappear with a shift
from agricultural to industrial economies. The narrator thus seems to
contest a teleological conception of history, the product of a positivist
philosophical mode of thought, by denouncing in these opening shots the
unequal distribution of wealth in Latin American as well as in European

28
 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

countries and North America. However, the narrator’s presumed subversive

ideological purpose is immediately contradicted by the solution he proposes.
He suggests a solution to poverty that is based, paradoxically, on the same
teleological conception of history that produces social otherness. Given the
inherent ideological contradictions in the opening scene, we could read the
film as an ironic commentary on the image of social cohesion, progress and
reform that Mexican official discourses propagated at the expense of
disavowing the structural causes that provoked youth crime and marginality.
The direct address of the narrator’s voice-over to the audience forces us to
take some kind of social responsibility for what we are about to witness.
Buñuel’s use of documentary techniques produces an apparently realistic
portrayal of the social situation. As we explained earlier, this effect of
realism and authenticity is a filmic strategy to manipulate the spectator’s
engagement with the subject matter. This ‘unmediated’ realism, which
attempts to disregard the mediating process of the camera and the process
of filmmaking, gives the spectator the sensation that cinema is not the
representation of reality but is reality itself.
It is interesting to note that the camera tilts up from the ground so that
the spectator can pay attention to these international tourist attractions. It
also offers panoramic and bird’s eye views of these modern cities. An aerial
shot of the Zócalo dissolves into a group of street kids who are playing at
bullfighting in one of the miserable and chaotic suburbs that haunt Mexico
City. Julia Tuñón suggests that ‘la metrópoli moderna, limpia y ordenada sólo será
real, si acaso, para un grupo social y se acomoda en tensión constante en el avasallante
proceso de crecimiento urbano’ (the modern metropolis, clean and tidied, will only
be real, perhaps, for a social group, and in the overwhelming process of
urban growth it accommodates itself by means of constant tension).65 The
first scene showing the street kids playing at bullfighting in one of these
arrabales allows the spectator to perceive how the socially abject can filter
through the cosmetic façade of bourgeois modernity. As Tuñón rightly
suggests, ‘la modernidad es tan sólo una apariencia que contradice los discursos oficiales
y deshace las ilusiones de algunos’ (modernity is only an appearance that
contradicts the official discourses and undoes the illusions of some
people).66 This blurring of the line between the cosmetic façade of
bourgeois modernity and the socially abject becomes threatening and
generates a situation of horror and anxiety. We can extend this analysis to
suggest that, in Los olvidados, the socially abject is associated with a breach or
threatened injury to that ‘skin’ of modernity. Tuñón goes on to say that, ‘la
primera ruptura de la ciudad es con el suburbio, que, en algunos momentos, parece una

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herida de la ciudad, y, en otros, un apéndice estorboso e inútil ’ (the first rupture of

the city is with the suburb, which, in some moments, looks like a wound of
the city, and, in others, a hindering and useless appendix.)67
In psychoanalytic terms, this socially abject space adds a phantasmatic
dimension to that juxtaposition or point where two meanings directly
coincide and become indistinguishable. Buñuel seems to foreground that
empty object, which is simultaneously the intimate kernel and foreign body
located on the border between opposite terms, by recovering the socially
abject that lurks behind the superficial mask of modernity. The empty
object, which Lacan defines as l’extimité, points to what is neither exterior
nor interior but that breaks the continuous skin to reveal the empty centre,
the space of the Real.68 If we associate the socially abject with the Lacanian
Real, Los olvidados thus reveals and uncovers the modern city’s series of
defensive strategies of protection or postponement that need to be played
out on the border between the inside and outside in order to cover the
empty object or to defer the encounter with the Thing.
Several of the actions of the film, such as the violent aggression against
the blind patriarchal figure and Jaibo’s sadistic murder of Julián, occur in
front of a kind of grid structure, or unfinished construction, which could be
read as an allusion to the myths of the Enlightenment and of modernity
being an incomplete project. The film’s mise-en-scène thus depicts the
incompatible coexistence of construction and destruction at the core of
modernity. As Tuñón contends, ‘la ciudad moderna es un espacio que al habitarse
olvida, que al urbanizarse deshumaniza y que al edificarse destruye’ (the modern city
is a space that as it is inhabited, forgets, as it is urbanized, dehumanizes and
as it is built, destroys).69 In the specific context of Latin America, the
continent’s colonial dependency on Spain, historically one of the least indus-
trialized nations in Western Europe, decelerated the modernization project.
Moreover, the juxtaposition of different cultural traditions in Latin America,
which Néstor García Canclini defined as ‘multitemporal heterogeneity’, has
prevented a ‘natural’ evolution from agriculture to industrialization.70
In her feminist sociocultural account of Buñuel’s Los olvidados, Jean
Franco argues that Buñuel challenged the authoritarian paternalism of the
Porfiriato years from 1876 to 1911. This still haunts the benevolent
paternalism of the reformist state, propagated by Miguel Alemán’s insti-
tutionalized revolutionary government, in which Los olvidados is set. Accord-
ing to Franco, the film subverts the official image of a Mexico that is
making a smooth transition to modernity.71 Franco attributes the
incompatible coexistence of the notions of construction and destruction in

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 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

the film to uneven modernization in Mexico, in which the archaic becomes

an unredeemed and unredeemable area that the rational modern city needs
to eject from its body. The concept of the human body has been
historically applied to the project of the construction of cities.72 According
to Franco’s metaphorical association of the modern city with the human
body, the modern city has to eject the corpses of the two main characters,
Pedro and Jaibo, as part of the symbolic process of exclusion, purification
and organization that underpins the transition to modernization in Mexico
during the 1940s and 1950s.
In the surrealist sequence of Pedro’s dream, Buñuel challenges the film’s
surface realism. Pedro sees the dead Julián, who is covered in blood and
laughing underneath his bed, and his mother Marta approaching him in slow
motion, a technique Buñuel has hardly ever used elsewhere. Marta talks to
Pedro without moving her lips. Pedro’s voice is also disembodied and
unsynchronized. Pedro’s mother gives him a torn piece of raw meat that
Jaibo snatches from him. The threatening presence of Jaibo in Pedro’s
dream points to how the expression of bonding between the two men is
represented through their rivalry for a woman.73 The latter becomes the
token of the exchange and power between men, thereby perpetuating the
patriarchal and heterosexist system. The raw meat, which looks like an
aborted foetus, functions as a metaphor for or metonymic displacement of
the body of Pedro’s mother.
Evans has drawn on Barbara Creed’s association of abjection with the
feminine in the horror movie to argue that the raw meat can be interpreted
as Marta’s torn vagina, which is the object of terror and desire for the male
unconscious and works against a scenario of the Freudian fetishist’s dis-
avowal of the perceived lack of a penis.74 From Evans’s perspective, the
monstrous apparition of Marta in Pedro’s dream symbolizes the figure of
woman as castrator rather than as castrated, as defined by Freud.
This association between abjection and the feminine is furthered by Laura
Mulvey’s theorization of the dialectical relationship between the cosmetic
and the abject body in her analysis of the different self-representations by
the contemporary photographer Cindy Sherman. According to Mulvey,
Sherman moved from the external artifice conveyed in her early photo-
graphs to the internal monstrousness and horror of her body she explored in
her ‘Anti-fashion’, ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘Disgust’, or ‘Bulimia’ series of the 1980s.
Mulvey’s analysis of Sherman’s self-representations rushes towards the
signified without attending to the way that the signifiers operate in the
picture, such as the disorienting framing, the lighting, the distance of the

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human face, the dislocating camera angle or the grainy texture of the picture.
These formal elements thus contribute to the sense of horror and anxiety of
the photograph. However, Sherman’s development from the cosmetic to the
abject allows Mulvey to argue that ‘this image grotesquely parodies the kind
of feminine image that is geared to erotic consumption and turns upside
down conventional codes of female allure and elegance.’75
After this presentation of Evans’s and Mulvey’s views on the dialectical
relationship between cosmetic femininity and abjection, I follow Franco’s
notion of the body of the city to draw an analogy between the monstrous
otherness – to use Evans’s term – located behind the cosmetic masquerade
of femininity in the body of Pedro’s mother and what is repressed in or
excluded from the construction of the body of the modern city. The latter is
a ‘ciudad rota, maltrecha, escenario preciso para sus personajes que siempre buscan,
escenario paralelo a los cuerpos torturados y desmembrados que fascinan al director’
(torn, injured city, a precise stage for its characters who are always searching,
a stage to parallel the tortured and dismembered bodies that fascinate the
filmmaker).76 In Los olvidados, the socially abject epitomizes what is repressed
or excluded from the body of the city. Mulvey also argues that, although the
Freudian notion of fetishism has to be distinguished from that of Marx,
both of them connected fetishism with the function of concealing.77 In the
Marxist notion of fetishism, the commodity fetish conceals a network of
social relations. In the Freudian notion, on the other hand, sexual fetishism
conceals the lack around which the symbolic network is articulated. Hence,
Marx and Freud both offered a critique of the modern subject by revealing
the construction of social and symbolic structures in the form of fetishes.
More importantly, while the ideology of the fetish is also the ideology of
phallocentrism, the Real subverts the symbolic mechanisms of disavowal
that are constructed in relation to the abject. The dialectical relationship
between the cosmetic and the abject in both the female body and in the
modern city in Los olvidados reveals the fragility of these bodies. If the
cosmetic denies the materiality of the image, the abject reintroduces and
reaffirms the tactile, the physical and the visceral. The notion of tactility has
been repressed in the construction of the rational model of thought that is at
the core of the project of modernity. The Real therefore subverts the
symbolic mechanisms of disavowal of the perceived wound that the fetishist
constructs in relation to the female body and that modernity constructs in
relation to the socially abject.
In Los olvidados, the Real thus becomes the trace of trauma. The Real pro-
vokes an anxiety and reveals the psychic vulnerability in modern hetero-

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sexual and patriarchal subjecthood, which is culturally constructed through

complex dialectics of power. If the soft, fragmented, liquid body is linked to
what is constituted as other, this kind of body in this film is a threat to the
ego because it is conceived of as provoking the possibility of its dissolution
and reaching a stage of non-differentiation. The Real, in this sequence of Los
olvidados, has not been ejected. From this perspective, the film points to the
way in which modern subjectivity contains the Real subject within its
symbolic mandate. As we have argued, the project of the Enlightenment
requires the repudiation of the detritus of the self. This process of exclusion
requires a kind of monster, which stands for everything that modern culture
has to repress. However, this monster of the Enlightenment reveals that the
latter is marked by a failure of complete determination.78 As Mladen Dolar
argues: ‘Ideology consists of a social attempt to integrate the uncanny, to
make it bearable, to assign it a place, and the criticism of ideology is caught
in the same framework if it tries to reduce it to another kind of content or
to make the content conscious and explicit.’79
To sum up, the film challenges the hegemonic ideology because the latter
needs to assert its social power by expelling the visceral and tactile abject
from its body. As we shall see, the Real in Los olvidados is associated with an
ecstatic shattering or traumatic breaking that counters the modern subject
with images of the fragmented body or with tropes of the horrific monster
of the repressed.

Detecting the Camp Aesthetic and Homoeroticism

In his reading of Los olvidados, Lillo explains that childhood poverty had
been a favourite theme in Mexican melodramas prior to Los olvidados. Lillo
suggests that these films were made for the purpose of developing a
compassionate sensibility in the audience. Instead of reflecting a political
challenge to the official vision of Mexico as a prosperous and rich country,
these melodramas were a confirmation of the conformist bourgeois
ideology.80 He argues that the kind of poverty represented in these films was
a poverty reconstructed in a film studio. According to him, this false and
artificial treatment of poverty in these popular films may invite a ‘camp’
reading of them.81 Lillo also suggests that poverty is treated in Los olvidados
in a way that attempts to break with the artificial mise-en-scène conventionally
used in these Mexican melodramas.
Lillo’s argument seems to privilege the critical tradition – described earlier
– that favours the social realist aesthetic over the exposition of the film’s
artificiality and stylization. Moreover, Lillo’s argument implicitly rejects the

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possibility of subjecting Los olvidados to a camp reading by emphasizing how

it differs from prior cinematic representations of poverty in aesthetic and
ideological terms. Without disagreeing entirely with Lillo’s approach, we can
nonetheless trace some continuity between Los olvidados and the emphasis in
these other melodramas on the theatricality of cinematic representation.
Such a reading is already an example of the praxis of camp spectatorship.
Richard Dyer offers a definition of camp as ‘a certain taste in art and
entertainment, a certain sensibility’.82 Camp is not inherent in a film, but is
found in the way the viewer reads the surface or style of a film differently
from its conventionally accepted content. Although the film presents no
overt instances of same-sex desire and displays minimal homoeroticism, a
camp reading of Los olvidados involves rereading small signs as having great
potential for queering the film.83
For instance, the group of street kids stop playing at bullfighting to smoke
a cigarette and talk about Jaibo, who has just escaped from a reformatory,
which is one of the institutional symbols created by the Mexican reformist
state.84 The street kids’ action of smoking becomes a symbolic or distinctive
social code that reassures them about their masculine behaviour according
to their socially marginal set of values and assumptions. According to the
sociologist Annick Prieur, Mexican sexual identity has not been historically
based on object choices. The macho can practice homosexual sex without
being defined as a joto. The macho can demonstrate his virility by playing the
man’s part in sexual encounters with either women or men, experiencing a
flexible cartography of desire.85 Although these gender and sexual markers
have historically differed in working- or middle-class sexual and gender
practices, Prieur suggests that Mexican heterosexual masculinity has more to
do with how the male performs his masculine gender socially. Therefore, the
joto, which would be the Mexican equivalent of a contemporary Anglo-
American or European definition of a gay subject, is identified as such
because of his failure to integrate his physiological sex with his gender role.
The performance of masculinity is achieved through an exaggeration of the
conventional representational forms that male subjects must impersonate to
conform to an identity society has established.86 When one of the kids refuses to
smoke he is called ‘mariquita’, which is a homophobic insult.
Homophobia here can be read as the irrational fear of the other in oneself
or a symptom of ambivalent social bonds as a way of enforcing the power of
heteronormativity as the dominant social practice. How could we read this
performance of homophobic masculinity from a camp spectatorship
position? According to Dollimore, camp is situated at the point of emer-

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gence of the artificial from the real, culture from nature, or when the real
collapses into artifice, nature into culture.87 If the politics of camp
emphasizes and exposes the theatricality and manipulations that are inherent
in the constructions of gender and sexual roles, we could interpret the
performance of homophobic masculinity here as a ‘heightened awareness and
appreciation for disguise, impersonation, the projection of personality, and the
distinctions between instinctive and theatrical behaviour’.88 The artificial
social enactment of these street kids’ masculinity thus renders gender a
question of aesthetics. Jack Babuscio argues that:

Camp, by focusing on the outward appearances of role, implies that

roles and in particular sex roles are superficial – a matter of style.
Finding stars camp is not to mock them; it is more a way of poking
fun at the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and sexual identifi-
ations which our society uses to oppress its women and repress its
men.89

Later on in the film, a policeman, and thus an official representative of the

law, is looking for Pedro in his house. The anti-hero Jaibo attempts to cross
the boundaries between his marginal space and the space of the represen-
tative of the law by offering him a cigarette. This action becomes a strategy
of seduction by Jaibo towards the policeman. The camera’s attention to
Jaibo’s way of posing against the wall, which suggests erotic intensity,
accentuates the possibility of male-to-male seduction. The physical intimacy
of the street kids’ relations also emphasizes Buñuel’s play on intimations of
homoeroticism or homosociality. There thus exists a conradiction between
the kids’ attempt to define their masculinity within heterosexual normativity
and their engagement in some kinds of homoerotic activity, even if these
homosocial bonds often perpetuate the patriarchal and heterosexist system
of punishing and excluding those subjects who do not abide by the
heternormative rules.
In the film, young Pedro plays a kind of Oedipal role in relation to his
symbolic father, Jaibo. The relationship established between these two male
characters involves the dynamic of rivalry and tension the Oedipal narrative
implies. We could suggest that the Oedipus–Laius tension involves an
implicit homoerotic relation between father and son.90 In the film, more-
over, this rivalry between father and son implies anal pleasure. Near the end
of the film, Jaibo is fighting Pedro. Buñuel shows Jaibo sitting on top of
Pedro’s genitalia. A close-up of this position directs our attention towards

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this particular detail, which fills most of the frame. Jaibo’s sadistic behaviour
towards Pedro thus coexists with the act of being symbolically penetrated.
The film’s implicit focus on homoeroticism is also expressed in the erotic
interchange of looks between Jaibo and Cacarizo. In symbolic terms, the
erotic complicity established between Jaibo and Cacarizo alludes to what
Anglo-American gay discourse and queer theory define as the space of the
closet.91 Jaibo and Cacarizo thus perform a speech act of silence, which is
epitomized by their complicity over Julián’s murder. Pedro ultimately
discloses this speech act of silence.92
How can Buñuel’s incorporation of religious iconography into the film be
reread within a camp aesthetic? When Pedro’s mother visits him in the
prison, she is dressed in a manto that covers her hair, thus allowing us to
associate her with the maternal Virgin as represented in religious paintings,
such as Piero della Francesca’s Madonna in trono col bambino e santi. Dalí’s
Madonna de Port Lligat could be seen as a modern version of Piero della
Francesca’s early Renaissance painting. Buñuel draws on these pictorial
representations of madonnas in order to associate Pedro’s mother with the
Virgin, even if she has not been coded within the model of marianismo.93
The theme of the mother is a Mexican obsession par excellence. Marianismo
has been the conventional pattern of the socialization of the white woman
in Mexican society, thereby polarizing the gender positions of Mexican
society.
This image of Pedro’s mother also reminds us of the pictorial quality of
the images of the black-shawled women in Visconti’s La terra trema (1948).
Although Visconti’s film is characterized by the extended length of its shots,
a defining mark of the film syntax of Italian neorealism, Visconti was heavily
criticized for representing poor women in a stylized manner. Detractors of
Visconti even alleged that the women in the film looked more like models
on a catwalk than poor women from a fishing village in the south of Italy.94
What the critical consensus found unacceptable was the beautiful pictorial
quality of Visconti’s use of cinematic images. Advocates of the ontology of
film as an unmediated recording of reality did not appreciate that the form
of pictorial realism that underpins Visconti’s film could also be used for
narrative or conceptual purposes.95
In addition, if we read the representation of Marta in Los olvidados through
Visconti’s lyrical exaltation of the pictorial quality of the images of women
in La terra trema, we could suggest that such pictorial realism produces a
deconstructive displacement of the sacred through its allusion to religious
images. The discourse of religion is thus repeated here with a critical distance

36
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that allows an ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity.

The figure of Marta is reinscribed through this subversion and extension of
the symbolism of Christianity. Buñuel’s allusion to the maternal Virgin
allows him to produce a deconstructive displacement from the realm of the
sacred to the marginal space of the prison. Pedro’s mother reappropriates
the image of the Virgin without falling into the conventional gender ideol-
ogy of Mexican society. The glamorized performance of Estela Inda and her
exaggerated femininity are emphasized by what Marvin D’Lugo identifies as
‘her incongruous costume mix of rebozo and high heels and angelic face,
which seems to parody the notion of the suffering indigenous mother
figure’.96 This particular image of femininity allows us to associate Estela
Inda with those fetishized divas of classical Mexican cinema, such as
Dolores del Río and María Félix, with whom the queer spectator may
identify and whom he or she may parody.
To sum up, we can associate the camp sensibility in Los olvidados with an
invasion and subversion of conflicting sensibilities through parody, pastiche
and exaggeration. The camp sensibility in the film does not, however, erase
previous practices, even if these are antipathetic to the aesthetic and psycho-
logical criteria of queer cultural productions. Instead, it allows for a coexistence
of divergent visions. Buñuel hybridizes the image repertoire of Mexican
popular culture aesthetics, thereby reintegrating the notion of camp into his
cinematic project. From this perspective, Los olvidados could undermine the
depth model of identity, being a kind of parody and mimicry that hollows
out from within, making depth recede to its surfaces. As Dollimore has
suggested, the hollowing-out of the deep self is a queer pleasure, a release
from the subjective correlatives of the dominant morality such as normality
and authenticity.97 A camp aesthetic allows the coexistence of binary cat-
egories that would conventionally be considered to be antithetical, such as
theatricality and authenticity or intensity and irony. The camp sensibility,
which I have argued is present in Los olvidados, shakes these fixed polarities
and privileges theatricality and irony over authenticity and intensity.

The Social Outlaw

In his essay on the figure of Christ in Buñuel’s œuvre, Cros suggests that
Christ coexists ambivalently with the figure of Satan throughout Buñuel’s
cinema. Cros argues, ‘no hay duda de que la figura de Cristo sufre una evidente de-
construcción en toda la obra de Buñuel en la medida en que siempre se difracta en una
“sistemática de reversibilidad” que le hace alternar con Satanás’ (there is no doubt
that Christ’s figure suffers an evident deconstruction in all Buñuel’s work to

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the point of always being diffracted by means of a ‘systematic of reversibil-

ity’ that makes him alternate with Satan).98 In similar vein, the mise-en-scène in
Los olvidados emphasizes Jaibo’s frequent movement between the poles of
good and evil. For instance, when Jaibo visits the workshop where Pedro
works, we see smoke coming out of the machines, suggesting that Jaibo is
born out of the flames of hell. Paradoxically, on the right hand side of the
frame, we see the shadow of a cross, which is conventionally associated with
goodness. Jaibo, who is one of the anti-heroes in the film, reinforces his
socially marginal position by not having a family and rejecting the insti-
tutional support of society. This character does not envision any positive
perspective on his future. He is, thus, devoid of any opportunity to establish
affective links within a family network or to exercise solidarity with his
peers, who belong to the same marginal space. This socially peripheral
‘other’ is deprived of any possibility of redemption99 and cannot escape
from the ‘logic of disorder’ that pushes non-privileged subjects ‘toward a life
of crime and at the same time represses criminal behaviour with violence’.
The latter ‘generates more brutality, which demands more repression, which
encourages criminal behaviour, which in turn engenders more repression in
a vicious cycle that never ends because it feeds off itself’.100
Jean Franco rightly suggests that Jaibo is less a delinquent than a destruc-
tive force utterly at odds with liberal-humanistic values101 because he is
ignorant of social taboos and boundaries and hostile to bourgeois insti-
tutions. Jaibo thus acts out his desires as if law and society did not exist.
Franco argues that:

Such hybrid figures that resist modernization are ‘delinquents’, a

classification as essential to the modern state as ‘delusion’ was to the
Inquisition. The delinquent ‘leaves undone’ – that is, he or she does
not do what the state demands. The delinquent is therefore the place
where the state fails and the one who introduces the disorder of death
into its Utopian and essentially masculine project.102

Buñuel represents a marginal subject who disturbs identity, system and order
without respecting borders, positions and rules. The young anti-hero is thus
located at the ‘outer limit’. Hence, Jaibo’s excessive nature transgresses the
social taboos that prohibit excess and promote self-preservation. Jaibo is
associated with a potential for fluid boundary crossing, destroys rigid
territoriality and undermines binary oppositions.
In the film, Jaibo, ‘dueño de la palabra y de la mirada ’ (owner of the word and

38
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the gaze),103 enjoys heterosexual sex and love with Pedro’s mother and
desires the young Meche. His male gaze, often identified as voyeuristic,
sadistic and fetishistic, reinforces the narrative’s ostensible concern with
straight desire and love and reconfirms the gendered divisions of roles and
spectatorship in mainstream films.104 However, let us explore how the film
disrupts these monolithic gender polarities by setting up the character as an
erotic object. Jaibo’s ‘repulsive’ personality contrasts with the classical per-
fection of his young and polished body. Through close-ups and medium
shots, the camera objectifies his body or focuses on his crotch, thereby
appreciating his physicality and allowing for a homoerotic scopophilic
pleasure. As Tuñón puts it, ‘conviene destacar la agilidad de bailarín de Cobo y la
plenitud física de los muchachos’ (it in important to emphasize the dancer’s agility
of Cobo and the physical plenitude of the boys).105 The shooting style thus
encourages the viewer to take pleasure in watching the male body.
With reference to Belle de jour, Evans suggests that ‘Sévérine is not the only
object of display. Pierre Clementi as the youthful gangster comes also into
this category.’106 Although it is implicitly suggested rather than graphically
shown, the sexual relation between Jaibo and Pedro’s mother reinforces the
objectification of Jaibo’s body, because she develops a fascination with the
young male and is seduced by the virile and more sexually charged other. In
the film, younger characters such as Pedro, Meche and even Jaibo are
identified as objects of desire, and older characters like Pedro’s mother, the
blind person or a male paedophile, to whom I will refer later on, engage in
elicit titillation. If the female figure has traditionally been the object onto
which the male projects his sexual desires, in Los olvidados male characters
such as Pedro and Jaibo also occupy this objectified position. In the scene
of the seduction of Pedro’s mother, Jaibo thus exercises his sexuality by
deploying his erotic potential. The celebration of male sexuality and sexual
desire for the male body remain defiant. The homoerotic element in Los
olvidados raises the issue of sexual politics by offering a challenging way to
explore sexuality and an alternative point of identification for queer
audiences.
Jaibo’s exaggerated and aggressive yet erotic masculinity can also be read as
the effect of hysterical anxiety felt by the heterosexual male subject and
manifested through the codes of machismo. In her psychoanalytic study of the
horror movie, Creed identifies how the hysterical mechanism at work in the
construction of male characters is not, as Freud argues, connected with their
failure to take up the proper masculine role. Instead, the notion of male
hysteria that Creed deploys is linked to the heterosexual subject’s symbolic

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castration, which goes back to the pre-Oedipal rather than to the Oedipal
stage of the subject’s formation.107 Jaibo’s hysterical masculinity is associated
with the separation or lack of relation to the mother’s breasts as opposed to
the mother’s genitals. Jaibo tells Pedro’s mother that the only memory he
recalls of his mother is of a beautiful face very close and looking at him.
Jaibo reactivates the uncanny memory of the oral mother, who represents the
fusion with the child, by being invaded by the presence of his mother. In this
pre-Oedipal stage of subjectivity, the child does not yet recognize sexual
difference. Hence, the psychic boundary between the inside and outside has
not yet been established.108 Furthermore, Jaibo’s hysterical masculinity can be
read as a performative response that parodies patriarchal and heterosexual
identity. The apparently monolithic nature of heterosexual and patriarchal
masculinity is fragile and can be fragmented. Jaibo’s excessive masculinity
thus emphasizes the contradictory process through which gender identities
are constructed.
As this point, let us pay attention to a particular item of clothing as a
punctual detail in the film to suggest that Jaibo’s masculine body can
transgress the conventional opposition between femininity and masculinity.
Like Brad Davis in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 adaptation of Jean
Genet’s explicit gay themed novel, Querelle (1947), Jaibo is usually dressed in
a very tight T-shirt, which, even if this clothing item had been popular
among young men of the same social status as Jaibo during this historical
period,109 simultaneously emphasizes his male chest and feminizes him.
Jaibo foreshadows the dangerously seductive sailor in Fassbinder’s film by
being dressed in this tight T-shirt. As is well known, images of sailors are a
significant part of contemporary gay iconography, as exemplified by the
pornographic drawings of Tom of Finland. With reference once more to
Belle de jour, we can recognize the gay look of the character played by the
diabolical Pierre Clementi, and the way the very rigid leather coat worn by
Clementi reinforces his feminization. This implicit queering of Clementi in
Belle de jour was explicitly exposed in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista
(1970). In this film, Clementi plays a chauffeur who has a homosexual
encounter with the main protagonist.
Susan Sontag has argued that the homosexualization of fascism, despite its
repressive sexual policies, is partly due to the tight uniforms worn by Nazi
soldiers. According to her, this erotic investment in the image of a Nazi
soldier wearing a tight uniform has led to a significant production of gay
pornography in which fascism is associated with kinky deviance and
homoerotic desire.110 Why do we engage with a small detail of the mise-en-

40
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scène, such a the T-shirt Roberto Cobo wore in Los olvidados, the tight T-shirt
Brad Davis wore in Querelle or the tight coat Pierre Clementi wore in Belle de
jour? I contend that these details in the films of Buñuel and Fassbinder allow
us to propose that the discourse on clothes suspends and reverses the
conventional oppositions between subject and object, active and passive,
and heterosexual and homosexual in these films. From this perspective,
Jaibo fluctuates freely between these binary oppositions.111 But is there also,
to some extent, a moralistic dimension involved in the representation of
Jaibo?
Near the end of the film, as Jaibo lies dying on straw in a dry, dusty allot-
ment, we see the superimposition of the image of a dog running towards the
camera and disappearing, which suggests that Jaibo’s peripheral existence
has the same symbolic value as that of a street dog in the Mexican society of
the 1950s. A disembodied voice, which we recognize as Jaibo’s, expresses
Jaibo’s fear of falling into a hole in the ground. This suggests his total
disempowerment. Another disembodied voice, which we assume belongs to
Jaibo’s dead mother, says: ‘como siempre mi hijito, como siempre, duérmase, duérmase
mi hijito’ (as always my little son, as always, go to sleep, go to sleep my little
son). This implies that Jaibo’s uncanny fantasy of the oral mother is now
being fulfilled in a space beyond life. Jaibo could achieve redemption by
being reunited with his mother, even if he has not been taken out of the
abject world of criminals and multiple perversions that he is obliged to
inhabit.
The final moral imperative in Los olvidados seems to lead to Jaibo being
condemned to death at the end of the film for committing the kinds of
crimes that are characteristic of the peripheral social space to which he is
doomed to belong. Jaibo’s death allows him to become the ‘anti-hero’ of
the film. As Cros suggests, ‘el desenlace es altamente significativo: éste presenta la
muerte de Jaibo como el sacrificio de una víctima expiatoria que permite reconstruir la
unidad de la colectividad y liberarla de los riesgos de desintegración social’ (the ending
is highly significant: this one presents Jaibo’s death as the sacrifice of an
expiatory victim, which allows the unity of the collectivity to be recon-
structed and protects such a collectivity from the risks of social dis-
integration).112 In symbolic terms, the association of the figure of Jaibo
with a kind of social monster confirms the inability of the symbolic law to
retain, to use Žižek’s metaphor, the ‘healthy and unspoiled child-ego’
within its project of civilization, which is comprised of a social space
defined by utilitarian ideology. The figure of Jaibo alludes to the remains of
the ‘dirty monster’ in the symbolic order, which is associated with the

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civilizing process of modernity. The monster is thus, for Žižek, the Real
subject of the Enlightenment. This monster articulates or materializes the
surplus that effectively escapes or cannot be located in the dynamics of the
civilizing project within the foundations of the bourgeois social and
symbolic order.113
In Homos, Leo Bersani rethinks gay desire as a redefinition of sociality so
radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from
relationality itself. For Bersani, desire for the same is a challenge to the
oppressive heterosexual desire that is defined as lack and that grounds
sociality in trauma and castration. Bersani’s reflection on homo-ness implies a
new notion of difference as a supplement that does not threaten sameness.
Thus, the subject could begin again, differentiating himself from traumatic
relationality and thereby reconstituting a notion of sociality that is always
shifting and is not assimilated into already constituted communities.
To reread the social and psychic condition of Jaibo as an abject figure from
a counter-hegemonic position, I propose that Jaibo’s engagement with
criminality could be read as an anti-redemptive reformulation of the social
stigmatization that is imposed upon him. Bersani persuasively argues that:
‘Evil is not a crime against socially defined good, but a turning away from the
theatre of the good, characterized by the performance of the social mask,
that is, a kind of meta-transgressive dépassement of the field of transgressive
possibility itself.’114 Following Bersani’s redefinition of the notion of evil, we
can reappropriate stigma, which is always imposed by others, as a defiant
inoculation against the depiction of hegemonic stereotypes. From this
perspective, Jaibo’s search for money outside the legality of the community,
from which he is excluded, represents his refusal to accept a conformist
ideology. The figure of Jaibo could be read as an aesthetic effect that implies
the production of queerness within the notion of abjection. This presentation
of abjection involves an ironic masquerade that could even be seen as
flirtatious.115
But if Jaibo’s body offers a potential for multiple, shifting identifications
and desires by being eroticized through close-ups, can the conventionally
heterosexual eroticization of the female body, which is also achieved
through close-ups, offer a similar gender destabilization in Los olvidados and
in the cinema audience? It is to this question that I now turn.

More Subversive Fragments in Buñuel: The Close-up and the Fragmented

Story
Throughout Los olvidados, we see close-ups of Meche or Pedro’s mother

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spilling a liquid substance (water or donkey’s milk) on their thighs. As is well

known, close-ups in Buñuel’s cinema are used as a regular device for
‘sintetizan la óptica maliciosa con que Buñuel se acerca a lo que él llama “secreta tensión
entre el placer y el pecado” ’ (synthesizing the malicious optics through which
Buñuel approaches what he calls ‘the secret tension between pleasure and
sin’).116 Moreover, through subjective shots from the point of view of the
male characters, the heterosexual male spectator’s gaze aligns itself with that
of the male characters to reinforce the process of the objectification and
fragmentation of the female body. In her early feminist psychoanalytic
theories of the male gaze and the spectacle of the female object, Mulvey
argued that women were rendered passive and fetishized into body parts by
the use of the close-up in classical Hollywood cinema. Concerned as it was
with the narrative of agency and resolution, Mulvey’s iconoclastic argument
also contended that women were usually destroyed in the course of the
narrative. According to Mulvey, the close-up allows the slightest detail to be
seen as huge, thus changing our interpretation of the text and holding the
story in stasis. For Mulvey, the close-up elicits the voyeuristic desires of the
male spectator by cutting images of women out from the general flow of the
narrative and emphasizing women’s function as a mere spectacle. The
female body, which is associated with secrets, with something that lies darkly
hidden behind the mask, functions, then, as an object of scopophilic
pleasure for the male gaze.117
Following Mulvey’s early critique of patriarchal fetishizations of women in
the dominant cinema, we could argue that if, in Los olvidados, the camera
fragments the bodies of Pedro’s mother and the girl Meche into their
eroticized parts, such as their legs, Buñuel thus deprives these female bodies
of unity. These fragmented bodies are fetishized as well as being com-
modified. Keown identifies corporeal fragmentation or dismemberment ‘as a
favourite motif in Buñuel’s evocation of the brutality of the capitalist
system, forming a key component in the elaboration of a grotesque
idiom’.118 The fragmentation of these images in Los olvidados might thus be
seen as a visual metaphor, which points to the fragmented nature of social
and sexual relationships based on commodity exchanges and consumption.
In patriarchal and capitalist societies, the body can then be recuperated only
through its fragments.
Mulvey’s thesis has been contested and revised by subsequent psycho-
analytic film theories of gender and sexuality. For instance, as I have sought
to demonstrate in my analysis of Jaibo, masculinity can function either as an
ideal ego for narcissistic identification119 or as an object of erotic pleasure

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for the queer spectator. The close-up can also create a more ambivalent
effect on the audience than that described by Mulvey. For instance, Labanyi
draws on Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence to suggest that ‘the
eroticizing camerawork, which is usually reserved for the female star, not
only functions for her objectification, but also it allows a process of
identification with the “colonized”.’120
Moreover, following a psychoanalytic interpretative method that extracts
the hidden meaning in fragments, I want to ask how commonplace
techniques, like close-ups, can take on a new significance in the context of
Buñuel’s films. Hence, Buñuel’s fragmentation of the bodies of these female
characters in Los olvidados raises the following questions: how can the frag-
mentation of the self be a subversive political representation when it is set
against Lacan’s formulation of the role of the mirror-image in the process of
the formation of the subject in the imaginary stage? If the fragmented body
alludes to the fragmentary subject of early infancy, which is part of what
Kristeva has defined as the heterogeneity of the chora, does Buñuel’s
eroticizing camerawork evoke a body that regresses to a polymorphous
sexual stage, where the social category of gender has not yet been stabilized?
Finally, if we associate the sexual and the social with formal transgression,
how does the textual fragmentation of the cinematic narrative reinforce the
fragmentation of the body?
In his psychoanalytic articulation of the ideal ego, Lacan defines the
mirror-image as: ‘a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from
insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught
up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that
extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall
call orthopaedic’.121 The Lacanian paradigm allows us to perceive how the
self is constructed on the basis of an illusion. This misrecognized imaginary
self always risks regressing to the initial state, which is the fragmented body.
Elsewhere Lacan argues that:

Here we see the ego, in its essential resistance to the elusive process
of Becoming, to the variations of Desire. This illusion of unity, in
which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery,
entails a constant danger of sliding back into the chaos from which
he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Ascent in which one can
perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.122

This uncanny regression to the fragmented body, which Lacan rightly sug-

44
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gests could be experienced as a source of anxiety in the subject’s psyche,

could also be experienced as a subversive pleasure. From this perspective,
the fragmentation of the body metaphorically generates the pleasure of a
liberating participation in the dissolution of fixed identities. This return to a
stage of multiple identities is linked to the fluid movement of our desires.
Hence, we can reread Buñuel’s use of close-ups in such a way as to suggest
that the fragmented images of Pedro’s mother and Meche work against the
coherent self. As Lacan has shown us, the coherent self is emphasized in
normative identity. The fragmentation of the female body in Los olvidados
could be seen as a representational strategy that points towards a trans-
formational psychic identity. The fragmented ego relates to a heterogeneous
subjectivity in which the body is receptive to different sexualities and
desires. Consequently, the female body can be seen to function as a site of
multiple pleasures, which defy phallic heterosexual wholeness. The
fragmented body transgresses the gendered heterosexual identity based on
the fictive complete ego.123
From a textual perspective, the coexistence in the film of incompatible
fragmented discourses reinforces the emphasis here on visual fragmentation.
On the surface, Buñuel exploits certain realist elements, such as linear
narrative progression and some coherence in the treatment of plot and
characterization. Los olvidados employs seamless narrative and editing accord-
ing to the conventions of classical narrative cinema. Narrative logic is always
respected and all the transitions from sequence to sequence are carefully
treated with perfect linearity. According to Seymour Chatman, the cinematic
narrator allows the viewer to rationalize the presentation of shots in all
films.124 For Chatman, unreliability in film narrative depends on some
clearly discernible discrepancy between the narrator’s account and the larger
implied meaning of the film as a whole.125 In Los olvidados, the voice-over
narrator in the prologue to the film claims that the film is a real denunci-
ation of poverty and proposes alternative solutions on the basis of a
teleological argument about social progress. The film refuses, however, to
offer any solution to poverty and juvenile delinquency, foregrounding the
voice-over narrator’s discursive incoherence.126 Lillo suggests that ‘las
soluciones alternativas que propone la voz off al problema de la delincuencia y
marginación juvenil, y que curiosamente coincide con el discurso oficial, son expuestas en
el film en total inoperabilidad’ (the alternative solutions that the voice-over
proposes to the problem of youth delinquency and marginalization, and that
curiously coincide with the official discourses, are totally inoperative in the
film).127 From this perspective, instead of attempting to understand conven-

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tionally the meaning of the narrative as a whole, it is more effective to read

isolated scenes and the irrational elements within some of the sequences of
the film, such as the construction of unusual acoustic spaces by means of
the unsynchronized voices of the characters that have been previously des-
cribed. This textual experimentation challenges the narrative of the classical
realist text, which seems to exclude any such possibilities and defies totality,
which is often associated with a structured order of discourse.
To sum up, we could thus suggest that Buñuel’s ultimate perversion is that of
the cinematic language. In more theoretical terms, he discomforts and brings
the viewer to a crisis in relation to language. Los olvidados frustrates the coherence
that is established within the domains of rationality. As I shall show throughout
this book, Buñuel’s transgressive écriture displays a kind of association between
the violation of sexual taboos and the violation of discursive norms. Buñuel’s
manipulation of the filmic discourse in Los olvidados escapes from a discursive
logic that ‘decides, divides, and then reconstitutes the self according to a set
of rules that are heterocratic in nature’.128 Dollimore suggests that:

The most disturbing of all forms of transgressions turns up the out-

law as inlaw; that which society forbids is reinstated through and
within some of its most central categories – art, the aesthetic, art
criticism, individualism. These categories are appropriated and trans-
valued through inversion, thus making them now signify those binary
exclusions by which the dominant culture knows itself.129

Mise-en-abîme and the Return of the Real

In her brilliant analysis of Los olvidados, Tuñón argues that the film shows
how the modern city alienates marginal kids who live in the suburbs – a
liminal space between the city and the countryside.130 For Tuñón, the
allusion to the modern city throughout the film thus refers to the impossibil-
ity of the characters escaping from their social condition in that urban space.
The modern city, which is crammed with lights and cars, represents an
impersonal and anonymous world where criminals, such as Jaibo, can get
away with the crimes they commit and where the police attempt to prevent
any major problems. It is worth quoting at length a passage in which Tuñón
describes a significant sequence that shows a male paedophile attempting to
cruise with Pedro in the Avenida Juárez – an action that is thwarted by a
policeman who is passing by:

Pedro ha huido de su casa y observa un aparador. La cámara lo filma desde

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 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

adentro del local, viéndolo ver el escaparate. Por más que conozcamos su historia
privada, aparece separado de nosotros por el vidrio y el silencio: se escucha una
música que nos aísla del sonido natural del episodio, cuando se le acerca un viejo
elegante y le habla, le ofrece dinero, y Pedro parece aceptar. La situación del
espectador es doblemente de voyeur. No oímos lo que dicen, por más que
entendamos lo que sucede: remite a nuestra impotencia. De pronto, los dos se
separan alarmados y aparece en cuadro un policía. Esta escena fue criticada por
los comunistas franceses, que la consideraron burguesa, pues presupone la ayuda
de la autoridad. (Pedro has fled from his house and observes a shop
window. The camera, filming from inside the shop, shows him seeing
the shop window. Although knowing his private history, the glass
separation and the silence alienates him from us. As we listen to the
soundtrack, which makes us feel alienated from the diegetic sound of
the sequence, an elegant old man approaches him, speaks to him and
offers him some money. Pedro seems to accept the deal. The
spectator’s position is characterized by being doubly that of voyeur.
We do not hear what they say, even if we understand what is
happening, referring, thus, to our impotence. Suddenly, the two
characters split up in an alarming manner as a policeman comes into
shot. French communists criticized this sequence, which they
considered bourgeois, because it presupposes the help of the
authorities.)131

In this passage, Tuñón pays attention to the camera’s position inside the
shop showing the action through the shop window. What interests me in
this sequence is to see this particular camera angle as a dislocating point of
view and to pay attention to how the shop window echoes the shape of the
cinematic screen. Such a distancing device becomes a self-conscious
reflection on the cinematic medium. On a formal level, this sequence makes
us think of the closed system of framing that is implied in a shot, and how
the system of framing always refers to what is in the frame and off screen. If
what is framed is visible, the off screen designates what exists elsewhere,
testifying to an invisible presence outside the space. On a psychoanalytic
level, the self-conscious reflection on the film medium here makes us think
of the conditions of visibility. In the Lacanian paradigm, vision is strictly
bound up with the sense of lack of wholeness because viewing depends on
an illusory wholeness and mastery. If this self-reflexive sequence makes us
think of the conditions of visibility, it ultimately reveals the fragmented
nature of the self that I have argued for in this chapter.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

Another self-reflexive sequence that is worth discussing at length is when

an angry Pedro, tired of his guardian’s condescension, throws an egg at the
lens of the camera. This punctual detail in the film is correlative of the
notorious sliced eyeball of Buñuel’s first surrealist film, Un chien andalou.
What interests me here is how this sequence also reveals our own specta-
torial place within a voyeuristic system of representation. The smashed egg,
which is analogous to a body without organs, is splattered all over the
camera lens, thus producing a disturbance in the spectator’s field of vision.
As Tuñón suggests, ‘ahí nos agrede a todos, aventándonos un huevo a los ojos’
(everything is attacked here, with an egg shattering in one’s eyes).132 This
image thus assaults the spectator and leaves him or her no space for
reflection by refusing the distance that is required in the visual process.133
From this perspective, as Steven Shaviro argues, this self-reflexive sequence
‘hyperbolically aggravates vision, pushing it to an extreme point of
implosion and self-annihilation’.134 This formless image can be read as
pointing to that shadow where, by performing a disruption of narrative
momentum, symbolic meaning and social identity fail to be articulated.
Moreover, the screen could be read as being so torn by the traces of the
smashed egg that the object-gaze not only invades the subject-as-picture, but
overwhelms it. The cinematic experience here is associated with neither
imaginary plenitude nor symbolic articulation, but with the blinding contact
with the Real by revealing the blindness that is intrinsic to sight itself.
If we follow Lacan’s association of the Real with the traumatic135 (or the
desired) trace of formlessness, we can identify the smashed egg as the
irruption of the Real through the screen. This irruption of the Real threatens
the viewer because the Real is established at the limits of the symbolic order.
The breakdown of the image-screen and the symbolic order through the
irruption of the Real could imply a horror at this phantasmatic event, which
produces despair. It is less a rupture in the world than in the spectator, who
becomes conscious of the Real in the process of perception.136 The irruption
of the Real here can be linked to a psychic fantasy of the pre-Oedipal and
prelinguistic nature of representation and perception. The smashed egg can
thus be read as acting as a metaphor for art, for meaning and for the
impossibility of meaning, where subjecthood is troubled and meaning
collapses. In addition, the smashed egg in our eye blocks our field of vision
in the process of perception.137 Lynda Hart argues that: ‘The Real might also
be understood as that which evades the frame of representation and its
(en)closures. The Real, in my reading, is precisely the possibilities of the
imaginary that are located at the very limits of representation. Or, what

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representation fails to limit.’138 In Los olvidados, the Real returns violently

into the symbolic to break us down but it cannot be assimilated within the
symbolic order. As a rupture, the Real is defined as ecstatic and deadly. This
is due to the location of the Real beyond the pleasure principle. In the
symbolic order, the Real must be bound somehow by the symptom if by
nothing else.139 The surface of symbolic reality is fragmented in the film by
revealing the negative space of the Real.
In his perceptive analysis of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Lee Edelman
draws on the Lacanian concept of the Real to argue that the film presents
several visual details associated with the punctum – to use Barthes’s term –
that reveal what stands behind the symbolic order by returning to a
repressed desire linked to anal compulsion, thereby destabilizing the logic of
symbolic vision and meaning. Edelman is able to associate the Lacanian Real
with the anal libidinal cathexis because, if the Real is identified as a surplus
that is excluded from the order of symbolic meaning, the symbolic order
establishes the law of genital difference out of a state of anxiety about the
formlessness of the anal cut. The repression of the Real has thus, Edelman
argues, shaped the phallic vision of the symbolic order. According to
Edelman, the Real has been defined as the archaic remnants of repudiated
libidinal systems that give way to the triumphant law of the symbolic order
and remain forever incompatible with it.140 Drawing on Bhabha’s concept of
ambivalence, Edelman also associates this construction of the symbolic law
with the core of Western civilizing logic. This implies the loss of access to,
or disavowal of, pre-genital pleasures and libidinal pathways that must
culturally evoke associations like those assigned to the repudiated other.
Hence, this repudiation of the other within Western discourse coincides
with the repression of the anus as the fantasmatic site of the unassimilable
Real. Since the symbolic order is unable either to articulate or to escape
from the Real, the Real always figures as either before or beyond it.
To return to Los olvidados, the punctual detail of the smashed egg splattered
all over the camera lens wounds, pricks or penetrates the viewer and points
to the Real. How can we associate this punctual detail with anality? Following
Edelman’s association of the Real with anality in Rear Window, I contend that
the emphasis on the threatened return of this trace of formlessness that
irrupts through the screen in Los olvidados can be read as the desired return of
the anal libidinal cathexis. This return of a repressed anal desire subverts that
repudiation through which the subject of genital law comes into being. In the
same way as does anality, the smashed egg in the film does not respect the
coding of phallic penetration as male and vaginal receptivity as female.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

Consequently, the association of the smashed egg with anality explodes the
binary bottom or groundwork of sexual signification. If the smashed egg is
identified as a formless anal image, it is exempt from meaning. The
exemption from meaning here is always just beyond the symbolic order of
visual relations and is always just on the other side of the partition.
After throwing the egg against the camera lens, like an arrow that pierces
us, Pedro kills two hens, while the rest of the kids in the reformatory enjoy
watching this brutal action from the other side of the fence. Hens are
frequently seen in the film, because they represent irrationality and the trace
of the rural in the urban world. As Tuñón describes:

En el barrio, en la casa de Meche duermen todos juntos en el mismo cuarto, pero

sí existe una habitación separada para los animales: el establo, en donde hay una
burra, una cabra y un cabrito, además de gallinas y gallos, de abundante presencia
en este filme. También en la casa de Pedro hay gallinas. Alcoriza hace notar que
las imágenes de corrales y establos existían porque su presencia era constante en
los arrabales de la ciudad. (In the neighborhood, in Meche’s house, they
all sleep in the same room, but there is a separate room for the
animals: the stable, where there is a donkey, a goat and a kid, besides
hens and roosters, which have an abundant presence in this movie. In
Pedro’s house, there are hens too. Alcoriza makes us notice that the
images of corrals and stables existed because their presence was
notable in the suburbs of the city.)141

In the next sequence, we see Pedro drawing the hens he has killed on the
wall of his cell in the reformatory school, where he is physically and
psychically trapped to recover from the traumatic event of killing the
innocent animals. As we shall see in Chapter 4, to integrate traumatic events
into the psychic economy, they generally need to be repeated. Pedro draws
the hens he has killed on the walls as a way of recording the image of an
object that possesses transcendent possibilities. The lost object, which the
drawing of the hens symbolizes, returns in a way that acknowledges the
power of death and of the dead in our lives.
Pedro’s action of drawing the hens as a way of sublimating violent
impulses is echoed in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). In this film, the
character Pietro – the Italian equivalent of Pedro in Spanish – expends his
energy on producing abstract paintings as a way of searching for new forms
of artistic production. If we understand this action as the inscription of a
meta-cinematic discourse (mise-en-abîme) in Pasolini’s film, Pietro’s action

50
 THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL

stands for the way in which art cinema questions its own medium, reflecting
on the elaboration of new languages of artistic expression. In terms of mise-
en-abîme, Los olvidados makes reference to the cinematic medium’s own
destructive–creative process by representing Pedro killing the hens and
subsequently drawing them on the wall. In a way that is reminiscent of
Miró’s call to ‘assassinate painting’,142 Los olvidados makes us think of how
the meaning of a work of art is also expressed in the process of obliterating
the work of art. In the film medium, the framed body, which is transformed
into a de-animated body, an absent body that is made present again by virtue
of substitution, reinforces this association between representing absent
bodies on celluloid and the act of killing.143 From this perspective, we might
suggest that the process of film editing implies a certain sublimated desire to
annihilate and obliterate the unsuitable shooting material that will not be
part of the final version of the film. This self-reflexive discourse (mise-en-
abîme) thus implies alteration and destruction. This chain of violent actions,
implied in the process of creation, is arguably bound up with unconscious
desires. The creative gesture liberates sadistic impulses. Bataille explains
that:

Doing violence to representation forms the basis of any represen-

tational act. Alteration involves not only the change from one state to
another but also a succession of changes, each destroying the pre-
ceding state. … Art proceeds by successive destructions. And so in so
far as it liberates libidinal instincts, these are sadistic.144

Los olvidados makes us think of how works of art reintroduce repressed

material existence and physical pleasure into the field of representation. This
process of de-sublimation in art suggests that works of art are linked to a
process of productive destruction rather than repressed creation. Conse-
quently, works of art are not constructed through a formal process of
sublimation, but through an instinctual liberation of libidinal impulses. The
act of artistic representation can be conceived of as a violent and obsessive
dance with death, which is associated with a productive process of uncon-
scious desire and with the return of the Real.
To conclude this chapter, I shall suggest that Buñuel discloses and fore-
grounds the implicit voyeuristic position in the cinematic medium from
which spectators derive visual pleasure by using self-reflexive devices.
Buñuel challenges the voyeuristic position of the spectator that is privileged
in more conventional cinematic practices. This subversion of the passive

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

position of the spectator leads us to think of the full participation of our

bodily self in the cinematic and aesthetic experience. The spectator
encounters and therefore becomes situated at the centre of the filmic space.
This reconceptualization of the spectator’s participation in the cinematic
experience allows Buñuel to rethink the ontological and epistemological nature
of cinematic art, thereby problematizing the relationship between the rep-
resentational image on the screen and the physical body of the spectator.
This new unsafe position of the spectator produces a disturbance in our
field of vision, and provokes instinctive reactions of revulsion and
attraction. As Shaviro argues, what inspires the spectator is, however, a
passion for that very loss of self-control, that abjection, fragmentation and
subversion of self-identity. Finally, to return to the problem of urban
poverty in Mexico City, my rereading of Los olvidados does not preclude the
possibility that the film might also be read as a realistic denunciation of this
problem during the government of Miguel Alemán in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. On the other hand, the film keeps insisting on the pain or
pleasure (jouissance) of being unable to get rid of the sublime effects of the
Real.145 The film, then, pictures what I have identified as the impossible
Real, thus establishing the punctual in a temporality and locality outside, or
at the limits of, ideological or historical determinism.
In Los olvidados, Buñuel takes further the mere realistic representation of
urban poverty in the 1940s and early 1950s Mexican society by pointing to
the symptoms, the ‘blind spots’ which evoke modernity as a heterogeneous
chaos rather than as a tidy linear narrative within a teleological conception
of history.146 If capitalist modernization attempted to obliterate abject
poverty in Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s, an economic system which,
paradoxically, predicates on social inequality, Buñuel’s film exposes the
uneven development of this modernization or its uneven devolution into
ruins or forgotten liminal spaces, such as the slums of Mexico City where
the characters of the film live. To sum up, Los olvidados makes us think of
how modernity coexists with abject poverty, external reality with its
fantasmatic spectres, symbolic history with its obscene Real other, optical
vision with hapticality, corporeality and blindness and heterosexual fetishism
with its own traumatic symptoms.

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2. PLEASURE OR PUNISHMENT?
ABJECTION, THE VAMPIRE TROPE,
AND MASOCHISTIC PERVERSIONS
IN VIRIDIANA
____________________________________________________________

Climbing, some years later, the hill which leads to her grave, the memory of that
first ascent returns. And there returns, as well, the special darkness of that night,
for he steps across the threshold of his house in the direction of the burial site into
a night whose darkness is, as it were, inexplicable. His pilgrimage is marked by
a sudden intensity of terror and by an experience of splitting, of possession by the
body and spirit of the dead woman, and it culminates in an ecstatic recapturing of
love lost.1

This epigraph encapsulates, symbolically and literally, some of the issues I

attempt to examine in my analysis of Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961).2 As is sug-
gested by the above quotation, which points to the threshold of the visible,
in this chapter I shall consider the ideological and psychic implications of
the dialectical relationship between the desublimated and sublimated, the
seductive and repulsive, the visible and invisible, the identifiable and
unidentifiable, as well as between pleasure and suffering. Therefore, I pay
attention to Buñuel’s emphasis on ‘these gaps, breaches, openings, and
wounds by which communication, sexual and social, is attained’.3 I focus on
Buñuel’s treatment of bodies in one sequence during the first part of
Viridiana. These can be understood in relation to Kristeva’s notion of
abjection, which itself is related to Bataille’s notion of hétérologie. This notion
allows Bataille to celebrate those objects that are prohibited or censored –
objects of revulsion, excluded from daily contact or touch, abstracted from
use because of their heterogeneous and excessive nature.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

In this chapter I explore how Viridiana is concerned with and obtains

pleasure (jouissance) from the transgression of social and psychic taboos by
alluding to the heterogeneous image experienced in the semiotic chora. I
argue that Viridiana engages implicitly with the theme of the vampire,
which suggests a return to the maternal body, in which arguably there is as
yet no understanding of the Freudian castration crisis. Drawing on
Deleuze’s critique of the Freudian notion of masochism, I also argue that,
in Viridiana, masochism is a form of sexual pleasure for Viridiana and for
one of the male characters, the patriarchal figure of don Jaime. I discuss the
association of masochism with the film medium in Buñuel’s œuvre. My
analysis of the sequence in which Enedina pretends to photograph the
other beggars at the dining table teases out the relationship between
masochism and artistic creativity. This action by Enedina is analogous to
Buñuel’s own position in the filming process. In addition, I ask to what
extent masochism, which fractures the unity of the self, can be interpreted
as a seductive pleasure for the queer spectator. As we shall see, the queer
spectator defines himself or herself as an unstable, propulsive and multiply
erotic subject.

Abjection and Psychoanalytic Theory

Let us begin with a brief description of Kristeva’s problematic theoretical
concept of abjection and its operational function within psychoanalytic
thought. Kristeva’s term contributes to a theory of subjectivity that is based
on the infant’s relation to the pre-Oedipal mother. This theory was first
formulated by Melanie Klein, who revised Freud’s work on the pre-Oedipal
stage of the infant subject by referring to a psychic stage prior to the
acquisition of language. Kristeva’s definition of the abject is bound up with
a theoretical perspective that may be defined as feminist.4 Her psycho-
linguistic rereading of Freudian and Lacanian formulations of the con-
struction of human subjectivity allows her to decentre the position of Freud
and Lacan in relation to the paternal function by reintroducing or re-
emphasizing the maternal body as the central axis in the process of the
formation of the child’s subjectivity. Kristeva ‘reinscribes the maternal
metaphor in the Oedipal triangle, just as Klein had insisted earlier on the
centrality of infantile ambivalence to the maternal body’.5 Kristeva argues
that:

Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body

into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and

54
 PLEASURE OR PUNISHMENT?

hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the

differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and
impossible, is impressed and exerted. It is a ‘binary logic’, a primal
mapping of the body that I call semiotic to say that, while being the
precondition of language, it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way
that is not that of linguistic signs nor of the symbolic order they found.
Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self’s clean
and proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which,
with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man
will take place.6

There are significant problems with Kristeva’s theory, especially in relation

to her ambiguous position towards biology. According to Stephen Frosh,
this feminist object-relations theory runs the risk of falling into biologistic
categories. The account that is given of the particular nature of mothering,
Frosh argues, might reinforce gender division.7 Frosh suggests that
Kristeva’s conceptualization of motherhood may rely on essentialist views
that have foregrounded the social differences between the feminine and the
masculine gender within a biological framework.
However, Kristeva’s definition of the abject reinscribes the body into sig-
nification. This strategy subverts what Lacan sees as the loss of the self
through his or her symbolic construction in language. As we discussed in the
previous chapter, according to Lacan, the definition of the subject is bound
up with lack and imperfection. Kristeva also redefines the Freudian theory
of the Oedipus complex and the castration crisis. As Kelly Oliver explains,
‘in traditional Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis it is the paternal
function that finally propels the infant into both language and subjectivity.’8
If the paternal imago functions as the centre of prohibition and sublimation,
Kristeva succeeds in challenging the two most canonical psychoanalytic
models that have been associated with privileging patriarchal and therefore
compulsory heterosexual identity and subjectivity by reinscribing the
maternal body into subjectivity. Foster persuasively argues that ‘in a world in
which the other has collapsed, Kristeva implies a crisis in the paternal law
that underwrites the social order’.9
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva introduces the category of the abject to
describe the constitution of acceptable forms of subjectivity and sociality of
the self. According to her, the subject achieves autonomy through the
process of rejecting improper and unclean elements that are reminiscent of
his or her initial fusion with the maternal body. Hence, the separation of the

55
QUEERING BUÑUEL

child from the mother takes place through the semiotic aspect of language.
Kristeva argues that ‘the abject confronts us within our personal
archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal
entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of
language.’10 For Kristeva:

The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed
to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within
the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which is a matter of fact,
makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject,
on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws
me toward the place where meaning collapses.11

This quotation from Kristeva suggests the extent to which desire and
identity occupy a paradoxical position. On one hand, the subject is caught in
the desire for the original object (the mother), which, structurally speaking,
occupies the position of death. On the other hand, the subject anxiously
desires satisfaction, which is associated with life. The subject is also
constituted through its struggle against separation, developing an endless
process of translating the unnameable other. Hence, separation is a vital
necessity in the formation of the subject. As I shall suggest, the subversion
implied in Kristeva’s definition of the abject allows us to understand the
extent to which some of the punctual details in Viridiana refer to fantasies
and anxieties, which, in the same way as Kristeva’s concept, reject the
theories of psychic and social organization that privilege genital sexuality,
which can be attributed to Freud and Lacan.

Abjection, Film, and Art Theory

In The Monstrous Feminine, Creed successfully applies Kristeva’s theory of
abjection in the context of film theory.12 Creed attempts to unpack the ways
that gender, more specifically the feminine, has been represented in the
Hollywood horror film genre. She questions why, in most of these horror
films, the feminine character reveals destructive powers that are castrating
for the male characters and for the male spectator. In the horror film, these
horrific figures of formlessness emerge from that terrifying borderline
between the clarity of the masculine and the obscurity of the feminine. This
tension between control and loss of control is central to patriarchal
discourses of the masculine. For this reason, the monstrous-feminine is one
way in which male anxiety might figure in cinematic representation. The

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theory Kristeva formulated provides Creed with an important theoretical

framework within which to draw the following conclusion: the monstrous-
feminine in the horror film is usually constructed as a figure of abjection.
This particular representation of femininity is ultimately punished psychi-
cally, and even physically, by the different elements that constitute the
cinematic apparatus, restoring the power of patriarchy within conventional
signifying practices. As Creed argues, ‘the horror film stages and restages a
constant repudiation of the “maternal figure” (the abject).’13
Creed suggests that the abject has been excluded and repressed in our
patriarchal society to keep the symbolic and therefore the social order
securely protected. According to her, these feminine representations pro-
duce a disturbance in the male spectator because they reveal the ambiguity
(the maternal body) that is repressed (abjected) in the collective unconscious
of patriarchal culture. As Creed says: ‘Abjection is above all ambiguity,
because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from
what threatens it.’14 The maternal body, which is related to the notion of
fluidity, challenges the boundaries the dominant ideology rigidly establishes.
The notion of fluidity, which is linked to contradiction, drive or frustration,
is either repressed or marginalized in the fictional construction of a rational
model of thought. The modern subject (presumed to be a heterosexual man)
fights against these ‘othernesses’. However, his fear and anxiety at that
fragmented and liquid body returns traumatically. Simon Taylor associates
sexuality and the unconscious, desire and drives with jouissance. Thus, it is
this psychic pain or pleasure that shatters the subject and surrenders it
precisely to the fragmentary and the fluid.15 Creed’s examination of the
representation of femininity as abject in the horror genre also suggests that
these figures of the abject, whether represented in a sublimated or
desublimated manner, open up the possibility that they are a site of
inscription of bodily alterations, of waste, decay and death. The ultimate
(non) subject of abjection is death. Foster states that such ‘images evoke the
body turned inside out, the subject literally abjected, thrown out. But they
also evoke the outside turned in, the subject-as-picture invaded by the
object-gaze’.16
According to Jan-Ove Steihaug, in her genealogical study of the concept
of abjection, Rosalind Krauss attributes the first articulation of the term to
the sociological studies of Bataille that focused on the exclusionary forces
that operate in modern state systems to strip the labouring masses of their
human dignity and to reduce them to dehumanized social waste. Particularly
celebrated in the French critical journal Tel Quel, Bataille became a central

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stimulus to French post-structuralist thought, as in the theories of Barthes,

Foucault and Derrida. The theoretical work of these authors had previously
been published in the journal Critique (1946–64), of which Bataille was an
editor. Kristeva, a prominent member of the Tel Quel group, rethought
Bataille’s concept of abjection from an anthropological and psychoanalytical
perspective in order to address the constitution of the subject in its negative
aspect, emphasizing a subject position located at the border between its own
subjecthood and objecthood. Subsequently, Bataille’s theories were taken up
in the critical discourse on art in the United States, through the reception of
post-structuralism and through new readings of surrealism, such as those in
the writings of Krauss. The latter championed Bataille’s dissident journal,
Documents, rather than André Breton’s association of surrealism with
idealized love and liberation.17 Some American visual artists in the 1990s,
such as John Miller, Robert Gober or Cindy Sherman, attempted to link
Bataille with Kristeva to deal with the abject through the representation of
the body as vulnerable, wounded, gendered, sexual, fragmented, horrific,
uncanny, scatological or excessive. As there has been an increasing emphasis
on the body in the visual arts, so there has been a parallel and intensified
interest in body theory in the academic field. Since the late 1980s, Western
society has also developed a growing fixation on the body due, for example,
to the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, which involves invasive disease and
death. Therefore, relatively recent fundamental, social and political questions
have been deeply implicated in the problematic of the body – a problematic
to which I shall return later.
To what extent does the abject blur the boundaries between self and other
or relate to Bataille’s notion of ‘base materialism’ in which he challenged
established notions of mind and body dualism? At this point we should
explore how the commonality between Kristeva and Bataille confronts
social and psychic taboos related to gender and sexuality in Viridiana.18 This
theoretical approach may uncover, retrospectively, why the film was so
controversial at the time it was produced. This controversy resulted in the
prohibition of its distribution in Francoist Spain. The Spanish authorities
even denied that the film existed.19

The Vampire Trope

In a sequence in the first part of the film don Jaime persuades the beautiful
Viridiana to play out one of his sexual fantasies. Don Jaime obsessively
wants Viridiana to put on his late wife’s wedding dress, which is a fetishistic
object throughout the film, so that he can traumatically relive, in a ritual

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manner, the tragic night of his wife’s death. Hence, don Jaime attempts to
retrieve one disappeared female by remodelling another. Robert Stam
explains that:

Don Jaime is haunted by the memory of his first wife, who expired in
his arms on their wedding night. Just as the heartbroken Tristan weds
a second Isolde in order to sustain the memory of the first, so don
Jaime attempts to transform Viridiana, the physical double of his
espouse, into a reincarnation of his former love. He dresses her in his
wife’s wedding clothes, drugs her, and beds her, caressing her ankles
and running his hands along her satin gown to the accompaniment of
Mozart’s Requiem.20

This obsessive sense of repetition through substitution reminds us of Hitch-

cock’s Vertigo (1958), in which the male protagonist also generates a hypo-
thetically endless play of the illusion of substitution through similarity.
Moreover, the spiral-like image we conjure from this repetitive action
emphasizes our sense of the openness of the film’s dramatic construction.
The death of don Jaime’s wife threw him into a melancholic depression. The
patriarchal subject therefore dedicates the rest of his life to the poetic
celebration of the lost object. Don Jaime’s search for eternity through his
attempts to transform Viridiana into his dead wife implies, according to
Evans’s association of the film with the death instinct, a ‘process that bears
all the hallmarks of the artist’s transformation of the chaotic material of
reality into the highly wrought patterns of art’.21
This old aristocratic-looking gentleman is reminiscent of the characters
portrayed in the eighteenth-century scatological writings of the Marquis de
Sade, whom surrealist artists had praised since the 1920s. The representation
of this character in the film suggests the close intertextual relationship that
exists between Buñuel’s work and that of Sade. Buñuel recognized that ‘en
Sade descubrí un mundo de subversión extraordinario, en el que entra todo: desde los
insectos a las costumbres de la sociedad humana, el sexo, la teología. … En fin, me
deslumbró realmente’ (in Sade, I discovered an extraordinary world of
subversion where everything enters: from insects to the customs of human
society, sex, theology. … Indeed, it really dazzled me.)22 The controversial
nature of Sade’s writings lies in the way in which he managed to represent
sexual attitudes that were prohibited by the social mores of the time. Like
Sade, Buñuel also enjoyed letting the viewer’s imagination have complete
control over its own domain. Buñuel returns to Sade to ‘scrutinise the very

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idea of evil, or of crime, or of blasphemy: the borders of nature. Sade for

Buñuel represented not vice but a form of principled pathology, a refusal of
all illusions about the ruthless propensities of humankind.’23
This patriarchal figure sadistically persuades Viridiana to dress up in his
late wife’s wedding dress and to promenade in his haunting ‘chateau’ – a
remote estate associated with a liminal space and with extreme psycho-
logical states. Here don Jaime attempts to perform one of the most ‘bestial’
of sexual perversions. The camera pays attention to the wedding dress,
which is made of white silk and fits Viridiana very tightly. The dress
accentuates her feminine figure, yet constrains her body to the point of
immobilization. Hence, the wedding dress fulfils the material function of a
rope, which is a constant motif throughout the film, and also serves as a
metaphor to suggest the extent to which desire and subjection, dominance
and submission, love and death, punishment and pleasure are mutually
interconnected in the film. Viridiana’s blonde hair is drawn back with a
beautiful crown of flowers. Although the white material covers the whole
of her body, the close-ups and medium shots allow the spectator24 to
imagine Viridiana’s voluptuous naked female flesh. In this case, one could
argue that Viridiana is defined only in terms of heterosexual male desire.
Buñuel’s representation of her femininity implies what Allen Jones later
explicitly revealed in his sculptures known as ‘women as furniture’.25
According to Mulvey’s psychoanalytic interpretation of these ‘punished
women’, the female figure historically has been visually represented to fulfil
the function of a socio-psychic commodity fetish at both levels: the
economic and the sexual. Viridiana, or Jones’s women, exist ‘in a state of
suspended animation, without depth or context, withdrawn from any
meaning other than the message imprinted by their clothes, stance and
gesture’.26 The figure of Viridiana can therefore function as a spectacle: an
object or piece of furniture to be displayed, looked at, gazed at, stared at,
even consumed and exchanged predominantly by men of various different
social and economic backgrounds.
In this ritualistic performance, after having being drugged by her uncle,
Viridiana recreates the dead feminine body of don Jaime’s wife both as a
sublimated phantom and as a fulfilment of the material function of a
corpse.27 In his analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, whose thematic concerns
with sublimation and with the male protagonist’s over-identification with
the lost female object remind us of Viridiana, Žižek rightly points out that
sublimation has to do with death. The power of fascination exerted by a
sublime image always announces a lethal dimension. Žižek argues that:

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The sublime object is precisely an ordinary, everyday object that

undergoes a kind of transubstantiation and starts to function, in the
symbolic economy of the subject, as an embodiment of the
impossible Thing. This is why the sublime object presents the par-
adox of an object that is able to subsist only in shadow, in an inter-
mediary, half-born state, as something latent, implicit, evoked. As
soon as we try to cast away the shadow to reveal the substance, the
object itself dissolves; all that remains is the dross of the common
object.28

If we follow Žižek’s notion of sublimation, Viridiana may be read as the

necrophiliac patriarch’s beloved apparition. The sublimated image of the
ethereal Viridiana implies an illusion that transcends itself, destroys itself, by
demonstrating that it is only there as a signifier. Viridiana’s sublime image is
the equivalent of a lid that covers up something else, so therefore conceals
its contents. As an attractive and seductive surface, Viridiana’s sublime
image is so resplendent that it is dazzling and irresistible. Her image invites
speculation, yet it resists explanation or fixed meaning. Viridiana lies
horizontally in the nuptial bed as if she were lying in a coffin, so radiantly
beautiful that she seems to be the ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The camera lingers on
her body to emphasize her horizontal pose, conjuring up in the spectator the
image of a corpse lying in a wake. In the second part of the film, don Jaime’s
dead wife reappears in the figure of a beggar, el leproso. After the beggars’
bacchanalian banquet and orgy, el leproso wears the corset and veil to perform
his danza macabra while Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus plays. Gastón Lillo and
Alejandro Yarza suggest that ‘el espacio perverso de la fantasía de don Jaime se
contamina de su otro reprimido, materializado esta vez en la carne putrefacta del leproso’
(the perverse space of don Jaime’s fantasy is contaminated by its repressed
other, which materializes this time in the leper’s putrefied flesh).29 If
Viridiana fulfils the function of a corpse, her dead body does not awaken to
become once more the bride of her perverse uncle (or father figure).
Kristeva distinguishes between three main forms of abjection. These are
constituted in relation to food, bodily waste and sexual difference. For
Kristeva, the ultimate in abjection is the corpse. Although the body expels
its waste to continue to live, the corpse is a body that can no longer expel its
waste. Kristeva argues that:

The corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has

encroached upon everything. It is no longer ‘I’ who expel, ‘I’ is

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expelled. The border has become an object. The corpse, seen without
God, and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death
infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does
not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an
object.30

If Viridiana is seen as a corpse, the camera’s constant attention to her hair

may no longer be read as displaying hair as a sign of cosmetic beauty. Her
blonde hair becomes a bodily part that is closely related to the abject (su otro
reprimido/its repressed other). Hair is defined as bodily waste that
transcends the death of the subject because it continues to grow even after
we are dead. I now bring into the discussion a contemporary art
installation, Recollection (1994), which the British-Palestinian artist Mona
Hatoum produced to explore this other function that hair fulfils. An
analysis of Hatoum’s installation also enables us to comprehend how theory
arises out of an experiential and contemplative engagement with the visual
arts.
The installation is composed of the artist’s own hair hanging from the ceil-
ing. The lines of hair are so thin that they seem almost invisible. In a corner
of the gallery, a kind of hand-operated machine weaves hair as opposed to
wool. This machine parodies the kinds of domestic labours historically
located within the realm of femininity. Hatoum also displays balls of the
same hair spread across the floor of the exhibition. This art installation
disrupts the boundaries between the art object and the privileged space of
the spectator, thus generating anxiety and disturbance in the spectator’s field
of vision. The physical contact of the hair with the spectator’s face and body
reinforces the claustrophobic effect. Like the torn piece of raw meat we
discussed in the preceding chapter, Hatoum’s art installation attempts to
reaffirm the notion of tactility. This is often repressed in the construction of
a rational model of thought that privileges sight. Hatoum thus challenges the
usual obsessional neuroticism that exists in relation to the taboo of touch.31
Hatoum’s redefinition of the function of hair enables us to reread the hair of
the corpse as a haunting abject body.
Hatoum’s redefinition of hair as a haunting abject body tends to render
the body, as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth rightly puts it, a territory of cultural self-
redefinition. The mobilization of this ‘strangeness’ within oneself may be
seen as emancipatory, as well as defining a more complex account of the
self. With particular reference to another installation work by Hatoum,
entitled Corps Étranger (1994), Lajer-Burcharth has argued that:

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Hatoum’s visual self-interrogation inspires one to account for the

work of hyphenations within oneself. This idea must have posed itself
with particular urgency to the artist as a culturally ‘hyphenated’,
British-Palestinian subject. Hatoum exposes the work of hyphen-
ations as the routes of an internal migration, rather than division and
stagnation, of psychic and cultural meaning.32

Lajer-Burcharth’s complex analysis of Hatoum’s installation work enables us

to suggest that the redefinition of Viridiana’s hair as an abject body during
the necrophilic ritual of don Jaime can also be seen as a kind of internal
mobility. This mobility allows for a more complex sense of subjectivity and
a greater awareness of its psychic and social implications.
The necrophiliac don Jaime subsequently commits suicide by hanging
himself with the rope that has also functioned as an erotic object. Through
distorted subjective shots, from the point of view of don Jaime, the legs of
Rita (the maid’s daughter) are observed voyeuristically while she plays at
skipping. As Raymond Durgnat observes, ‘don Jaime, instead of taking
advantage of Viridiana, hangs himself with the skipping-rope which he had
given to his servant’s illegitimate daughter.’33 We assume that don Jaime will
achieve a full erection and his male body will become a site of unbridled
eroticism due to his hanging himself. If we read the rope symbolically as a
penis that ‘penetrates’ the neck, in don Jaime’s body there coexists a
‘penetrated’ neck and an erect penis. Therefore don Jaime’s body now
unsettles the polarities between ‘penetrator’ and ‘penetrated’.34 The eroticiz-
ation of torture allows us to link the film with the erotic and terrible
universe of the dissident Bataille, who had a fascination with the com-
bination of desire with violence.
Don Jaime’s sublime object has involved the mortal danger that it always
entails. The sublime object allows the subject to recognize that the condition
of life for human beings is the recognition of death. Bataille asserts that
eroticism affirms life to the point of death, as well as life even in death.
Hence, death and sex are bound up with a remainder that is experienced at a
primal level. This remainder is linked to anguish, which appears when the
desiring subject, who is caught in a double bind, wishes to return to an
undifferentiated stage that is before or beyond life.35 In this universe, all
differences are abolished. The notion of good is synonymous with that of
evil. Even death dies, or ceases to exist, since it is no longer distinguishable
from life. Thus, death haunts both Bataille’s fiction and Buñuel’s films. More
importantly, death is a reality that is embodied in representational practices.

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However, during this performance, don Jaime, like the vampire, is still
condemned to live. This perverse aristocrat is unable to forget the
defilement that is involved in this incestuous relationship between uncle and
niece, or between ‘father’ and ‘daughter’. This explicit Sadean incestuous
scenario is indeed a challenge to bourgeois morality, for the dominant
ideology punishes any act of incestuous union. Moreover, incest is a clear
violation of the symbolic order, since it is a challenge to reproduction.
In her essay ‘Fetishism and the Problem of Sexual Difference in Buñuel’s
Tristana’, Labanyi rightly suggests that Cathérine Deneuve becomes ‘increas-
ingly vampire-like towards the film’s end, her pallor emphasized by her
garish make-up and her black shawl echoing Dracula’s cape’.36 In Viridiana,
it is the morally depraved old patriarchal figure who leans over his dead
niece ‘like a vampire over its victim’37 to grieve for the loss of his desired
object. We could make an analogy between don Jaime and Count Dracula.
Both characters are depicted as sinister, yet elegant and seductive males
who dwell in a kind of Gothic castle and prey upon the bodies of men
and/or women. Long winding stairs, dark corridors and cobwebs charac-
terized this building. Evans explains that ‘la mansión de don Jaime recrea también
el ambiente de la novela gótica que tanto interesaba a Buñuel y a los surrealistas’ (Don
Jaime’s mansion also recreates the atmosphere of the Gothic novel that so
interested Buñuel and the surrealists).38 The issue of incestuous love inter-
twines, then, with the anxieties or pleasures that are associated with the
vampire trope. The vampire not only sucks the victim’s blood, but his
victims are often also those he has most loved. In the case of this film, the
vampire don Jaime takes his niece as his prey. Viridiana, like most of the
victims of the vampire, is a young virgin. The issues of incest and of vampir-
ism are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they are complementary, primordial
transgressions that the pervert is condemned to repeat endlessly by
subjecting himself or herself to a fragmentary perception of the Real.39
The camera cuts to shots of Rita looking at this performance from one of
the room’s windows. Kinder’s analysis of the film concentrates on the
extent to which female characters from the lower classes capture the gaze at
various points in the film.40 We can hear dogs barking, which can be
compared with wolves howling in vampire films. The camera cuts from an
objective shot of Rita looking through the window of the room at the scene
inside to a subjective shot from Rita’s point of view of the old patriarchal
figure lying over his ‘dead’ niece’s body to satisfy a coital urge. To
emphasize the blasphemous nature of this act, Buñuel juxtaposes the
incestuous relationship between the necrophiliac don Jaime and the ‘dead’

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Viridiana with religious music coming from somewhere off-screen. Like a

vampire, Viridiana’s body does not elicit compassion; it elicits the morbid
attraction of a sublimated body that is completely covered in white silk and
that reveals simultaneously and paradoxically the possibility of its decaying.
Through this particular imagery and these conventions, the mise-en-scène
recalls (and evokes) the vampire film. As Evans has rightly suggested,
Buñuel uses the contrast between light and dark, associated with the style of
chiaroscuro, to enhance the film’s analogy with baroque and Gothic styles and
genres. Moreover, the contrast between light and shadow is further empha-
sized by the uniform temporal pattern that is established between the day
and night in which the action of the film takes place.
At this point, we may relate don Jaime’s vampire body to the uncanny
return of the Real. In addition, in this atmosphere of proximity, Viridiana’s
body may also be read as a vampire body when it lies in the nuptial bed. On
the one hand, the representation of vampirism in Viridiana can be inter-
preted as a retrogressive phobic critique of perversion. On the other hand,
the vampire trope can be seen as a progressive challenge to patriarchal
ontology. In the latter case, the vampire figure is an abject space that a queer
viewer can reclaim. Although Viridiana seems to be the victim of the necro-
philiac vampire, her sublimated body lies in the bed as if in a coffin. Like the
vampire, Viridiana rests ‘in her coffin like an unborn baby nestled in the
dark comfort of the mother’s womb’.41 Moreover, the vampire body alludes
to an oral relation of jouissance, since vampirism can only be achieved
through sucking the victim’s neck, which is a displacement of the breast. In
‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety’, Joan Copjec argues that vampirism
provokes an anxiety in the complete ego. The breast is a partial object,
which the subject needs to abject to constitute itself as a unified subject.
Copjec argues that it is not the image of the child at the mother’s breast that
provokes anxiety in the subject’s psyche. The vampire body is rather located
beyond the relationship between the child and the object of its desire, the
breast. Vampirism refers to the point at which desire disappears, for the
breast has dried up. The drying up of desire thus asphyxiates the subject.
Hence, vampirism is a threat to the notion of the body as being securely
protected in the symbolic. The vampire body is a bodily double the subject
cannot intelligibly recognize. In an earlier sequence, Viridiana plays a sleep-
walker who reminds us of the figure of the phantom. Like the vampire, the
phantom positions itself between the material and the immaterial, the visible
and the invisible, the recognizable and the unrecognizable, presence and
absence. The phantom, which is born out of the shadow, transgresses the

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threshold of the visible world by going beyond culture, beyond the signifier
and therefore inhabiting a domain of non-meaning. Copjec’s emphasis on
the Real allows us to suggest that the vampire is a fragmented body located
in the semiotic chora. In opposition to the semiotic, in the thetic phase, the
subject, qua subject, is always already in language and thus in the symbolic.
The semiotic focuses instead on the imperfections of the body. The
fragmented body breaks the skin that functions as the boundary between the
inside and outside of our bodies by suggesting that the self is in an
unfinished state. It envisions the instability of the internal psychic bound-
aries as a concrete embodied experience. The vampire disrupts the dominant
society’s teleological conception of resurrection by pointing to a cyclical
notion of return. The body is no longer subject to cultural signification, but
is now part of an arbitrary process of fluid ‘schizo’-symbolization.42 If Lacan
has defined identification as an incorporation that transforms the subject,
identification here is less a matter of assimilation than a kind of spectral
decomposition of the self.
The morning after this sinister performance, Viridiana believes that her
uncle possessed her during this ritualistic act. The audience never finds out
whether he indeed had sex with her or whether it was just an excuse to force
Viridiana not to go back to the convent and to stay near him as his lover.
What interests me in this sequence is how this female character’s sense of
disgust at her uncle’s actions and at the fantasy space of sublimation in
which the action took place provokes her to leave the bourgeois house
abruptly. Viridiana is no longer securely protected either by a bourgeois
social and symbolic order or by a world governed by perverse relations. It
seems as if any trace of the Real should vanish from her repressed con-
sciousness. In psychoanalytic terms, this reaction of repulsion on the part of
Viridiana could be a symptom of Buñuel’s heterosexual and patriarchal
anxiety at the danger associated with the Real that remains inaccessible to
the subject and nonetheless structures its functioning. Copjec suggests that
the subject ‘flees into a symbolic domain which implies a hedge against the
Real. For this reason, the evasion of the Real can only be secured through
the negation of the Real’.43
At the end of this sequence, Buñuel punishes Viridiana by perpetuating
her sense of disgust. He also punishes don Jaime by having him commit
suicide. Don Jaime becomes the corpse sublimated in the previous ritual
that alluded to the vampire. This effect reinforces a rereading of the vampire
film in which the Real is retrogressively associated with monstrosity.
Although the interpretation that follows could be considered anachronistic,

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a contemporary analysis of vampire films allows us to perform a close read-

ing of this sequence from Viridiana, adding and inferring a queer perspective
that critics of the film have hitherto largely ignored. From a contemporary
queer subject position, we may in retrospect suggest that Buñuel perhaps
anticipates a kind of psychic anxiety about contamination or pollution that
was later explicitly manifested and associated with sexual disease in the
filmic representations of the vampire that were produced during the Reagan
years in the United States. This historical context coincides with the
development of a growing fixation on the body in relation to the progressive
and retrogressive social and political questions mainly associated with the
AIDS crisis.
In this context, the representation of bodily fluids in the mainstream
vampire film came to be metaphorically associated with the AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s. As Simon Watney suggests, the media coverage of
AIDS in the United Kingdom was aimed at heterosexual groups, especially
at an imaginary national family unit.44 The homosexual was portrayed as a
monster who infected the harmonious heterosexual society with his
poisonous blood. It is interesting to note, in this specific socio-political
context, that Cathérine Deneuve, who collaborated with Buñuel in Belle de
jour and Tristana (1970), later played a bisexual vampire in Tony Scott’s
movie, The Hunger (1982). Harry M. Benshoff observes that during the
sequence in which Deneuve and Susan Sarandon make love, discordant
sounds suddenly disrupt the harmonious melody of Delibe’s Lakme.
Benshoff argues that ‘the scene slowly turns from tender and erotic to
menacing and evil. What had begun as a beautiful scene of making love
ends as yet another monstrous horror.’45 From this perspective, the repre-
sentation of vampirism could function as a negative stereotypical depiction
of the sexual outlaw as a monster that needs to be expelled from the
hegemonic society. What interests me in Scott’s movie is the way the
opening scene, in particular, incorporates a rock-video style, with loud
music, dazzling lights, violent imagery, frenetic cuts and confusing juxta-
positions at a time when MTV was still an innovation. The film became a
cult movie within subcultural communities. Some queer artists have tried
to dismantle the relationship between the vampire, monster and queer by
appropriating a Gothic style for their own purposes. Ellis Hanson
contends that ‘Gothic camp is a popular mode of short-circuiting the
homophobic tendencies of the gothic novel while still retaining its creepy
sensuality. The vampire in particular has been for some time now the
central figure of Gothic camp.’46

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To sum up, the vampire body allows for the possibility of a queer pleasure
dynamic. The vampire, as a figure of abjection, contributes to the collapse of
the boundaries between the human and non-human subject. In this utopian
space, there is no longer any distinction between masculine and feminine.
From this perspective, the vampire does not exist in the dimension of
gender and sexual difference, but rather in the dimension of ontology. The
boundaries that separate life from death (the binary of the natural, the limits
of Being) are disrupted in the vampire’s ‘unnatural’ being. The latter has
been historically associated with queerness. Sue-Ellen Case argues that
‘queer desire is constituted as a transgression’ of the borders of life and
death and of ‘the organicism [defined as natural] which defines the living as
the good. The Platonic construction of a life/death binary opposition at the
base, with its attendant gender opposition above, is subverted by a queer
desire which seeks the living dead.’47
Rereading Viridiana as a representation of vampirism transforms the film
into a powerful site of fantasy, or an ironic site of rebellion in which queer-
ness can be addressed. Viridiana’s implicit allusion to the vampire body is
reread as revenge by a minority that is outside the dominant heterosexist
hegemony. The vampire has been extracted from ‘the monolithic patriarchal
and heterosexist discourse that it once inhabited’.48 Moreover, the vampire’s
separation from gender-based categories contributes to the collapse of the
hierarchical distinction between the ‘penetrator’ and the ‘penetrated’ (this
allows for an inter-subjective narcissism in which self and other intermesh).
Queer spectators who observe the vampire body in the nuptial bed, which
stands metaphorically for the coffin, are able to celebrate the socially and
psychically abjected space that the sexual outlaw has been obliged to
inhabit. Hence, the Real can be critically reclaimed in order to instill a kind
of doubt as an imaginary basis for a more complex and flexible sense of the
self.

Desiring the Punishing Mother

This sequence also shows us the extent to which the patriarchal don Jaime is
as masochistic as Viridiana. The patriarch illuminates an important aspect of
the novice’s perverse, yet repressed, sexuality. In an earlier sequence,
crosscutting reinforces the interconnection between the personality of
Viridiana and of don Jaime. Buñuel alternates the action of don Jaime
playing the organ (a displacement of Viridiana’s body) with that of Viridiana
praying in her bedroom. Viridiana’s mystical experiences imply the
introjection of the body of Christ. She masochistically takes on the absent

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body of Christ by praying and venerating Christ’s attributes, such as the

crown of thorns, the cross and the nails. Lillo and Yarza rightly suggest that
in this sequence, ‘se establece, por primera vez en la película, la conexión entre el dolor
corporal y el placer de la carne’ (the connection is established for the first time in
the film between corporeal pain [suffered by Viridiana] and the pleasure of
the flesh [enjoyed by don Jaime]).49 On other occasions, the camera’s
attention to the female shoe and corset reinforces their function as fetishes
for don Jaime. Likewise, the camera’s attention to Christ’s attributes in the
film reinforces their function as Viridiana’s fetishistic objects. The sound of
don Jaime playing religious music can be heard when the film crosscuts to
the shots of Viridiana praying in her bedroom. The soundtrack thus
functions as a link between the alternation of shots and this emphasizes the
psychological interconnection between don Jaime and Viridiana. Hence,
these constant acts of voyeurism allow us to draw a parallel between don
Jaime’s act of introjecting the lost object and Viridiana’s of introjecting the
body of Christ and to identify both as masochists. The introjection of the
lost object can be defined as a masochistic act that implies a degree of
humiliation and is associated with a feminine position. While the shoe and
corset replace don Jaime’s lost object, the body of Christ is replaced by his
attributes.
In my analysis of this sequence, I am not primarily concerned with the
extent to which Viridiana and don Jaime might epitomize examples of
female and male masochism. Instead, I would like to discuss the Freudian
location of masochism in the Oedipal phase and Deleuze’s re-evaluation of
the Freudian psychopathological conception of this form of perversion.
Following Deleuze’s relocation of masochism in the pre-Oedipal phase of
the child’s subjectivity, which is itself linked to Kristeva’s emphasis on the
semiotic chora, I suggest that Buñuel’s obsession with the male and female
masochistic subject unconsciously subverts the law of the father. Masochism
becomes a seductive fantasy for the queer spectator. I am ultimately less
interested in the process of cross-gender identification that emerges from
the relationship that is established between Viridiana and don Jaime.
Instead, I focus on the extent to which Buñuel’s parodic rewriting and
reappropriation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper (1494–97) is
to be understood in terms of the relationship between queerness,
masochism and artistic creativity.
According to Freudian psychopathology, masochism is a form of
aggression directed toward the self. Although a child’s first impulses are a
form of aggression directed towards the exterior (sadism), through the role

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of the father this violence comes to be directed inwards. In Freudian

psychoanalysis, sadism and masochism derive from the same sexual drive.
Sadism and masochism are distinguished from each other by the passivity
masochism implies and the activity sadism implies. The role of the father is
thus crucial in this transformation from sadism to masochism. ‘The father
represents punishment to the child, and the child incorporates the father’s
law in his own superego, which punishes him for his hatred of the father.’50
In 1915, Freud added the phallic phase to the previous oral and anal stages
of infantile sexual development, establishing the ego/superego
psychodynamic. The superego is the internalized locus of the law of the
father, which represents genital sexuality and it is the agent of repression.
Through the introjection of this superego, the child needs to seek internal
punishment. More interestingly, the introjection of the superego implies
the sublimation of the child’s polymorphous perversity and the fortification
of heterosexual desire, which is necessary for the advancement of
civilization. According to Freud, masochism thus originates in the child’s
instinctual manifestation of internal destructiveness that is present in the
ego.51 The Freudian theorization of the pathological cause of this perversion
suggests that ‘masochism is derivative of the incestuous wishes of the son,
the fantasy in which the father is all-powerful and potent, beats the son,
punishes him, possesses the mother, and makes her inaccessible for ever.’52
In contrast to the centrality of the patriarchal figure in Freud’s theory of
masochism, Deleuze’s re-evaluation of Freud implies a theoretical shift
away from Freud’s emphasis on the castration fear in perversion. Deleuze’s
theory of masochism also implies an overcoming of the Hegelian master/
slave model. According to Deleuze, masochism is a form of pre-genital
pleasure that originates in the symbiotic bond. The child develops an
anxiety in relation to the threat of losing the mother. Hence, Deleuze
introduces a mythical dimension with regard to the maternal role. The oral
mother is a powerful and controlling figure against whom the child
constantly struggles. Kaja Silverman has suggested that pre-Oedipality still
has a structural relationship to Oedipality. Silverman objects to the con-
flation of Deleuze’s oral mother with the pre-Oedipal mother who is
emphasized in object relations theory. According to Silverman, this con-
flation grounds perversion in biology as opposed to culture. However,
Silverman tends to reconstruct the Lacanian formulations of subjectivity and
pleasure as based on lack.
On the other hand, Silverman acknowledges masochism as a subversive
pleasure directed against the law of the father. She suggests that: ‘The male

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masochist articulates both his conscious and his unconscious desires from a
feminine position. Although he seems to subordinate himself to the law of
the father, that is only because he knows how to transform punishment into
pleasure and severity into bliss.’53 However, masochism is not a perversion
that seeks punishment. The male masochist regresses to the oral stage. He
thus emphasizes a non-differentiated form of pleasure. Masochism erases
any trace that is left by Oedipal genitality and its self-shattering jouissance
negates paternal power and privilege. Masochism is thus a liberation from
the superego, thereby privileging the sharing of similarities rather than an
unequal relationship between the sadist and the masochist. Deleuze suggests
that: ‘In opposition to the institutional superego, the masochist establishes
the contractual partnership between the ego and the oral mother. The oral
mother functions as an image of death, but death can only be imagined as a
second birth, a parthenogenesis from which the ego re-emerges, liberated
from the superego.’54 According to Deleuze, masochism is thus a pre-
Oedipal pleasure that challenges the image of the father as the repressive
authority. The latter regulates a genital sexuality that is constitutive of the
superego.
To sum up, in Viridiana male and female masochists, unlike the Freudian
ego, submit themselves to the punishment, suffering and humiliation
implied in the process of introjecting the lost object, in the case of the
patriarchal figure, and the body of Christ, in the case of Viridiana. These
male and female masochists defiantly acquire the right to enjoy the
gratification previously denied to them. In this case, the masochistic
performances in Viridiana open up the possibility of the reversal of
traditional gender roles. They also locate this perverse sexual practice in
opposition to functional pleasure. In this process of resexualization,
masochism presents a challenge to the phallocratic father by emphasizing
the free sexuality of the matriarchal, which the Freudian superego forbids.
Rosalind Coward rightly suggests that, in masochism, ‘the law of the
Mother prevails; Earth and Fertility goddesses are the centre of worship. In
the mythical world of matriarchy, homosexuality is associated with the
concept of sex for pleasure.’55 The film thus subverts the heterosexual and
phallocratic structures of subject formation and the representation of
masochism in the film is a challenge to the dominant society’s moral vision.
From this perspective, Buñuel’s depiction of the male and the female
masochist in Viridiana can be reread from a contemporary queer subject
position.

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Picturing the Beggars: A ‘Perverse’ Appropriation of Leonardo da

Vinci’s The Last Supper
At this point, let us look at the sequence in which Enedina, who is one of
the female beggars, pretends to photograph the other beggars at the dining
table. Detailed analysis of this kind allows us to understand to what extent
the film aligns itself with what is frequently identified as patriarchal surrealist
experimentation with parodic rewriting. Inversely, this analysis also allows
us to ask to what extent current queer modes of rereading and rewriting
cultural texts may appropriate Viridiana. I propose to consider the different cine-
matic elements Buñuel uses to represent this parodic image and how he
transforms the conventional function of objects so that they fulfil a different
material and symbolic function.
As is evident, Buñuel draws on the discourse of religion, more specifically
on that of Christianity, to construct the mise-en-scène of this sequence. As
Ronald Schwartz explains: ‘One of Buñuel’s chief targets is the Catholic
church and Viridiana is extremely critical of the church, the clergy, their
practices and their hypocrisy, their life-style being out of touch with modern
Spain of the 1960s.’56 Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper functions, thus, as
a parodic religious intertext, which is inscribed in the film. This religious
intertext provoked considerable controversy at the time the film was released.
The film was awarded the prestigious Palme D’Or award at the fourteenth
Cannes Film Festival in 1961. Despite this success at Cannes, several articles
in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, condemned the
film as blasphemous and irreverent towards what the Vatican considered a
sacred scene of Christianity.57
Once the Vatican had condemned the film as a liturgical parody, Franco’s
Spanish government banned it outright and reprimanded a minister for
having passed the script.58 Although Buñuel had been invited to come back
to Spain to make Viridiana, the director was then forced to set the film in
Mexico instead of Spain, as he had already done in 1949. In an attempt to
acquit Buñuel of the charge of being blasphemous, Emilio Riera suggested
that the Vatican’s view of the film as a liturgical parody was reductionist,
arguing that:

In Viridiana, Buñuel does not group the beggars in an arrangement

similar to the figures in da Vinci’s Last Supper in order to belittle
Christ and his apostles by comparing them to some drunkards.
Hence, Buñuel is not mocking Christ himself, but the manner in
which Christ’s image is worshipped.59

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The sequence may be identified as an ironic aesthetic gesture towards

Leonardo da Vinci’s pictorial source. Buñuel achieves an iconoclastic assault
on and subversion of the composition of this celebrated sacred scene. In an
attempt to explore the aesthetic, ideological and psychic operations Buñuel
deploys and conveys with respect to Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, let us
now examine the narrative and visual context in which this religious
intertext irrupts in Viridiana.
Taking advantage of the house being vacant, the beggars decide to
organize a kind of bacchanalian banquet and orgy. During the dinner, they
eat, drink, dance, sing, spill wine, throw food around, fight irrationally, have
sex and smash antique furniture, ornate dishes and glasses. Finally, in an
unconstrained attack of rage, the blind man destroys the banquet table with
his stick. The beggars’ disenfranchisement as a class suggests a kind of
subjectivity that is under siege in a bourgeois society. As the beggars
momentarily occupy the bourgeois space, we may read their attempt to
transgress its threshold as a self-conscious political act of subversion. From
a Marxist perspective, the beggars are challenging the power relationship
that exists between the bourgeoisie and the subaltern social position they
inhabit. Moving beyond this Marxist political reading, I would suggest that,
rather than giving powerful expression to these feelings of class dis-
enfranchisement, Buñuel is ironically exploring the beggars’ mimetic desire
to possess the objects and attributes that define the bourgeoisie. Their
behaviour can also be read as the expression of a defiance that implies the
instability of the limits of the self. Bourgeois rationalized exchange and
productivity, the values don Jaime’s son upholds in the film, come to be
subordinated to unlimited, non-productive expenditure. Hence, the self
comes to be subordinated to the expressive, quasi-mystical state we might
associate with religious ecstasy and, in general, with the realm of the sacred.
The collective celebration of the beggars exceeds the bounds of everyday
behaviour, which is generally constrained by considerations of self-
preservation or profit.
Suddenly, at the suggestion of El Poca and Enedina, the beggars pose
around the dining table, imitating the pictured scene of the 12 apostles in da
Vinci’s painting. It is interesting that the scene does not appear in the
shooting script but was in fact improvised during the shooting of the film.60
The beggars stop moving to become as immobile as the figures in da Vinci’s
painting. At this point, their poses dramatically contrast with the unre-
strained behaviour these subaltern characters have demonstrated up to this
point. Buñuel freezes the frame to emphasize the contrast between the

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beggars’ unrestrained behaviour and their current frozen position. The lack
of integration of the pictorial reference to da Vinci with the overall setup of
the sequence emphasizes the beggars’ frozen position. The religious inter-
text in this scene thus functions as a heterogeneous element in the filmic
text, thereby emphasizing its parodic function and disorienting the spec-
tator’s visual perception of the image.
This disorienting effect Buñuel provokes in the spectator is also achieved
at other moments in the film through the use of crosscutting;61 for instance,
one of the most striking examples of these cinematic juxtapositions is the
sequence dealing with the celebration of the ‘Angelus’ in the fields. In this
sequence, Viridiana and the beggars, arranged as in Millet’s The Angelus
(1855–57), are praying in the fields at daybreak. The camera cuts repeatedly
from the beggars at prayer to shots of feverishly industrious workers who
are in the process of transforming the neglected landscape that surrounds
the house. Buñuel’s use of crosscutting enables him to juxtapose two con-
flicting temporalities that coexist incompatibly in the film. Whereas the
temporality the workers represent is profane and historical, the one
Viridiana and the hypocritical beggars represent is sacred, an ahistorical
temporality bound up with inactivity. As Lillo and Yarza contend, ‘Viridiana
y sus mendigos son una mancha, un patético anacronismo, en el proyecto civilizador de
Jorge’ (Viridiana and her beggars are a stain, a pathetic anachronism, in
Jorge’s civilizing project).62
To return to the sequence of The Last Supper, Buñuel succeeds in disrupt-
ing and disorganizing the filmic visual space by making these slippages
between the realm of painting and that of film. This disjunction creates a
confusion between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ space by showing a mixture of
different registers, a procedure reminiscent of the modernist technique of
collage.63 The latter is by definition a hybrid form, since it combines hetero-
geneous verbal, visual and tactile elements. Moreover, the technique of
collage dissolves the unified surface into different parts. It implies an oper-
ation of mutilation and the destruction of a previous reality so that another
can take its place, allowing the original object to acquire a new hierarchical
position. Hence, the association of this sequence with the technical pro-
cedures characteristic of modernist collage allows us to suggest that the film
functions as a reunification of contradictory and incompatible registers that
serve to disrupt the uniformity of the cinematic screen itself. Can the
disruption of the cinematic screen through this collage-like effect be
symbolically linked to the challenge made to the flattering reflected image of
the subject that Lacan associates with the imaginary? According to Krauss,

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the Lacanian mirror image stands for ‘the organization and order of the
good Gestalt’. In this sense, it assumes in the viewing subject a concomitant
logical and visual control.64 Following Krauss’s analysis of Lacan’s theories
of the mirror stage, we can read Buñuel’s disruption of the cinematic screen
through the collage-like effect as a subversion of that ‘process of establish-
ing a distinction between subject and object. This process starts with the
infant synthesizing a whole body out of the manifold of limbs and proceeds
only gradually as language confirms the syntheses and separations of the
mirror stage.’65 From this perspective, Buñuel points to a fragile self that
cannot master its potential limitations by taking apart the imaginary. The ‘I’
comes face to face with that infinite otherness that has the potential to undo
the self.
In this tableau vivant, don Amalio, the blind figure, occupies the central
position at the table, the position Christ occupies in da Vinci’s The Last
Supper. Buñuel’s ironic association of don Amalio with the figure of Christ
reminds the spectator of his earlier surrealist film, L’Age d’or (1930), in
which the degenerate Duke of Blangis was presented as Christ. Further-
more, Enedina, who maintains a sexual relationship with don Amalio,
positions herself in front of the beggars to take their picture ‘con una máquina
que me regalaron mis papás’ (with a machine my parents gave me as a
present).66 A socially marginal woman thus occupies the place of da Vinci,
the male painter, which would have been unacceptable in the Cinquecento, the
historical period in which da Vinci’s painting was produced. At this moment
a cock crows in the background. According to Sánchez-Biosca’s thorough
analysis of the film, the camera cuts to a shot of the centre of the table,
thereby allowing us to appreciate the pose of the proud don Amalio and a
glass of wine, which is an explicit allusion to the blood of Christ. Sánchez-
Biosca suggests that Buñuel is alluding to a passage in the New Testament
where a cock crowing follows the denial of Saint Peter on the day of Christ’s
capture. Christ himself had predicted this moment of betrayal during the
‘Last Supper’, which da Vinci and Buñuel represent in pictorial or filmic
terms. Enedina occupies the position of the painter, thereby replacing the
painter’s palette with her modern camera and inflecting the sacred scene
with modernity. But Enedina uses a different instrument to take the picture
of the beggars. The female photographer lifts up her skirt and, in a laughing
manner, pretends to take the picture with her vagina. Enedina’s literal ‘cut’
(namely her vagina) executes the ‘click’ of the shutter. Hence, the irruption
of the female genitals perversely challenges the notion of sacredness
conventionally attributed to the celebrated scene of da Vinci’s Renaissance

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painting. In his analysis of photography and fetishism, Christian Metz

associates photography with death. He attributes the importance of
immobility and silence, two objective aspects of death, to the authority of
photography. Following Metz, I suggest that the ‘click’ of the shutter that
Enedina executes marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from
which the look has been averted forever.67
In her analysis of this sequence, Kinder observes that Enedina’s obscene
gesture can be read in terms of sexual politics. Enedina problematizes the
traditional definition of male voyeurism explained in Chapter 1. Kinder is
also concerned with the sexual inversion that Enedina’s vagina fulfilling
the function of a camera implies. The female sexual apparatus is not
merely an obscene object of desire, but a structuring subject. Kinder argues
that:

Enedina performs a sex change on both the fetishistic cinematic

apparatus and its referent. Her defiant act appropriates and conflates
both sides of the gaze – voyeurism and exhibitionism, which are
traditionally, gendered male and female respectively. Hence, Enedina’s
obscene gesture marks the moment in the film that is more sub-
versive on several registers: religion, class, gender, and cinematic
enunciation.68

What Kinder does not discuss is that Enedina’s spatial position

coincides with the symbolic position of the director looking at the scene
of the beggars at the dining table. Buñuel places the camera behind
Enedina so that our gaze merges with that of the director and Enedina
looking at the sacred scene, yet unveiling the principle of suture, the
process by which the subject is joined to the signifying chain, allowing the
signifier to stand in for the subject’s absence in discourse. Cinematic
suture functions as an apparatus through which the subject acquires
identification and is transformed into an ideologically functional entity. In
the subsequent reverse shot, the spectator’s point of view coincides with
that of the beggars who are looking at Enedina’s obscene gesture. Enedina
is the subject of the utterance and, more importantly, the subject of
enunciation because she looks back at the camera while paradoxically being
the camera herself. By preventing a smooth interpellation of the viewer
within the discursive fluctuations played out across the specular registers,
Buñuel transgresses conventional audience–screen relations, thereby fore-
grounding the structures of voyeurism and the rules of suture that allow

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the subject’s interpellation within the social order. Buñuel does not rigidify
or secure the subject in a coherent spatial location, where the subject would
reaffirm a full phallic viewing position, through the rules of cinematic
suture. Stam explains that: ‘Instead of stimulating desire, Buñuel holds the
mirror to our own psychic fix on films themselves. He scrutinizes our
phantasmatic relation to the spectacle, exposing desire as a cultural
cinematic construct. Hence, Buñuel touches on the issue of the sexual
politics of looking.’69
According to Christine Battersby, Lacan takes from Kant the concept of
the self as only being constructed via a ‘cut’ from its ‘other’.70 The notion of
the transcendental ego is a form of necessary illusion. Feminist philosophers
have objected to the way that, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the notion of
woman represents the other against which the oedipalized and masculinized
self constructs itself as a self. For instance, Battersby argues that Luce
Irigaray proposes the concept of the ‘speculum’ to challenge this divide
between self and other. She thus opens up ways of thinking about the self
and subjectivity that do not rely on the divide between the self and the
other. Irigaray thus uses the notion of the ‘speculum’71 to undermine the
Western philosophical tradition of being, which she connects with patri-
archy, heterosexuality and rationality. This tradition has constructed a divide
between the Real and the world that is presented via the optics of sensual
desire. In a rather similar way to that of Irigaray, by using Enedina’s body,
and more specifically her vagina, as a camera, Buñuel reverses the direction
of the gaze, thereby forcing the spectator to confront a black hole. Lillo and
Yarza explain that:

En otras palabras, se trata de las excrecencias de lo real trepando por los

intersticios de lo simbólico y retratadas por el agujero negro, cuya brutal
exclusión es origen de la subjetividad y la cultura pero que a la vez amenaza
constantemente con su colapso (In other words, it is a question of the
excrescences of the real climbing over the interstices of the symbolic
and portrayed by the black hole whose brutal exclusion is the origin
of subjectivity and culture. However, we are simultaneously and con-
stantly threatened by its collapse.)72

Moreover, one could interpret Irigaray’s disruption of this divide between

gendered and sexual subject positions as having the same ideological effect
as Barthes’s notion of textual rupture, which signifies the escape from
phallic mastery and breaks apart the workings of language and the certitude

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of subjectivity. By drawing on feminist literary critics, such as Jane Gallop,

I shall suggest that the association with the notion of rupture in Irigaray
and Barthes allows us to propose that, in Viridiana, Buñuel points to a
difficulty in separating subject and object within the realm of textual
pleasure.73

Enedina and Rrose Sélavy

To what extent does Enedina, by occupying the symbolic position of the
director, become Buñuel’s own ego and to what extent is she a woman with
a phallus? Does the latter necessarily undo the supposedly natural logic of
the ideological solidarity between the phallus and the patriarchal and
heterosexist law? The film may suggest a slippage between heterosexual and
homosexual identity through a feminine ego embodied in the figure of
Enedina. To answer these questions, let us bring into the discussion a well-
documented case within surrealist/Dadaist art, the feminine ego of Marcel
Duchamp known as Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp’s surrealist appropriation of da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa allows us to understand how problematic it is to link the
psychosexual dynamics of perversion, including masochism, in Buñuel’s
appropriation of da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with a queer subject position.
My interpretation problematizes the existing critical literature on Buñuel’s
cinema, which, like Buñuel in his interviews, denies or disavows the
possibility of articulating queerness.
In Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-garde, an examination of
gender, politics and French avant-garde art and writing, Suleiman analyses
Duchamp’s LHOOQ (1919), a mass-produced colour reproduction of da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Duchamp makes us think of how the original oil painting
is submitted to the mass serialization of images in the age of mechanical
reproduction, which entails its infinite repetition. If Buñuel also alludes to
the reproduction of The Last Supper in Viridiana, both he and Duchamp,
through the use of the ready-made, contribute to the desacralization of da
Vinci’s celebrated Renaissance paintings. More interestingly, Duchamp,
having read Freud, famously drew with a pencil a kind of Dalí-like
moustache and small beard on the face of the Mona Lisa. This moustache
can be interpreted as her pubic area displaced upwards. The Mona Lisa
becomes a man in drag or a woman with a phallus. Duchamp aggressively
defaces the most famous painting in Western art and plays with sexual
identities that evoke da Vinci’s supposed homosexuality.74 More important
in the context of this discussion, Duchamp evokes his own feminine ego.
His friend, the photographer Man Ray, took several photo portraits of Rrose

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Sélavy. Sharing his admiration for the theme of cross-dressing with other
surrealists, such as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray took a photograph entitled
‘Barbette Dressing’ (1920), which portrays a famous cross-dresser among the
surrealist circle. In Man Ray’s photo portraits, Duchamp masquerades as a
classic lady who might be associated with a female patron of the arts,
dressed in furs and wearing an elegant hat. Man Ray thus explores and cele-
brates different sexual preferences and gender tropes.
Like Duchamp, Buñuel perversely makes fun of da Vinci’s painting
through his appeal to Enedina’s pubic area, which has acquired a new phallic
dimension by fulfilling the function of a camera. Also like Duchamp, in the
sequence of The Last Supper, Buñuel plays with sexual identities. Enedina, a
low-class woman, can be interpreted as an evocation of the particular form
of Buñuel’s feminine ego. Stam tells us that, as adolescents, Buñuel and
García Lorca would cross-dress to flirt mockingly with male passengers on
streetcars.75 Like a drag queen, Buñuel uses the signifiers of a particular
lower-class femininity to disrupt mainstream bourgeois masculinity. From
this perspective, representing Enedina as Buñuel’s ego might, as Guattari puts
it, provide an escape ‘from the repressive social structure, and could be seen
as a process leading beyond the symbolic order altogether by experiencing a
bodily jouissance and pleasure which is closer to an existence beyond the
opposition between persons’.76
Drawing on the notion of ambivalence, which implies the coexistence of
contradictory tendencies in the relationship to a single object, Amelia Jones
suggests that Duchamp’s feminine ego, Rrose Sélavy, instigates such a
notion, thereby allowing for an interchange of subject positions. Jones
argues that this interchangeability is due to the resistance formed out of the
consequence of transference. Hence, the subject is simultaneously able to
shift and to confuse the oppositional poles of masculine viewing and
feminine viewed object or homo and heterosexual desiring. It is this mutable
system of ambivalence that constitutes subjectivity, producing the coexist-
ence of both passive and active instinctual forms in the subject.77 According
to Jones, Duchamp’s feminine ego splits the Duchampian author-function
into an ambivalent coexistence between feminine and masculine gender, and
therefore disrupts the patriarchal objective of defining sexual difference as
oppositionally coded in alignment with anatomically fixed male and female
bodies. Jones argues that:

Rrose is the ‘me’ with and against whom Duchamp plays his ‘little
game’. The non-oppositional other, Rrose is Duchamp and yet,

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clearly, she is not. She is separated (or not separated) from her other
only by activating the paradox of subjectivity, especially for the
woman: she becomes an author signing and yet she herself has been
authored by her other.78

Referring back to Buñuel’s feminine ego, I propose that by identifying

with the female character, he (Buñuel) unconsciously loses his masculine
authorial control. He thus ‘blasphemes’ against his own directorial authority.
Buñuel’s gesture can be seen as a kind of parody of the definition of
feminine identity designed to disrupt the boundaries of gender identity.
Taking into account Jones’s discussion of the implications of the notion of
ambivalence, I suggest that Buñuel’s feminine ego allows him to enact his
gender undecidability. Hence, Buñuel’s gesture could be read as a dissident
drag act working to resignify his feminine ego as necessarily and deliberately
transgressing the anti-feminine and homophobic construction of ideal male
subjectivity.79
We could also argue that Buñuel’s feminine ego can be interpreted as a
strategy of doubling, which points towards the male’s fantasies and anxieties
in relation to castration. In his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, Freud reads
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s early nineteenth-century story ‘The Sandman’ as his
first example of the uncanny.80 Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of
Hoffmann’s tale allows him to argue that the fear of castration, which is first
suffered in early infancy, returns as an anxiety about blindness. He suggests
that this particular example of the uncanny refers back to the sight of the
mother’s genitals. According to Freud, in the story the young Nathaniel
splits his father into two different figures. One is a protective father. The
other, on the contrary, is a castrating father who wants to blind Nathaniel.
The son desires the good father. Therefore, according to Freud, this
feminine attitude in male subjectivity is represented in the story by the doll
Olympia with whom Nathaniel falls in love. This animate doll can be seen as
an image produced to protect oneself from the fear of castration, which
could be identified as a strategy and an effect of anxiety. The invention of
the protective strategy of doubling suggests that the paranoid persecution by
the father may be a reversed form of a repressed desire for the father. From
this perspective, the act of doubling through the creation of a feminine ego
symptomatically becomes a strategy for protecting oneself against the fear of
castration. More importantly, like Olympia in Hoffmann’s story, Enedina
becomes an animated doll, which functions as a projection of Buñuel’s
repressed desire for his father.

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Buñuel’s ego, manifested through the figure of Enedina, opens up the

mask of femininity, whose excess might make manifest the female’s rivalry
with the male. Buñuel’s femininity is associated with transvestism, since this
social practice relates to crossing gender boundaries. Transvestism has often
been read as problematizing the category of ‘male’ and ‘female’, as well as
that of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. In Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber discusses at
length the symbolic meanings attached to clothing and appearance.
Transvestism is associated with a subject position that confounds the
symbolic meanings associated with gender and sexuality within the dominant
culture. For Garber, the disruptive element that intervenes in the discourse
of transvestism provokes a categorical crisis not only in the conventions of
male and female genders, but also in the way that culture defines these
conventions.81 This implicit allusion to transvestism through the con-
struction of Enedina as a feminine ego is Buñuel explicitly revealed by
having one of the beggars, el leproso, and don Jaime cross-dressing in the
wedding dress of the latter’s wife. Therefore the representation of the
feminine ego allows us to reclaim other transgressive functions, which
Buñuel unconsciously achieves. Enedina’s image becomes a kind of trans-
vestite body, which works against the initial patriarchal and heterosexual
ideology’s foreground of innate differences. Her body achieves a symbolic
inversion by subverting the conventional hierarchies within heterocracy.
Hence, the image of Enedina greatly contributes to the unpacking of the
dominant systems of thought.

The Phallic Mother

Suleiman argues that Duchamp’s parodic perversion, in which he
appropriates da Vinci’s painting by displacing the pubic area onto the
woman’s face, renders the latter phallic. The phallic woman refers to the
subject’s ambivalent relationship with the mother. Drawing on Chasseguet-
Smirgel’s theories of creativity and perversion, Suleiman argues that the
pervert wants to free himself from the law of the paternal universe. As an
avant-garde artist, Buñuel, like Duchamp, can be identified as a transgressive
son who perversely enjoys playing with the maternal body in order to
declare his rebellion against the law of the father. However, the allusion to
the phallic mother not only refers to a transgressive, anti-traditional and
anti-patriarchal aesthetic or psychosexual political attitude, but a fetishistic
perversion on the part of the subject in order to deny or disavow sexual
difference also constitutes the phallic mother. In Freudian psychoanalysis, a
fetish always functions as a fabricated object the subject substitutes for the

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natural one because the latter is perceived to be missing. According to

Freud’s 1927 essay on fetishism,82 the fetish, functioning as a reassuring
substitute for the woman’s ‘missing penis’, allows the man to disavow
(deny/affirm) the woman’s castration. The fetishistic image functions as a
screen the male fetishist creates to cover his fear of castration. Moreover,
one of the purposes of male fetishism is to create stiff, phallic images of
women that immobilize them, reassuring men that women are not so
frighteningly different, while denying them agency. From this perspective,
the phallic woman does not gain female sexual power.
Drawing on Freud’s essay on fetishism, Suleiman argues that the
fetishized image of the phallic mother involves a masochistic relationship
of the subject with the mother, which masks a previous homosexual fantasy
of the child in relation to the father. Parveen Adams explains that: ‘In his
1919 paper, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, Freud defines the masochistic
position through the grid of neurosis. The fantasy ‘a child is being beaten’
is analysed in standard Oedipal terms; it concerns a child, either male or
female, with an incestuous desire for the father.’83 The beating fantasy is
passive because it derives from a feminine attitude towards the father. This
incestuous fantasy is subsequently transformed, in the case of the boy, into
one of being beaten by the mother, who is then identified as the phallic
mother. The masochistic fantasy of being loved by the father, which is then
transformed into one of being beaten by the mother, is crucial to the per-
version, the disavowal and the construction of the fetish. Male fetishism,
which is at the root of the other male perversions, concerns disavowal of
the absence of the mother’s penis. On the other hand, the phallic mother
saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by endowing women with the
attribute that makes them acceptable as sexual objects. Freud argues that:
‘The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodelling his
unconscious fantasy of being sexually loved by his father and the remark-
able thing about his later conscious fantasy of being beaten by his mother is
that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-
choice.’84
Suleiman argues that the subject, despite his unconscious homosexual
desire for his father, invents an object, the phallic mother, in order to
remain within heterosexual genitality. Suleiman contends that the son’s
rebellion, epitomized by Duchamp’s perverse appropriation of da Vinci’s
traditional art, whether perverse or not, always ends up being implicated in
the realm of heterosexual patriarchy because it reaffirms the primacy of the
phallus. Suleiman justifies this view by suggesting that, although the avant-

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garde artist has initially used the maternal body to subvert the Name-of-the-
Father, she nonetheless contends that the son ultimately comes to be allied
with his father, to the extent that this new alliance between father and son
involves the elision and repudiation of the mother. Hence, according to
Suleiman’s critique of male perversion, the eternal Oedipal drama of trans-
gression and law always ultimately maintains the latter.
Suleiman’s valuable contribution to the critique of avant-garde art and
writing considers the extent to which Dada/surrealist parody, although at a
highly ambiguous psychological level, provides an anti-patriarchal and anti-
traditional impetus. Her critique of male perversion could, however,
reinforce the patriarchal advocacy of the male subject’s eventual Oedipal
integration within the symbolic realm she otherwise refutes. How could her
feminist argument embrace the possibilities of psychic, libidinal and
ideological emancipation of the male masochistic perversion from patri-
archal and heterosexist ideological and psychic repression, instead of seeing
the male pervert as a symptom of an aggressive male sexuality that is
inherently perverted and a primary enemy of feminism?85
What interests me in Buñuel’s parodic perversion of da Vinci’s The Last
Supper in Viridiana is the extent to which the masochistic perversion implicit
in this artistic appropriation subverts the heterosexual and patriarchal
psychic and social organization feminists have associated with the phallo-
centric theories of Freud and Lacan. This analysis attempts to challenge any
fixed identity in order to subvert the totalitarianism that is associated with
the symbolic law, which my theoretical position assumes is inimical to the
contingency and ambiguity that characterize desire. Focusing on a specific
structure of perversion, to understand the inheritance by psychoanalysis of
the category of male perversion, which has since the end of the nineteenth
century functioned as a synecdoche for male homosexuality, we now need to
digress from Buñuel’s Viridiana. This digression will allow us to depatho-
logize male perversion and to theorize it, in the film, as fully consistent with
a queer resistance to normalization.

Depathologizing Perversion
Jane Gallop suggests that the theory of the Oedipus complex is ‘a theory of
sexual function (ultimately the reproductive function) and questions of
pleasure are excluded, because they have no place in the economy of
production’.86 According to this theory, the Oedipus complex can only
appear in the institution of the family, which is reproduced in the capitalist
economic system. Gallop argues that Freud introduced the Oedipus com-

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plex to naturalize the social process by which the male child moves away
from the initial state of primary bisexuality and polymorphous perversity.
Freud discovers libido to be the basis of affective life and immediately
enchains it. As Guy Hocquenghem explains, ‘the Oedipus complex
represents the internalization of the family institution. Freud asserted the
universality of homosexual desire, as a translation of the polymorphous
perverse, only to enclose it not geographically but historically, within the
Oedipal system.’87
Is perversion distinct from or opposed to the norm, or is it internal to it?
Does the norm sublate perversion or is the latter a deviation from the
former? Can Freud’s ideological concerns ultimately be dissociated from
the reinforcement of social sanction?88 As Jeffrey Weeks observed, ‘psycho-
analysis represents both the discovery of the mechanisms of desire, and the
means of its recodification and control. Sex is the secret that needed to be
both discovered and controlled. Freud’s analytic work offers some evidence
for this recodification.’89 From this perspective, through the introjection of
the Oedipus complex, the child’s polymorphous sexuality is transformed
into a socially sanctioned sexuality and gender role. Freud’s teleological
perspective on sexuality implies that adult (heterosexual) sexuality requires
the recognition of (sexual) difference and the integration of the fragmented
component instincts of infantile sexuality under the primacy of a single
erotogenic zone. Hence, in adult genital sexuality, which implies the union
of the genitals in the act of copulation, the pursuit of pleasure comes under
the sway of the reproductive function. Adult genitalization thus transforms
sexuality into a productive expenditure that is equivalent to its desexualiz-
ation. Following such a teleological view of sexuality, any perversion, or
more specifically any pathological fixation, of the kind traditionally
associated with the figure of the fetishist, the sadomasochist and the male
homosexual, would be a disorder of a sexual nature. Freud argues that
‘perversions are defined as sexual activities which either extend, in an
anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for
sexual union, or linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object
which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path toward the final
sexual aim.’90 Although Freud’s ambivalence towards the process of
normalization allows him to attribute a certain degree of disruptive power
to the perversions, his teleological perspective on sexuality privileges
heterosexual genitality. The latter implies a hierarchical stabilization of
sexuality’s component instincts and, therefore, according to Bersani, the
perversions of adults can only become intelligible as the sickness of

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uncompleted narratives.91 Hence, heteronormativity implies the negation of

fragmentation and self-shattering fantasies. The finding of arbitrary ideo-
logical and psychic ways to block the re-emergence of the destabilizing
forces in the subject are subjective forces upon which the civilizing project
depends.
In this Freudian conceptualization, the masochistic perversion becomes a
constitutive part of human sexuality, though one that would ideally be over-
come once sexuality has submitted to the dictates of the genital telos men-
tioned above. Masochism is understood as a perversion associated with an
intrapsychic disorder that originated in the infantile polymorphous sexual
phase and as a disruption of the sexual instinct in its movement toward
heterosexual genital organization. However, as we argued, with Deleuze,
instead of seeing masochism as an intrapsychic disorder, we could see this
regressive form of perversion as a pleasure without a function and as a
political gesture that sustains a critical relationship to representation and to
ideological symbolic organization; the latter works by killing off the Real of
human existence. Masochistic perversion reorders the subject’s relationship
to the law. Dollimore notes that ‘perversion is a refusal or attempted
subversion of those organizing principles of culture which are secured
psychosexually, principles which include sexual difference, the law of the
father, and heterosexuality.’92 According to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, per-
version, which implies a regression to the anal-sadistic phase, is a pleasure
connected with transgression. Perversion transgresses reality, thereby
creating a new one, that of an anal universe where all the differences are
abolished. In fact, it is the principle of separation and division that is the
foundation of the law.93 Chasseguet-Smirgel argues that ‘perversion rep-
resents a reconstitution of chaos out of which there arises a new kind of
reality, that of the anal universe; this will take the place of the psychosexual
genital dimension, that of the father.’94 Chasseguet-Smirgel contends that
perversion might refer to a symbolic restoration of the state of unity without
differentiation that preceded the creation of the law of the father. The
return to confusion manifests itself in a supreme act of regeneration and an
enormous increase in the power of inventing oneself in the perverse
dynamic.95
Masochistic perversion, in particular, involves an intensification of
pleasure, which is equivalent to a loss of control and, as I argued earlier on
in this chapter, depends on the participation of the mother. But the loss
becomes paradoxically liberating, at once self-shattering and self-renewing,
because it cannot be contained, held in or defined by the self. Masochism

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elevates the abject to the constitutive principle of subjectivity, generating a

pleasure freed from penile representations of the patriarchal phallus and
freed into a mobility of representations.96 From this perspective, masochism
can be equated with a heterogeneous desire that the symbolic order con-
tinues to negate and avoid. Masochism challenges the mechanisms of
control that the dominant heterosexist symbolic order employs to contain
and silence diverse forms of desire and identification, precisely by acting out
the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity that are normally disavowed.
What Freud identified as the sickness of uncompleted narratives might then
be redefined as the subject’s persistent self-shattering fantasy of the thing in
itself that exists beyond language, beyond representation, beyond the closure
of representation. Such a fantasy would subvert the normalizing and
repressive ways of thinking, being and desiring.
To end this chapter, in our reading of this sequence in Viridiana, we can
infer that Buñuel has masochistically played with the phallic mother,
embodied in the figure of Enedina, in order to represent a confrontation
between an all-powerful father and a traumatized son staged across and over
the body of the mother. This masochistic fantasy implies the psychic
fragmentation or mutilation of the masochistic son. This, in turn, suggests a
liberation from the structures of language and laws that regulate the
establishment of heterosexual identity. As a masochistic son, Buñuel is
emancipated from the paternal law that belongs to a reified and instrumental
cultural organization and functions at the centre of prohibition and sub-
limation. The masochistic fantasy implies a desire to return to the original
oneness of things, to return to the parthenogenetic rebirth of the son, which
indeed depends on the participation of the mother. This masochistic desire
subverts the masculine heterosexual desire that oscillates between the erotic
obsession with the female body and the fear of castration that is disavowed.
The masochistic son has the psychic fantasy of maternal plenitude that
becomes a dynamic intrinsic to the social process. It is a dream of a space-
time that exists before bodily separation and psychic lack. More importantly,
the masochistic son dissolves the Oedipus complex and abjects the father as
superego. In this context, I suggest that the sequence of The Last Supper in
Viridiana implies a desire to challenge an oppressive psychoanalysis that
supports the phallocratic basis of a modern society based on the
identification of desire with lack. Dollimore rightly proposes that
‘perversions come to challenge the integrity of the psychoanalytic project
itself.’97 Buñuel also challenges the concept of normative sociality, acquired
through the Oedipus complex, based as it is on trauma and paternal

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castration. This sequence in Viridiana reminds us that Buñuel, as the

masochistic son, enjoys his mother’s love. The phallic mother kisses and
nurses the masochistic child with her phallus. This self-shattering regressive
fantasy thus allows Buñuel to engage in a kind of experimental filmic and
artistic representation that subverts the symbolic order of law and sexual
regulation.98

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3. THE FALL FROM GRACE: ANALITY,
THE HORIZONTAL BODY, AND
ANTI-OEDIPUS IN EL ÁNGEL
EXTERMINADOR
____________________________________________________________

In this chapter I draw on Freud’s theory and on Freudian readings of the anal
stage of subjectivity to ask how we can reread El ángel exterminador (1962) as a
social and psychic space that breaks down the fundamental distinctions
between dominant and marginal culture, human and animal, cleanliness and
filth. As we shall see, previous accounts of the film, such as those of
Mémbrez, Stam, Higginbotham or Edwards, have not brought together the
political and psychosexual to demonstrate the coexistence in the film of what
Allen Weiss defines as the two heterological, untouchable elements: the very
high and the lower than low. In this chapter I argue, through a textual
approach characterized by a strategic re-evaluation of visual detail, which I
associate with scatology and anality, that El ángel exterminador could be reread
as alluding to the symbolic reversal of the first step into civilization, which
implies the repression of the anal and the olfactory.
Drawing on rereadings of surrealist aesthetics using Bataille’s notion of
the informe, such as Krauss, and on Lacanian psychoanalysis and critiques of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, such as that of Deleuze and Guattari, I focus on
the repeated scenes of horizontal bodies filling the cinematic space in order
to reread these scenes as suggesting a symbolic reversal of the phallic
visuality of the erect body, since verticality is conventionally associated with
virility.1 I argue that the fallen bodies of the bourgeois guests subvert our
culture’s concern with verticality and what modernist art critics, such as
Clement Greenberg, have defined as opticality. In the same way that the
scatological image challenges the notion of visuality through its emphasis on

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the olfactory, I propose that the horizontal space is also a challenge to the
fetishization of the visual within modernity.
In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972),2 Deleuze and Guattari
attack Lacanian psychoanalysis for remaining within the family framework.
Although they do not break with the psychoanalytic paradigm, Deleuze and
Guattari propose a theory of desire that moves beyond the ‘privatized’ indi-
vidual psyche located within the Oedipal family.3 Their theory of desire is
neither constrained by binary categories and exclusions nor connected with
lack. Following their theory, I argue that on the floor, which we understand
as a desublimated phantasmatic space, the fallen bodies of the bourgeois
guests in El ángel exterminador could be seen as turning into a kind of
‘desiring machine’, implying the existence of infinite different types and
varieties of relationships, where each person’s machine parts can plug into
and unplug from the machine parts of another. I claim that the horizontal
space implies a liberation of the subject from his or her neurosis by privileg-
ing ‘schizos/flows’ and transforming the Freudian unconscious from a
repository of repressed wishes into an interaction of intensities. Hence, in
this chapter I attempt to challenge a traditional psychoanalytic methodology
that insists on the codification of the unconscious by privileging instead the
freedom of the signifier.
To sum up, I shall explore the extent to which the film’s attempt to under-
mine the Hegelian edifice, which reconciles the contradictions of knowledge
in the Absolute idea,4 could emancipate the subject by restoring a kind of
subjectivity that is beyond social rituals or norms of behaviour imposed by
the hegemonic culture. This dislocation of normative subjectivity could be
seen as a rereading of El ángel exterminador from a queer subject position.

The Nihilistic Tone

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the
angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward.5

The nihilistic tone of the above quotation is closely related to the thematic

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interest of Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador in challenging the institutional

power, representational modes and subjectivity of the bourgeoisie of the
1960s. Beyond the level of national specificity, Buñuel’s film was produced
during a decade clearly marked by a profound discrepancy between the
establishment of a dominant conservative, bourgeois and capitalist ideology
and the rise of radical social and political counter-cultures. That major
socio-cultural innovations were being made in different parts of the world
during this decade increases the legitimacy of reading Buñuel’s film in a
wider context than the specifically Mexican one. Buñuel declared that ‘a veces,
he lamentado haber rodado en México El ángel exterminador. Lo imaginaba más
bien en París o en Londres, con actores europeos y un cierto lujo en el vestuario y los
accesorios’ (sometimes, I have regretted having filmed El ángel exterminador in
Mexico. I rather imagined the film set in Paris or London with European
actors and with a certain luxury in the wardrobe and in the accessories).6 As
is well known, the 1960s was a decade of transformation in attitudes
towards authority, and in modes of self-presentation, customs and behav-
iour. The new search for self-definition and struggle against the dominant
ideology provoked such events as the students’ demonstrations of May
1968. Such upheavals were, thus, a product of all the forces developing
throughout the decade. The 1960s saw striking developments in thought and
culture. Conceptual art and avant-garde and art movies became artistic
media used to express the counter-cultural values of the decade. Art movies
concentrated on formal experimentation with film style and narrative
structure as a means of critiquing the modes of ‘bourgeois realism’ and
‘bourgeois society’. Art movies pronounced judgements on the alienating
nature of modern life, characterized by failure of communication, and on
the human condition, associated with emotional dysfunction and annihil-
ation.
In the specific context of Mexico, independent cinema, influenced by the
theories and practices of the oppositional cinema in Latin America during
the 1960s, manipulated established cinematic forms and anarchically sub-
verted conventional film practices. For instance, the season shown at the
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, in 2000 under the title ‘The Mexperimental
Cinema’ demonstrated that Mexican independent cinema had already begun
in the aftermath of the revolution when the moving camera became a tool
for the nationalist, utopian projects of artists and intellectuals. Afterwards,
as a leading national industry, mainstream cinema was used as a tool to
homogenize Mexico by encouraging patriotism and ‘national values’ associ-
ated with Mexicanidad. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the product of the

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Mexican mainstream cinema was ‘an idealized, romanticized, and imaginary

Mexico that illuminated the movie screens of Latin America’.7 Carlos
Monsiváis was one of the first intellectuals to underline the relationship
between film and national identity in a number of essays dating from the
1970s. The following commentary on México de mis amores exemplifies this
relationship between cinema and national identity. Monsiváis asks:

What can be recovered from the Mexican cinema? The answer lies
beyond the mere enumeration of artistic works. In the first place we
should consider Mexican cinema a creator of signs of identity: tastes,
idols, and myths. The national cinema has enraptured and manipu-
lated [audiences], but without a doubt it has also managed to note and
create customs, organise and invent traditions, and nourish in one
way or another the diverse social groups that inhabit Mexico.8

By the 1960s, however, a new generation of Mexican film critics no longer

felt obliged to defend their national cinema merely to be patriotic. These
critics thus attempted to renew the practices of what they considered a
moribund film industry.9 The crisis in Mexican cinema arose because the
middle classes became more interested in Hollywood films and television
than in the national cinema. Moreover, the intellectually sophisticated
sectors of the Mexican population were more interested in European avant-
garde films than in their local film productions. According to Maximiliano
Maza, UNAM (Universidad Autónoma de México) started a campaign to
support what was defined as ‘cinema of quality’ by organizing film clubs and
founding the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC),
the first official school of cinema in Mexico. To understand why El ángel
exterminador, independently produced by Gustavo Alatriste, who had already
produced Viridiana, shared such affinity with the language of European art
cinema, it is necessary to consider the context in which independent cinema
was produced in Mexico during the 1960s. Hence, if we regard El ángel
exterminador as an example of 1960s Mexican independent cinema, the film
reveals an important social dynamic, particularly one that largely existed in
opposition to the consensual relationship between the so-called Golden Age
of cinema and the majority of the Mexican audience.
This emphasis on social indictment in the art film through the presence of
cynicism, irony, secular humanism and cultural relativism reminds us of
Bataille’s modern, disaffected and nihilistic thought. In his essay ‘L’Art
primitif’ (1930), published in the dissident surrealist magazine Documents,

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Bataille, who was also the editor of this journal, understands primitive art
less as the work of form than of violence. Bataille articulates a kind of
creative process that implies the destruction of phenomena by introducing
the concept of altération.10 In the same way that Bataille interprets a child’s
scrawls as a wish to destroy or mutilate, the concept of altération can be
applied to the creative methods used by artists influenced by Bataille’s
provocative writings, preoccupied as they are with the violent process of
physical decomposition and disintegration implied in the process of
representation. This chain of violent actions in the process of creation is
motivated by unconscious desires. Krauss writes:

The term that Bataille finds to generalise the phenomenon of sadism

in both children’s art and that of the caves is alteration, and this
word, in the precision of its ambivalence, is characteristic of Bataille.
Alteration derives from the Latin alter, which by opening equally onto
a change of state and a change (or advancement) of time, contains
divergent significations of devolution and evolution. Bataille points
out that alteration describes the decomposition of cadavers as well as
the passage to a perfectly heterogeneous state corresponding to …
the tout autre, that is, the sacred. … In the confounding of the logic
that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar
opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think
the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has
historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine,
the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience
of death.11

I would like to use this physical dimension, associated with Bataille’s

concept of alteration, as a metaphor to understand how Buñuel’s El ángel
exterminador attempts to destroy or alter, to use the Bataillean term, the
ideological and aesthetic values of the upper classes of society. Buñuel’s film
exposes and attacks the underlying artifice, the hypocritical values and the
stereotyped life-style of a culture defined by etiquette instead of humanity by
using ironic humour and surrealist imagery as instruments of social
indictment. The characters of the film epitomize this absurd culture of self-
imposed burdens. Significantly, these characters belong to the different
liberal professions of society, as critics, such as Stam and Higginbotham
have noted. Buñuel strips the upper classes of their pretensions, dictated by
their privileged milieux, or the passive comfort of their social status, which

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creates their claustrophobic isolation and complacent inertia. Ironically, it is

a return to ritual that liberates them from their artificial prison. Buñuel is
concerned with revealing the kinds of emotional dysfunctions these
bourgeois subjects display, which need to be repressed in the construction
of their own mythologies, by exposing how their innate behaviour remains
fundamentally instinctual, base and primal. As Higginbotham argues:

The talk of manners and the refusal to take action are so central to
the film that to dismiss them is to discount half the dialogue. Further-
more, the paralysis caused by conformity does not attack only the
upper class, but extends to officialdom as well. One of the first
principles of Buñuel’s social diagnosis is that the police and the
Church support the haute bourgeoisie, thus what is going on outside
the mansion closely mirrors the confusion within.12

Nancy J. Mémbrez clarifies the Spanish literary motifs to which El ángel

exterminador refers.13 During the polite dinner, two of the guests refer to
famous verses by the Medieval poet Jorge Manrique that compare the
notion of life with the image of a river flowing into the sea and thus
encountering death. Mémbrez also associates the film with the Spanish
Medieval and Golden Age auto sacramental, such as Calderón de la Barca’s El
gran teatro del mundo (1633). Calderón’s play can be seen as a metaphor of the
world as theatre. It can also be seen as an allegorical play that embodies
abstract concepts, Catholic theology, and a final apotheosis.
Buñuel’s film can also be associated with French surrealist aesthetics and
politics, and with the general fascination with violence and the irrational that
characterized French existentialist thinkers and artists after the Second
World War. In this context, Bataille and Lacan shared the surrealists’ esteem
for irrationality as a way of criticizing Cartesian subjectivity. Whereas in
Cartesian thought reason confirms the existence of the self, for Bataille and
Lacan reason can never be sure of its own rationality. Carolyn Dean con-
tends that, in Bataille and Lacan’s work, subjectivity thus escapes rational or
scientific explication and representation.14 Buñuel’s existential anxieties
express the idea that human beings have become aware of the absurdity of
the world. Therefore, the subject has to look for the essential to understand
his or her authentic existence. Buñuel’s existentialism rejects pre-existing
moral codes, since they are not connected with real existence. An emphasis
on irrational beliefs in the destiny of the world and the acceptance of one’s
own fate thus marks Buñuel’s existentialism. In an age in which rationality

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seems to have collapsed, Dionysus returns from the realm of intoxication

and drunkenness to celebrate the chaotic and violent elements that form
part of human existence.15
According to Stam, Artaud’s ‘theatre of the absurd’ influenced Buñuel’s El
ángel exterminador. This influence is revealed in the allusion to the theme of
‘entrapment’ and in the film’s reference to the apocalyptic vision and the
nihilism implied in existentialist philosophy. Stam argues that ‘Buñuel offers
a more politicized version of the themes that obsessed the “theatre of the
absurd”: entrapment (one thinks of Sartre’s proto-absurdist No Exit);
paralysis (Hamm in his wheelchair, his parents in their dustbin in Endgame);
proliferating chaos (Rhinoceros) and the devaluation of language (The Bald
Soprano).’16
The apocalyptic reference in the film’s title seems to point to the funda-
mental contradictions between revolution and religion, activism and resig-
nation, and political partisanship and historical detachment, thereby running
parallel to Walter Benjamin’s catastrophic vision of the course of history and
the powerlessness of its witnesses.17 As we shall see shortly, Buñuel’s inter-
textual association with Artaud becomes apparent in the film’s concern with
desublimation, beyond the ultimate bounds of the grotesque and the chaotic
limits of the informe.18 Desublimation becomes an act of self-revelation and a
movement towards an unattainable liberty. Against the values of hope and
redemption, Buñuel’s film embraces the underside of rationality and logical-
ity. As Edwards observes, ‘although in a different sense from the largely
sexual preoccupations of L’Age d’or, the irrational is to the forefront of The
Exterminating Angel and some of the film’s scenes are among Buñuel’s most
memorable and accomplished cinematic sequences.’19 The film’s impact
depends on rendering the uncomfortable and unspeakable with such acute
blandness, that the film displays a matter-of-fact quality that leads to
nihilism. Struggling for a particular existence against dogma, Buñuel uses a
nihilistic tone in El ángel exterminador as a way of showing the absurdity of
self-imposed burdens.

Carnivalesque Inversion
According to Bakhtin, the social practice of the carnivalesque allows socially
marginalized subjects, even if only for a brief period, to acquire some
power.20 The carnivalesque is thus a social phenomenon that contributes to
the collapse of hierarchical distinctions. It is a kind of utopian space where a
revolution takes place and in which the boundaries between performers and
spectators are disrupted. All the celebrants, female and male, rich and poor,

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are united in the common pursuit of pleasure. Bakhtin’s historical study of

carnival in early modern Europe21 thus offers a prescriptive model of a
socialist collectivity. Keith Booker argues that ‘all the images of the carnival
are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis:
birth and death, blessing and curse, praise and abuse, youth and old age, top
and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom.’22 The notion of the
carnivalesque brings to the fore the physical aspects of human existence,
such as sex, excrement, death and, therefore, the material bodily principle,
especially of the body’s ‘lower-stratum’.
Bakhtin sympathizes with anything related to marginality, such as marginal
social subjects, or the marginal use of the language, which is defined as a
grammatica jocosa, and he puts great emphasis on the margins of the human
body. From this perspective, ‘hunger, thirst, copulation and defecation
become a positive and corrosive force, and festive laughter enjoys a sym-
bolic victory over death, over all that is held sacred, over all that oppresses
and restricts.’23 Bakhtin subverts the values of the dominant class in which
marginal social groups are associated with such ‘unpleasant’ aspects of
existence. In turn, the dominant class seeks to distance itself from marginal
social groups through oppression and rejection. Mary Russo argues that:

Carnival and the carnivalesque suggest a redeployment or counter-

production of culture, knowledge, and pleasure. In its multivalent
oppositional play, carnival refuses to surrender to the critical and
cultural tools of the dominant class, and in this sense, carnival can be
seen above all as a site of insurgency, and not merely withdrawal.24

Furthermore, the symbolic power of the carnivalesque relates to the

question of gender and sexual transgression. The carnivalesque prob-
lematizes the conventional heterosexual differences that are part of the
social hierarchies established in the dominant society. Bakhtin’s theory of
the carnivalesque uncannily relates to the blurring, deferral or shifting of
gender difference.
Stam suggests that there are different versions of the carnivalesque within
avant-garde art and writing: the outrageousness of Dada; the provocations
of surrealism; the emphasis on transvestism in Genet’s fiction and theatre
can all arguably be read as modified forms of the carnivalesque. Although
the disaster film was not perceived as a genre until it coalesced in the 1970s,
Stam identifies El ángel exterminador as parodying the genre of proto-disaster
films. From this perspective, the film does not favour a narrative structure

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that leads to some form of epiphany, but focuses instead on a range of

characters subjected to increasing despair and humiliation, who are captured
in a rotating series of interlocking scenes in which some endure while others
are crushed. Moreover, Stam focuses on the ideological subversiveness
implied in the transformation suffered by the rich through the slow descent
from ‘normality’ into ‘anarchy’. Drawing on the carnivalesque theme of
social inversion and the ‘world turned upside down’, Stam’s Bakhtinian
analysis of the film concentrates on its carnivalesque disintegration of the
bourgeois social space and symbolic order. Stam argues that: ‘The noble
mansion becomes an overcrowded mini-slum without running water, with
people sleeping on the floor in promiscuous cohabitation. The same aristo-
crats who spilled expensive food as an amusing theatrical device are now
ravaged by hunger.’25
Stam’s conceptualization of the film in terms of the carnivalesque is useful
for understanding its challenge to the bourgeois world. Buñuel strips away
the façade of social pretence and exposes the fundamentally base instinctual
and primal behaviour of the humans. Buñuel contributes to social and
political change and, by implication, reinforces carnal polyphony and sexual
heteroglossia by executing a mission of social justice through the emphasis
on the apocalyptic laying low of the bourgeoisie. As we shall see, on a
formal level, such carnivalesque strategies are also manifested in Buñuel’s
radical subversion of the conventions of illusionism. The film adopts an
‘aggressive anti-illusionism, as seen in modernist texts which adopt strategies
of carnivalesque fantasy and absurdity by creating an impossible meta-real or
“surfiction” which explodes and transcends conventional narrative
categories’.26

The Unknown Cause of the Catastrophe

El ángel exterminador uses a series of the modernist cinematic devices that
played a major role in the art-cinema narration of the 1960s, such as
narrative, spatial or temporal ambiguity, or chance. These modernist cine-
matic tropes are based on the use of unrealistic coincidences as a principle
of narrative organization and a belief in the fundamentally random yet
strangely meaningful structure of reality, which leads to a loosening of the
cause–effect relation.27 The cause of the catastrophe in the film is unknown,
thus making it a mystery that goes beyond rational explanation. This
resistance to explanation, which Buñuel’s surrealist legacy conditions, serves
to question the nature of modern life and the human condition on the
spectator’s own terms. According to Hugo Santander, every time the film

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was screened it was prefaced by a title card that declared: ‘If the film you are
going to see strikes you as enigmatic or incongruous, life is that way too.
Perhaps the best explanation for the film is that, reasonably, there isn’t
one.’28 Let us focus on El ángel exterminador’s celebration of irrationality as a
way of coming to terms with existence.
In his reading of The Birds (1963), Robert Samuels attempts to dissociate
Hitchcock’s film from previous theoretical interpretations that have posited
some level of ideological intentionality and purpose in relation to the film’s
main themes. For instance, the forces of the entrapment could be sym-
bolically read as throwing off the shackles of exploitative capitalism. Against
such interpretative closure, Samuels puts into question all forms of know-
ledge and all attempts to project the horror of the Real into the place of the
other. He identifies these attempts at ideological control as reductive and
relates them to heterosexist and xenophobic formations. According to
Samuels, in the Real there is no intentionality or reason that explains any
action that fails to follow strict causal logic, such as the entrapment in
Buñuel or the birds’ attacks on the humans in Hitchcock. By coincidence,
Hitchcock’s The Birds and Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador are almost
contemporary. On a theoretical level, Stam has mapped parallels and
differences between the kinds of ideological and technical anxieties and
fantasies, manifest and latent, that occur in Hitchcock and in Buñuel.
Samuels argues that: ‘The birds stand in for the nothingness that is the other
side of consciousness and vision. Consciousness is most often attached to
some level of visual control and intentionality. What the birds then
represent is precisely that which has no vision or intentionality.’29 Samuels
privileges the unsymbolized aspects of the Real by calling into question the
totality of knowledge and truth. His reading of The Birds aims to destabilize
the foundational logic on which knowledge per se depends. Such a crisis of
certainty makes it possible to reread texts that, like Buñuel’s El ángel
exterminador, go against their ideological interpretations.
Following Samuels’s reading of The Birds, I suggest that the theme of
‘entrapment’ in Buñuel’s film represents the pure irrationality a failure of
representation fundamentally causes. If the Real is by definition impossible
to symbolize, then language, social exchange and moral law are sublimated
processes of neurotic transposition that continue to circle the absent
referent or Real in attempting to cover over the desiring drive. Žižek
argues that: ‘We have the Real as the starting point, the basis, the
foundation of the process of symbolization. … That is the Real which in a
sense precedes the symbolic order. But the Real is at the same time the

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product, remainder, leftover, scraps of this process of symbolization.’30

This psychic negativity allows for a lack in the symbolic order to be made
present in the Real.
According to Samuels, in Lacan’s ethics of the Real, in which the concept
of pure desire plays a central role, the notion of foreclosure is bound up
with hallucinations of the unstructured Real, part of which cannot be
accounted for by language. Samuels argues that, for Lacan, while the basis of
moral law is found in repression, the symbolic order associates jouissance with
a mechanism of social exclusion in order to destroy the Real. This operation
in the symbolic reveals the fear of a symbolically produced form of bitextual
difference, to use Samuels’s terminology. The irrationality of the entrapment
serves to subvert the rule of the symbolic name of the father. This emphasis
on irrationality allows us to expose the ideological structure of projection
that negates and destroys the impossible Real. Alenka Zupančič argues that
‘all ideological formations aim at masking some lack. But this attitude fails to
recognize that the lack is simultaneously constitutive of all ideology as well
as being the essential support of fantasy.’31 This exposure allows for the
emergence of alternative forms of desire and identification that resist the
type of symbolic destruction of the Real associated with the ideological
structure of projection. From this perspective, as Samuels argues, ‘an ethics
of the Real can only be an ethics based on unconscious bisexual and multi-
textual desire. It is only on the level of heterogeneous desire that we
acknowledge the Real that we continue to negate and avoid.’32

The Lack of Linearity

In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell distinguishes between the
narrative and filmmaking strategies used in classical Hollywood cinema and
those explored in art cinema. For instance, in opposition to Hollywood’s
emphasis on linearity, character causality, conditioned by individual motiva-
tions, goals and drives, and a three-act structure leading towards a pro-
nounced deadline, the characters in art cinema, Bordwell argues, are typically
without clear-cut traits, motives and narrative goals, wandering as passive
observers through a certain social milieu in a series of unconnected
episodes.33 If Hollywood cinema posits a rational agent who is in control of
his own destiny, Bordwell suggests that the art film’s thematic crux depends
on its formal organization, creating unfocused gaps and facilitating an open-
ended approach to causality. The textual system in El ángel exterminador
resists a rational and oversimplified explanation that is produced in reaction
to the absence of narrative coherence and the director’s rejection of the

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conventional cinematic codes that govern chronology, itself based on an

implicit logic that combines succession with consequence.
Obsessive and disorienting repetitions of dialogue or actions within the
film also emphasize the lack of linearity. For instance, the guests go back to
the positions they occupied on the night of the dinner party to free
themselves from their original imprisonment. The guests’ entrance scene is
repeated from a higher camera angle: Buñuel shows the dinner guests
arriving twice at the Nobilé family’s house, ascending the stairs twice and
walking through the wide doorway twice. The second version of the
entrance scene is different from the first, thereby transgressing and altering
the original scene. The film’s characters introduce themselves twice and
make the same toasts twice, even if they express different reactions or
different people utter the same lines. This recurrence of the same produces a
suspension in the production of meaning. Buñuel, who preferred not to
clarify or pin down the meaning of his films, instructed his son, Juan-Luis,
to tell the critics at Cannes that these repetitions served to lengthen the
film.34
In theoretical terms, Deleuze defines repetition as a figure of time that
implies two mutually exclusive meanings. On the one hand, repetition can
be associated with temporal confinement, a return to the same situation,
turning human agency against itself, or a frustration of progress. On the
other hand, Deleuze suggests that repetition can also be associated with the
possibility of escaping from the same, with a new beginning.35 These
repetitions, which are associated with ludic deferral, provoke a dynamic,
unpredictable play of mystery and chance and an eruption of subjective
fantasy and unconscious desires. Olney associates the figure of the simu-
lacrum with a state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions,
and crowned anarchy, and he identifies repetition with difference as a kind
of alterity or excess in the original Idea.36 In contrast to Hollywood’s
progressive achievement of a teleological closure, the sense of repetition in
this film might be read as a return to the beginning, which is less a return to
the identical than a return to the being of becoming. Buñuel playfully defers
closure indefinitely, thereby extending the process of being and becoming.
Higginbotham has rightly suggested that the film’s soundtrack underlines its
circular structure. She notes that the non-diegetic music sung by a choir
both opens the film and accompanies the guests’ entrance into the church in
the concluding scene.37 This sense of circularity, engendered by repetition,
discloses, retrieves, deepens and extends the implications of difference,
which is repressed, concealed or domesticated by the normative cultural and

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socio-political representations of being. Hence, motivated by the

representation of ‘psychological’ time, of the sort Bergson discussed, Buñuel
deliberately fails to respect the priorities of chronology in order to subvert
bourgeois obsessions with order.38
As mentioned earlier, the use of stylistic devices that refuse realistic moti-
vation, illusionism and an effect of seamlessness by which spectators are
‘stitched’ into the reality with which they are presented through the
techniques of suture further supported Buñuel’s self-conscious narration.
Conventional empathy-inducing film techniques, such as point-of-view
editing, shot-reverse shot structures, eyeline matches, or even emotionally
engaged music are challenged throughout the film. Instead, deviating from
classical norms, Buñuel attempts to give the camera its own autonomy,
exploring the mise-en-scène or the characters’ actions without falling into the
dynamic of subjectivization and ideal identification. The ‘invisible witness’
canonized by Hollywood precept becomes overt. Instead of continuity,
which suggests a mirroring or empathetic identification, the emphasis here is
on something that is lacking. In symbolic terms, if the cinematic screen has
been conventionally associated with the mirror, here it has become a
threshold, a place of exchange and movement. Near the end of the film,
during a dream sequence, Buñuel draws on specific surrealist film
techniques, such as non-voice synchronization, superimposition of shots,
unusual camera angles, slow motion and accelerated editing, which are
ideally suited not only for representing a dream but also for mimicking its
procedure of figuration. These surreal cinematic devices convey the char-
acters’ traumatic inner life and suggest the illogical and terrifying character
of the nightmare the bourgeois guests are dreaming.39 Robert Eberwein’s
Jungian definition of the collective dream suggests that the latter is an ‘ironic
depiction of shared desires and fears that haunt the minds of those who
control the corrupt society Buñuel wishes to condemn’.40
These representational devices, which are traces of the process of
narration, allow Buñuel to redefine established systems of meaning by
reordering the spectator’s perceptions without reconciling the contradictions
between our perceptions and narrative coherence. These two ends of the
spectrum are not brought together to create a homogeneous system of rules
and regulated oppositions. In this way, the heterological is inscribed in
Buñuel’s film, creating an art of failure or an aesthetic of the low. Let us
now explore how this aesthetic of the low, associated with scatology and
anality, is incorporated into the film’s mise-en-scène. If character psychology
often motivates spatial representation in film, the scatological surroundings

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may be construed as the projections of the psychological state of anality in

El ángel exterminador.

Scatology and Anality

In El ángel exterminador, the camera pans with precision around the drawing
room, where the guests are entrapped, and it lets us see with clarity the
range of beautiful and expensive objects that decorate the interior of
bourgeois life. As the narrative of the film develops the camera pans with
the same precision as before, but shows devastation rather than the previous
elegance. In the absence of a lavatory, the guests excrete in Chinese urns
kept in the salon walk-in cupboard and decorated with Renaissance frescos
of Saint Michael, the Virgin and Saint Francis. By means of close-ups, the
camera dwells fetishistically on these Chinese urns, which become important
objects in the mise-en-scène and what I see as a crucial detail of the film. While
the Chinese urns are not graphically shown as filled with excrement, the
guests repeat the action of entering and leaving the closet containing the
vases with peculiar discretion even if they react with a sense of disgust to the
room’s repugnant smell caused by the accumulation of excrement.41 The
film reinforces this emphasis on the sense of smell by focusing on the
characters’ facial expression of horror and disgust provoked by the smell of
a corpse hidden in one of the room’s closets. The corpse, which elicits a
sense of horror and repulsion in the other characters, could be seen here as
a dead animal that reminds them of their own deterioration. It is left unclear
whether the bourgeois subjects do indeed excrete in these beautiful
decorative objects, thus challenging our expectations. Indeed, Buñuel’s
cinema creates permanent narrational gaps of this kind and solicits con-
notative reading, requiring a higher level of interpretation, by often relying
on ambiguity and on making us wonder.
The implied juxtaposition of the Chinese urns, which are associated with
the beautiful, and excrement, which is associated with the ugly, could be
interpreted as a desire to move away from a sublimatory practice of the
beautiful. The urns become a ‘fatal strategy’ at the level of representation.
Buñuel is not opposing the beautiful and the repulsive. On the contrary, he
is seeking what is uglier than the ugly: the monstrous42 or the lower than
low. Buñuel does not juxtapose the visible and the hidden, but what is more
hidden than the hidden: the secret. The ambiguous emphasis on scatology
calls attention to the social ills that can only be explained through this kind
of anarchistic response. Bataille’s writings are also concerned with the
contradiction between the respectable surface of bourgeois life and the

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perversion that is buried beneath this respectable façade. If one establishes

the ideological link between Bataille and Buñuel, especially in relation to
their similar account of ritual transgressions that combine intense pleasure
(at the transcendence of boundaries) with intense anguish (at the realization
of the force of norms), the scatological image in this film points to the way
that the terrible lies uncannily beneath order and respectability. How, then,
does the association of scatology with the anal-sadistic function have sub-
versive implications? I am not interested in delving into Buñuel’s own
psyche by examining anal imagery in his film. Rather, I am attempting to ask
how the pre-socialized action of excreting and the notion of dirt in the film
can be reread from a queer subject position.
In her structuralist anthropological examination of the notion of dirt,
Mary Douglas suggests that the taboo of filth always depends on the specific
social and cultural context in which these taboos are constructed.43 Accord-
ing to Douglas, in most of the societies she examines, dirt becomes a form
of disorder that works against society’s ideal constructions of notions of
order. Dirt is thus nothing more than matter out of place. In contrast, order
is a kind of compulsion that enables men to use space and time to the best
advantage. Cleanliness and order occupy, then, a special position among the
requirements of civilization. Douglas also argues that the establishment of
differences between male and female are part of the social conventions that
create those notions of order. All the members of a particular society need
to respect these social conventions. Douglas treats all pollution behaviour as
the reaction to an event that is likely to confuse or contradict cherished
classifications. Similarly, in his analysis of Jasper Johns’s paintings, Jonathan
Weinberg argues that ‘culture is nothing more than an elaborate set of
systems for putting experiences and people into their proper categories and
functions.’44 Dirt, which seems to us incompatible with civilization, can be
interpreted as a kind of fantasy that challenges respect for bourgeois social
conventions.
In his art installations, the contemporary American artist Robert Gober
creates replicas of domestic spaces and objects, such as kitchens and bath-
rooms, sinks and urinals, to deal with the scars and traumas of childhood in
relation to the domestic sphere. His installations show us that clinical
sanitary functionalism can be connected with a repressive sexual morality.
Gober’s art emphasizes the relationship between cleanliness and moral
health, which was a necessary prerequisite to establish the mores and values
of the puritanical, repressed American nuclear family of the 1950s. Gober’s
art installations reinforce the recognition that hygiene and filth, health and

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sickness, taste and distaste, pleasure and shame coexist. They thus aim to
subvert the rite of passage into socially approved heterosexual relations.45 As
Lynne Cooke puts it:

The modern obsession with dirt affirms filth even as it seeks to eradi-
cate it: the attention to dust, sweat, bad breath, cooking odours, and
germs was a process of objectification as well as elimination, making
visible what had once been invisible, bringing to the surface impuri-
ties that once had passed unnoticed.46

To return to the film, is Buñuel’s defiant fantasy of filling the urns with
excrement an expression of a regression to an anal world, where the young
child, who does not know anything about his or her genital functions,
believes that she or he has been born out of the mother’s stomach through
the anal canal? In this process, as Weinberg argues, ‘excrement becomes part
of the self’s own body’.47 During the period of the infant’s socialization, in
which the anus becomes the place of possession and exclusion, the scato-
logical is seen as a trace of the infantile perversion of the secret wish to be
spanked, or to wallow in excrement, in the belief that the most defiled might
reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent. Is,
then, the fantasy of a non-sublimated return to anality in adult life (in art,
dreams, delirium or erotic perversion) a strategy of perversion that
transgresses social and psychic taboos by producing a twist in the paternal
law?48 In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ (1930), Freud suggests that for
the civilized subject the main defence mechanism is sublimation. As a
vicissitude that civilization forces upon the instincts, sublimation implies the
desexualization of sexual energy by redirecting it towards new objects. Freud
argues that ‘civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. It pre-
supposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some
other means) of powerful instincts. This cultural frustration dominates the
large field of social relationships between human beings’.49 On several
occasions Freud highlights the coprophilic instinctual components which,
according to him, ‘have proved incompatible with our aesthetic standards of
culture, probably since, as a result of our adopting an erect gait, we raised
our organ of smell from the ground’.50 Man’s adoption of an erect posture
leads to the visibility of his genitals, which provokes feelings of shame. It
also implies a revolution in the senses: the olfactory stimulus is diminished
and degraded and sight is privileged as the dominant sense. More impor-
tantly, the adoption of an upright carriage creates the urge to get rid of

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excreta and anal eroticism. The repression of anal eroticism and the
privileging of genital love leads, Freud argues, to the formation of new
families and, therefore, paves the way for a normative conception of
civilization. As we shall see later, Freud’s discussions of man’s assumption
of an erect posture as the first step toward culture makes possible a
sublimated visuality. Foster explains that:

The anal was repressed and the genital pronounced. The rest is
history; with his genitals exposed, man was returned to a sexual fre-
quency that was continuous, not periodic, and he learned shame: and
this coming together of sex and shame impelled him to seek a wife, to
form a family, to found a civilization, to go where no man had gone
before.51

After the May 1968 revolts to which I referred earlier, to transform society
and sexual politics and to challenge the cultural stability, authority and order
the ruling bourgeois society imposed, new political and social movements
rearticulated key political issues. In his attempt to subvert the normalizing
moralism and discriminatory practices carried out by official psychiatric
institutions, Hocquenghem reinterpreted psychoanalytic concepts, particu-
larly Freud’s artificial construct of the Oedipus complex, to synthesize a
range of thinking about issues concerning sexuality, subjectivity, identity,
desire, power, capitalism and the state, and to propose a radical gay critique
of the nuclear family and capitalist state.52 Hocquenghem argues that the
manifestation of homosexual desire, which properly speaking is neither
homosexual nor heterosexual, because its components are only discernible a
posteriori, was a challenge to the roles and identities imposed by the
Oedipus complex. Drawing on Hocquenghem, John Fletcher argues that
official psychiatrists, especially in Britain and the United States, have used
Freudian psychoanalysis as an instrument to support a social system based
on a reproductive society.53 The Oedipal family unit is an artificial construct,
the social function of which is to trap and control the disorder that haunts
social life under capitalism.54 Therefore, the despotic signifier (the phallus) is
in league with a capitalist society that needs potential proletarians by
devaluating the anus, anal desire and pleasure.
For Hocquenghem, homosexual desire transgresses or ‘castrates’ the social
and symbolic codes of a heterosexist capitalist society by being a challenge
to reproduction. He thus redefines desire as an element in the social field,
not just an element in the individual’s psyche. In Hocquenghem’s

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politicization of Freud’s theory of polymorphous perversity, anality has been

privatized and relegated to the realms of the secret, the shameful and the
abject, and becomes a site that erases the distinction between the category of
‘man’ and that of ‘woman’. Anality is a social and sexual disorder that
creates confusion in an ‘ordered’ identity that attempts to protect bodily
orifices and bodily and communal boundaries. Anality can be rethought as
defiance, which reveals heterosexual men’s repressed awareness of their
anatomical vulnerability to penetration. In Buñuel’s first film, Un chien
andalou, the opening image of the bleeding eye could be read as a metaphori-
cal fantasy for anal penetration. Moreover, in his painting, Le Jeu lugubre
(1929), Dalí excused himself for making a scatological image by saying that
it was only a simulacrum of excrement.55 Dalí’s painting points to the
scatological as a mode of ontological heterogeneity or an anti-metaphysical
subject position, which substitutes regressive desire for symbolic law.
Bataille considered Dalí’s painting emblematic of the surrealist ethic and
aesthetic of desublimation.
For Kristeva, the abject is less a substance or an object than a process that
threatens the boundaries between the subject and its objects, thereby dis-
rupting classificatory structures.56 The abject, moreover, ‘shatters the wall of
repression and its judgements. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone
through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms the death drive
into a start of life, of new significance.’57 Problematizing the connection
between Bataille’s notion of the informe and more contemporary explorations
of Kristeva’s notion of abjection, Krauss criticizes the idea that ‘the informe
has a destiny that reaches beyond its conceptualization in the 1920s to find
its fulfilment and completion within more recent contemporary artistic
production, this is the domain of what is now understood as “abjection”.’58
Krauss objects to the way in which these visual artists have
unproblematically attributed to the abject the function of describing the
properties of objects, as is the case with John Miller’s pile of excrement.59
According to Krauss, these artists have literalized and reified the abject. For
Krauss, the appeal to essence and substance in such artworks might
paradoxically be seen as culturally stereotypical, thereby reconfirming the
symbolic order and retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being. More-
over, it contradicts the structural subversion that Bataille’s notion of the
informe performs. Bataille’s informe is a condition where significant form
dissolves because the fundamental distinction between figure and ground or
self and other is lost. What Krauss does not discuss is that both senses
revolve around some kind of expulsion, a casting out and down, and a loss

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of self-identity, a narcissistic injury. Like the informe, scatological images also

produce a desublimatory collapse of natural and psychic categories into a
magma of sheer disfiguration and distortion. Scatological images exist on the
other side of the border and return from that other side by dissolving the
distance that is implied in aesthetic judgement. Dollimore, paraphrasing
Freud, explains that:

The sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding disgust. It has to

struggle against disgust (and shame) which in turn are struggling to
keep the instinct within the bounds of the normal. A major challenge
to civilization’s defensive strategies comes from sexual perversions;
they especially transgress the cultural boundaries between desire and
disgust. Actually it might be more accurate to speak here not of
transgressing boundaries but of shifting them: perverse desire pushes
back the boundaries, claiming ground from disgust.60

Scatology breaks the significative chain of daily existence by inaugurating a

return of the repressed. It also threatens us with the danger of what comes
from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its
outside, life by death. The emphasis on a non-sublimated return to anality
transgresses or shifts the border, which serves to make a clear-cut
distinction between the space of the subject and the other space that
threatens the extinction of that subject. Weiss suggests that:

Excrement, as an image of death, as the formless, as pure hetero-

geneous matter, is excluded from the order of the symbolic. Excre-
ment is a sign that is doubly threatening to cultural formations: first
because it signifies a pure, wasteful expenditure, circumventing
societal modes and organizations of production; secondly, because it
is a sign of self-production, an autonomous, sovereign creativity
which eludes the exigencies of the Oedipal situation, since the origin
of the creation of excrement is the body, not the socius.61

After this presentation of Freud’s (and Freudian) readings of the anal stage
of subjectivity, which is associated with the scatological, I draw on
Hocquenghem’s privileging of anality to propose that the urns filled with
excrement in El ángel exterminador allow us to reread the film as suggesting a
transgression of the anatomical difference between the female and male sex.
This can be interpreted as a blurring of the symbolic difference between the

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two genders. Such a scatological image breaks up the fixed categories

imposed by heterocracy. I read the film as celebrating this representation of
these decorative objects as a simultaneous site of pleasure and repulsion.
The hegemonic Western subject defines himself through the repression and
exclusion of the other. But what is socially excluded or repressed constitutes
the central fantasy or anxiety in psychic life. For instance, it is believed that
in cultures that are more ‘primitive’ than Western societies, there are no
taboos or restrictions on the excremental function. Western culture, by
contrast, with its emphasis on production, denies the anal dimension.
Although it might seem problematic to associate primitivism with pregenital
drives, I see anality in Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador less as an exempli-
fication of the primitive than as the breaking down of the border of
hegemonic identity. Buñuel’s allusion to an anal stage, which clearly evokes
the heterogeneous, could be read as rethinking the differences that the
heterocratic position, which claims to be perfect, imposes. Moreover,
drawing once more on Kristeva’s definition of the function of the abject, we
could interpret the urns as being figures of abjection that are also linked to a
process that threatens and disrupts boundaries and classificatory structures.
From this perspective, the urns function as punctual details in the mise-en-
scène that threaten the fragility of civilization and of the symbolic law.
Let us now return to Bataille’s notion of the informe to explore how the
characters’ action of falling to the ground can also function as a punctual
detail that can be seen as politically significant for a rereading of the film
from a queer subject position.

The Horizontal Body

During their confinement in the Nobilé family mansion, the dinner guests
repeat the action of lying horizontally on the floor of the room from which
they cannot get away. The cinematic space is so crammed with horizontal
bodies that no one else could possibly be added. The emphasis on
horizontal bodies here is also noticeable when one of the guests walks on
his hands and knees, while the camera follows him from left to right to keep
him in the frame. This male character, who is physically and emotionally
unpleasant, is explicitly portrayed as effeminate, thus confirming the apparent
homophobia in Buñuel’s cinema. What interests me here is the way the film
reinforces the loss of the verticality that had previously distinguished the
guests from beasts by showing them crawling about on the floor. Buñuel
affirmed that the only difference between humans and beasts was that the
latter have more freedom than the former.62 As is well known, most animals

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are situated along the horizontal axis even if they strive to raise themselves
up to the vertical position. Recreating the animal axis, the camera moves
slowly in lateral tracking shots to search out details that are provocative or
bizarre, thereby giving a tangible quality to the objects presented to the
spectator. Buñuel’s cinematic language is also characterized here by long
takes and an almost static composition, which allow the spectator to observe
closely the provocative or bizarre objects presented on screen. These repre-
sentational devices foster a sense of clinical observation, thereby reinforcing
the powerful visual impression of mounting chaos and confusion. The slow,
lateral tracking shots and the use of long takes produce a sense of claustro-
phobia in the spectator that is parallel to that of the entrapped characters.
Because the film takes place in a single setting shown as a bounded and
limited space, it induces in the spectator a feeling of temporal and spatial
confinement. Higginbotham suggests that ‘the action of the film is limited to
what can happen within the space of a room. The restlessness, frustration,
and ennui the group suffers is, to a large extent, shared by the viewer.’63
While the room is imperceptibly transformed into a prison and the orderly
progression of time has been abolished,64 the actors move as if they were
caged animals or fish in an aquarium.
Throughout the film, there are shots of Julio, the butler,65 observing the
characters from a distant perspective, just as spectators observe the actors
on stage in the theatre. El ángel exterminador thus attempts to blur the
boundaries between theatre and cinema and between life and performance,
thereby creating in the spectator less a suspension of disbelief than a
distancing effect. Distancing effects are the key to avant-garde theatre, such
as Brecht’s plays, which aim to produce active, politicized spectators who
are aware of the processes of art and the ideological work they perform,
rather than the passive, depoliticized, unaware spectators that are taken as
typical of the audience for what has been defined as classical cinema. This
distancing effect, which is associated with the concept of ‘making strange’,
leads to an inability to feel complacent pleasure. Rather, alienation in film
and theatre is consciously directed toward a subversive political goal.
Distancing techniques are often tied to a dialectical analysis of alienation in
order to explore the extent to which the human condition is fragmented and
alienated. For instance, Stam argues that Brecht’s theatre attempted to shock
the audience into an awareness of the arbitrariness of social life and art.
Hence, the laws of a predatory society, such as the one portrayed in this
film, become subject to human intervention and change. According to Stam,
for Brecht, alienation was necessary to all understanding and crucial for

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humanity’s liberation from the predatory laws of society that Brecht

associated with both fascism and bourgeois liberalism.66 In El ángel
exterminador, the guests move like actors on a stage because they have not
simply returned from the theatre but are themselves theatrical and their lives
can be considered as performances. Buñuel underlines the conflict between
the essence of the individual and his or her social mask. The film prevents
us from constructing a false assurance of escaping from our existential
crises67 and forces us to confront the lack of hope of survival in a bourgeois
society. In this view, Sandro has contended that pleasure has become an
unfamiliar object, achieved only through an ironic form of knowledge.68
Bataille’s concept of the informe has influenced my reading of Buñuel’s
representation of the dinner guests’ ‘fallen bodies’. In his exploration of
artistic expression outside convention, Bataille is often interested in
elements that bourgeois culture has repressed and repudiated, such as the
ugly, the forbidden, filth or spit. As Krauss states, ‘the glamour of rot and
decay going up in smoke is, as we shall see, the very essence of the informe.’69
In his obsessive exploration of base materialism, Bataille articulates the
notion of the informe as a resistance to classification and form. The informe
thus has the performative function of declassifying. In El ángel exterminador,
the guests’ bodies are bound up with a drive to declassify and undo
verticality by falling to the ground. In other words, if this horizontal space is
indicative of a fall from the dizzy heights of civilized bourgeois society to a
primal state of abandon, the dinner guests’ bodies can satisfy their
uncontrollable perverse fantasies that are repressed in the vertical social
space they normally inhabit. As Monsieur Nobilé affirms, lying on the floor
is perceived as a gross form of behaviour. Edwards notes that ‘the polite
social gathering, still clinging to its own peculiar rites and practices, becomes
by the early hours an incongruous spectacle of bodies littering the floor,
draped over sofas, and slumped in chairs.’70
In the horizontal space, the entrapped bourgeois subjects are unable to
distinguish good from evil. This confusion leads to chaotic behaviour, which
mixes up their sickness with obsessions and perversions. Their impulsive
behaviour is associated with what Sandro defines as the originary world of
impulses and tears away, ruptures, or dislocates what he defines as the
‘derived world’.71 As such, the guests’ conduct is similar to that of the
beggars in Viridiana or the marginal children in Los olvidados. The logic of El
ángel exterminador is to reduce its upper-class protagonists to the miserable
condition of the slum-dwellers of Los olvidados. As their bourgeois etiquette
disintegrates and their hostility towards each other grows, the guests’

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impulsive behaviour cannot be distinguished from that of animals. Several

actions on the part of the characters, such as slamming shut a piano on the
player’s fingers, deliberately breaking a comb to humiliate a woman who is
still concerned about her appearance, or slapping one another, are examples
of this kind of hostile and brutal behaviour. One of the characters explicitly
says that their existence now coexists with rudeness and violence. Freud
argued that ‘civilization describes the whole sum of the achievements and
the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal
ancestors and which serves two purposes – namely to protect men against
nature and to adjust their mutual relations.’72 El ángel exterminador points to
the way the social and bourgeois man, conventionally seen as elegant,
sophisticated, distinguished in diplomatic or military circles, becomes, in the
face of peril, a wolf man (homo homini lupus est).73 As Stam rightly observed,
‘Buñuel’s radical, almost Darwinian, equation between animal existence and
human life constitutes an aggression because it undermines the privileged
status usually granted to the human subject in narrative.’74
At this point, let us ask how the spatial devices used in surrealist photo-
graphs, such as those of Man Ray, can be related to the psychological
implications of the guests’ performative gesture of falling into the horizontal
space. In The Optical Unconscious, Krauss attempts to present an alternative
history of modernism, ‘one that had developed against the grain of
modernist opticality and that had risen on the very site of modernism only
to defy its logic’.75 Concerned with the epistemological character of the
function of the informe, Krauss identifies Duchamp’s anti-formalist works as
providing a counter-history to modernism. This has always repressed the
informe by privileging formal mastery. The Optical Unconscious led Krauss to
co-organize with Yves-Alain Bois the exhibition, entitled L’informe, mode
d’emploi, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in the summer of 1996. In
this exhibition, the concept of the informe, which constitutes a third term
standing outside the modernist opposition between form and content,
served as a reinterpretation of modern artistic practices, such as those of
Marcel Duchamp or Cindy Sherman, among others. The exhibition was
divided into four sections. The theme of each section referred to Bataille’s
concept of the informe: ‘Horizontality’, ‘Pulse’, ‘Base Materialism’ and
‘Entropy’. These four themes analyse the informe as an operational and
structural tool, which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of
subject matter in art. Neither content nor form, the informe is, as Bataille
himself expressed it, a ‘job’.
Focusing on surrealist photography, Krauss draws on Bataille’s notions of

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the informe and bassesse to suggest that the equation of humans with animals
was commonplace in early surrealist photography, which focused on degrad-
ing transformations of the human body into animal-like images.76 Surrealist
photographers such as Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard, Hans Bellmer and
Raoul Ubac explored the possibilities of photographing bodily organs,
especially orifices, which disgust because of their excretions, going so far as
to produce confusion among them. Due to this confusion among bodily
orifices, the spectator cannot distinguish the mouth from the anus. This
concern with the margins of the human body is also noticeable in Bataille’s
essay entitled ‘The Big Toe’ (1929).77 Bataille argues that the very definition
of humanity is inextricably entangled with that most base of human features,
the foot. The toe makes humans separate from other primates by allowing
them to stand erect. Thus the toe determines the hierarchies of the body and
of society, which are based on clear-cut distinctions between the high and
the noble and the low and the ignoble. In Bataille’s account, the toe exceeds
such distinctions by ‘developing bunions, corns, and callouses. It becomes
splayed, bulbous. It refuses to be ennobled or even to be ignoble. It is,
simply, base.’78
In Man Ray’s photographs, such as The Primacy of Matter Over Thought
(Primat de la matière sur la pensée) (1929) or Untitled (1930), the spectator can
perceive how the human body has been rotated into the horizontal position,
thereby making it a ‘fallen body’. The camera propels the image into the
realm of the vertiginous by shooting the body from a low angle. The
mechanics of the fall is achieved through an axial rotation from the vertical
to the horizontal, which Bataille defines as bassesse. With this term, Bataille
rejects the idealism commonly attributed to surrealism and privileges a
Dionysian lowering of the self on to an instinctual plane in which irrational
drives determine most behaviour. Surrealist photographers manipulated the
human body by subjecting it to a series of violent visual assaults, such as
submitting it to the force of gravity, presenting it in a distorting perspective,
decapitating it through the projection of shadows, or eating it away by
means of heat or light.
After this excursion on the function of the informe in surrealist photo-
graphy, let us return to El ángel exterminador to suggest that the dinner guests’
bodies are, like Man Ray’s photographed bodies, rotated and disoriented
from the vertical axis to fulfil the condition of man as animal. The bodies of
the bourgeois dinner guests can no longer be seen as human, for they have
fallen from the state of ‘grace’ into the condition of the animal. Moreover,
lighting reinforces figure/ground differentials, thereby modelling the

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object’s form and rounding off planes to create volumes. Buñuel dims the
cinematic space during the sequence when the guests fall down to create a
tension between the visibility and the invisibility of the objects represented
in the filmic space. This representational strategy emphasizes the aesthetic
and ideological connections between Buñuel’s film and early surrealist
photography. In symbolic terms, darkness in the film could point to a crisis
in the primacy of sight and vision in the Western epistemological tradition
and, therefore, brings about an epistemic shift. The hitherto forbidden
elements, such as transgressive eroticism, can be rescued from the
domination of light and transparency.
In El ángel exterminador, several close-ups and medium shots of bare feet
allow us to see their toes. Buñuel shows bare feet stepping on each other to
reinforce the guests’ hostility to one another. A close-up shows someone
cutting the nails of his or her toes while someone else makes a comment
about hygiene and abjection. The film also offers a close-up of someone
shaving the lower part of his leg. Like Bataille and Boiffard’s Untitled (1929),
Buñuel shows shots of legs, bare feet and toes, thus presenting the toe as an
insubordinated and marginal part that refuses to respect the hierarchical
relations of the body and of society. The toe is not integrated into the
organic system as a whole. Rather, the toe suddenly emerges as a partial
object that does not fulfil its initial function of sustaining the entire edifice.
What possibilities of ideological and sexual emancipation arise when a
human being comes to be equated with an animal by falling to the
horizontal position? Let us discuss a minimalist sculpture that the artist Eva
Hesse produced in the 1960s. An analysis of Hesse’s sculpture enables us to
go further in understanding El ángel exterminador ’s attachment to horizontal
space.
Area (1968) is composed of a surface made of latex on wire mesh and
metal wire. As an industrial material, latex is a fragile medium that decays
over time. Many of Hesse’s works have in fact become discoloured and have
disintegrated because of their susceptibility to light and heat. Like some
strange and abstract prosthetic extension, this apparently soft sculpture
extends down the wall and into the gallery space, thereby insisting on the
lowest possible level of space the work of art could occupy. Fer argues that
Hesse’s sculpture ‘looks as if it has slipped down the wall [which is linked to
the vertical axis] to lie slumped and somewhat crumpled’.79 The effect of
‘falling from grace’ of Hesse’s sculpture tends to subvert the dominant,
patriarchal modernist movement of art in the United States, which is
retrospectively referred to as abstract expressionism, and the corresponding

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model of modernist art criticism, exemplified by Clement Greenberg and

Michael Fried. In this patriarchal artistic and critical context, the bodily,
horizontal and material spaces were, unlike in Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador
or Hesse’s sculpture, repressed to construct a discourse of sublimation.
Hesse’s sculpture pulls downward, thus challenging our dominant culture’s
concern with notions of verticality and opticality, which are associated with
sublimation and vision. Leslie Jones notes that: ‘Vision has often been
privileged as the superior sense in modernism and therefore constitutive of
the male subject. The experience of the other senses of the body has been
denigrated and relegated to the realm of the feminine.’80 The critique of
such cultural privileges, which Margaret Iversen defines as ‘the deflationary
impulse’81 was at the heart of the avant-garde art produced during the 1960s
in which, as I argue in this chapter, El ángel exterminador is to be situated.
During the 1960s visual and performance artists, such as Hesse, started
challenging the sublimation and homogeneity associated with modernism.
Sublimating instincts helps to protect them from frustration by the external
world. Sublimation, moreover, serves to reinforce dominant ideologies.
Desublimation, on the contrary, through its emphasis on libidinal impulses,
is a clear challenge to civilization.
Like Hesse’s desublimatory sculpture, the ‘fallen bodies’ of the bourgeois
dinner guests in El ángel exterminador escape from logicality and lodge them-
selves within the bodily and the obsessional. Desire is thus not proposed
here as the desire for form and thus for sublimation. Rather, desire is
defined in terms of transgression against form. In psychoanalytic terms, the
emphasis on horizontality here could imply an aggression against Lacan’s
association of vision with the vertical axis in his paper ‘The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I’, which emerges in the historical context
of modernism.82 Horizontality defies the meaning of the bounded, flattened
plane of the screen, which functions like the mirror Lacan described, reflect-
ing back to the subject a flattering picture. Bataille suggests that human
structure has remained strictly subjected to the vertical axis.83 Moreover, in
his analysis of spatial representation in film, Bordwell suggests that the
human mind structures vision through Gestalten or visual concepts, which
govern the structure we ‘read out’ of the world.84 According to Krauss, the
Gestalt, which is associated with the law, is defined as a vertical and unified
body, with a top and a bottom, a left and a right. The Gestalt assumes a kind
of orientation in the imaginary field that mirrors the viewer’s own bodily
dimensions. Verticality is itself a signifier on to which the phallic signifier is
mapped. The mapping of the phallic signifier onto the vertical axis allows

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the subject to acquire cognitive unity. From this perspective, the unified
whole implied in the Gestalt allows the signifier to move only if it is placed
in a signified unit so that symbolic meaning is not disrupted.85 Buñuel
prevents the coalescence of the Gestalt by dimming the cinematic space,
thus disrupting the process by which subject and object are put into
reciprocity as the two sides that need to be unified.

Anti-Oedipus
To conclude, in Anti-Oedipus, which marked a culmination of the post-1968
theoretical celebration of desire, Deleuze and Guattari did not entirely
disagree with Lacanian ‘anti-humanist’ psychoanalysis. They argued that
classical psychoanalysis was complicit in formulating the Oedipus complex
to regulate desire by reinscribing a universal history of lack and oppression.
Psychoanalysis, which the psychiatric establishment has used as an apparatus
of power, subjugates, recaptures and restratifies desire by having recourse to
the infinite representations of a structural unconscious. According to
Deleuze and Guattari, the privatized family is also seen as a morally imposed
construct that regulates the telos of human sexual behaviour, condemns
indecency and perversion and creates an anti-homosexual paranoia. As we
discussed in relation to Hocquenghem, Freudian psychoanalysis became
complicit in this moral construct because, by making desire Oedipal, it
established a framework of control instead of describing the notion of
desire. The institutionalized use of psychoanalysis internalizes, perpetuates
and reproduces the norms and hierarchies of the dominant capitalist and
heterosexual society. Shaviro explains that:

Psychoanalysis is merely the last word in the ‘incorporation of perver-

sions’ and ‘specification of individuals’, in the ‘hysterization of
women’s bodies and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure’. It
creates an eternal image of (hetero)sexual difference, instead of
recognising it as a specific and highly contingent political arrangement
(agencement). The crucial point is that Freud and Lacan internalise the
norm as a fundamental principle of human psychic functioning, as
unattainable as it is ineluctable, whereas Proust, Foucault, and
Deleuze and Guattari recognise it for what it is: purely formal, purely
extrinsic, and hence purely oppressive.86

In the same way as it is for Deleuze and Guattari, desire for Lacan could
also be seen as a productive drive that causes heterogeneous elements to

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overlap in what he calls the ‘signifying chain’.87 Because this term is also an
elaboration of the drive that Freud called the ‘compulsion to repeat’, it is not
only connected with language. As we shall see in the next chapter, this drive
is linked to the death drive. Following Lacan’s concern with the notion of
desire, Deleuze and Guattari do not seek to interpret sexuality, but to open
up possibilities of liberating desire from social and linguistic significations.
Their project of ‘schizoanalysis’, which could be seen as a rewriting of the
Lacanian Real, liberates desire from the Oedipus complex by privileging its
free flow in order to turn it against fixed configurations of power to such an
extent that desire itself could be said to produce reality. Although Weiss
maps out a clear-cut distinction between Lacan on the one hand and
Deleuze and Guattari on the other, he suggests that the ‘anti-Lacanian, anti-
semiological and anti-metaphysical celebration of disequilibrium, of non-
order, of rupture, and of jouissance, is brought to its epistemological and
rhetorical limits in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe and Mille plateaux’.88
Unlike the Freudian/Lacanian alternative between an imaginary illusion of
wholeness and a symbolic law of difference via castration, Deleuze and
Guattari propose a pre-originary multiplicity in which partial objects, parts
of machines, and micro-organs continually refer to other parts outside
themselves. These connections do not constitute a totality and do not
permit closure. Even if connections are always being established, they do
not imply the abolition of distance and difference. Rather, they require
additional parts, which establish the connection without being integrated
within it. Although the whole exists, it always remains peripheral. Hence,
‘libidinal flows must be understood as fragmented, detached from the
despotic Oedipal signifiers that attempt to rule them through an insidious
micropolitics of control that functions, first and foremost, through
language.’89
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation of desire as part of their
project of reactivating psychoanalysis, I shall finish the chapter by suggest-
ing that the bourgeois dinner guests in El ángel exterminador have symbolically
become disorganized psychotic subjects in a horizontal space where they are
incapable of further linguistic articulation. They have thus undergone a
process of social and psychic disintegration. The fallen bodies of both
Hesse’s sculpture and the bourgeois dinner guests can be compared with
schizophrenic subjects. If schizophrenia implies a disintegration of the ego–
other boundaries and a fatal breakdown of the symbolic order of the unitary
subject, these two floor-bound bodies challenge an Oedipal structure seen as
the imposition of a controlling and disempowering network on the free flow

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of desire. The fallen bodies, located in the ‘Anti-Oedipus’ phase of

subjectivity, become a kind of desiring machine, a body without organs. This
kind of body is not opposed to organs as such, but to the organic
organization of the organs, where there is limit and restriction. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that:

The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and

thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and lines, traversed by gra-
dients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of
the subject developing along these particular vectors. Nothing here is
representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience.90

At this immanent moment, there is only desire moving forward endlessly. In

this space of nomadic multiplicities, there is no longer a sexual norm, and no
longer a range of deviations from that norm. The body without organs in El
ángel exterminador can be seen to have reached a realm where homosexuality
and heterosexuality can no longer be distinguished from each other. This
desiring machine has discovered new ecstasies of abjection.

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4. THE INVISIBLE TRAUMA: VIOLENT
FANTASIES, REPETITIONS AND
FLASHBACKS IN ENSAYO DE UN
CRIMEN
___________________________________________________________

The essential connection between death and language flashes up before us, but
remains still unthought.1

If I choose Heidegger’s reflection as an epigraph, it is because it makes us

think of the productive tension between visibility and invisibility, or between
the thinkable and the unthinkable, inscribed in the processes of represen-
tation and perception and the implications of this tension for subjectivity.
The implication of this productive conflict, which points to what is simul-
taneously present and absent in symbolic representation, also reminds us of
the paradox at the core of Kristeva’s theorization of abjection and its direct
or oblique points of intersection with Bataille’s informe and Lacan’s Real. As
I have broadly argued in the preceding chapters, the abject posits a pre-
symbolic, unsymbolizable Real. At the same time, the representation of
abjection through artifice is part of a signifying practice and is thus part of
the symbolic order. This contradiction at the core of Kristeva’s notion
allows one to probe the boundaries of subjectivity. I have argued that in
Buñuel’s films we can often trace absent referents. It is around this absence
that the abject, namely what is outside symbolization, is constituted. The
abject continues to be subversive by remaining outside classification. Con-
cerned with this productive tension between invisibility and representation, I
intend, in this chapter, to focus on Buñuel’s use of flashbacks and subjective
flashforwards in Ensayo de un crimen (1955)2 in order to offer a formal parallel
to the protagonist’s repetitive return to an invisible psychological trauma

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that is based on absence, loss, pain, death and annihilation. This trauma
evokes the painful or pleasurable experiences that are linked to abjection.
To reread Ensayo de un crimen as an allusion to the subject’s infantile aggres-
sive fantasies towards partial objects, I emphasize pain and hatred as
structures of feeling. This rereading attempts to expand previous interpret-
ations of the film that have focused on fetishistic desire and on the etiology
of what could be defined as the male character’s criminal behaviour. How
do Archibaldo’s compulsive attempts to kill several femmes fatales gesture
towards a traumatic Real? Buñuel ultimately displaces trauma onto the
female body, thereby repeatedly enacting symbolic mutilations of it. As we
shall see, I attempt to identify the female subject less as the real object of
Archibaldo’s aggression than as the means by which Archibaldo directs his
aggression masochistically against himself. Drawing on Therese Lichtenstein’s
discussion of the distressed female dolls the German surrealist artist Hans
Bellmer constructed and photographed in the 1930s, I propose a theoretical
model of the self ‘based on shifting boundaries of inside and outside or self
and other. This theoretical framework also offers a raw projection of
repressions and anxieties, private physical and psychological interiors.’3
As we shall see, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), Freud argues
that memory serves a therapeutic purpose for the patient suffering from
traumatic symptoms who ‘is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a
contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see,
remembering it as something belonging to the past’.4 In this chapter I
explore the possible subversive implications of trauma in presenting alterna-
tive ways of experiencing reality, modes of knowing, and of understanding
and constituting subjectivity. I point to the missed encounter with the Real,
to presences that are beyond representation, thereby creating ambivalent,
ambiguous and in-between identities and subjectivities, which are located
between all the fixed points of classification. This shift in emphasis from
neurosis to psychosis and from sexuality to the death drive will allow us to
reread the film as challenging a reified and instrumental cultural organization
that functions as the centre of prohibition and sublimation.
To return to Buñuel’s use of diegetic time, I contend in this chapter that
in the same manner as traumatic memories, the flashbacks in Ensayo de un
crimen indicate events in which repressed material returns in a way that twists
time and space into Möbius strips and other strange topological defor-
mations, thereby disrupting unitary identity.5 The flashback and the sub-
jective flashforward, which is also a temporal displacement of classical
narrative cinema, suggest the disruption of linear modes of representation

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and storytelling in cinema. In this chapter, I interpret Ensayo’s narrative

construction and stylistic devices as subverting the conventional narrative
trajectory and stylistic constructions of commercial cinema, even although
most of Buñuel’s melodramas produced in Mexico have been associated
with this cinema. The temporal displacements and confused boundaries
between the film’s multiple diegetic levels avoid the normative subject’s final
gratification of his desire, defer narrative closure and disrupt cinematic
unity. Instead of concentrating on the genre conventions Buñuel adopts or
transgresses, I am interested in how Ensayo de un crimen does not disavow a
dialogue between longing and loss, thereby upsetting the illusion of an
integrated autonomy of the normative self. As in Kristeva’s definition of the
abject, Ensayo concentrates on the violence of mourning for an abject that
has always already been lost.6

Crossdressing and Androgyny

Based on a detective novel by Rodolfo Usigli written in 1944, Ensayo de un
crimen is a black and white film that can be conventionally identified as a
black comedy about a misogynistic, yet seemingly rational, artist named
Archibaldo de la Cruz who has a ‘pathological’ compulsion to kill ‘those
obscure objects of desire’7 (namely women). Nevertheless, his elaborate
murder attempts are continually thwarted. Buñuel manipulates Usigli’s
novel, creating a retrospective narration, leaping from the protagonist’s
childhood to a few weeks prior to the adult’s narrating present.8 Through
Archibaldo’s bizarre and unorthodox double life as an unsuccessful serial
killer, Buñuel subverts the conventional devices of the suspense film. As
Donnell rightly suggests, ‘Buñuel mixes, inverts, or otherwise confounds
canons and genres.’9 Donnell has argued that Ensayo de un crimen has much in
common with neo-baroque writing in their shared disruptions of categorical
distinctions between ‘the real and the unreal, between the psychotic and the
sane, and between criminality and morality’.10 Donnell suggests that the film
maintains a tension between surrealism and baroque imagery in order to
resist, in a kind of postmodern impulse, generic or formal classification.
Buñuel juxtaposes the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema with
norms that are more appropriate to art cinema and experiments with shifts
of narrative modalities,11 thereby deconstructing each mode and revealing its
relative arbitrariness.
The film opens with a first-person, voice-over narration about the horror
and cruelty of the Mexican revolution in 1910, while the camera lingers on a
hand that turns the pages of a photographic history of the revolution. The

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next shot shows a toy train endlessly running around a circular track in the
room of a bourgeois provincial mansion. A stern woman (the governess)
looks for little Archi who happens to be hidden in the closet of the room.
When his governess finally discovers him, the camera cuts from a close-up
of the governess looking in surprise at someone out of shot to a medium
close-up of little Archi dressed in his mother’s clothes, shoes, hat, and corset
over his pyjamas. The image of the cross-dressed child makes us think of
the poem by Lorca, who was Buñuel’s friend, dedicated to the American
modernist poet Walt Whitman. Lorca writes:

Por eso no levanto mi voz, viejo Walt Whitman/Contra el niño que escribe
nombre de niña en su almohada/Ni contra el muchacho que se viste de novia en
la oscuridad del ropero. (This is why I do not raise my voice, old Walt
Whitman/Neither against the child who writes a girl’s name in his
pillow/Nor against the boy who dresses as a bride in the darkness of
the clothier).12

Let us ask the following question: are there any other punctual details in the
film, like the cross-dressed child, that can be interpreted as prophetic signs
that make us conscious of the way that Buñuel could unmask gender ambi-
guity by having actors and actresses perform masquerades of femininities
and masculinities?
For instance, during the visual recreation of Archibaldo’s delusional
murder of Carlota, which is indicated by a subjective flashforward, Carlota is
dressed in a white wedding dress to emphasize and parody the inner conflict
between the notions of purity and impurity she embodies. This conflict
perturbs and fascinates Archibaldo. As Evans suggests, ‘the religious aura
excites him, confirming Buñuel’s abiding interest as a surrealist in the
heightening of erotic experience through religious transgression.’13 In terms
of the use of iconography, by being dressed in a white wedding dress Carlota
alludes to the angelic figures that nineteenth-century realist painters like
Millet represent.14 Does this virginal and pure image of femininity encap-
sulate the romantic paradigm of feminine virtue? Buñuel is known for
representing androgyny, for example, as Evans notes, ‘the reference to
Lorca through the figure of the disorientated androgyne poking with a
phallic cane at the severed hand in the middle of a busy street’.15 How could
the representation of Carlota as an angelic figure, who blurs distinctions
between the masculine and the feminine gender, be read as suggesting that
she is rather an androgynous character?

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Creed suggests that ‘the androgyne is a totally self-sufficient figure, its

narcissistic desire for complete sexual autonomy fulfilled. Therefore, the
androgyne represents a fantasy about the abolition of sexual difference.’16
Throughout the film, Archibaldo shows great enthusiasm for the figure of
Joan of Arc, who has been historically characterized as an androgynous
figure. Because of the gender ambivalence attached to this historical
character, the gay and surrealist artist Jean Cocteau and his circle of friends
and members of other sexual minorities celebrated her canonization in
1920.17 Cocteau seems to have followed earlier male artists like Baudelaire
and Flaubert, who adopted marginal subject positions, by identifying with
the feminine or cultivating hysterical symptoms of nervousness and
vulnerability to subvert and attack medical discourses on hysteria. In
nineteenth-century French psychiatric discourses, hysteria was defined as a
feminine pathology, thus stereotyping and codifying gender roles.
Rimbaud’s famous statement: Je est un autre, through which the French
avant-garde poet questioned the solidity of the ‘I’ and the idea of a
substantive identity is worth mentioning here. During the interwar period,
there was a proliferation of surrealist cultural productions featuring cross-
dressed protagonists and androgynous adolescents, such as the photo-
graphic works of Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray, who were active between
the 1920s and 1940s. This backdrop provided an ideal arena in which to
explore and play with gender identity.18 Did these male artists’ celebration
of the feminine and the hysteric subvert or, on the contrary, reinscribe the
stereotypes they initially attempted to undermine? Mary Kelly, the artist and
critic, has remarked that the male avant-garde artist assumed the feminine
position as a mode of ‘being other’, but he did so ultimately as a form of
virile display.19
To sum up, the image of the cross-dressed child and the representation of
Carlota as an androgynous angel enable us to reread the film as promoting a
fantasy of gender transformation, thus suggesting subject positions excluded
from and articulated in opposition to the dominant symbolic order. This
challenge to the ‘naturalness’ of gender roles and displacement of essentialist
versions of identities allows a much more fluid process of cross-gender fan-
tastic identification with and among the characters and audiences. The flux
of identity positions, which the dominant society arbitrarily polices, is
opened up. The spectator can be narcissistically and/or masochistically
identiied with the characters in the film. Ensayo de un crimen could thus excite
a multiplicity of spectatorial identifications that would illuminate the
complexity of seeing.

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Time, Space and the Lack of Closure

Little Archi, who is a very spoiled child, objects to his mother going to the
theatre. She keeps him quiet by replacing her presence with a music box. On
the top of the music box, a dancing doll turns every time the box plays a
melody, echoing the circular movement of the toy train in the earlier scene,
suspending narrative time and creating an illusion of eternity. Little Archi
has been told that the music box is invested with magic powers to kill his
enemies. Throughout the film, the musical accompaniment of the box is
heard during Archi’s delusional moments, thus becoming the leitmotif of the
film. The same melody is replayed in a minor or major key, turning eerie and
nightmarish whenever the male protagonist is seized with the urge to kill.
The music functions as subjective sound playing inside the protagonist’s
mind.20 For instance, in one sequence, the camera crosscuts between shots
of Archibaldo walking towards the house of his fiancée (Carlota) and shots
of Carlota’s mother looking out of the window. When the camera shows
Archibaldo, we can hear the music that is haunting his psyche, whereas
when the camera cuts to Carlota’s mother, the music stops playing. The
asymmetrical use of sound in this juxtaposition of shots enables us to note
how the melody functions as an audio cue to mark the troubled psychic
world of the protagonist.21
After the initial undisclosed flashback, there is an abrupt cut to a close-up
of a nun listening to someone outside the frame. A cut to the person talking
reveals to the spectator that the voice-over narrator is the tragicomic hero,
Archibaldo de la Cruz, a sensitive and handsome gentleman. He explains to
Sister Trinidad how his current ‘depraved’ adult existence and dissociated
behaviour is rooted in his traumatic childhood memories of the death of his
governess. Evans claims that ‘the narrative’s drives are aimed at an exposure
of Oedipal disturbances defined as ultimately responsible for the leading
character’s neuroses.’22 Archibaldo readily confesses that his murderous
obsession is conditioned by his attempt to recreate and attain this ideal
pleasure in which, as in Bataille’s writings, death and eroticism coexist.
Archibaldo is the narrator during most of the film. More specifically, two
tales narrated by the first person narrator/protagonist make up the bulk of
the film. The narrator/protagonist talks to two diegetic narratees. Inversely,
an omniscient narrator takes over during the last short sequence.23
Archibaldo, ‘el tipo de perfecto caballero cristiano de rígidos e intachables principios
éticos y morales’ (a perfect Christian gentleman of rigid and irreproachable
ethical and moral principles),24 is recovering in hospital from the traumatic
shock of his fiancée (Carlota’s) recent death. As the plot subsequently

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reveals, Carlota’s jealous married lover (Alejandro) had murdered her on the
day of Archibaldo and Carlota’s wedding. However, Archibaldo had appar-
ently already murdered Carlota when he discovered her secret relationship
with Alejandro. Due to the film’s different levels of diegesis, Archibaldo’s
murders of Carlota and Patricia, another of his prospective victims, only
take place on a more oneiric level of the narration. The diegetic time and
space here is associated with a dream-like world in which Archibaldo
projects his delusions. The male protagonist’s imaginary murders of Carlota
and Patricia are visually recreated through subjective flashforwards that
foreshadow material that will occur, though in a different way, later in the
narrative.
For instance, when Patricia goes to the kitchen to prepare some drinks for
herself and Archibaldo, the latter fantasizes about killing her when she
comes back. A subjective flashforward is accompanied by indicators of the
delusional realm in which the action occurs, such as the repetitive melody of
the film’s soundtrack and the optical effect of a dissolve at the beginning
and at the end of this oneiric sequence. Archibaldo imagines Patricia coming
towards the foreground carrying a glass of milk. Smoke fills the frame and
the camera cuts to a close-up of Archibaldo’s eyes, an image reminiscent of
the opening scene in Buñuel’s first surrealist film, Un chien andalou. A shot of
Patricia and Archibaldo kissing each other is followed by one of him slitting
her neck. Another close-up of Archibaldo’s eyes cuts to a shot of Patricia
falling towards the right side of the frame. A close-up of a knife dripping
blood dissolves into a shot of Archibaldo looking anxious in Patricia’s
apartment. This dissolve signals the end of the subjective flashforward. In
contrast to Archibaldo’s delusion, at what would appear as the more realistic
level of the narration linked to Archibaldo’s daily life, the vulgar Patricia kills
herself by cutting her throat after having quarrelled with her elderly
American lover.
In the case of Carlota, Archibaldo follows her and sees her arriving at
Alejandro’s apartment. While a shot from Archibaldo’s viewpoint outside
the apartment shows Carlota and Alejandro talking in an intimate manner,
we hear the sound of a train rather than the conversation between Carlota
and Alejandro. The frame of the apartment window echoes the framing of
this shot. The sound of the train stops when Alejandro draws the Venetian
curtains and the camera cuts to an interior shot of Carlota and Alejandro
quarrelling in the apartment. When the camera cuts back to an exterior shot
of Archibaldo thinking, a disembodied voice, which we recognize as
Archibaldo’s and a dissolve signal the beginning of an oneiric sequence; we

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see how Archibaldo would like to kill Carlota while she is reciting the ‘Dios te
salve’ (God may save you) Catholic prayer. In contrast to Archibaldo’s
delusion, at the more realistic level of the narration, Carlota is shot while
being photographed during the wedding ceremony. Buñuel zooms in on the
camera and then cuts to a subjective shot, from the photographer’s view-
point, of Carlota getting ready for the picture. This framing of the shot
echoes the frame of the camera, thus functioning as a distancing or anti-
illusionist device. A close-up of Carlota looking in horror at someone off-
screen is followed by a shot of Alejandro shooting at her, thereby creating a
moment of confusion between the flash of the camera and the gunshot. A
shot of Carlota falling down dead dissolves into Archibaldo confessing to
the policeman, thereby bringing the action back to the present. The ‘real’
deaths of Carlota and Patricia can therefore be read as a déjà vu, thereby
further emphasizing the film’s concern with trauma, anxiety and repetition,
which I shall explore shortly. Thus Archibaldo shudders over a catastrophe
that has already occurred.
This ability to manipulate diegetic time and space in order to differentiate
between oneiric and non-oneiric sequences reinforces the film’s lack of con-
ventional chronology, which is based on linear time, and the spatial
imprecision of the locations where the actions occur. This spatial and
temporal disruption breaks down the line between the impression of reality
and that of dream, and between dream tout court and dream within the
diegesis. As Eberwein argues, ‘we are not shifting from a fantasy to a real
event, rather, we are moving from one kind of reality to another, both of
which exist on the level of dream.’25 The film’s narrative structure and
cutting style slip into different modes of consciousness to such an extent
that they refuse to allow us to unify the film around any single mode. Buñuel
challenges any clear boundary between the ‘irrational’ space, where
Archibaldo projects his delusions, and the ‘rational’ space of his ordinary
life. As Michael Wood has argued with reference to Belle de jour: ‘the point is
not that dreams have a material reality, or are present in minds other than
the dreamers, but that they are not secondary, that their relation to material
reality is precisely what is in question.’26
In the last sequence of the film, which functions as a form of epilogue,
there are no audiovisual indicators of the diegetic level. If there are no cues
as helpful markers, it is impossible to continue marking clear distinctions
between fact and fantasy. This last sequence is set in an outdoor location,
which seems to be Chapultepec Park. When Archibaldo throws the music
box into a lake, the soundtrack changes from the music box melody to

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orchestral music; ironically, the latter reminds us of the soundtrack used in

Hollywood happy endings, thus suggesting conventional closure. Tracking
from right to left, the camera shows the trees of the park, until Lavinia
comes into shot on the left walking towards the foreground. The next shot,
which shows Lavinia and Archibaldo having an incongruous conversation,
reinforces this sense that ‘what we think is reality is only the surface of the
dream’.27 Attempting to differentiate events from memories, fantasies or
delusions, critics have defined the last scene as showing the triumphal walk
of Archibaldo and Lavinia away from the camera as a conventional thera-
peutic ‘happy ending’, of a kind that is characteristic of the classical
melodrama genre.28 However, if the spectator loses all sense of which
diegetic level of the narration the action is occurring in, we could interpret
this final scene as signalling the passage of a kind of fantasy across both a
psychic and physical threshold that Archibaldo has established. As we shall
see later, instead of being a ‘happy ending’, the final sequence might
implicate us in Archibaldo’s ultimate ‘tragedy’, thereby discovering retro-
actively that what appears to be one kind of reality is in fact a final dream.
We will thus have to ‘confront the reality underlying the manifest dream’.29
After Sister Trinidad’s fatal accident, the police start the investigation into
her death. This sequence of the film reminds us of the hermeneutic
structures of film noir, which entail investigation and the technology of
confession. Foucault has articulated the power relations that are inherent by
definition in the confession. Replacing the ars erotica as an enterprise of truth
in Western civilization from the Middle Ages onward, the ritual of con-
fession has been central to Christian penance, and to medical, psychiatric
and pedagogical discourses, especially the confession of one’s sexual fantasies
and hidden practices. As Foucault has argued, the technology of confession
functioned as a central component in the expanding technologies for the
discipline and control of bodies and of society.30 For instance, medical and
legal discourses simultaneously demanded the revealing of homosexuality
and attempted to discipline and conceal it. Foucault argues that:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject

is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds
within a power relationship; for one does not confess without the
presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the
interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes
and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive,
console, and reconcile.31

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From this quotation by Foucault, we can infer that confession thus implies
a discourse based on power relations between an individual or subjected
body and a configuration of power, knowledge or a channelling force of
society. The confessor, who incarnates the society’s channelling force,
requires the subjected body to account for transgressions. Conditioned by
the idea of threatened punishment and the reward of forgiveness, during the
interrogation Archibaldo declares his responsibility for the death of Sister
Trinidad and for three other murders of women. His declaration reminds us
of those confessional practices that Foucault mentions, such as the Catholic
faithful confessing their sins to the father or the patient lying on the couch
speaking to the analyst in the psychoanalytic encounter. To prove his guilt,
Archibaldo starts the process of ‘working through’ the past events to the
judge. In the context of psychoanalytic therapy, the process of ‘working
through’ implies the often tedious recitations of events and sequences in
order to rehearse less articulated psychic acts. In this performative act, the
patient might be able to discern what consciousness overlooked during the
unfolding of the event. The process of ‘working through’ implies the possi-
bility of a curative interpretation, which occurs within the psychoanalytic
process. Nonetheless, can we challenge normative psychoanalytic attempts
to integrate the ego in a teleologically narrativized sexuality by focusing on
Archibaldo’s acting out or his performative elaboration of the symptom
rather than on the curative element of the psychoanalytic technique?
Archibaldo’s retrospective account that reinterprets the recent past (a few
weeks before) is introduced by a second and lengthy flashback. This
flashback occupies the major part of the diegetic time and of the running
time of the film. Jean-Louis Leutrat argues that:

La compression du temps est dédoublée: le ‘présent’ du film peut en effet se

résumer à presque une journée (scène avec la religieuse, enquête, élimination de la
boîte à musique, retrouvailles avec Lavinia), le flash-back d’une semaine réunit
trois femmes, Carlota, Patricia et Lavinia, dont les relations avec Archibaldo
s’entrecroisent de façon complexe (The compression of time is accelerated:
the ‘present’ in the film lasts barely one day (the scene with the nun,
the inquest, the discarding of the music box, the reunions with
Lavinia), the flash-back to a week earlier brings together three
women, Carlota, Patricia and Lavinia, whose relations with Archibaldo
intersect in a complex way.)32

This segment of the film is structured into several episodes and follows a

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relatively linear progressive narrative, even if the protagonist-narrator is

recreating the past rather than progressing towards future actions. In an
interview with Janet Bergstrom, Raymond Bellour has suggested that what
are understood as classic narrative films are patriarchal texts that share a
common Oedipal trajectory, thereby reinforcing traditional notions of
gender and sexual difference.33 In other words, Bellour argues that the
classical narrative trajectory allows the film to move from its beginning to its
end by integrating a certain number of elements that are given in the course
of the narrative. Bellour contends that this organization in classical narrative
films is the result of the scripting of the psychic conflicts caused by the
Oedipus complex and the castration complex.34 According to Bellour, the
progressive succession of actions that constitute the film correspond to the
hero’s psychic progression towards the symbolic paths of the Oedipus
complex and of the disavowal of castration.35 Silverman argues that:

Classic cinema plays a vital part in the construction of this subjec-

tivity. Not only is it an important supplier of paternal representations,
but it orchestrates for the male subject the projections so necessary to
his sense of personal potency. Its images, sounds, and narrative
structures are drawn from the ideological reserve of the dominant
fiction, and its suturing mechanisms function both to insert the
viewing subject into that fiction, and to inspire confidence in its
capacity to resolve conflict and neutralise opposition.36

In contrast to this classic paradigm, what interests me in Ensayo de un crimen

is the way in which it points to Buñuel’s mixing of the credible with the
incredible, where no definite boundary can be identified. This filmic text
emphasizes ‘what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows
over unities, mobile arrangements over systems’.37 Ensayo de un crimen cham-
pions incompatible, contradictory discourses, thereby producing confusions
in the construction of the filmic text and fragmented subjectivities. Víctor
Fuentes has rightly suggested that:

El punto focal de la narración es la memoria y la imaginación del narrador

protagonista. De aquí que, en la historia, queden desdibujadas las fronteras entre
lo vivido y lo imaginado, la realidad exterior y la visión subjetiva, el tiempo
pasado, el presente y el futuro. Los sucesos se reordenan en su dimensión
configural, preñada de significados latentes, iluminada y oscurecida por las
pulsiones subconscientes instintivas puestas al desnudo de repente. (The focal

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point of the story is the protagonist/narrator’s memory and imagin-

ation. This is why, in the story, the borders between what is lived and
what is imagined, between external reality and subjective vision,
between past, present and future remain blurred. The events are
reordered in their configured form, which latent meanings fill and
instinctive unconscious drives illuminate and darken. These are sud-
denly uncovered.)38

The film connects the different episodes by selecting segments of

Archibaldo and his fiancée Carlota’s story. In attributing the category of
‘auteur’ cinema to some of Buñuel’s Spanish-language films, François
Truffaut is following the French film critical tradition. Although in this
book I attempt to expand this auteurist approach, it is worth mentioning
that Truffaut observed how the interest of the film lies in the ingenuity of its
construction, in which Buñuel demonstrates an audacious handling of time
and an expertise in cinematic narrative.39 The second flashback, showing a
retrospective account of the recent past, takes us to Archibaldo’s redis-
covery of the old music box at an antique shop, where it had been lost years
before. Archibaldo once again becomes haunted by that original image of
the dead governess. It is ‘la sensualité de la frontière des bas noirs sur les cuisses et
l’attrait de ce ruisseau de sang frais et sombre qui s’épanche sur le cou de la gouvernante’
(the sensuality of the border of the black stockings over her thighs and the
attraction of the stream of fresh dark blood pouring out onto the
governess’s neck)40 that conditions Archibaldo’s emotional life for a major
part of his existence.
In the next sequence, we see a close-up of Archibaldo looking at the
music box and listen to the diegetic music coming from it. This shot fades
to a close-up of the dancer turning and the song winding down, indicating
that time has passed. In deep focus, we see the music box in the foreground
and Archibaldo in the background of the cinematic space. A pan showing
Archibaldo shaving his beard with a razor in the toilet is followed by an
image of his back and a double reflection of his face seen in the mirror. We
see a close-up of Archibaldo cutting himself and non-diegetic organ music
begins to play the melody the music box has just been playing. The sound-
track helps to link a rapid succession of the following brief shots: a close-up
of Archibaldo’s bloodstained hand dissolves into the haunting image of the
dead governess. A shot of the governess’s bloodstained neck is followed by
blood streaming over the camera lens. A close-up of the governess’s legs
from Archibaldo’s voyeuristic point of view is followed by more blood

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streaming over the camera lens until the screen’s surface is flooded with
blood, thereby blocking our field of vision. The image of the dead governess
fades out and the camera returns to a frontal view of Archibaldo. Through
this anti-classical cinematic language, which recalls Buñuel’s early excursions
into surrealist filmmaking, the film conveys how the haunting music from
the box returns from Archibaldo’s traumatic childhood and precipitates his
collapse into a kind of madness. From this moment, each episode focuses
on one of the different plans Archibaldo compulsively orchestrates to
murder the female characters.
Archibaldo’s victims (Patricia, Lavinia, Lavinia’s mannequin and Carlota)
have a common characteristic: the four women have a stereotypically
feminine beauty. Represented as splendid, charming, doll-like figures with
creamy porcelain-like complexions, they become objects of a desire that
titillates the heterosexual male libido. If we establish a connection between
Archibaldo’s and Sade’s victims, we could read these female ‘victims’ as
being in a position of the greatest possible humiliation or ‘objectification’ vis-à-
vis their ‘aggressor’.41 However, if, as queer critics like Dyer42 have suggested,
a preoccupation with surface and style can have, in general, a subversive
dimension in the politics of representation, the film’s hyperbolic represen-
tation of women could be reread as a parodic signifier that connotes an
excessive investment in the representation of femininity. In a similar way,
the film’s mise-en-scène emphasizes costumes, lingerie and the interior design
of Archibaldo’s and Patricia’s house, which are so artificial that they seem
almost theatrical. The film’s mise-en-scène thus reinforces a kind of hyperbolic
engagement with characters and objects, whether they be women, clothes or
furniture.
This quality of excess, artifice and theatricality could imply a subject
position that is antipathetic to the aesthetic and psychological criteria of
patriarchal cultural productions, thereby undermining rigid definitions of
gender. The surfaces of life are ‘part of a dream which disguises as much as
any dream we could imagine’.43 This loss of the boundary between ‘artifi-
ciality’ and ‘naturalness’ is also expressed by associating Lavinia with her
mannequin. Close-ups of her mannequin’s face dissolving into her own face
in a different diegetic space reinforce their interchangeable identities.
Instead of punishing the ‘real’ Lavinia, Archibaldo displaces his aggression
onto the mannequin. A tracking shot shows Archibaldo dragging the
mannequin out and it losing a leg. When Archibaldo places the dis-
membered mannequin in his kiln, the camera crosscuts between shots of it
in the kiln and shots of Archibaldo looking at the sinister scene through a

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window, and we see these shots from the unusual point of view of the
mannequin. As we shall see shortly, this loss of a boundary between
artificiality and naturalness, fantasy and reality allows us to identify the
female characters as a symbolic projection of Archibaldo’s unconscious fan-
tasies. They function as replacements of the lost object (the mother or the
breast). Archibaldo thus needs the female body in order to materialize his
repressed narcissistic or masochistic desires.
Each episode demonstrates how Archibaldo’s obsessive, compulsive and
repetitive desire to murder these femmes fatales can never be fulfilled. In The
Plague of Fantasies, Žižek exemplifies the juxtaposition between a meta-
physical ‘Limit’ and some trivial empirical impediment by referring to the
cinema of Buñuel. According to Žižek, Buñuel’s films demonstrate the
inscrutable impossibility of the fulfilment of a simple desire.44 In this
Buñuelian fashion, as soon as Archibaldo plans to commit a murder, an
element of ‘objective chance’, which symbolizes the expression of a hidden
order, intervenes, thereby preventing him from achieving his most desired
aim. The film’s celebration of chance as a revolutionary principle can be
linked to the potential of chance to disrupt and undermine the bourgeois
notion of history as progress, thereby opening to doubt the validity of
modern cultural assumptions about the strength of modern culture itself.45
Apart from the mannequin, which Archibaldo succeeds in burning in his
kiln, these women are killed by accidents that have nothing to do with
Archibaldo. Marcel Oms argues that the preparations for the crimes,
manifested by the protagonist’s choice of razor, gloves, towel, oven in which
Archibaldo makes his vessels and the gun, create a horizon of expectations.
Through close framing and dramatic lighting, which recall German
Expressionism, Buñuel emphasizes the protagonist’s choice of criminal
objects. According to Oms, the visualization of the desired criminal act in
the protagonist’s imagination through the subjective flashforward reinforces
the preparations for the crimes. However, this horizon of expectations is
frustrated because the crimes are never realized, thereby de-dramatizing the
imagined situation and leaving the character in an uncomfortable situation.46
The aim of the act will never be accomplished and another act will follow.
From this close reading of the narrative construction and cinematic
devices of the film, I propose that Buñuel’s Ensayo de un crimen can be reread
as a relation between two types of discourse. On the one hand, there is a
psychoanalytic argument that explores the theoretical incompatibilities
between the Real/Symbolic or pre-Oedipal/Oedipal representation or
repetition of a sexual trauma. On the other hand, there is a self-reflexive

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discourse that parallels the trauma in terms of formal procedures. According

to Foster, trauma and repetition are fundamental to both modernist art and
psychoanalytical theory.47 We could argue that Ensayo de un crimen, although
not an example of modernist art does indeed evoke the commonality bet-
ween trauma and film. Evans writes that Archibaldo’s traumatic submission
to pre-Oedipal regression is a ‘disqualification from the rights and privileges
of phallic power and a condemnation to find only unhappiness and
disruption in his pursuits of love’.48 Evans suggests that Archibaldo’s
fixation on his mother condemns him to an endless series of affairs in which
he becomes both the rejected and rejecting subject/object of desire. Evans’s
analysis of the film manages ultimately to challenge a monolithic discourse
that attempts to incorporate ‘incomplete’ sexual practices and instinctual
disturbances into notions of ‘development’ and institutes closure on the
basis of the fixation of meaning, of the non-recognition of the infinite play
of differences.
Let us ask whether the film’s concern with repetition could be associated
with an obsessional, neurotic, symbolic protection against prohibition. How-
ever, how can the uncanniness of the return of the repressed and the
immanence of death in Ensayo de un crimen address the confusion of the
psychic role of sexuality that is located before or beyond Oedipal dis-
turbance? Silverman suggests that ‘trauma can best be understood as the
rupture of an order which aspires to closure and systematic equilibrium by a
force directed toward disruption and disintegration.’49 If there is a
subversive association between sexual trauma and artistic (unconscious)50
representation of the unassimilable, how can we interpret the deadly,
regressive and ecstatic repetition associated with the missed encounter with
the Real as a shattering and intrauterine fantasy or pleasure? This shattering
fantasy celebrates the subject’s psychic disturbance and shatters his sub-
jectivity, thus challenging, rather than concealing, lack and paternal inter-
diction or prohibition. Freud tells us that it is reminders of death and
evocations of scenes associated with sexual traumas that evoke the uncanny.
It is to this point that I now turn.

Violent Fantasies
As a child, I only saw the things of the world that delighted me. …
During two summers at least I had eyes only for one big stone. It was
a golden monolith, its base opening on a cave; the entire bottom was
hollowed out by the action of water. … I considered this stone a
friend at once … like someone whom we knew and loved a long time

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ago and whom we met again with infinite joy and surprise. … I was
overjoyed when I could crouch in the little cave at the bottom; it
could hardly hold me; all my wishes were fulfilled.51

In the above quotation from the artist Giacometti, the narrator ambivalently
expresses a mixture of fear and comfort associated with his childhood memories
of the return to a particular familiar/strange place. If we read the cave as a
metaphor for the maternal womb, Giacometti could be spontaneously and
fragmentarily remembering some kind of uncanny fantasy or anxiety of
intrauterine existence, which is experienced both familiarly and strangely.
The intrauterine fantasy is prior to castration and to paternal interdiction
since it implies a reunion with the maternal body, as the figure of the father
entails the repression of the desire for the mother. Hence, castration anxiety
conditions and interweaves with the intrauterine fantasy. This fantasy, which
is defined as a screen memory, is a direct trace of a psychosexual trauma that
occurs before castration. If the intrauterine fantasy coexists with castration,
the experience of being, which is based on separation and differentiation,
thus coexists with that of being with the other, which is based on reunion
and non-differentiation. Hence, the opposition between being and merging
is not based on a mutual exclusivity; it involves a necessary complementarity
in which both function as part of the same psychic structure rather than as
opposing forces. This decentring operation thus allows for a reversibility
of the terms of the binary oppositions between the following psychic
experiences or human actions: pleasure and pain, losing and finding love,
castration and restitution, abandonment and reunion, death and resur-
rection. Janice Lane argues that ‘the world’s structure is explained by
reversibility: the fact that the toucher is always touched, the seer seen, the
knower known. Reversibility means that human beings are not belated
minds imprisoned in a world of insensate matter, but exist in a reciprocal
relation to other people and the world.’52
The logic of substitution, which disturbs the logic of the chronological
and the determinate relationship of cause and effect, conditions this
reversibility of structures. By breaking down the duality of inside and
outside the reversal of structures questions the arbitrary social construction
of classificatory systems relating to the body, identity and subjectivity.53
Hence, we could redefine human subjectivity as a subjectivity in flux or a
subjectivity mutilated by relativizing social and psychological oppositions.
As Dean suggests, subjectivity is only a continuous series of failed attempts
to identify with an ideal.54 Let us explore how, in Ensayo de un crimen, we can

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reverse the conflicting psychic experiences of pain and pleasure or des-

truction and self-annihilation that Archibaldo confronts in coming to terms
with his own subjectivity.
If the association of desire with destruction haunts Archibaldo, how can
his several attempts to murder his female victims be identified as a sado-
masochistic scenario? Lane suggests that the abuser, who threatens the
victim with literal or metaphorical non-existence, refuses to acknowledge
reversibility, thereby trying to usurp the victim’s body and spirit as proof of
his own power.55 The abuser’s aim is the complete control of sexual pleasure
divorced from all possible emotional or social intimacy. But if sexual
pleasure is not the gaining but the losing of control, if the moment of an
individual orgasm can no longer be located in one body, or if the fulfilment
of sexual pleasure requires the punishment of that satisfaction, could
Archibaldo’s attempts to murder women, which imply a return again and
again to the traumatic scene of the image of the dead governess, be inter-
preted as a means of displacing the real source of conflict? Is this conflict
linked to experiences of psychic pain, abandonment, and loss? In a different
context, Thomas Elsaesser has suggested that:

The character comes to a confused awareness that he is being pur-

sued by his own self, and that in the killing of small girls, he is in a
sense punishing himself, at any rate the part of himself that, having
been victimized, identifies with a vulnerable, innocent, ‘feminine’ self
image, upon which his other self takes ritualized revenge.56

As Elsaesser’s quotation implies, violent aggression desublimates the uncon-

scious desire for self-punishment, thus representing a movement from the
symbolic to the unrepresentable. From this perspective, some of the psychic
experiences associated with loss, abandonment and pain, which one might
think would be related to Oedipal configurations, are on the contrary rooted
in a pre-Oedipal psychic space. In this psychic stage, the subject is physically
and psychically undifferentiated from the mother. If violent aggression
escapes the symbolic representational structures that constitute the self, in
the opening scene of the film Archibaldo’s aggressive reluctance to separate
from his mother could be seen as a method of finding a signifier for a prior
experience of absence or loss. This prior experience cannot be symbolized,
since it remains outside symbolic representation. Without this signifier, the
original loss cannot be recollected or brought under linguistic control – the
process whereby it is anchored to signifiers and consequently to meaning.

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For instance, in her Kleinian reading of Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures,57

Mignon Nixon argues that the non-verbal psychic space associated with pre-
Oedipality is already formed around the experience of the loss of the partial
object, such as the mother’s breast and milk, which the subject fantasizes in
connection with other part objects, such as the mouth. Nixon suggests that
‘psychic life is structured by unconscious fantasies driven by bodily experi-
ences, and these fantasies, present from early infancy, persist not as states
into which the subject may regress, but as ever-present positions in which
one is sometimes lodged’.58 According to Nixon, in the pre-Oedipal stage of
subjectivity, subjects enact destructive fantasies associated with the oral-
sadistic fantasy, thereby allowing them to experience their own violent
aggression. The oral-sadistic fantasy operates in the atemporal field of
infantile experience rather than in the temporal linguistic field of the
Oedipal subject mapped by Lacanian-based work. This anxiety about one’s
own aggression, which is displaced onto the mother–infant relation, can be
seen as deeply structuring unconscious fantasy beyond the gendered body.
Aggression is thus not a function of sexual difference, but is structural to all
subjectivities. Aggression overcomes the primacy of castration by subverting
the Lacanian account of the entry into subjectivity via the lack in being and
language. Nixon suggests that ‘the distinctions of inside and outside or body
and environment that are foundational for the gendered body are not
observed by infantile fantasy.’59 The subject thus takes the mother’s breast
as its own object to the point where this part of the other is experienced as a
part of the subject itself. If the infant has not yet gained access to the
difference between self and other,60 the infant fears less the loss of the
mother than the loss of all objects. This fear of loss motivates his or her
own destructive, violent impulses.
To return to Ensayo, Donnell interprets the different objects that figure in
the film less as suspended aimlessly in time than as markers of Archibaldo’s
history. The glass of milk appears on two occasions in the film, the music
box constantly haunts Archibaldo and the high-heeled shoe of Lavinia’s
mannequin is shown in close-up. Kinder defines this last object as function-
ing as a fetish.61 Are these objects just markers of Archibaldo’s history or are
they presented only as fetishistic objects? I would add that these objects,
which become signifiers of the lost and unreachable object, function as
reminders of Archibaldo’s attempt to experience directly and reenact pre-
Oedipal jouissance.62 Because jouissance is unsymbolizable, there is no direct
relation to it. According to Adams, the objet petit (a) comes from the Real,
thereby piercing the symbolic. The Real and the symbolic are two different

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orders, yet the Real appears in the symbolic. The objet petit (a), as a remnant
of jouissance, as an index for the way that mortality inscribes birth, in that it
marks the singularity of each mortal existence, reminds us that the subject,
unable to avoid any longer his or her own division, has to attain jouissance
beyond the pleasure principle.
Donnell applies the narratological concepts of theorists such as Chatman
and Genette to study the degree to which the story’s telling challenges our
ability to interpret the story itself,63 thereby producing a crisis of spectator-
ship. For instance, Donnell suggests that, in the last sequence of the film
described above, which might point to conventional closure, a ‘symbolic
reintegration of the original childhood trauma never occurs’.64 Buñuel
himself declared that there is nothing in the last sequence to indicate that
Archibaldo’s psychotic subjectivity, which arises as an effect of the death
drive, has changed. As Buñuel puts it, ‘the audience can ask itself what is
going to happen to Lavinia. Archibaldo may kill her an hour later, because
nothing indicates that he has changed.’65 Donnell argues that: ‘While a few
critics have noted the ending’s irony and even absurdity, none have chosen
to explore the final sequence’s lack of verisimilitude or how it punches a
hole in the film’s story. There is little hope for satisfactory, therapeutic
closure.’66 Donnell proposes that we are left with a kind of epistemological
aporia concerning the character’s psychological aporia. It seems as if Buñuel
consciously or unconsciously turns in ‘an endless circulation of forms, in a
language of signs, of gestures, of mutual indications at play, which remains
vacant of all ultimate meaning, thereby revealing in a dazzling succession
only a further vista of signs behind signs’.67 To speculate upon Archibaldo’s
fate in the last sequence of the film, let us return to the politics of jouissance
and the dialectic of violent self-destruction. The latter entails a paradoxical
tension between self-destruction and survival or between culpability and
desire.
My speculative rereading of the film proposes that when Archibaldo
finishes the confessional process at the judge’s office, which I associate with
the psychoanalytic practice of ‘working through’, he does not achieve
heterosexual bliss. Rather, Archibaldo is dominated by the Real of his
perceptions, thereby piercing the screen of knowledge that is sustained by
language. Archibaldo does not attempt to achieve symbolic reintegration or
restoration of the disruptive desires that constitute his psychotic or dissident
subjectivity.68 Rather, he could act out self-annihilation to find the object in
the Real. After the endless series of failed murder opportunities,
Archibaldo’s urgent need to accomplish jouissance could prompt him to make

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himself the victim of his own auto-eroticism, ultimately turning trauma into
pleasure. Archibaldo would thus move from an existence-as-rehearsal to an
unconstrained state of being. From this perspective, is Archibaldo’s re-
encounter with Lavinia a break with his childhood association of sexual
pleasure with death? As is well known, Buñuel signifies by means of
allusions and circumlocutions, thereby fostering a metaphorical tendency in
his works. Although this is not shown in the film, Archibaldo could commit
suicide. While the idea of death and suicide fascinated the early French
surrealist group to which Buñuel had belonged,69 the explicit representation
of the protagonist’s death here would have reproduced the moralistic
implications that occur within the psychoanalytic narrative economy of the
1940s’ melodrama and the film noir in their configuration of a compulsive
desire that only death can end.70
To sum up, to reread the film from a queer subject position I suggest that
the coexistence of pleasure and death in Ensayo de un crimen is associated with
the political implications of jouissance, which can be seen as lying beyond the
principle of surplus repression the dominant society imposes. The jouissance
around which queer subjectivities are elaborated points to something at the
heart of the subject that is nevertheless unassimilable to it. In symbolic
terms, queer subjectivities are already articulated through the recognition of
our own ‘deaths’ within the law of the social. Queer subjectivities are
associated with a social and psychological state of abjection by returning
from or inhabiting a symbolic death. The ability of queer subjects to mourn
their own mortality allows for the possibility of social and symbolic
vengeance.71

La Poupée
In Hans Bellmer’s photographs, taken in the 1930s and 1940s, we see a doll
made out of glue and tissue paper, shaped with tools and painted to
resemble flesh. The doll consists of various appendages that could be
pivoted around a central ball joint. The doll is shown with more than one
pair of legs, or with no head or torso, adorned with wigs, shoes, white socks,
or other fragments of clothing. Bellmer places the doll against the back-
ground of a wooded landscape, which will remind later viewers of Cathérine
Deneuve’s masochistic fantasy of being tied up to a tree and flagellated by
her coachmen in the first scene of Buñuel’s Belle de jour. Bellmer also places
the doll on a staircase inside a house and in other interior and outdoor
spaces.
In her exploration of the complex and contradictory aspects of Bellmer’s

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photographs of the doll, Lichtenstein argues that the doll raises complex
psychosexual and psychosocial questions about sadomasochism, pornogra-
phy and male fantasies of erotic domination and control in the context of
Nazi Germany.72 As in the case of Buñuel’s mannequin of Lavinia, this
psychosexual and psychosocial ambivalence is emphasized, Lichtenstein
argues, by the doll’s simultaneous appearance as an animate and an
inanimate body. As I explained earlier, in Ensayo Buñuel also emphasizes the
confusion between the animate and the inanimate by using a dissolve from
Lavinia’s mannequin to a shot of Lavinia. According to Lichtenstein, the
photographs of the fragmented body of the doll engage with unsettling
psychological processes, disturbing emotions and shifting spectatorial
positions. These photographs present equivocal and unfixed meanings that
might suggest psychoanalytic theories about the nature of subjectivity and
the formation of the subject. To reveal the intricacies of its fabrication,
Bellmer’s doll desublimates the procedures of fascist ego construction.73 The
fragmented doll thus contradicts the Nazi ideal of the warrior hero or
patriarchal authority figure. More important in the context of this
discussion, with regard to the question of sadomasochism Lichtenstein
interprets sadism as a form of masochism. She argues that:

Sadomasochism can operate as a defence mechanism against the deep

psychic pain that arises out of early childhood experiences of loss and
abandonment. Freud reminds us that sadism is a kind of masquerade
in which the sadist’s hidden identification with the masochistic
position enables him or her to identify with the victim and so to
receive pleasure from both psychosexual orientations.74

To return to Ensayo, Archibaldo’s regression to pre-Oedipality has been

conventionally interpreted as the etiology of his ‘perverse’ adult fetishistic
and criminal behaviour. Drawing on Lichtenstein, I contend that in this
non-verbal stage of subjectivity Archibaldo takes chances with new roles
and ideas that are connected to pleasure and jouissance, thereby interrupting
the operation of fetishism and disturbing the life of the symbolic order. If
fetishism implies the affirmation of a belief in presence over and against the
knowledge of loss, the traumatic scene that is re-enacted in Ensayo is that of
affirming a belief in loss over and against the knowledge of presence.
Lichtenstein explains that ‘a reversion to the pre-Oedipal phase means
rejecting the law of the father and merging with the mother. Instead of
bringing its subject into a position of power, the fantasy produces an

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ambivalent, guilt-tinged, sadomasochistic titillation.’75 This sadomasochistic

play could be interpreted as a compelling desire to merge with the other.
Moreover, returning to Nixon’s location of aggression in a pre-Oedipal stage
of subjectivity that is associated with a sexuality born as aggression, we
could interpret sadomasochistic aggression as an attempt to become the
other by being contained within the body of the other or emerging from
inside it. Lavinia’s mannequin, which replaces the female dancing doll,
functions as a transitional object. This transitional doll blurs the distinction
between ‘me’ and ‘not me’, between mother and self, between external
reality and internal fantasy, thus departing from ideas of a fixed, unified,
Cartesian subject. This violent fantasy, which provides a means of fusing
with one’s own self, relates to the death wish and escapes from the tension
between the repressed awareness of our own fragmentation and the
imaginary ideal of a coherent, unified self. Therefore, the reversibility of
conflicting psychic experiences here opens up the possibility of a psychic
liberation from the restraints and repressions of the dominant social and
symbolic order. This reversal of positions allows for highly volatile desires,
for the possibility of multiple, non-exclusive, erotic identifications and
positionings and transferrals of identity, which unhinge the familiar binary
categories by combining and overriding the boundaries between pleasure
and pain.
This rereading refutes linear readings of the film when it comes to the
character’s sexuality or criminality. In The Self and its Pleasures, Dean demon-
strates that, since 1860, the ‘criminal’ body has conventionally been used as
evidence of deviance and pathological behaviour in order to define and
punish forbidden acts.76 Moreover, Dean has argued elsewhere that psycho-
analysis redefines crime as an expression of a self-destructive drive by
shifting the object of study from clinical symptoms to unconscious
processes. This drive liberates its perpetrator from guilt and sustains his
desire to be guilty.77 Criminality designates the limits of the symbolic,
escapes rational conceptualization and representation, and becomes a meta-
phor for what it is impossible to symbolize, for what escapes ‘that social
rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based’.78
To sum up, in Ensayo, the term criminality could be seen as ironic in
relation to the systematic codes, laws, rules and classifications that punish
sexual deviants. The film’s representation of fears and fantasies of life-in-
death and death-in-life points to conflicting emotions and desires that are
both recognizable and alienating and allows us to reread the film from the
point of view of a queer form of subjectivity. The male protagonist

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repeatedly undertakes a return to a trauma occasioned by an earlier event

that does not exist as a scene of trauma until the subject is able to represent
or reproduce it. Moreover, the film’s obsession with repetition, manifested
in Archibaldo’s repeated attempts to murder several women, in the reflected
images seen in mirrors, in the repetitive music and the repeated image of
Lavinia in the form of her mannequin, is ‘an effect of a repetitive working
over a fantasmatic scene by a mobile subject, a working over that is never
purely involuntary and symptomatic or controlled and curative’.79 Let us
digress from Ensayo to open up the notion of compulsive repetition within
psychoanalysis and to reread repetition in the film in a way that is consistent
with a queer subject position.

Traumatic Repetitions
In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud introduced the concept of
compulsive repetition, which offers us insight into the flirtation with the
death drive and presents an account of the development of his own
thought.80 One year after ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, Freud outlines the
network of a more complex problematic in relation to the intervention of
the vital order and of death. As we have already seen, the death drive points
to the primacy of self-aggression, which is a consequence of the subject’s
tendency towards external stimulation and destruction over the tendency
towards constancy. The latter is, according to Freud’s ‘economic principle’,
the tendency of the psychical apparatus to maintain the quantity of external
excitation as low as possible by developing a protective shield. The self-
preservative drive (Eros), which includes the sexual drives, is the force that
maintains the ego as a narcissistic unity. However, the subject’s tendency to
return to a prior state (Thanatos) within the domain of the vital can reduce
and shatter that narcissistic unity. The subject is thus caught between
binding and unbinding forces. This coexistence of opposing forces provokes
a tension between the articulation of the vital and, as in Ensayo de un crimen, a
kind of frenetic enjoyment (jouissance). In the latter case, the repetition
compulsion becomes a major piece of supporting evidence. Laplanche
suggests that Freud’s concern with this intervention places his theoretical
enquiry at the periphery of the domain of psychoanalysis.81 From this
perspective, human sexuality is defined as traumatic because it is constituted
as a kind of psychic shattering. Bersani identifies this condition as ‘a threat
to the stability and integrity of the self, a threat which perhaps only the
masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive’.82 Moreover, I
shall shortly problematize Freud’s identification of compulsive repetitions,

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which are spurred by the death drive, as the mark of obsessional neurosis.
The latter is suffered by repressed subjects who re-enact compulsive
repetitions and, at the same time, struggle to avoid them.
In his reading of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Samuels
associates the death drive with the imposition of the masculine heterosexist
symbolic order. According to Samuels, the subject becomes a subject of
language and culture by experiencing separation from the Real and from his
instinctual needs. This realm of language and culture thus represents the
absence and loss of the Real, which is usually associated with the materiality
of the maternal body. The subject’s experience of the death drive, which
could imply his overcoming of the Real, thus becomes a path for the
‘progress’ of civilization.83 Moreover, the subject attempts to master the
absence of his desired object, which is linked to the mother, in symbolic
terms. The subject substitutes for that absence a binary opposition of two
signifiers.84 The death drive can thus only be experienced through its
linguistic and symbolic representation. Hence, if the death drive, caused by
the subject’s sense of loss and separation, is the necessary precondition for
the origin of language and culture, what is lost in the gaining of symbolic
language is the Real of the subject’s perceptions in which nothing was
lacking. Moreover, Samuels argues that the death drive is located within the
symbolic structure of the Oedipus complex. The subject gives up his or her
relation to the mother and accepts the deadening demands of the law of the
father. The subject thus accepts the constraints of the symbolic reality
principle, which is based on prohibitions and restrictions, and acknowledges
the possibility of his own death. In this context, Samuels contends that the
repetition compulsion is the way in which the repressed neurotic subject,
subjected to and alienated in language, attempts to master and repeat painful
experiences. The repressed neurotic subject is thus located within the
heterosexist symbolic order of representation and longs to recuperate the
lost object. The traumatic event needs to be integrated into a psychic
economy or a symbolic order so that the individual subject is protected
against any stimulus that is strong enough to penetrate and shatter the
protective shield.
How can we interpret compulsive repetition less as the symbolic mastering
of a traumatic event than as the symptomatic, non-narrative performance of
the pre-Oedipal, traumatic, missing Real? In the latter case, repetition would
not serve to cover the absence of the Real in the symbolic through the
semantic richness of language. If there exists a certain incapacity to contain
the gap between Real perception and symbolic cognition, I want to propose

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that repetition, or the unconscious of representation, reveals the presence of

the Real. The latter cannot be equated with the reality principle. Let us
introduce the performance art of the French female artist Orlan as an
artistic practice that illustrates the distinction between reality and the
irruption of the Real. Orlan also suggests the emancipatory potential of the
interconnection between the experience of being unfinished and traumatic
repetition.
Omnipresence (1993) is a performance work based on a repetitive series of
surgical operations, which were recorded on video for CBS News, and
relayed by satellite to several centres in Canada and in Paris, including the
Pompidou Centre. Orlan voluntarily submitted herself to a series of facial
operations, which involved cutting away sections of skin, and the installation
of implants, as well as receiving multiple gruelling injections. In the process
of removing her facial skin, the boundaries between Orlan’s inside and
outside became confused.85 Orlan’s performance art seems to establish a
dialogical relationship with the French artist Fautrier, whose ôtages, or
paintings of the wound, are representative of l’art engagé after the Second
World War in France. Fautrier attacked the prestige of oil painting, which is
usually associated with traditional Western art, by using different materials
and textures, such as encaustic, wax or glue. He applied these soft materials
to the surface in different layers, using different tools, such as palettes or
knives. This haute pâte creates the effect of wounded flesh. Fautrier’s surfaces
are transformed into the flesh of a human being. This amorphous image is
stripped of its own identity by tearing away its own flesh from a formless
body in which it is no longer possible to distinguish flesh from skin. This
process of striation can arguably be related to Bataille’s notion of altération,86
which was discussed in the previous chapter. Fautrier’s ôtages suggest that
matter is a method of communicating an emotional feeling that expresses
the suffering of human existence. Matter is consubstantial with subject
matter. This relationship demonstrates Fautrier’s preoccupation with both
matière (matter) and sujet (subject matter). Matter is the raison d’être of the
painting. The ôtages are analogous to the unconscious that both reveals and
conceals fears and fantasies in an undefined space between an inside and an
outside world. Fautrier’s ôtages express a tension between repulsion and
desire, violence and love.
To return to our main hypothesis, how can we relate Orlan’s performance
art and her intertextual relationship with Fautrier’s ôtages to the unsettling
force of repetition in Ensayo de un crimen? Orlan’s experience of being
unfinished, which Adams associates with the ‘emptiness of the image’,87

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suggests that communication with the ‘self’ or with the ‘other’ is unattain-
able, except through ruptures or violent narcissistic or physical injuries.
Drawing on Adams, I suggest that instead of covering the absence of the
Real, the collapse of the boundaries between the inside and the outside in
Orlan’s performance art means that the structure of representation opens
onto a void. Orlan thus confronts the stain, which is a tychic point (tuché), to
use Lacan’s term, in the scopic function. Moreover, the tychic point is in the
subject, who is an effect or shadow that is radiated by the gaze of the
other.88 The tychic point rises from the scene like a flash and creates con-
fusion in the subject concerning the location of that rupture, thus opening
the gap between the subject and language, or between the inside and the
outside. This uncertainty is what we identify as traumatic, which is defined
as the missed encounter with the Real because it cannot be represented in
symbolic terms. The traumatic repetitions in Ensayo de un crimen can thus be
linked not so much to the screening of the Real as to the uncovering of the
Real. If, for Samuels, repetition serves to screen the Real, I propose that
repetition allows the Real to rupture the screen of repetition.89 The punctum,
which Foster locates in the subject’s psyche, breaks though the screen of
repetition and evades representation. From this perspective, I reread
repetition in Ensayo de un crimen as not being about the integration of trauma
in a psychic economy within the symbolic order. Rather, repetition in the
film could symptomatically reveal that the traumatic Real returns violently
into the symbolic beyond the insistence of linguistic signs. The Real thus
uncovers the gap that symbolic representation covers over. In this context,
as Bersani suggests, the death drive may be the foundation of, rather than
the exception to, the pleasure principle,90 thereby allowing the subject to
experience the shattering inextricability of the sexual and the (auto)
destructive.
How can we think of repetition beyond its association with the obses-
sional neurosis of the repressed subject in Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure
Principle’? According to Butler’s reading of foreclosure, in the definition of
this notion by Laplanche and Pontalis, what the barred subject of language
forecloses is to be distinguished from what he or she represses. Butler
argues that ‘the entrance into language comes at a price: the norms that
govern the inception of the speaking subject differentiate the subject from
the unspeakable, that is, produce an unspeakability as the condition of
subject formation.’91 In addition, for Butler, the psychotic space of sub-
jectivity, which I have celebrated here, is located either prior to or beyond
the barred subject, where the subject is able to celebrate his autoerotic

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existence. This problematic space beyond subjectivity reveals how the Real
threatens the symbolic order through the belated imagination of what is
before or beyond that order. Following Butler, I propose that if repetition
points symptomatically to the traumatic Real, it reveals the way in which the
symbolic order’s foreclosure of the Real attempts to exclude the latter in
order to guarantee symbolic coherence.
In Ensayo de un crimen, we could interpret the repetition of the traumatic
Real as revealing less the repressed neurotic subject than the psychotic space
of subjectivity in which the law of the father is rejected. In Freud’s
attribution of obsessional neurosis to repetition compulsion, the symbolic
articulates the order of cultural language by taking the place of the Real.
Contrariwise, we challenge the ‘dead’ law by attributing repetition to the
psychotic’s revelation of the foreclosure of the Real. This law implies the
integration of the repressed subject into the symbolic order by means of the
acquisition of a narrative. Therefore, our interpretation associates Buñuel’s
emphasis on repetition with the (missed) encounters with the absent thing92
by moving to the unnarrativizable domain of the traumatic Real. The subject
is, therefore, always already occupied by a dispossessing exteriority or
extimité. In this context, sexuality cannot be articulated within that psychic
space to which pleasure is often reduced.
Freud acknowledges that the space of trauma is not simply represented by
words, for an incomprehensible reality outside the self has already entered
the subject without the mediation of consciousness.93 The power of trauma
resides in its repetition as well as in the way its inherent forgetting is first
experienced. Through an endless inherent necessity of repetition, trauma
conveys precisely what cannot be grasped or narrated intelligibly, thereby
becoming a wound in the system of meaning. In the same way as a waking
memory or dream does, trauma escapes symbolization, even if it keeps
recurring in a symbolic form.94 Cathy Caruth suggests that the temporal
unlocatability of traumatic memories allows the subject to experience a
sense of fragmentation that might cause psychic disorientation, destruction
and disintegration. Throughout this chapter, my concern with trauma has
not focused on how the subject might master trauma through processes of
integration and assimilation. Rather, we have emphasized how the fragmen-
tation of the subject subverts the corporeal and psychic logic underlying the
symbolic’s representations through a deforming process. The belatedness
and incomprehensibility at the core of trauma point to an ethical relation to
the Real in which language causes us to long constantly for a return of the
absent object that language itself has effaced. Ensayo thus points to the

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traumatic Real through the repetition of the pleasure of non-ideological

closure of identification, thereby moving away from the Oedipus complex
and impeding the fulfilment of the male’s desire.
In more concrete terms, the film’s episodic construction, in which each
episode represents one of Archibaldo’s repeated failed murder attempts,
reinforces an expressive language that does not reach the end of the
sentence, thereby challenging the imposition of traditional narrative
closure.95 The repetition of the pleasure of non-ideological closure96 here
implies a reflection on how to represent the unrepresentable in relation to
the psychic temporality of belatedness and a different relation of narrative to
individual agency.97 Ensayo offers a formal parallel to Lacan’s notion of tuché,
which is identified as that instance of contact with the Real that lies behind
imagery and symbolic formations. The representational structures of trauma
reveal the illusion and therefore undermine the integrity of the self. Hence,
if trauma can be identified as a heterogeneous system, the film expresses
various ways of undermining the fictive self.98 As Lacan argues, ‘language
reveals itself only in as much as it fails and allows for the emergence of
letters in the unconscious.’99

Flashbacks and Subjective Flashforwards: A New Significance for

Commonplace Techniques in Ensayo de un crimen
Despite the apparent assimilation of flashbacks within dominant cinematic
conventions, the flashbacks and subjective flashforwards in Ensayo de un
crimen can be defined as cinematic ruptures in the context of 1950s’ Mexican
commercial cinema. These formal ruptures expose and undermine the mech-
anisms of filmic narration through what Bersani defines as ‘concentric
circles’.100 These imply blurrings, slippings and/or juxtapositions of register.
If Ensayo de un crimen seems to proceed narratively towards a conclusive
vindication, then Archibaldo’s constant unassimilated memories and
delusions undermine this classical movement towards a climactic resolution
and revelation. The flashbacks and subjective flashforwards here serve to
point self-consciously to the artifice through which time becomes an
expressive element of filmic narrative form. Williams has noted in connec-
tion with Buñuel’s early surrealist films that ‘the surrealists’ interest in film
arose not from the power of motion photography to create the illusion of
diegetic time and space, but from the power of the image to structure this
time and space into radically different forms.’101 In this context of avant-
garde filmmaking, Turim suggests that the flashbacks and subjective
flashforwards reverse the sequential logic of conventional filmic narrative,

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thus presenting a challenge to the impression of an imaginary reality, which

fictional representations create.102 These cinematic devices disrupt the very
fiction of progress upon which the filmic narrative depends. In terms of
subjectivity, this regressive and potentially perverse tendency at the core of
the flashbacks and subjective flashforwards in the film disrupts the spatio-
temporal consistency that assures the subject a place in the social and
symbolic order.
In her association of the flashback with traumatic memories, Caruth
argues that a flashback can be defined as an interruption or as something
with a disturbing force or impact. For Caruth, the flashback thus cannot be
thought of as a representation.103 Can we rethink these references in non-
representational terms or in terms of an interruption of a representational
mode? In the same manner as trauma, the flashbacks and subjective flash-
forwards in Ensayo de un crimen could function as cinematic devices that point
to the possibility of speaking from within a crisis that cannot be known or
assimilated into consciousness. The latter protects the organism by placing
stimulation within an ordered experience of time. We may thus interpret
these cinematic signifiers as remaining unassimilable to consciousness and as
a way of exploring how traumas return within the filmic narrative.104 Is,
then, the spectator also engaged in recollecting or perceiving memories and
forgetting them, thereby opening a field of speculation about what may be
the film’s disturbing or pleasurable qualities? Caruth defines repetition as a
painful experience by associating the poesis of the flashback with involun-
tary memories. For Caruth, the repetition of flashbacks is seen in terms of
an absolute inability to avoid ‘an unpleasurable event that has not been
given psychic meaning in any way’.105 If Sedgwick reclaims what has been
debased and repudiated through the notion of ‘shame creativity’,106 how
could we embrace, rather than refuse, the negative affect or trauma in order
to overturn the fear of the flashback’s perpetuation of an original trauma?
How can we move beyond therapeutic categories and a concern with the
patient’s integration or assimilation of traumatic events?
To conclude, I contend that the flashbacks and subjective flashforwards in
Ensayo de un crimen can be reread as an antithesis of progressive or evolving
modes of discourse because they reveal themselves as pure representations.
Such an anti-illusionist impetus shatters conventional classic realist represen-
tations that imply ideological closure of identification and subjectivization,
so as to accomplish the social act. I see Buñuel’s use of cinematic signifiers
as disturbing the illusory stability of classical language, which is arbitrarily
considered to be the very boundary of law and prohibition and as limiting all

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expressive human capacities. From a queer subject perspective, the use of

the flashbacks and subjective flashforwards in Ensayo de un crimen can be
reread as undermining the establishment of stable forms of representation
that privilege hetero-masculine controlled structures of discourse and
representation through the foreclosure of the possibilities of a desire that
lies beyond the constitution of the social.107 Ensayo de un crimen symptomati-
cally reveals a resistance to symbolism, thereby challenging the established
concept of repression. This concept is linked to the neurotic subject and to
the traditional Oedipal theory of normative psychoanalysis.108 The cinematic
devices in Ensayo de un crimen re-emphasize the way the (missed) encounter
with the Real is, like Orlan’s performance art, located less inside or outside
than in the moment of the transition between Archibaldo’s delusions, his
memories and his ‘real’ actions. This movement from one to the other
underlies the repetition of the gap, thereby extending the process of being
and becoming.109 The sense of disorientation (dépaysement) and moral ambi-
guity produced by the flashbacks and subjective flashforwards open up a
space for nomadic modes of thought that negotiate subjectivities between
conventional binary oppositions by echoing the experience of trauma.
Perhaps the only ‘invisible trauma’ one could identify in the theme and
formal procedures in Ensayo de un crimen is the one in which the film gives
voice to multiple forms of textuality, sexuality and subjectivity by exposing
the very limits of signification and representation.

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5. THE REFUSAL OF VISUAL
MASTERY: PARANOIA, THE
SCREAM AND THE GAZE IN ÉL
_____________________________________________________

Nous sommes tous plus ou moins des psychotiques guéris (We are all more or
less healed psychotics).1

The above epigraph makes us think of Lacan’s analysis of paranoia in his

doctoral dissertation. Lacan develops a more general theory of human
subjectivity by identifying paranoid crimes as a form of self-punishment.
As we shall see later, for Lacan, paranoia becomes a conceptual metaphor
for the development of human consciousness.2 Concerned with this com-
plex psychological category, in this chapter I question the relationship
between paranoia and the latent representation of same-sex desire in
Buñuel’s Él (1952). This film is based on an autobiographical novel,
entitled Pensamientos, by Mercedes Pinto. In this novel the female pro-
tagonist denounces the persecution she suffered at the hands of her
paranoid husband in the Spanish bourgeois society of the 1920s. Pinto
adds essays written by doctors, psychiatrists, or lawyers in the form of
prologues and appendices to the fictional novel. She attempts to justify a
woman’s right to divorce, which was unacceptable to the conservative
Spanish society of the 1920s.3 French film critics acclaimed Él, despite its
commercial failure in Mexico and its initial negative reception at the
Cannes Film Festival in 1953.4 To rescue the film from this negative
commercial and critical reception, in 1954 Positif, one of France’s most
prestigious film magazines, dedicated a special dossier to Buñuel’s Mexican
cinema.5 In an auteurist fashion, some critics, such as Claude Baylie,
reinterpreted Él as one of Buñuel’s masterpieces, which supposedly

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represents the director’s own personal mythology and allows total access
to the mentality of the Buñuelian hero.
Drawing on Freud’s association of paranoia with homosexuality, this
chapter explores how the female subject in the film (Gloria) displaces male
homoerotic relationships. These could imply an expression of bonding
between Francisco (the master) and his valet (the slave), one of exotism
between Francisco and the young altar boy whose foot is being washed and
kissed by Father Velasco, or one of rivalry and betrayal between Francisco
and Raúl. Paraphrasing Freud, I suggest that the paranoid subject, suffering
from the repression and distortion of homosexual desire, projects a
persecuting double.6 In his analysis of the themes of fetishism and paranoia
in the film, Evans suggests that Él could initially be seen as a direct
illustration of Freud’s classic association of paranoia with the repression of
homosexual desire in a homophobic society that requires the repression of
all ‘abnormal’ desires.7 Drawing on Evans’s account of the film, in this
chapter I contend that Buñuel’s representation of a paranoid subjectivity in
Él does not reflect a respect for science and systematized knowledge.
Instead, I reread paranoia in the film as escaping from psychiatric and
psychological modes of pathologizing the relationship between paranoia and
homosexuality, precisely by embracing the possibility of paranoid pleasure.
As is well known, conventional psychiatric discourses have defined paranoia
as a biological malfunction. In this chapter I see paranoia as a dissident
cognitive mode that offers a critique of the symbolic realm, thereby counter-
acting normative modes of cognition. Defining paranoia as a tautology of
human knowledge, Lacan states that:

I have demonstrated in a monograph that the persecutors were

identical with the images of the ideal ego in the case studied. But,
conversely, in studying ‘paranoiac knowledge’, I was led to consider
the mechanism of paranoiac alienation of the ego as one of the
preconditions of human knowledge.8

Lacan, who gave an authoritative scientific voice to Salvador Dalí’s

paranoiac critical method,9 is reported to have screened Él in his classes to
illustrate the logic of paranoid psychosis. Lacan thought the film accurately
exemplified this logic.10 Following Lacan’s association of paranoia with
human knowledge, I associate paranoia in Él with the understanding
involved in cinematic representation.
According to Charles Tesson, ‘l’homosexualité, sujet central du film à partir des

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déchirements intérieurs de Francisco, travaille aussi l’inconscient du texte, jusque dans ses
agencements narratives’ (homosexuality, the central theme of the film mani-
fested by Francisco’s internal afflictions, works also at the level of the
textual unconscious, even in its narrative dispositions).11 How does Buñuel
reformulate or escape from hegemonic explanations and representations of
subjectivity through his cinematic language in Él? Besides looking at the
ruptures of cinematic conventions in Él, by means of temporal ellipses in
the film’s editing, in this chapter I explore how, formally speaking, the mise-
en-scène and the use of sound in the film problematize the conventional
distinction between the realms of the systematic and the arbitrary or the
rational and the irrational within the Cartesian logic of the ego-cogito. The
Cartesian logic, in turn, perpetuates certain binary oppositions between
mind and body and between cognition and emotion. These oppositions are
diametrically opposed to the film’s refusal to categorize and its defiance of
the stabilization, organization and rationalization of human experience. The
association of the aural and the visual in the film with the constitution of
subjectivity and the understanding of phenomena at a physical and emotional
level beyond the discourses of Western metaphysical thought allows us to
stage an intertextual dialogue between Él and some of the artistic practices
of the German Expressionist avant-garde. German Expressionism thus
helps us to illustrate the way in which Buñuel is concerned in the film with
instinctual modes of knowing and irrationality as a challenge to the realm of
the rational and the scientific.
Dealing with questions of masculine anxiety and injured narcissism, I
suggest here that the narrator’s female voice could be seen as representing
the loss of the phallic control of language, thus offering a critique of the
symbolic structures of patriarchal thought. I attempt to detect some
instances in the film of mise-en-abîme in relation to the theorization of
specularity and interspecularity within psychoanalytic film theory. Drawing
on Lacan’s much discussed concept of the gaze and on subsequent psycho-
analytic readings of this concept, I propose that Él challenges the con-
ventional association of the specular with notions of voyeurism and
fetishism by arguing that Lacan’s concept of the gaze implies a refusal of
visual control or mastery. I intend to challenge the narrow view of masculine
subjectivity associated with the distanced control of vision. Finally, I
contend that Él makes visible the mechanisms of projection, thus opening
up an epistemological gap, a space onto a ‘fear of abjection that is intimately
associated with questions of visibility and the place of the visual in the
articulation of sexuality’.12

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Paranoia
Light is born of the deepest dark, hope out of horror.13

In the first sequence of Él, which represents the celebration of the

‘Mandatum’ in a church, we see three priests about to wash the altar boys’
feet. The camera moves in on a boy’s bare feet a priest is about to kiss. This
is followed by a close-up of the boy looking down at someone who is out of
shot, whom we assume is the priest. A pan from left to right showing a line
of altar boys’ feet is followed by a medium shot of Francisco looking off-
screen. A subjective shot from Francisco’s point of view shows the priest
kissing the boy’s feet. As we shall see, this shot has a pronounced homo-
erotic connotation. The camera cuts back to Francisco looking out of shot
towards the other side of the frame. Another subjective shot, from
Francisco’s viewpoint, pans from left to right along a row of feet belonging
to the congregation, thereby echoing the previous pan showing the altar
boys’ feet; a further pan from right to left stops at an unknown woman’s
feet. The camera, still keeping to Francisco’s viewpoint, tilts up to frame
Gloria’s beautiful body and face. The camera cuts back to a close-up of
Francisco looking left out of frame. We assume he is looking at Gloria. The
camera cuts again to a close-up of Gloria closing her eyelids.
In this first sequence, subjective camera movements and the use of parallel
editing thus reinforce Francisco’s search for and obsession with his objects
of desire, Gloria and the altar boy. The onscreen looks within the sequence
provide an explanation for the camera’s fixation. During this religious scene,
Buñuel makes direct reference to the Holy Trinity and uses diegetic sacred
music to emphasize further the fatal nature of the Catholic religion, in which
piety and sexual attraction are ironically interconnected. Evans suggests that
the camera offers a formal parallel to the way ‘Francisco’s route towards the
female is only accessible through the male’14 by moving from Francisco’s
gaze at Father Velasco kissing the altar boy’s feet to the shoes of a feminine
figure.
It is interesting to note that by the use of a pronounced contrast between
light and shadow, Buñuel emphasizes the luminosity of Gloria’s body and
face against the dimly lit interior of the church, thereby drawing attention to
her beauty. The contrast between the light and shadow cutting across and
dividing the space within the frame makes reference to the baroque pictorial
style known as chiaroscuro, which Caravaggio initiated.15 Subsequently, early
twentieth-century German Expressionist artists and filmmakers used the
menacing technique of chiaroscuro to emphasize their dramatic effects of

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pictorial composition. As we shall see later, this particular technique allowed

these artists to represent tortured mental states. How can we symbolically
renarrativize the brightness of Gloria’s face and body as being associated
with the light of her invasive presence in the field of vision? Does Gloria’s
invasion reveal violence, suffering or a longing for mortality that could be
linked to the phantasmatic aspect of human sexuality?
In symbolic terms, I interpret this explosion of light as blocking our field
of vision, thereby creating a sort of opacity. Fer has stated that opacity is ‘a
term found in the phenomenological language of the philosopher Merleau-
Ponty, who defined the logic of all perception as grounded in the fun-
damental opacity of vision’.16 Merleau-Ponty’s term can be seen as a form of
negative inscription scratched on the surface of vision. The brightness of
Gloria’s face and body blind us to such an extent that the film turns its
aggression against us. Blindness thus emphasizes a sense of disintegration,
precisely by breaking down certain protocols of viewing. I suggest that, in
Él, Buñuel frustrates our impulse to move towards the image, thereby
attacking the epistemological confidence that more conventional films
usually encourage. This epistemological confidence is based on the idea that
the ‘phenomenal world is an object of representation that can be
appropriated through the illusion of knowledge. This illusion reinforces the
boundaries that separate a knowing subject from the object to be known.’17
Buñuel’s aggressive assault on vision itself, which has been one of his major
concerns ever since the opening scene of the bleeding eye in Un chien andalou
(1928), as previously discussed, is achieved through the use of shatteringly
bright light. This points to the reconfiguration of circuits of light and
shadow as a series of discontinuities. The shattering light emphasizes the
disturbances that are associated with sight and the act of seeing that ‘Freud
described as exerting pressure on the subject from both conscious and
unconscious sources’.18
On the basis of the first sequence of the film, we could argue that Gloria
and her shoes become Francisco’s fetish objects, thereby pointing to the
paradoxical process of disavowal of lack and castration and the projection of
disturbed fantasies and desires that is at the core of the internal logic of
fetishism.19 This paradoxical process generates sexual arousal in the fetishist.
According to Freud’s theory of fetishism, the sexual arousal the fetishist
experiences cannot reach a genitalized sexual relationship. Rather, his
perverse, libidinal instincts lead to a kind of sadomasochistic discharge,
which can be translated into violent acts upon the fetishized object or upon
the self. In the case of Él, the fetishist Francisco disavows castration by

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investing in the veneration of objects, such as Gloria’s shoes, which stand

metonymically for Gloria. The latter is identified as the fetishized Other. On
the other hand, the fetishized object, which is associated with a detachable
phallus, ultimately reminds the fetishist of that unconscious sense of lack
and of castration. Hence, the fetishized object, as a denigrated, substitute
object, ends up generating hostility in the fetishist, which is ultimately
directed towards the fetishized Other. Francisco constantly punishes Gloria
so that he can identify with his castrating father, who introduces a
precarious triangulation due to what Kinder has described as Francisco’s
problem with patrilineage.20 From this perspective, Buñuel seems to
illustrate the self-engendering fantasy in which the subject thinks he has re-
engendered himself as a self-sufficient and autonomous being. Through a
fantasy about a ‘particular filiation’, the subject will be able to palliate the
disastrous effects of a self-engendering fantasy. We could read Francisco’s
delirium of filiation21 as an escape from that self-engendering fantasy, which
would lead him to a psychotic psychic disintegration.22
The figure of Gloria, as the fetishized Other, thus highlights ‘the film’s
interest in male power’23 and male masterful agency. Gloria could also be
identified as Francisco’s symptom. Žižek argues that:

The symptom is the way we – the subjects – ‘avoid madness’, the way
we choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing
(radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)
through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, sym-
bolic formation which assures a minimum of consistency to our
being-in-the-world. … This, then, is a symptom: a particular, ‘patho-
logical’, signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain
resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be
included in the circuit of discourse, of social network, but is at the
same time a positive condition of it.24

Following this quotation from Žižek, I suggest that the symptomatic dimen-
sion attributed to the representation of Gloria reveals Francisco’s regression
to the proto-genitality of the anal-sadistic phase. According to Freud: ‘The
faecal mass or “stick” foreshadows the genital penis, the production of
stools becomes a prototype of childbirth (the infantile sexual theory of
giving birth through the anus), the daily separation from the faeces is a
precursor of castration, and excrement in the rectum anticipates genital
coitus.’25 Thus, the fetishization of Gloria involves Francisco’s disavowal of

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his symbolic castration and can be reconceptualized as symptomatic of

Francisco’s repressed narcissistic desire for fusion with the lost mother in
that proto-genitality of the anal-sadistic phase that Freud associates with
anal childbirth. This might imply that Gloria becomes a symptom of
Francisco’s own regressive identification with her. This regression, which
might suggest a psychotic disintegration, is often accompanied by megalo-
maniac fantasies.
For instance, in the sequence showing Francisco and Gloria in the belfry
tower, Buñuel reinforces, by cinematic means, Francisco’s omnipotent
fantasies by using overhead long shots of the crowd from Francisco’s
viewpoint while we hear the diegetic sound of the bells. Francisco tells
Gloria: ‘Ahí tienes a tu gente. Desde aquí se ve claramente lo que son, gusanos
arrastrándose por el suelo. Me dan ganas de aplastarlos con el pie. … Yo desprecio a los
hombres. Si fuera Dios no los perdonaría nunca’ (There you have your people.
From here one sees clearly what they are, worms crawling on the floor. I
wish I could squash them with my foot. … I despise humans. If I were God,
I would never forgive them.)26 This sequence anticipates the bell tower in
the Spanish mission in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the latter, the male
protagonist’s attempt to master the female subject results in the loss of the
male subject himself. Donald Chankin argues that:

Scottie’s successful recreation of Madeleine to compensate for her

loss precipitates the acute crisis stage of his delusion characterized by
a new view of the world as infinitely pliable to his own desires. What
he conceives of as moving forward in the direction of his dreams is
an enactment of delusional thinking.27

In this regression to primary narcissism, Francisco also experiences desire

through projection onto Gloria, which destabilizes the distinctions between
subject and object, between the self and the other.28 As we have discussed at
length in this book, this recapturing of the bisexual identifications of the
pre-Oedipal position counterbalances, as Jessica Benjamin persuasively
argues, ‘the Oedipal position of mutual exclusivity in which we can only be
like the one or the other. This recuperation of earlier bisexuality in the post-
Oedipal complementarity challenges the apparent immutability of the
polarities activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity.’29 If fetishistic
representation could be associated here with heterosexual desire, because it
neglects the bitextual disruption of the symbolic order, our reading of the
film moves beyond a concentration on fetishistic representation by focusing

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on the way the subject of the unconscious and non-heterosexual sub-

jectivities acts as a counter-text to the manifest level of the film.
In addition, Francisco’s homosexual excitation, provoked by his attraction
to the altar boy, is disguised as an apparent heterosexuality through his
fetishistic attachment to Gloria’s shoes, thereby activating his system of
paranoia. Through close-ups of his face and his attractive thick lips, the
camera treats voyeuristically the exotic male beauty of the altar boy. Accord-
ing to the Spanish psychiatrist José Luis Gallego Llorente, Francisco’s initial
fetishistic sexual arousal is the mechanism necessary to activate the system
of paranoia. Although there are slight variations in relation to the Freudian
text, the activation of paranoia in the film illustrates Freud’s main thesis in
his 1915 essay, ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic
Theory of the Disease’.30 In this paper, Freud explained that an apparently
heterosexual excitation provoked the delirium of persecution in one of his
female patients. Freud argued that this delirium of persecution was the
translation or displacement of a homosexual fixation in his female patient
towards her mother. Freud emphasized how, in the system of paranoia, the
fantasy of the primal scene, which entails an element of bisexuality and of
penetration from behind, is structured outside the voyeuristic position. The
latter functions to deploy the urethro-genital context in which any trace of
anal desire would be effaced.31 In Él, Buñuel also refers to a fantasy of the
primal scene in which the voyeuristic position is absent. This absence is
further emphasized by the fact that Francisco gets lost in his identification
with Gloria, reawakening an anal-erotic desire for penetration. Llorente
explains that:

Francisco intenta identificarse narcisísticamente con Gloria, de

colocarse en el sitio de Gloria en una relación sexual en la cual
estuviera sometido a la penetración. En esta maniobra identificatoria
con Gloria queda un sitio vacío que es el que corresponde al propio
Francisco que se pierde en la identificación y en consecuencia el sitio
que debería ocupar, que es el del que mira, está vacío (Francisco
attempts to identify narcissistically with Gloria, to be placed in
Gloria’s position in a sexual relationship in which he would be sub-
mitted to penetration. In this identificatory process with Gloria, an
empty place remains, which is the one that corresponds to Francisco
himself. The latter gets lost in the identificatory process and, as a
consequence, the place he should occupy, which is that of voyeur, is
emptied.)32

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During their honeymoon in Guanajuato, thinking that someone must be

voyeuristically looking at them from the other side of the hotel room,
Francisco inserts a knitting needle into the keyhole of the hotel door. This
image in the film reminds us that the subjectivity of vision implies a painful
experience. As we shall see later, in our discussion of the gaze, the
experience of vision implies that the ‘organism is no longer the origin of the
coordinates, but one point among others: it is dispossessed of its privilege
and, in the strongest sense of the term, no longer knows where to put
itself’.33 Unlike in the Freudian text, Francisco, who will later suffer from
the delirium of persecution,34 becomes the implacable persecutor of Gloria,
which is paradoxically symptomatic of the way in which his subjectivity is
constituted through identification with her.
Francisco manifests the delirium of claiming his family lands and properties
of which, according to him, his grandfather was unfairly dispossessed. This
quest for his family inheritance prompts Francisco to reinterpret any
impediment to his pretensions from a delusional perspective. If Francisco
suffers from paternal disaffiliation, which is associated with the foreclosure
of the symbolic, his delirium of claiming his family lands and properties has
to be understood as a return of the foreclosure in the Real. Francisco reveals
this delusional reinterpretation by rejecting those obstacles that perturb his
attempt to reinvest reality with a different kind of meaning. For instance, he
throws out one of his maids because she represents a threatening rival who
might perturb his latent homosexual relationship with his valet, Pablo. The
latter is a highly hypocritical character who always finds the appropriate
moment to praise his master. Francisco and his valet establish a kind of
intimate communication through physical contact, which emphasizes the
homoerotic relationship between the two men. The latent homosexual
relation between Francisco and his valet replicates the previously mentioned
homoerotic relationship between Francisco and the altar boy.
Freud argued that ‘delusional jealousy had its roots in repressed desires for
infidelity, but the object is of the same sex as the subject’.35 Francisco’s
manifestation of delusional jealousy towards Gloria could thus be read as a
displacement of a homosexual/homoerotic relationship between Francisco
and Raúl. Raúl, who represents the rational order, becomes the eroticized,
paranoid double of Francisco, who represents the irrational order. This
homoerotic relationship, which implies the threat that slipperiness of
identity poses for the male subject in the homosocial order, involves rivalry
and betrayal between the two men in relation to the appropriation of
Gloria.36 During the dinner party, Francisco manifests his desire to

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appropriate Gloria through his defence of a love relationship, which is first

experienced in early infancy and is anchored in infantile relationships.
Francisco’s idea of loving, which is associated with l’amour fou, can be
understood as Buñuel’s surrealist celebration of a subversive and liberatory
passion. This surrealist notion of love suggests the desire to become more
than oneself, to become exchangeable, or to become oriented toward an
expanding interiority.37
These latent, aggressive homosexual/homoerotic relationships in Él seem
to illustrate the parallel history of paranoia and homosexuality in classical
psychoanalysis. In his 1911 essay, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Auto-
biographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, Freud
focused on the particular case history of Paul Schreber and wrote his most
comprehensive account of paranoia. Schreber was a Dresden judge whose
autobiographical account of his visits to several mental institutions details
his delusions of persecution. Schreber’s paranoid delusion involved an
elaborate narrative about his transvestite desire to become a woman and be
penetrated by the rays of God to become impregnated in order to save the
human race. Schreber writes:

The month of November, 1895, marks an important time in the

history of my life and in particular in my own ideas of the possible
shaping of my future. … During that time the signs of transformation
into a woman became so marked on my body, that I could no longer
ignore the imminent goal at which the whole of my development was
aiming.38

According to Freud, Schreber, who became the most famous paranoiac in

the annals of psychoanalysis, took up a feminine attitude towards God and
thought of himself as God’s wife. Freud interprets Schreber’s paranoid
delusions as a defence against homosexuality and claims that the exciting
cause of his mental illness was related to an outburst of homosexual libido.
Freud thus conflates the feminine subject position held by Schreber, his
desire for emasculation and feminization, with that of homosexuality.
In Él, Francisco’s valet is recognizable as a mestizo, and the altar boy
triggers in Francisco and the spectator a kind of scopophilic pleasure in the
exotic body of the younger boy. How can an analysis of these homosexual/
homoerotic relationships between the paranoid Francisco and his valet, or
between Francisco and the altar boy, allow us to explore to what extent
these relationships stand at a point of tension between a subversive

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homoerotic dimension and the reinscription of racial otherness?39

Francisco’s homoerotic fascination with the racially other, which implies the
voyeuristic objectification of the mestizo’s body, articulates a fantasy of
power and mastery over the other, thereby repressing any awareness of his
own nothingness.40 The ego41 avoids an encounter with its own lack by
projecting that lack into the place of the other, which is often played out in
gender and racial terms. This process of projection of nothingness reveals
‘the symbolic relations of power and subordination at work in the binary
relations that structure dominant codes and conventions of visual represen-
tations of the body’.42 However, we could detect a kind of subversive
implication in Buñuel’s homoerotic representation of these racial others,
since this representation may sometimes be a self-conscious challenge to the
social and symbolic order.
For instance, in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, which ignited a con-
troversy, the black male body is seen through the lens of desire.
Mapplethorpe thoroughly sexualizes the black male body, thus making it
available to the consuming white gaze.43 However, there is also something
powerfully transgressive in Mapplethorpe’s photographs. The white gaze’s
desire for the black body, which had generally been repressed, was made
overt and explicit in these photographs.44 If we bring our reading of
Mapplethorpe’s photographs into our analysis of Él, we could argue that
Buñuel’s homoerotic representation of these racial others produces a
psychic threat to the white master. Thinking that the racial other is more
sexually powerful than himself, the white master is ideologically conditioned
by racist myths. In Él, Francisco bursts into tears in front of his mestizo valet
and feels protected when he sits ecstatically next to Pablo in the latter’s bed.
If Francisco’s process of feminization and submissiveness could be read as a
homophobic punishment, we could also read this process as a challenge to
both the hegemonic ideology of whiteness and that of heterosexuality,
which are often interconnected. Taking into my reading of the film a
subcultural constellation of subject positions, I suggest that the film’s focus
on interracial experiences and its fascination with the racial other can be
read as a threat to the hegemonic ideology. The latter privileges white and
heterosexual subjects and has historically constructed discourses homo-
phobically, as well as through an anxiety about interracial sexual exchange.
This is due, in part, to the anxiety of the heteronormative society about
reproduction.45 From this perspective, the homoerotic interracial relation-
ships in Él could thus pose a threat to the dominant white heterosexual
society’s fear of miscegenation, racial degeneration and the extinction of the

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white heterosexual race. This fear can also be defined as a homophobic

expression of that dominant society. As Richard Dyer has persuasively
argued, ‘if race is always about bodies, it is also always about the
reproduction of these bodies through heterosexuality. This is implicit in
notions of genealogy, degeneration, and genetics.’46
This rereading of Buñuel’s representation of homosexual/homoerotic
relationships in Él has allowed us to explore the potential of the paranoid
subject to counteract the conventional assumption that male subjects enjoy
only a safely distanced fetishistic or voyeuristic relation to the image.47
Instead of reading paranoid delusion as a pathological defence against
homosexual desire, I suggest that the psychic mechanisms of paranoid
hallucination point symptomatically to the failure of traditional hetero-
normative structures to account for all the vicissitudes of human desire.
Hanson contends that Freudian theories of paranoia and homosexuality
have allowed mainstream cinematic representations to develop paranoia,
which is associated with a protective quality in relation to primary passive-
ness, into a crucial filmic strategy to avoid explicit representations of sexual
deviants.48 In Él, Francisco encapsulates a paranoid pleasure in submission,
thereby exceeding control or the illusion of possession.
To sum up, if we think of paranoid psychosis in terms of a theory of lin-
guistic structure, the paranoid pleasure in the film, which is equivalent to the
constitution of subjectivity through alienation and separation, can be read as
a heterogeneous discourse. A paranoid psychosis is associated with the
semiotic and threatens the social overdetermination of oedipalization and
phallocentrism by introducing ‘enigmatic’ disorders and alternations in the
repressive system of symbolic signification. Él opens up the structures of
patriarchal and heterosexual forms of subjectivity, thereby challenging tra-
ditional feminist arguments that implicitly assume patriarchal power to be
seamless and monolithic. Stam suggests that ‘Buñuel radicalizes his critique
of Mexican machismo by making his protagonist to all appearances a model
husband, the quintessence of social charm and grace, and by having him
played by the prototypical Mexican “gallant”, Arturo de Córdova.’49

Ruptures and Ellipses

The figure of Gloria could be described as the stereotypical dutiful wife who
stands by and looks after Francisco even after she has been submitted to
physical violence and emotional humiliation, and even after he has tried to
shoot her. She could be identified as a kind of oral mother. If Gloria fulfils
the function of the oral mother, Francisco seems like a child fusing again

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with the maternal body,50 thereby conveying the mother–child symbiosis. In

this psychic relationship, sexual difference has not yet made its appearance.
The mother–child dyad implies, moreover, multiple identifications instead
of the introjective identification associated with the Oedipus complex. In
symbolic terms, Francisco and Gloria form a kind of pre-Oedipal idyllic
landscape, where there is no trace of the psychological boundary between
interior and exterior: this idealization of the semiotic amounts to a denial of
the psychic pain and violence involved in this interaction between mother
and child. But, as Kristeva reminds us:

The child is bound to the mother’s body without the latter being, as
yet, a ‘separate object’. Instead, the mother’s body acts with the
child’s as a sort of socio-natural continuum. The pleasure is auto-
erotic as well as inseparable from the mother’s body. Through
language, the Oedipal phase introduces the symbolic agency, the
prohibition of autoeroticism, and the recognition of the paternal
function.51

After desperately seeking help from her mother and from Father Velasco,
Gloria returns to the house and tries to go directly to her room. Francisco is
aware of her return and cannot accept that she is telling everyone the secrets
of their conjugal life. Francisco takes a gun and shoots her. Although Gloria
falls down, as if she had been killed, we later find out that Francisco shot
her with a gun without bullets. He just wanted to scare her to teach her a
lesson. Thus, Francisco does not kill Gloria. Nonetheless, his aggressive
behaviour towards her wounds her sense of human dignity and psychic
integrity. I would like to suggest an analogy between the martyrdom of
Gloria and that of Christ, in order to suggest that the figure of Gloria shows
the divine, symbolic meaning of sacrificial wounds, whether they are
physical or psychological. In Belle de jour, Marcel also shoots Pierre,
Severine’s husband, since Pierre is the obstacle that prevents Marcel from
establishing a relationship with Severine outside the marginal space of
prostitution. Although Marcel also fails to kill him, Pierre is wounded. He is
paralysed and deprived of his voice and vision, thereby suggesting that the
pathologization of his body abolishes masculinity itself. This constant
obsession with mutilated subjects in Buñuel’s films allows us to perceive an
intertextual connection between these fragmented subjects, such as Gloria
or Pierre, and the Christian tradition of the language of holy wounds. As is
well known, Christians have historically believed in the link between

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mutilation, as a universal emblem of corporeal vulnerability and abjection,

and holiness.52 In this context, the tortured body becomes a site of intense
beauty and painful grotesqueness. Dollimore suggests that the death of
Christ could be read as the keenest image of abjection and arrogance, the
epitome of that transgressive masochism that has played such an important
part in making and unmaking our culture. The image of the martyr has
figured over and again in the cultural depictions of the crucifixion.53 In Un
chien andalou, the image of the bleeding eye enacts a sense of physical
degradation and symbolic castration. Is, then, Gloria sadistically tortured
and submitted to psychological degradation? Does Gloria’s suffering lead
her towards a redemptive end, a moment of sublime perfection?
A rather different perception of Gloria is suggested by Raúl’s reaction to
her story about having been shot by Francisco. Raúl wonders how she could
have survived the gunshot, and his expression of astonishment coincides
with the spectator’s suspicious thoughts. Although we see a shot of Gloria
falling to the floor,54 as if she had died from the shot, she later tells a
stunned Raúl that Francisco’s gun was full of blanks.55 Tesson explains that:

Lorsque Francisco tire une balle sur Gloria, Buñuel enchaîne directement sur elle
dans la voiture avec Raúl. L’absence de ponctuation (fondu au noir ou enchaîné)
est motivée par l’effet de surprise. Le spectateur croit Gloria morte et la retrouve
aussitôt vivante, réalisant alors qu’elle ne pouvait pas mourir dans le récit
puisque c’est elle qui le raconte (When Francisco shoots a bullet at Gloria,
Buñuel directly carries on with her in the car with Raúl. The absence
of punctuation (black dissolves or a fade-in fade-out) is motivated by
the effect of surprise. The spectator believes that Gloria is dead, but
immediately finds her alive, understanding, then, that she could not
have died in the story since it is she who is telling it).56

This explicit incongruity reminds us of the way the film makes the spectator
wonder, thus challenging our expectations in relation to conventional modes
of storytelling and viewing, and allowing more freedom to our imagination.
For instance, during the dinner party, we see an objective shot of
Francisco and Gloria looking out of the window of Francisco’s mansion.
The frame of the window echoes the framing of this shot, which is a stylistic
device used in several Buñuel films. Because the scene is shot from the
outside, we are unable to hear their conversation. This interruption of the
sound thus provokes a suspension of the linearity of the film’s narrative,
subverting the conventions of a linear, progressive narrative structure. The

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impossibility of the film establishing communication with us signals the

impossibility of our suturing in language or in vision.57 Hence, in the film,
there are ‘black holes’ or ‘blind spots’ that the spectator is unable to fill,
thereby suggesting that the subject’s lack-in-being can never be joined.58 In
more philosophical terms, the silence in this sequence could lead to a kind
of aphasia, which is associated with the loss of language and therefore with
silence.59 The acquisition of language implies the fading of the pre-Oedipal
or Real subject, to use Lacan’s term, since one uses the language of the other
to make oneself understood by that other. Aphasia, which is equivalent to
the loss of language, could allow the subject of enunciation, who dis-
cursively represents him or her self as a subject by using the language of the
other in order to regain his or her Real subjectivity that had faded in the act
of signifying.
These ‘blind spots’ or ‘black holes’, which I associate with silence, are
graphically represented by means of abrupt fades to black between shots in
which there are no discernible images.60 Tesson suggests that ‘l’enchaînement
direct du chantier sur le baiser cache une ellipse, un trou noir sans images à l’intérieur
duquel le récit à venir de Gloria, objet d’un retour en arrière, va pouvoir pendre place’
(the direct link between the building site and the kiss hides an ellipsis, a
black hole without images, inside which Gloria’s subsequent story, about a
journey backwards, will be able to take place). 61 These ellipses in the film,
which could imply an interruption of the logico-causal and/or spatio-
temporal continuity, disorient the spectator, thereby pointing symbolically to
a heterogeneous, incommunicable experience. Subverting a teleological
framework, these ellipses also entail the fortuitous or intentional omission
of a linguistic element, as well as the disruption of our integral vision and
cohesiveness.62 They thus create a liminal space in which signification is
brought into play as what Tesson calls glissage. In his analysis of the editing
of the film, Tesson explains that:

Le montage chez Buñuel a le pouvoir singulier de faire exister des images en les
maintenant sur deux niveaux séparés. Il coordonne deux plans tout en proposant
deux orientations de sens car le montage produit un effet immédiatement visible
qui laisse de la place à un effet second, rétrospectivement présent. (Buñuel’s
editing has the remarkable capacity to maintain images on two separ-
ate levels. Because the editing can produce an immediate visible effect
that gives way to a second effect that is present retrospectively, he
coordinates two shots while offering two different interpretations of
their meaning.)63

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We might also suggest that the film’s mixture of documentary-like images,

such as the long shot of the explosion at the construction site, and more
synthetic and theatrical sets could further emphasize the insistence on that
possible fragmentation of vision. The coexistence of the surreal and the
expressionist with the documentary64 in the film emphasizes an incommen-
surable relationship at the level of cinematic form.65
Moreover, in an alarming scene in Él, Buñuel draws on Sade’s Philosophie
dans le boudoir, in which Madame de Mistival’s orifices are stitched up, but
represents the failure of Francisco to sew up Gloria’s vagina with cotton,
scissors, string, a razor blade and a rope. In metaphorical terms, we could
read Francisco’s failed attempt to suture Gloria’s orifice as reflecting the
film’s self-definition as a disjunctive machine of the visible and aural rather
than a conjunctive apparatus. The impossibility of suture here signals that,
despite the apparent narrative and thematic continuity achieved through the
use of a rather classically structured narrative framework, Él insists on
celebrating instances of narrative and visual rupture. We could argue that Él
challenges the viewer’s desire for the passive consumption of narrative of
the kind the Mexican film industry of the time would have expected. The
film’s ruptures of register lead us, moreover, to acknowlede what Kinder
calls other enunciative agencies, such as the dramatic mise-en-scène66 under the art
direction of Edward Fitzgerald.67 At this point, I will argue that the film’s mise-
en-scène could visualize the inner angst of the male protagonist and could
dismantle the juxtaposition between the rational and the irrational, the
systematic and the arbitrary, or the abnormal and the normal, thus
subverting the Cartesian logic of the ego-cogito.

The Scream
Francisco’s Gaudiesque house is the only element in the film to make any
reference to his personal history, for his father or grandfather built it after
having visited the universal exhibition that took place in Paris in 1900.68 A
dinner guest attributes the construction of the house to Francisco’s father.
Later on, Francisco tells Gloria that it was actually his grandfather who com-
missioned the art-nouveau house. This explicit contradiction about who
decided to build the house allows Buñuel to emphasize Francisco’s problem
with his paternal affiliation and his foreclosure of the symbolic order, which
leads him into a psychotic state. During the dinner party, the guests pay
attention to the house’s modernist architectural and decorative style. The
eccentric set design is composed of theatrical curtains and improbable
distorted perspectives reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, such as

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Running Child in Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). This dramatic

painting is composed of hallucinatory light and shadows and an emotive and
poetic quality of deep perspective, achieved through the manipulation of the
sizes of objects and figures to convey a distorted space. De Chirico employs
illogical juxtapositions to create disturbing emotional relationships.69 In a
similar manner, Francisco’s mansion in Él could be associated with one of
those houses we see in German Expressionist films that have curved stairs
without a beginning or end, reminding us of the topography of the uncon-
scious, dark narrow spaces filled with mirrors, or huge labyrinthine leaves.70
The guests observe the house’s stylistic features, which could be defined as
an assortment of reminiscences irreducible to the mathematical principles
usually associated with classical architecture. The disruptions of spatial form,
perspective, measure, equilibrium and dimension in the house style71
challenge our understanding of the space of the phenomenal world as a
unified system of coordinates. I suggest that the house reflects a creative
digression that could be associated with a hallucination or a dream. The
creative digression here could refer to the between world, which is linked to
the borderline dividing the real from the imaginary.72
The strange poetics expressed by the architectural space in the film
contrasts, according to the guests, with the ‘perfect normality’ of Francisco’s
personality. The guests seem to ignore, however, what lies beneath
Francisco’s superficial façade of order and tradition. The scattered and
obsessional architecture and the set décor of the film thus exceed the
constraints imposed by the humanistic tradition. The latter involves the
deification of the human mind by reason of its mathematical prowess.73
From this perspective, the house’s architectural and decorative style allows
Buñuel to unmask the contrived nature of the upper-class behaviour the
surrealists claimed had killed l’amour fou and stopped human beings becom-
ing perfectly transparent to themselves. Evans argues that: ‘The interior of
Francisco’s house, like the inner recesses of his degenerative mind, seems to
reproduce in the Gaudiesque art deco patterns the monstrous return of the
repressed. The onslaught of irrational, natural forces, returning monstrously
to challenge the inflexibilities and claustrophobic social structures of a
decaying inherited order.’74
Moreover, in some scenes in Él, the contrast between light and darkness
creates a projection of Francisco in the form of a shadow. In psychological
terms, we could interpret Francisco’s shadow as haunting and taking posses-
sion of him. If shadows make present a certain absence, they uncover the
non-self within the self. We could establish here an analogy between Buñuel

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and Hitchcock. Both filmmakers incorporated elements of German Expres-

sionist cinema into their films, such as the grotesquely distorted sets
previously described and an expressionist play of light and shadow, to
punctuate the truly significant scenes like visual exclamation marks.
Hitchcock, who worked in Berlin in the 1920s, was familiar with the most
significant films of German Expressionist cinema, such as F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Subsequently, Hitchcock
used Expressionist film techniques in the context of mainstream Hollywood
cinema. The legacy of German Expressionism has thus had a lasting
influence on what is considered the most important popular art form of the
twentieth century.75 Buñuel, like Hitchcock, also brought the avant-garde
artistic elements he acquired from the French surrealism of the 1920s and
1930s into the Mexican commercial film industry of the 1950s and 1960s;
and he also admired the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and
1930s.76 Nonetheless, it is difficult to establish whether the Expressionist
mise-en-scène in Él refers directly to the European avant-garde or to a more
hybridized version of Expressionism influenced by the commercial cinema
of Hitchcock or by the Hollywood film noir of the 1940s.
Moving beyond these interesting generic boundaries and aesthetic hybrid-
izations, I draw on Evans’s perceptive analysis of the architectural and
decorative style of Francisco’s mansion to trace an intertextual relationship
between Buñuel and Bataille. As I have argued throughout this book, these
two authors provided a heterological art of excess and violence that could
be the source of liberating subversion. The cinematic experience of space in
Buñuel’s films and the literary experience of space in Bataille’s writings
provide a counter-model ‘against architecture’. Martin Jay explains how
architecture represents visual order and legible space. In their attempts to
challenge the symbolic authority of architecture, Buñuel and Bataille reveal
how architecture’s precision, neatness and finicky exactitude cover over like
a tomb the subterranean disorder and abyss of irrationality that architecture
abhors.77 In contrast to Bentham’s architectural plan for the disciplinary
prison, the example of vigilant architecture Foucault criticized, the notion of
architecture that Buñuel and Bataille propounded neither produces good
social behaviour nor institutionalizes subjectivity. Although the exterior of
Francisco’s house looks like a fortress, Buñuel and Bataille open up a space
that is anterior to the division between madness and reason. Denis Hollier,
the renowned critic of Bataille, suggests that this space is less a function of
the subject than of the ‘a-subjective’, ‘a-semantic’ space of an ‘un-edifying’
architecture.78

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Moreover, in another alarming scene in the film, while watching an

objective shot of the sumptuous stairs we hear someone screaming off-
screen and recognize that person as Gloria. As with the cry in Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde, which Buñuel uses in the soundtrack of several of his films,
Gloria’s shriek could be described as a moment of pathos interrupting the
development of the linear narrative. Her scream, which the darkness of the
night emphasizes, thus cuts across the film space. At this point I shall argue
that if the set design and juxtapositions of light and shadow in the film
produce an intense atmosphere that has a forceful emotional effect on the
audience, we should also take into consideration the psychological effects
encapsulated in a single cry of agony that disrupts the silence of the night.
The sound of drums in another scene when Francisco frantically batters
against the handrails of the sumptuous staircase could also evoke irration-
ality, excess of emotion or the crisis of subjectivity.79
According to the musicologist Philip Friedheim in The World as Will and
Representation (1819), Schopenhauer seeks a notion of our inner experience
that breaks with all objectification by defining the phenomenal world as
mere appearance. Schopenhauer reacts against the philosophical legacy of
the Enlightenment and its faith in a surer understanding of the profound
truth of human existence that can be achieved through reason, history or
science. He thus demonstrates that the Enlightenment was fundamentally
incapable of providing solutions to all the dilemmas of human understand-
ing. Wagner, who was highly influenced by the philosophical pessimism of
Schopenhauer, distinguished music as a more authentic art form than the
visual or literary arts, which are imitations of the phenomenal world, since it
expresses the world as will.80 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, the scream became one of the most significant elements in German
Expressionist literature, painting and music and it managed to provoke
violent emotional responses from the reader or viewer. Let us now bring
into the discussion a reading of one of the most expressive pictorial rep-
resentations of the scream in the history of Expressionist painting, Edvard
Munch’s The Scream (1893). Munch’s painting was produced a decade before
the founding of the German artistic group referred to as Die Brücke.
Although Munch was from Norway rather than Germany, this painting
epitomizes German Expressionism’s critique of the Enlightenment’s ‘project
of modernity’. The latter implied the desacralization of knowledge through
the development of objective science and universal morality and law
according to their inner logic.81 How can an analysis of Munch’s painting, a
necessarily silent artistic work, allow us to grasp how the scream in Él could

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be the single most obvious sign of pain, and that sound could express
existential angst? I will argue that sound can function as a fragmentation of
the symbolic, thereby forming an alternative epistemological system and
subjectivity by becoming an index of irrationality.
Munch’s The Scream depicts in the foreground a human face with wide-
open eyes staring at us in the midst of an urban landscape. These eyes have
an expression of terror and anguish. Although we cannot see what the figure
is staring at, it is believed that the eyes of the central figure could be staring
with horror at the new realities of the modern industrialized world of the
socio-cultural period in which the painting was made. This social moderniz-
ation was a product of the ‘progressive’ process of the Enlightenment,
including the new developing cities and new technologies.82 The industrializ-
ation and mechanization of society generated poverty, ugliness and uni-
formity. The central figure has an oval, elongated open screaming mouth,
which is one of the most salient features of the painting. However, the
spectator is not sure whether this central figure is actually screaming or, on
the contrary, he is hearing an internal scream. The main figure of Munch’s
painting has placed his hands over his ears, as if he wanted to block out the
sound that seems to vibrate inside his body and mind. The spectator can
perceive that this central figure is standing on a bridge, while two other
figures standing in the background of the painting seem totally unaware of
the central figure’s experience of psychic fragmentation caused by and/or
expressed in the scream.
In formal terms, Munch uses distorted shapes, such as exaggerated curves,
and applies non-naturalistic colours to represent the sky and the body of the
central figure. The surface of the painting could be interpreted as the
expression of the scream, thereby recovering a primal mode of expression
that functions independently of codified systems of communication, such as
language. Through the distortion of the shapes and colours, the surface of
the painting reveals, then, what we are unable to hear. The external
manifestation of the scream thus becomes the direct expression of the
central figure’s inner will. The scream conveys an emotional and psycho-
logical state that is outside the prescribed boundaries of what would be
considered civilized behaviour. Moreover, Munch’s painting attempts to
achieve the difficult task of rendering sound in paint, as well as to analyse
the experience of sound per se in order to attempt to rediscover humanity’s
original condition. From this perspective, Munch’s famous Expressionist
painting becomes a direct successor of the Wagnerian scream.83 Munch
represents the irrational as a way of liberating the imagination from social

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and psychological determinism, which is associated with the Enlighten-

ment’s philosophical legacy.84
After this reading of Munch’s painting, I contend that the articulation of
Gloria’s single agonized cry and the sound of drums in Él could function to
suggest that the predatory tendencies that operate within modernity in the
name of reason provoke the anguish and psychic breakdown of the modern
subject. As in Munch’s The Scream, sound in the film could become a meta-
cinematic discourse by which cinematic practice questions its own artistic
medium. The self-reflexivity of sound thus calls attention to the artificial
nature of the cinematic apparatus, reflecting upon the elaboration of a new
language that can transgress the constraints of the dominant cultural order.
Turim argues that ‘by exploring the coding processes that have been estab-
lished in other cinematic usages, we can come to understand avant-garde
filmmaking as comparable to what Kristeva has called “a revolution in
poetic language”, as a restructuration of filmic expression.’85 Turim’s associ-
ation of avant-garde filmmaking with the subversion implied in Kristeva’s
notion of the poetic follows Kristeva’s own analysis of the discourse of
delirium in avant-garde writing.86 Drawing on Turim, we can identify
Buñuel’s investigation of the effects of sound in Él as a poetic way of
uncovering the constraints that govern the classical film apparatus and the
dominant philosophical, scientific and aesthetic traditions. These are
associated with an instrumental, utilitarian rationality that reaffirms the
nobility of sight and the hegemony of vision as the privileged model of
knowledge. Silverman suggests that there is ‘a close analogical connection
between the rationalism and humanism of the Enlightenment project, and
the notion of human vision as an agent of illumination and clarification’.87
For the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, ‘Cartesian perspectivism’,
which has been the dominant scopic regime of modernity, is a government
of seeing built upon the dualisms of inner self and outer experience, mind
and world, fixed subject and inert object. This philosophical tradition has
naturalized the visual practice of perspectivalist painting and universalized it
into a supposedly scientific method of establishing objectivity and certainty.
As a strongly gendered scopic regime, Cartesian perspectivalism, according
to Bordo, underpins the hegemony of a disembodied mastering subject who
can comprehend the affairs of the world from a position that is elevated,
distanced and, within the terms of this regime of reasoning, neutral. This
philosophical framework offers a view from above or outside the world that
is a disembodied view from the nowhere of Logos.88 To return to the film,
Buñuel might thus place sound in a position of alterity to the rational social

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order as a critique of the pretensions of Cartesian perspectivalism and sub-

jective rationality. As we shall see shortly, this rationalism is associated with
a centred and transcendent subject whose look is defined as the centre of
the field of vision. Sarkar argues that ‘the self-certainty of the Cartesian
(male) thinking subject arises from seeing his own reflection in the mirror;
he can then imagine himself with certitude as a seeing subject gazing at the
world.’89 To sum up, Buñuel’s attention to sound here represents a
reconfiguration of the perceptual and cognitive faculties that leads to alter-
native forms of knowledge and subjectivity. Gloria’s agonized cry and the
sound of drums in the film become semantic excesses, thereby reinforcing a
definition of sound as a strategic signifying process. This allows Buñuel to
focus on psychological experiences of marginalization and displacement that
would be repudiated within the Enlightenment’s paradigm of rationality,
knowledge and selfhood.

The Female Voice of the Narrator

The very scene of language becomes the place of its exclusion.90

In an interview with film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jeanne Rucar, Buñuel’s wife,
talks about her book Memories of a Woman without a Piano. In this book, Rucar
exposes the secret tyranny and chauvinism of Buñuel, whose public face of
antibourgeois anarchism concealed a domestic life of bourgeois regulation
and sadistic authoritarianism.91 Rucar’s memories seem to corroborate the
claims of the detractors of surrealist artistic practices, in general, and of
Buñuel’s cinema, in particular. According to these, Buñuel’s cinema and
surrealist art tend to represent women as objects of desire in a simple
misogynist attempt to control women. For instance, Michel Dordsay
explains that:

Hay en Buñuel una misoginia mítica que refuerza el barroquismo del erotismo
con el que adorna a la mujer. Creo que ha intentado mostrarnos en Gloria la
maldición de todas las mujeres incapaces por naturaleza de alcanzar lo sublime.
Gloria es dependiente y no entiende nunca nada. Su buena voluntad es peor que
una traición. (In Buñuel, there is a mythical misogyny that reinforces
the erotic barroquism through which he adorns women. I believe
that he has tried to show us in Gloria the curse of all women who
are, by nature, unable to reach the sublime. Gloria is dependent and
she never understands anything. Her good will is worse than
treason.)92

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In Él, however, Buñuel grants Gloria a considerable degree of agency by

having her take over a great deal of the film’s narration in which she talks
about past events retroactively, in flashback, such as the incident between
her and Francisco that involved the gun previously mentioned. Kinder
argues that the narrative framework here reminds us of the framing devices
associated with the masochistic aesthetic of what she defines as ‘the
woman’s film’.93 This film genre represents a certain degree of disintegration
of the classical cinematic organization, which is associated with patriarchy,
by re-emphasizing the superior oral immediacy associated with the female
voice of the narrator by comparison with patriarchal written culture, which
is associated with the paternal superego.94 The voice, which is connected to
our pre-Oedipal experiences, is a part of the body and therefore a part of
the subject. But the voice also exists outside the body – as an object for the
subject. Hence, the voice challenges the boundaries between object and
subject: it is neither exclusively the one nor the other. The narration of
Gloria can be seen as an eroticization of a kind of aggressivity that has
defensive rather than pleasurable purposes. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues notes
that:

le rôle de la narratrice est de produire un récit détourné et d’offrir la possibilité

que toute cette histoire ne soit que l’effet de ses propres craintes (the role of the
female narrator is to produce a circuitous story and to offer us the
possibility that this story is only the effect of her own dreads).95

Liandrat-Guigues argues that the film acquires the dimension of a spectacle

of the theatre of cruelty, which can already be perceived in Buñuel’s first
surrealist films. Stam has argued that Él offers a ‘profound critique of the
symbolic structures of patriarchal thought, a critique at once political,
economic, cultural, religious, and even anthropological’.96 How can we add a
critique at the psychological level to Stam’s acknowledgement of the film’s
profound critique of patriarchy? Drawing on Lacan’s ethics of psycho-
analysis, we can ask how the female voice of the narrator in the film can
function against the institutionalized discourses of patriarchy. Is it precisely
by giving meaning to lack and absence, which is often associated with the
female voice, thereby allowing for the empowerment of feminine discourse?
From this perspective, does Buñuel’s original cinematic investigation of the
feminine novel97 on which the film is based offer us a psychic revolution
that allows us to see how the return of repressed feelings of loss and
alienation enters the political field?98

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In Lacan’s theory of ethics and representation, the Oedipus complex is

equated with the general structure of language.99 According to Lacan, the
disappearance of the thing is not primarily associated with the separation
between the mother and child or the separation between the sexes, which is
at the core of the Freudian notion of the Oedipus complex. Instead, Lacan
associates the subject’s murder of the thing with the original separation
between the Real world of things and the symbolic world of language. In the
Real world of things, the subject lacks a signifier of identification. In the
symbolic world of language, by contrast, the subject can be in contact with
the place of the social other in order to find symbols of identification. The
subject thus becomes barred by the symbolic order, thereby denying its
nothingness and the way in which consciousness is always of another con-
cept, image or person. The subject, from a position of lack and conditioned
by fantasy, endows the other with authority and certainty. On the other
hand, what is defined as the other changes in the subject at different stages
of life. The other may be primarily associated with the phallic mother, or
with the father of the Oedipal triangle, who is referred to as the name of the
father. The other is the person to whom the subject, out of a certain sense
of loss, grants absolute infallibility. The other guarantees the structure of
reality in the subject and is identified as the ‘subject who is supposed to
know’.100 But, if individuals always fall short of that structural position, a
person can never fill the demands of the structural position of the other.
Reality could be seen as a fantasy construction that enables us to mask the
Real nature of our desire. The symbolic control of the subject is based on a
repression or disavowal of the subject’s own inability to direct and master
discourse and language. If language functions as a barrier between the
subject and the Real, the barred subject is alienated in the symbolic and
understands the initial separation through sexual difference. The integration
of the self has to be established by denying the disruptive aspects of
language and sexuality. The structure of subjectivity thus implies the
repression of the split in the subject between knowing that a real person can
never occupy the place of the other and yet living under the fantasy of the
authority of the other.101
To return to the film, in Él, we can reread the female voice of the
narrator as reminding us of those traces that are left behind in the textuality
of the unconscious. These traces float without a point of anchor, thereby
emerging or appearing not directly, but in an oblique perspective, and the
attempt to grasp them directly makes them vanish.102 Adams suggests
that:

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An apparition is both sublime and horrible; an apparition is silent,

being outside signification. I think Lacan draws a picture of an appar-
ition in speaking about the toi that comes to our lips in an attempt to
find the signifier of the remainder, that which cannot be signified.
The toi is a reference to the other of jouissance, a primal Other, a pre-
symbolic Other – a very different Other than the other of
language.103

The female voice of the narrator in the film makes us think of how the
subject of enunciation, who is conventionally associated with the male rather
than the female, does not always have control over language. The male
subject, then, could become anxious on confronting the female voice, since
he could be reminded of the loss of language. This fear of the loss of
language is related to the subject’s fear of losing control of his discourse,
which is equivalent to the loss of one’s own self (manque-à-être). From this
perspective, the female voice does not function to screen the absent referent
of the Real. Instead, the female voice resignifies the function of language to
make the absence of the thing present. In symbolic terms, Gloria’s voice
could be read as showing how language can be defined as a discourse
without a controlling subject who is identifiable with the Cartesian self-
enclosure of the cogito. Instead, the female voice here allows for the
possibility of ‘presenting the subject in the Real’.104 Gloria, ‘qui transforme
l’homme en unique objet de son récit’ (who transforms the man into the only
object of her story),105 has an active role in directing the narrative in Él,
revealing the masculine subject’s lack of activity and phallic control and
implying a radically heterogeneous return of repressed feelings.
To sum up, I have paid attention to the problem of the subject’s relation
to language – its alienation–separation, its suturing in language – to uncover
the relation of language to identity and subjectivity. Let us now focus on the
imaginary and the problem of the relation of knowledge (which could be
identified as paranoid) to vision in the constitution of subjectivity.106 As
Lacan has argued, the formation of the subject’s ego is conditioned by an
alienation of the subject from itself that constitutes the phenomenology of
consciousness. In the final section of this book I explore how patriarchal
structures of thought in Western cultures have privileged regimes of visibil-
ity in which a self-assured male gaze is in control of vision and knowledge.
In contrast to this view, drawing on Lacan’s much discussed concept of the
gaze, and on subsequent psychoanalytic readings of this concept within film
theory, how can we explore the failure of the gaze to secure this structure of

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identity107 by reconsidering how the gaze works against the effects of

sublimation in the film? Finally, how does Buñuel make visible the mech-
anisms of projection in Él?

The Gaze
I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.108

During the 1970s, the paradigmatic theoretical framework in the field of

film studies was apparatus film theory, which drew primarily on Althusser’s
definition of the apparatus as an ideological institution, and on Lacanian
psychoanalysis, particularly on the ‘mirror stage’. Apparatus film theory
rethought Lacan’s category of the imaginary as part of the process of the
historical construction of the subject109 and explored the relationship bet-
ween primary identification, considered to be the necessary preliminary to
other identificatory relations, and the filmic apparatus. According to Copjec,
apparatus film theory conceptualized the gaze as analogous to that
geometrical point that is conceived in the perspectival laws that have con-
stituted the Western norm of vision since the Renaissance. From the
Renaissance onwards, the rules and ideology of monocular perspective
defined the visual field to a significant degree.110 From this locus of
epistemological mastery, the spectacle becomes fully visible and intelligible,
thereby reinforcing the notion of transcendental vision. Apparatus theorists
were aware of the specular mediations, such as suture, the viewer needs to
sustain to identify with the camera. However, Copjec criticizes the
proposition of apparatus film theory that there is always a smooth and
successful meshing of the spectator with the apparatus, which allows the
gaze to be associated with a point at which the subject comes into being by
identifying with the signified of the image. From this perspective, the
cinematic apparatus can be defined as an instrument that perpetuates the
idealist illusion of a transcendental spectator111 who maintains a certain
distance between his or her position and the spectacle by looking from a
vantage point at an illusionist three-dimensional space.
With particular reference to feminist film theories, such as that of Mulvey,
these theorists drew on apparatus film theory in order to construct theories
of representation and cinematic spectatorship. Feminist film theories
explored at length how, within the structural features of the classic narrative
cinema such as the point of view, the shot/reverse shot or the depth
conveyed by cinematic space, the notion of a transcendent vision was more
available to some spectators than others. For Mulvey, classic narrative

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cinema organized vision in relation to both spectacle and truth, so as to

perpetuate a conventional account of the male subject. The latter was able to
keep a safe voyeuristic and fetishistic distance from the image, as if the field
of vision were clear rather than ambiguous and treacherous.112 Voyeurism
and fetishism are then treated as the sexual equivalent of the masculine
control of vision.113 From this perspective, the feminine subject114 carries
the burden of specularity, so that the voyeuristic look of her male counter-
part can be aligned with the camera in order to have control over the visual
field and to regain his lost humanist heritage.115 Feminists have contended
that the classic cinematic text fetishized the spectacle of the female subject
and vision itself to reassert the integrity of perception in relation to gender
and sexual difference. From this perspective, the masterful male gaze is
associated with the vertical axis, thereby repressing what is outside this
privileged plane.
However, some critics, such as Samuels, have noted that Mulvey’s view
assigned too much masterful agency to the position of the male, thereby
presenting a narrow view of masculinity as structured primarily around
voyeurism and fetishism. If male subjectivity is associated with visual
mastery, Mulvey does not discuss how the subject is outside the gaze in
Lacan. As I shall discuss shortly, the gaze, which is the threshold of the
visible world, constitutes the subject whose own visibility is determined by
the gaze. In addition, Samuels has noted that Mulvey does not discuss the
fact that, in Lacan, the gaze is defined as a kind of failure to control the
visual field, which proves masculine castration. If the system of symbolic
representation bars the subject of vision, the latter is not the master of his
gaze and could consequently feel threatened. Hence, for Lacan, the gaze
itself is an example of a ‘lack’ that undermines the mastery of the visual
field. Lacan argues that:

In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the

way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something
slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some
degree eluded in it – that is what we call the gaze.116

As I shall explore shortly, in Él there are some meta-cinematic sequences

that reformulate a position of visual and representational non-mastery by
destabilizing the cinematic specularity and perception that apparatus film
theory propounds with regard to the classic cinematic text. Él could thus be
seen as unhinging the very logic by which vision is privileged in Western

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culture as the site of knowledge. Let us now digress in order to understand

the Lacanian concept of the gaze as decentring the subject. This decon-
struction and subversion of the position of the spectator as controller of the
field of vision allows us to stress the permeability of the boundary between
the spectator and the spectacle.
According to Silverman, in Being and Nothingness Sartre tells the story of a
voyeur who peers through the keyhole of a door, which is reminiscent of the
hotel scene in Él. The voyeur looks from an unchallenged centre of the
visual field.117 From this absolute centre of a lived horizon, the field of
vision unfolds before him. The voyeur is so absorbed in the act of looking
that his very ‘being’ escapes him. However, this ‘nothingness’ is associated
with a certain transcendence of spectacle. Suddenly, the voyeur hears the
sound of approaching footsteps. The voyeur is caught by another look,
which thwarts his desire to see. The self-enclosure of the watcher is
fractured when he becomes aware of the intrusion of another centre. The
watcher realizes that he can never see himself from the point of view of the
one who sees him. The watcher is the object of another look, as well as
being in the field of the other. Sight is then structured for the watcher,
which implies that he does not control the syntax of seeing or is less at the
centre of visual experience than within an engulfing void. The intruder, who
is associated with the vanishing point where the viewer is not, challenges his
previous plenitude, thereby provoking a castrating and threatening effect on
the subject from without.
The subject now feels powerless because facticity,118 which is linked to
one’s relationship to the other, limits his freedom. For Sartre, the subject’s
being for another implies that the other pushes against and circumscribes his
freedom. The other, who could help the subject establish his freedom, also
destroys it. Thus being-for-itself and being-for-another implies that they
shatter each other, thereby haunting the very existence of the subject. As
Bryson explains, ‘the self-possession of the viewing subject has built into it,
therefore, the principle of its own abolition: annihilation of the subject as
centre is a condition of the very moment of the look.’119 Sartre thus criti-
cizes the Cartesian philosophical tradition of the self-enclosure of the
unseen seer or cogito. This tradition conceives the subject as a universal
centre, surrounded by a stable plenitude in the mode of unidirectional
contemplation.120 Bryson has criticized the way the Sartrean je ultimately re-
emerges from its encounter with annihilation. For Bryson, Sartre still deals
with the question of the ontology of the subject and object from within the
perspective of the subject. The subject needs to accept its decentred

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condition of existence in a field of radical emptiness. In this context, if the

threatened remains of the cogito were thrown out, how could we welcome
instead of resist this decentring, which would imply that the gaze is not
regarded as terrorizing?
The Lacanian formulation of the gaze seems to follow on from that of
Sartre. Like Sartre, Lacan conceives of the viewing subject as not standing at
the centre of a perceptual horizon, thereby rejecting the notion of a unitary,
coherent subject. Against the reification of the cogito, Lacan contends that
the subject cannot control or master the chains and series of signifiers that
pass across the visual field. Lacan’s account is therefore as pessimistic as
Sartre’s, for it implies that the desire within the scopic field is necessarily
grounded in castration.121 Lacan also gives an account of vision that implies
a paranoid dimension to the gaze. Unlike Sartre, he associates the gaze with
the metaphor of the camera. The camera is characterized as an apparatus
that has the function of picturing us. Moreover, Lacan reconceptualizes the
Sartrean field of vision by desubjectivizing the gaze. For him, the presence
of another person seeing the subject looking is irrelevant. Even if there is no
one else present, one is always subject to the gaze. As the subject looks, he
is also a picture, because he can also be seen. The discrepancy between
being seen by someone and being seen by no one is, then, irrelevant. The
gaze does concern being seen, but the function of the look is not carried by
any specific pair of eyes.122 The gaze is the subject of individual fantasy. For
Lacan, the gaze the subject encounters is not a seen gaze, but a gaze
imagined by the subject in the field of the other and is inscribed into the
phenomenology of consciousness. Lacan thinks of the gaze less as an
imaginary rival than as a symbolic third term, the other. The gaze, in its
capacity as one’s fantasy of the gaze of the other, polices the border of in-
or-out-of-placeness. The subject, who is trapped by the gaze, is reduced
from transcendence to visibility.
Lacan superimposes on the usual cone of vision, which emanates from the
subject, another cone that emanates from the object. The subject is thus
located in a double position. Lacan suggests that ‘on the right-hand line is
situated, then, the apex of the first triangle, the point of the geometral
subject, and it is on that line that I, too, turn myself into a picture under the
gaze, which is inscribed at the apex of the second triangle.’123 In the
traditional Renaissance model of perspective, the phenomenal world or the
object beheld by the subject is apprehended from its geometrical point of
view. In the Lacanian paradigm, the object looks at the subject who is
photographed by the light of the object and therefore pictured by its gaze.

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For Lacan, the two cones are superimposed, so that the object is at the point
of the light, which is the gaze, and the subject is also at the point of the
picture. Lacan goes on to explain that ‘It is through the gaze that I enter
light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about
that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through
which, in a fragmented form, I am photo-graphed.’124 Furthermore, according
to Silverman, the image is in line with the screen, which ‘gives shape and
significance to how the subject is seen by others as such, how the subject is
defined and interacts with the agency to which he/she attributes his/her
visibility, and how he/she perceives the world’.125 The screen tames the gaze
because, if the subject saw without the screen, he would be blinded by the
gaze or touched by the Real. Lacan thus demonstrates that the gaze is less
embodied in the subject than it is in the external world, thereby pre-existing
and enveloping the subject from all sides. Hence, to be looked at by another
is associated with the failure of the affirmation of certainty, as the subject is
only rendered visible by way of the gaze. The subject is, therefore, blended
with space, thereby occupying a position in the picture that could be defined
as a mere stain.126 This implies an experience of being dispersed; in other
words, we are subject to a picture in which the point of view of an inappre-
hensible gaze is fragmented. Moreover, if the gaze occupies an unlocatable
point, it becomes a form of what Žižek defines as the object (a) without a
specular image, thereby marking the absence of a signified. The subject
cannot, then, be located at the point of the gaze, for the latter marks a point
of annihilation. The subject is thus cut off from the gaze of the other, which
has become a blind eye. The gaze of the blind other is lethal, which means
that the subject operates under the sign of death.127
After this digression into the Sartrean and Lacanian theorization of the
gaze, let us explore how some of the sequences in Él reconceptualize the
filmic apparatus, and how this allows us to rethink the theoretical dis-
courses on cinematic specularity.128 I will argue that the film dislocates the
self-assured (male) gaze, thereby subverting the hegemonic mode of
representation and vision that is fundamental to the masculine sense of the
self.
For instance, at the beginning of the film, when Francisco starts chasing
Gloria, after the ‘Mandatum’ celebration sequence described earlier, we see
an apparently objective shot of Gloria and Raúl talking inside a restaurant,
but we are unable to hear their conversation. The interruption of sound in
this sequence marks once more a disjunction between diegetic sound and
image in the film.129 Instead of hearing the conversation between Gloria and

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Raúl, we hear the street noises from outside the restaurant.130 When the
camera pulls back, capturing the gaze of the viewer, by forcing him or her to
look again at the scene of the restaurant, the spectator realizes that the
camera is placed outside the restaurant window looking in. The viewer also
realizes that Francisco shares the filmic space with the camera because he is
seen on the right hand side of the frame. Francisco is spying on or looking
through the restaurant window at the two other characters inside the
restaurant.131 This subjective shot is, then, only retrospectively readable. The
‘retroactive’ shot of Francisco being shown as a voyeur uncovers and
problematizes the implicit voyeurism that is at stake in the cinematic
medium.132 Hence, the film apprehends the ‘otherness’ of both the gaze and
the constituted image by foregrounding, rather than disavowing, the
signifiers through which they sometimes mark their presence within the field
of vision.
Near the end of the film, Francisco is haunted by a paranoid delirium,
caused by his foreclosure of the paternal signifier and, as we shall see
shortly, a regression to the pre-Oedipal stage, the space of the maternal.
Gloria has abandoned Francisco forever. She thus represents his failed
attempt to establish an object relationship in which he has always inter-
preted the position of a third person as threatening and persecutory.
Francisco is running desperately through the streets searching for Gloria. He
stops in front of a window to see if she is inside. This action reminds us of
that disclosed ‘voyeuristic’ scene previously described. Buñuel mobilizes the
conventional structures of film vision by challenging the logic of continuity
editing and the principle of eye-line matching. Our gaze does not merge
with Francisco’s act of looking from his point of view through the window
at the scene inside. Instead, by means of a sudden, illogical or mismatched
transition, Buñuel forces the spectator to look from inside at Francisco in
the act of looking through the window from outside. The film’s challenge to
the principle of suture allows him overtly to specularize and externalize our
look and that of the other. In the context of avant-garde and experimental
cinema, Turim suggests that ‘to be looked at from the other side of the
glass, turns the act of looking into a viewing through.’133 The film now
positions Francisco’s eye more as the object than as the agent of vision.
From this perspective, the eye is defined less as ‘seeing’ than as ‘seen’. The
spectator, then, looks at Francisco from the point of view of Francisco’s
own projections. Moreover, to be looked at from the other side implies that
we are also constituted as objects rather than as subjects of the gaze. This
example of the mise-en-abîme of interspecularity makes the spectator enjoy

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being startled by this vertiginous glimpse. Samuels has suggested that ‘the
menace of losing control over vision may cause subjects to seek out more
oppressive and obvious forms of mastery.’134 The impossibility of fixing the
boundaries between one’s single point of view and that of the other
foreshortens the required distance for the articulation of voyeurism. This
spectatorial disabling in Él implies an ethical inversion of the intentional
cogito, which prioritizes thought over perception and seeing over being
seen.135
The final sequence we will discuss is when Francisco, who is still searching
for Gloria all over Mexico City, enters the same church shown at the
beginning of the film. Francisco is convinced he has seen Gloria and Raúl
entering this sacred space, which could be seen as a ‘theatre of displace-
ment’, to use Kinder’s term, of paranoid anxieties and homosexual and
fetishist desires.136 Moreover, although this anonymous couple look like
Gloria and Raúl, we are not sure if it is actually they who enter the church.
The spectator thus fails to discern whether the two characters entering the
church actually are Gloria and Raúl. This implies that signification in Él is
subject to doubt and to the anxiety of retroactive interpretation. Buñuel
challenges the conventional association of the spectatorial position with a
locus of epistemological confidence and mastery,137 thereby ‘foregrounding
the potential splitting of the totality associated with the spectator’s sub-
sumption’.138 Francisco begins projecting his psychic fears, which entail a
psychotic disassociated anxiety, onto the external world. As Samuels has
noted with reference to Hitchcock, to place the subject in a psychotic
structure allows the spectator to see his or her own ‘horror of the Real
unconscious desires’,139 thereby making him or her utterly transparent and
vulnerable to the gaze from the outside. Suddenly, when an old man begins
coughing near Francisco, we notice that Francisco begins transforming his
regressions into external images, thereby becoming a subject of the uncon-
scious that finds itself lacking in relation to the dominant symbolic order.140
Freddy Buache has described the succession of delusions that Francisco
suffers in the church. He explains that:

The couple in the first row is not of course Raúl and Gloria but two
people who look like them. A meditating woman guffaws, and then
abruptly resumes her serious expression. Father Velasco conducting
the service suddenly makes a grimace in between two perfectly
normal movements. The choirboys cock snooks at him, and then
imperturbably follow the service.141

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In this sequence, Buñuel uses editing techniques characteristic of the Soviet

cinema in the 1920s to analyse the theoretical and dramatic qualities of pur-
posive juxtaposition. As Tesson suggests, Buñuel ‘oppose deux régimes d’images.
La perception d’une réalité extérieure conforme à l’univers offert par la fiction (les gens en
train de prier), est perturbée par la perception mentale du personnage (opposes two
regimes of images. The perception of an external reality shaped by the
universe offered by the fiction (people praying), is disturbed by the mental
perception of the character.)’142 The theory of montage explored in the
Soviet cinema of the 1920s involved an attempt to shatter the surface of the
picture, as if the moving picture were stripped back to its raw celluloid.143
Moreover, Buñuel overlaps the sound of one shot of the congregation
hysterically laughing at Francisco with another of the congregation praying,
thus exploring the lack of synchronization of sound and image. The fact that
the shots alternate while the soundtrack remains the same means that these
unanchored or disembodied sounds, which the dissociation between image
and sound causes, mark the disintegration of the unity of the cinematic sign.
In Él, Buñuel reflects on the way that regressions are transformed or pro-
jected onto images by fusing the camera itself with the delirium of per-
secution. Fuentes suggests that ‘Buñuel nos ofrece unas secuencias extraordinarias
de la visión paranoica de la realidad, que, en su vertiente de meta-cine, también podemos
interpretar como subversión total del placer de la mirada masculina potenciada por el cine
de Hollywood.’ (Buñuel offers us some extraordinary sequences of the
paranoid vision of reality. As meta-cinematic sequences, we can also inter-
pret them as a total subversion of the pleasure of the masculine gaze
promoted by Hollywood’s cinema.)144 Buñuel thus foregrounds, in cinematic
terms, the epistemology that is associated with paranoid speculation and the
systematicity of delusions, which is caused by the subject’s foreclosure of
the paternal signifier. Barton contends that paranoia is comparable to the
cinematic in that it sends ‘out to the external world an image of something
that exists in us in an unconscious way’.145 Buñuel thus externalizes the
latent paranoia at the core of the cinematic. As we have seen throughout this
book, Lacan describes the formation of the subject’s ego as being
aggressively constituted from an image at a distance, an image of another. In
addition, Lacan associates subjective identification with a paranoid structure
of human knowledge. I propose that Él releases an aggressive identification
and alienation of the subject from itself that has been considered as an act
of knowledge in psychoanalysis.146 The film thus destabilizes the symbolic
positions that constitute the self-cohesion of the subject in the imaginary.
This deconstruction of the mechanisms of projection in Él points to the

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instability and dissolution of the spectator’s own process of identification

with the language of cinema.
To end this chapter, I would just suggest that a rereading of Buñuel’s Él
from a queer subject position implies thinking of this film as not giving us
the illusion of mastery. This illusion would imply a negation of the pre-
Oedipal state of autoerotic existence. Buñuel’s film does indeed subvert an
order of visual perception that is associated with the foundational logic on
which hegemonic knowledge depends. This logic makes visible a non-
contradictory symbolic regime of linguistically and visually articulated ident-
ities and the establishment of the security of hierarchized fixed subject
positions.147 Buñuel’s film destabilizes the symbolic coherence of visual law
and rearticulates punctual details that can be seen as ruptures, or pointing to
the fissures between the Real and the representational. These ruptures, these
fissures can be read as a kind of counter-logic in the visual field that
acknowledges the dislocating effects of visual texts. Finally, I would like to
suggest that a rereading of Buñuel’s Él from a queer subject position allows
us to affirm our non-antagonistic attitude towards difference and allows us
to think of the utopian reconstitution of a plenitude of being,148 even if we
know that this can only be provisional and temporary.

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______________________

The rearticulation of the Real, fragmentation, abjection, masochism, anality,

the informe, horizontality, repetition, paranoia, or the gaze in these five
Buñuel films means that in this book I have been concerned with asking
whether these theoretical perspectives function independently or inter-
connectedly, implicitly or explicitly in the construction or deconstruction of
the films discussed here. In each of the five chapters I have discussed a
chosen film from the perspective of particular theoretical concepts of a
psychoanalytical bent. In my attempt to expose these films to highly
complex theoretical arguments, I have devoted almost as much space to
theoretical debate as to film analysis without privileging one over the other.
While the films are not used as an illustration or instantiation of theoretical
concepts, they do, however, allow the reader to make productive con-
nections between theory and film. To illustrate how Buñuel’s films can be
read through contemporary perspectives, within each chapter I have also
included discussions of images and installations by a wide range of
twentieth-century artists. The driving force of this book is my attempt to
open up psychic strategies that are not addressed towards closure but rather
towards an exploration, a bringing together of diverse ideas, thereby risking
contamination through a queer interpretation. The latter is manifested less
through a fixed definition than through the elaboration of various critiques
of standard psychoanalytical concepts performed across the analyses of
Buñuel’s films. If Buñuel’s ultimate perversion is that of perverting
cinematic language, as discussed in Chapter 1, a queer reinterpretation of his
cinema problematizes and raises more contradictions than already existed in
his films.
I have made no attempt to rediscover the ‘hidden truth’ in Buñuel’s
unconscious expressed directly in his films. Rather, I have argued that the

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films remain at a tensional and ambivalent point between sexual and psychic
sublimations and desublimations. Buñuel’s films, moreover, articulate
anxieties and pleasures that underpin the possibility of a psychic subjectivity
prior to or beyond patriarchal and heterosexist systems of thought, even if
this can only be provisional and temporary before being reincorporated by
the social and symbolic order. These conflictive inscriptions in the films are
thus seductive for queer subject viewers. If pleasure is another form of
cultural domination that is passively imbibed and renders us all cultural
victims, in this book I argue that, within a patriarchal and heterosexist space
such as Buñuel’s films, the queer spectator can reactivate uncanny memories
of the pre-Oedipal stage of subjectivity, which is associated with the
maternal body. Those who are alienated from dominant positions of sub-
jectivity, which are based on lack and castration, are likely to welcome these
uncanny memories. In the same way as the textual system of the films
explicitly articulates childhood memories as a way of travelling back to a
traumatic past, as in the cases of Archibaldo in Chapter 4 and Francisco in
Chapter 5, the films also function as a kind of screen onto which our
psychic disturbances, perversions and subversive sexual fantasies are pro-
jected. These resistant experiences of reading or queer intrusions in the films
are a challenge to the social and symbolic order because they aim to
destabilize the patriarchal and heteronormative framework.
This previously unspoken scenario is where a radical and constestatory
queer rereading of Buñuel’s cinema ends. The queer subject is conceived of
as being a cultural and material body on which his sexual and subjective
difference and marginality are written. This produces the need to construe
an emblem of queer difference that situates that sexual and subjective differ-
ence and marginality in the phenomenological, embodied process of reading,
or encountering the object, dominant cultural texts that establish or stage
the viewer as subject.
It is important to remember that, to articulate this queer rereading of
Buñuel’s Spanish-language films, I have needed to allow for several
omissions. I am not trying to be reductionist by concentrating on only five
of Buñuel’s films, or to elide contextual factors by focusing on the theoreti-
cal discourses about gender, sexuality and representation. I am in fact calling
for other books that may detect my own ‘blind spots’. In my queer rereading
of these films I have, however, attempted to detect pleasures, fantasies and
anxieties that are part of a coded surrealist aesthetic across modern and
postmodern visual arts. Most importantly, I have been interested in the
ambivalent coexistence of homophobic anxieties and queer pleasures, as well

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as of transgression and prohibition in the films and visual images. Thus, the
queer spectator can also use some of the techniques that function to
perpetuate patriarchal and heterosexual power structures to remain sub-
versive and to produce ruptures in the social and symbolic order by celebrat-
ing the kinds of exclusions and repressions performed in the dominant
patriarchal and heterosexist paradigm. Finally, in this book I have put
emphasis on the queer spectator’s awareness and understanding of his sexual
and subjective difference and marginality as constructed in his own his-
torical period. Such a displacement from the filmmaker to the spectator
challenges conventional criticism of the cinema of Buñuel by adding other
radical meanings to the films and supplanting an antecedent one. Such an
‘allegorist’ rereading of the films invites those who defend more bio-
graphical orientated perspectives for the critical analysis of Buñuel’s films to
rethink his films in the light of their theoretical significance and complexity.

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APPENDIX: SYNOPSES OF THE FILMS
____________________________________________________________

1. Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel) Ultramar Films, 1950

A group of Mexican street children live in a slum in Mexico City. Jaibo
becomes the leader of this group and organizes petty crimes to gain some
money. The children plot to steal a purse from Don Carmelo, a blind
musician who hankers nostalgically for the years of General Porfirio Díaz’s
government, and in the process Jaibo brutally attacks Don Carmelo. Jaibo
then searches for Julián, against whom he wishes to seek revenge because he
thinks he was the ‘squealer’ responsible for him having been sent to a
reformatory. With the aid of Pedro, Jaibo’s protégé, Jaibo hunts Julián down
and beats him to death. When the other members of the gang discover that
Julián has been brutally killed the relationship between Jaibo and Pedro
becomes conflictive. Pedro lives with his beautiful widowed mother (Marta),
who detests him for not contributing to the household expenses; we also
learn that his birth had resulted from a rape suffered by Marta. Pedro
unsuccessfully seeks affection and nourishment from his mother; his
anxieties in relation to her and his feelings of guilt about Julián’s murder are
revealed in a dream sequence.
In this dream Pedro asks her why she refused to give him food and, to the
accompaniment of murdered Julián laughing silently under his bed and
chicken feathers flying about, she hands him a piece of raw meat, which
Jaibo, who is hiding under the bed, snatches. After the dream, Jaibo makes
Pedro’s life miserable. He has an affair with Marta and steals a knife from
the workshop where Pedro is employed. Pedro is then accused of the theft,
dismissed from his job and sent to a reformatory. While there, Pedro takes
out his frustrations by throwing an egg onto the camera lens and beating
two hens to death. Jaibo and Pedro argue over some money and Pedro
discloses publicly that Jaibo killed Julián. Planning to kill Jaibo, Pedro then

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runs away and hides in Don Carmelo’s house where he and Ojitos witness
Don Carmelo’s attempt to seduce Meche. Pedro discovers Jaibo sleeping in
Cacarizo’s stable, but when Jaibo wakes up he kills Pedro. Meanwhile, Don
Carmelo informs the police of where these marginalized children have
sought refuge and when they arrive they shoot Jaibo. Meche and her grand-
father find Pedro’s dead body in the stable and dump the corpse in a pile of
rubbish. At the same time, Pedro’s mother, who has rediscovered her
maternal love for him, is looking unsuccessfully for him.

2. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel) Gustavo Alatriste and Uninci Films 59, 1961
Viridiana, a beautiful novice, visits her uncle don Jaime before pronounc-
ing her religious vows. Since his wife’s death on the night of their
wedding, don Jaime has lived alone with his servants and when Viridiana
arrives at the house he is astonished by her remarkable resemblance to his
late wife, who was Viridiana’s aunt. Don Jaime pleads with Viridiana to
give up her religious vocation and become his sexual partner. One night he
persuades her to put on his late wife’s wedding dress, upon which he drugs
her and attempts to make love to her in a necrophilic manner. However,
we are left in some doubt about whether or not he has actually violated
her.
The following day, disgusted, Viridiana decides to leave the house, but
because don Jaime commits suicide she is obliged to stay and to renounce
her monastic life. Later she dedicates herself to charitable work by inviting
a group of beggars into the house. Jorge, Don Jaime’s illegitimate son and
heir who wishes to turn the estate into a productive farm, begins to share
the house with Viridiana. His pragmatic spirit contrasts with Viridiana’s
sterilized sense of the world. One night, when the house is vacant, the
beggars take advantage of the situation and decide to organize a kind of
bacchanalian banquet and orgy. One of the beggars pretends to take a
picture of the others as they pose in a manner reminiscent of Leonardo da
Vinci’s The Last Supper. The debacle ends with an assault on Viridiana,
whose rape is only prevented by Jorge’s intervention. Once the beggars are
expelled from the house, the bourgeois order is re-established. This
coincides with Viridiana abandoning her religious inclinations. and deciding
to seek the sexual company of her cousin Jorge. The latter accepts
Viridiana’s company as well as that of the maid. The final sequence of the
film shows the three characters playing cards in Jorge’s bedroom, clearly
suggesting that the three have agreed to opt for a ménage à trois.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

3. El ángel exterminador (Luis Buñuel) Gustavo Alatriste, 1962

After attending the opera, a group of prosperous and well-dressed socialites
are invited for dinner at the Nobilé family mansion. Although most of the
servants unexpectedly escape from the house, the elegant dinner party is a
success. The guests perform their bourgeois social functions, such as
pretending to enjoy banal conversation. After dinner, they stroll into the
drawing room, where everyone seems to enjoy the activities associated with
this kind of party, such as dancing, talking over a drink and listening to a
piano recital.
Subsequently, in a series of subtle developments, it becomes apparent that
no one can leave the mansion. As the guests have to behave politely, there is
an unspoken acceptance of the situation. The guests then try to get more
comfortable by removing the clothes that identify them as bourgeois
subjects and lying horizontally on the floor of the beautiful and luxurious
mansion. After an unspecified period of time, the material and psychological
conditions of these characters begin to deteriorate. The guests destroy the
walls of the house in search of water to alleviate their thirst. Although the
camera does not actually show this action, it is suggested that the guests are
forced to excrete in beautiful Chinese urns kept in an elegant armoire
decorated with Renaissance frescos of saints. They slaughter some sheep
that wander into the room and, to satiate their animal urges, cook them on a
fire made from the expensive furniture that adorns the mansion. The pros-
perous and respectable dinner guests have turned into savage, violent and
dirty animals. In the same way, the beautiful mansion has turned into a kind
of primitive cave. The ending of the film is highly ambiguous. The
characters become trapped once more, this time in a church they are unable
to leave and, in this ‘sacred’ space, more slaughtered sheep will be needed
for the guests to eat.

4. Ensayo de un crimen (Luis Buñuel) Alianza Cinematográfica, 1955

Archibaldo de la Cruz recalls a traumatic event that took place during his
childhood. Hoping to keep the spoilt child entertained, little Archi’s mother
gives him a music box and asks his governess to tell the boy a magical story.
A king had once used the music box to wish for the death of his enemies
and, fascinated by the potential power of this instrument, little Archi wishes
for the death of his governess. Then, as she moves towards the window to
observe an uprising in the street outside, a stray bullet pierces her neck. As
she falls to the ground little Archi is aroused by her sensuous legs and the
blood streaming down her neck. Years later, after the death of Archibaldo’s

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 APPENDIX: SYNOPSES OF THE FILMS

wife (the details of which are revealed later) and he is in a hospital, he tells
Sister Trinidad about these childhood memories. She runs down the hospital
corridors before Archibaldo can kill her, but she falls down an elevator
shaft. Archibaldo claims to be the murderer of Sister Trinidad to local
authorities before recalling, when speaking to a judge, the day he redis-
covered his music box.
Archibaldo, who is haunted by the death of his governess, attempts to
murder four other women. At a gambling club, Patricia seduces him and
takes him to her home, but just as he is about to slit her throat, her lover
arrives and frustrates his plan. The next morning, Patricia is found with her
throat cut in just the way Archibaldo had imagined doing, but having
apparently committed suicide. Next, at a local bar Archibaldo notices
Lavinia’s face framed by a flaming drink. Seduced by her beauty, he acquires
a mannequin of her and, before his next encounter with Lavinia, takes it to
his Mexican mansion. When they next meet, Lavinia forces him to choose
between her and the mannequin, but an unexpected visit by a group of
American tourists interrupts his attempt to strangle her. Archibaldo tries to
gratify his murderous impulses by throwing the dismembered mannequin
into his kiln. Although Archibaldo is going to marry Carlota, when a
mysterious note informs him that she is having a love affair with Alejandro,
a married man, he imagines killing her too. After the wedding ceremony,
however, a jealous Alejandro shoots Carlota, thereby thwarting Archibaldo’s
murderous intent. The local authorities admit that Archibaldo cannot be
held responsible for the women’s deaths on the grounds that he merely
wished for them. Apparently freed from his childhood memories, Archibaldo
re-encounters Lavinia in a park. The last sequence suggests an apparently
happy ending by showing Archibaldo and Lavinia walking arm-in-arm into
the distance.

5. Él (Luis Buñuel) Ultramar Films, 1952

Francisco, a rich decadent landowner, fanatical Catholic and bachelor in his
mid-forties suddenly becomes infatuated with the image of Gloria during a
Good Thursday celebration of the ‘Mandatum’ in a church in Mexico City.
While Father Velasco is washing and kissing the church altar boys’ feet,
Francisco follows the trail of feet with his eyes until he finally focuses on
those of Gloria. He soon discovers that Gloria is engaged to one of his old
friends, the engineer Raúl, so invites Raúl, along with his fiancée and his
mother’s fiancée, to a dinner party in his house, which is decorated à la
Gaudí, with a view to seducing Gloria. During the after-dinner piano recital

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

Francisco and Gloria promenade in the labyrinthine garden of Francisco’s

house and Gloria finally surrenders to his seduction by accepting his kiss.
After the sequence of the kiss, the camera cuts abruptly to a shot of an
explosion at a construction site where Raúl supervises the engineering
works. Driving through Mexico City, Raúl encounters a disoriented Gloria
walking through the streets as if she were fleeing from someone. The film
then takes on Gloria’s point of view, narrated in flashback. At this point, the
spectator also realizes that Francisco has succeeded in marrying Gloria.
While Raúl drives her back to her house, she tells him about her unhappy
marriage with Francisco. The flashback takes us back to the day of their
honeymoon in Guanajuato, when Francisco started to behave in an unstable,
sadistic manner and to show signs of morbid paranoid jealousy. Although
Francisco was physically violent towards Gloria on several occasions,
neither her mother nor Father Velasco was prepared to show her any
compassion, for everyone seems to be deceived by Francisco’s apparent
Christian virtue. As the narrative of the film develops, Francisco’s mental
state deteriorates further. Eventually, Raúl and Gloria arrive at the house, at
which point the film’s narration changes from Gloria’s point of view to that
of an omniscient narrator and cuts back to the present. Francisco does not
trust anyone except his valet Pablo, with whom he maintains a latent
homosexual relationship. Gloria eventually decides to abandon Francisco
after he attempts to stitch up her vagina. In great despair, Francisco starts
suffering from delusions of persecution in a church, where he perceives the
congregation laughing hysterically at him. He ends up attempting to strangle
Father Velasco, as if the latter were responsible for Francisco’s degenerative
mental disease. Years later, Gloria is now engaged or married to Raúl. The
couple and a child go to a monastery in Colombia, where Francisco has
finally retreated in order to find spiritual peace. Francisco’s final zigzagging
down the monastery walkways suggests that his paranoid behaviour may
never be cured.

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NOTES
___________

Preface
1. See Marvin D’Lugo, ‘Buñuel! The Look of the Century’, in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie, ed. by Marsha Kinder (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999) pp. 101–10.
2. Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy
(London: Routledge, 1993) p. 224.

Introduction
1. Roland Barthes, cited by David Vilaseca, Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay
Hispanic Autobiography (New York: Peter Lang, 2003) p. 29.
2. I am indebted to Robert Samuels’s psychoanalytic study of Hitchcock’s films,
Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms and Queer Theory (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1998). In the same way as Samuel’s book, this book
expands theoretical frameworks in the Anglo-American academia to Buñuel by
applying queer and feminist theory and psychoanalysis.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978) p. 101.
4. I borrow this term from Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde,
Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
5. As we shall see throughout the book, the notion of dissidence will be elaborated less as a
fixed definition than through my performative critiques of standard psychoanalytical
concepts and theories.
6. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986) p. 5.
7. The abject is socially and culturally constructed and it changes contingently.
8. I am indebted to Robert Samuels’s psychoanalytic study of Hitchcock’s films. See
Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality.
9. See Peter Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995) p. 2.
10. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003) p. 3.
11. Sally Faulkner, Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (London: Tamesis, 2004) p. 128.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

12. I give the titles of the films in the language of the country where the films were produced.
13. I am indebted to Slavoj Žižek who articulates this argument in The Plague of
Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 128–30.
14. I am indebted to Acevedo-Muñoz who articulates this argument.
15. Gastón Lillo, Género y transgresión: el cine mexicano de Luis Buñuel (Montpellier:
Université Paul Valéry, 1994).
16. Harmony H. Wu, ‘Unravelling Entanglements of Sex, Narrative, Sound, and
Gender: The Discreet Charm of Belle de Jour ’, in Marsha Kinder (ed.) Luis Buñuel’s
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
pp. 111–40.
17. As is well known, dissident surrealists used the abject to test sublimation. The
surrealist circle of Georges Bataille identified the point where desublimatory
impulses confront sublimatory imperatives.
18. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) p. 76.
19. Joan Copjec, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety’, October, vol. 58 (1991) p. 29.
20. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood
(London: Penguin, 2001) p. 63.
21. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) p. 270.
22. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 322.
23. See Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real, p. 270.
24. See Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London:
Routledge, 1998).
25. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 97.
26. Tanya Krzywinska, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, in Paul Burston and Colin
Richardson (eds) Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (London:
Routledge, 1995) p. 101.
27. Hallas, Roger, ‘AIDS and Gay Cinephilia’, Camera Obscura, vol. 18, no. 1 (2003) pp.
85–126. See also Anne-Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London:
Pluto Press, 1998) p. 41.
28. Patrice Pavis, ‘Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire’, New Theatre
Quarterly, vol. 1 (1985) p. 211.
29. Carlos Fuentes, ‘Luis Buñuel and the Cinema of Freedom’, in Carlos Fuentes,
Myself with Others: Selected Essays (London: André Deutsch, 1988) pp. 125–39.
30. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen,
1987) p. 4. I borrow these concepts from Schor whose methodological proposi-
tions are crucial for the one adopted in this book.
31. Cited by Schor, Reading in Detail, p. 79.
32. In an interview with Buñuel, André Bazin reminds Buñuel that the latter had to
work under very commercial conditions in Mexico, thereby producing thrillers or
very trivial films. See André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, ‘Conversation
with Buñuel’, Sight and Sound, vol. 24, no. 4 (Spring 1955) pp. 181–5.
33. Cited by Lillo, Género y transgresión, p. 6.
34. André Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty (New York: Seaver Books, 1982) pp. 59–60.
35. See Raymond Borde, ‘Emilio Fernández’, Positif, vol. 10 (1954) pp. 16–20. See also
the Archives of the Cannes Film Festival <http://www.festival cannes.org/archives/
ficheedition.php?langue=6002&edition=1946> (accessed 25 August 2003).

190
 NOTES

36. In Buñuel and Mexico, p. 5, Acevedo-Muñoz cites an article by Bazin, published in

L’Observateur in August 1952, where Bazin dismisses Fernández’s films and praises Buñuel.
37. Lillo, Género y transgresión, p. 7.
38. Vilaseca, Hindsight and the Real, p. 28.
39. Suleiman thinks of this as a kind of dialogue that the critic stages as a form of
intertextuality; and, as with intertextuality, to accomplish the staging of a dialogue
one does not have to prove an ‘influence’ from one work to the other. The
juxtaposition of works and making them speak to each other should suffice. See
Susan Suleiman, ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance: Some Contemporary Women
Artists and the Historical Avant-garde’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed.) Mirror Images:
Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) p. 152.

1. The Encounter with the Real: Social Otherness, Fragmentation and Mise-en-
abîme in Los olvidados
1. Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, October, vol. 31 (1984) p.
30. Originally published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1935, Caillois’s essay
played a crucial role in shaping Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage in 1936.
2. Los olvidados has been selected by the International Advisory Committee of
UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme. See Román Gubern, ‘Los
olvidados’, El País, 8 September 2003, p. 12.
3. See Julia Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, in Gastón Lillo
(ed.) Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2003) p. 72.
4. For a fine articulation of a psychoanalytic theory of sexuality with a gay critique of
psychoanalysis, pushing both of them to a new place, see Tim Dean, Beyond
Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard
Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982) pp. 26–7.
6. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 26.
7. Ibid., pp. 26–7.
8. Ibid., Camera Lucida, pp. 42–3.
9. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion
Books, 2006) p. 183.
10. Ibid., p. 192.
11. Ibid., p. 195.
12. Jo Labanyi, Rescuing the Living Dead from the Dustbin of History: Popular Memory and
Post-war Trauma in Contemporary Spanish Film and Fiction (Bristol: University of
Bristol, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, 1998)
p. 5.
13. See Douglas Davis, ‘The Birth of the Punctum ’, Artforum, vol. 22 (1984) pp. 56–63.
14. It is the concept of the Bathesian punctum that allows us to elaborate a network
of affects at work in Buñuel’s films that undermine (sexually) normative frame-
works.
15. Kevin Kopelson, ‘Seeing Sodomy: Fanny Hill’s Blinding Vision’, Journal of Homo-
sexuality, vol. 23 (1992) p. 179.
16. In this chapter, I am aware of Judith Butler’s critique of the limitations of psycho-
analysis in terms of its founding prohibitions and its invariable heterosexualizing
injunctions. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’
(London: Routledge, 1993).

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17. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, p. 262.

18. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86.
19. Dominic Keown, ‘The Critique of Reification: A Subversive Current within the
Cinema of Contemporary Spain’, in Wendy Everett (ed.) European Identity in Cinema
(Exeter: Intellect Books, 1996) p. 61.
20. See John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
21. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Routledge, 1989) p. 172.
22. The film generated considerable controversy in Mexico when it was released. In
contrast, Buñuel’s surrealist friends, such as Aragon and Breton, celebrated the film
when they attended a private screening of it in Paris in 1951. See Agustín Sánchez
Vidal, Luis Buñuel: Obra cinematográfica (Madrid: Ediciones JC, 1984). In Buñuel’s
archive at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, there is the original invitation
to the première designed by Jean Cocteau with a poem by Jacques Prévert. This
graphic material demonstrates the successful reception of the Mexican film within
the French avant-garde circle. Los olvidados won the mise-en-scène award at the
fourth Cannes Film Festival in 1951.
23. See ‘Preface’, in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Coral Kaplan (eds) Formations of
Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 1–3.
24. See Foster, The return of the Real, p. 166.
25. For a fine historical discussion of the relationship between Los olvidados and
classical Mexican cinema, see Acevedo-Muñoz’s book, Buñuel and Mexico.
26. Buñuel wanted to be true to reality, instead of creating a space for the articulation
of Mexicanidad, which was the major concern of revolutionary visual culture.
Nonetheless, in an interview, Buñuel admitted that he never broke his ties with
surrealism, even if he was no longer part of the movement in an official or
orthodox sense. Buñuel’s statement seems to run counter to the kind of realism
that has been stressed in Los olvidados. See André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-
Valcroze, ‘Conversation with Buñuel’.
27. See John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London: Verso,
1990) p. 66.
28. Cited by Acevedo-Muñoz, ‘Los olvidados: Luis Buñuel and the Crisis of
Nationalism in Mexican Cinema’ (unpublished paper, Latin American Studies
Association, 1997) p. 4.
29. Geoffrey Kantaris, ‘Violent Visions: Representations of Violence in Contemporary
Latin American Urban Cinema’, Cambridge International Studies Association Con-
ference on Popular Culture and the Political Discourse of Violence, 2002. <http://
www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/culture/violence/> (accessed 31 May 2006).
30. See Emilio García Riera, Breve historia del cine mexicano: primer siglo, 1897–1997
(Jalisco: Ediciones Mapa, 1998) p. 175.
31. However, although it is outside the scope of this chapter, critics, such as Ana
López, have argued against this association of classical Mexican cinema with
reactionary film practices. My deepest thanks to Andrea Noble for bringing this
issue to my attention.
32. J. Hoberman, ‘Los Olvidados’, American Film, 8 (1983) p. 14.
33. Ana López, ‘At the Limits of Documentary: Hypertextual Transformation and the
New Latin American Cinema’, in Julianne Burton (ed.) The Social Documentary in
Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) p. 408.

192
 NOTES

34. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.) French Literary Theory
Today: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 11–17.
35. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, p. 10.
36. Schor, Reading in Detail, p. 86.
37. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 312.
38. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 78.
39. Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano (Jalisco: Universidad de
Guadalajara, 1993) p. 192.
40. James Lastra provides an excellent reading of Buñuel’s Las Hurdes by engaging with
the question of ‘counter-ethnography’ developed by dissident surrealists. James
Lastra, ‘Why Is This Absurd Picture Here? Ethnology/Equivocation/Buñuel’,
October, 89 (1999) pp. 51–68.
41. Edmond Cros, ‘De Piero della Francesca a Los olvidados: el texto cultural de la
figura crística’, in Gastón Lillo (ed.) Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa, 2003) p. 29.
42. I am indebted to John Muller who explains this Lacanian concept. See reference
below.
43. Cited by John P. Muller, Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in
Freud, Peirce, and Lacan (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 75.
44. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990) p. 79.
45. Butler, Bodies that Matter, pp. 205–6.
46. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 87.
47. Ibid., p. 85.
48. Butler, Bodies that Matter, pp. 206–7.
49. See Lee Edelman, ‘Rear Window’s Glasshole’, in Ellis Hanson (ed.) Out Takes:
Essays on Queer Theory and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) p. 92.
50. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, p. 16.
51. This theoretical argument is developed and justified across the rereadings of
Buñuel’s films and of different theorists throughout the book.
52. Žižek, Sublime Object, p. 164.
53. See Robert Miklitsch, ‘Going through the Fantasy: Screening Slavoj Žižek’, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 2 (1998) p. 485.
54. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 277.
55. Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 146.
56. See Charles Shepherdson, ‘History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan’, Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, no. 2 (1995) <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/
issue.195/shepherd.195> (accessed 16 January 2003).
57. Rosaria Champagne, ‘Queering the Unconscious’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.
97, no. 2 (1998) p. 291.
58. See Charles Ramírez Berg, ‘Figueroa’s Skies and Oblique Perspective: Notes on
the Development of the Classical Mexican Style’, Spectator, vol. 13, no. 2 (1992)
p. 37.
59. Paul Julian Smith, ‘City of God’, Sight and Sound (January 2003) <http://www.bfi.
org.uk/sightandsound/2003_01/review03_city_of_god.html> (accessed 6 November
2003).
60. I should express my deepest thanks to Geoffrey Kantaris for making me aware of

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the problematic comparison between the flamboyant MTV style of Cidade de Deus
and Los olvidados. However, such a comparison allows us to focus on aesthetics and
subversive pleasures (as opposed to grimy realism) in Los olvidados, thus giving us a
new reading of the film.
61. Cited by J. Hoberman, ‘Los Olvidados’, p. 15.
62. For an excellent discussion on the aesthetics of garbage, see Robert Stam and Ella
Shohat, ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’, in Jessica
Evans and Stuart Hall (eds) Visual Culture: A Reader (London: Sage in association
with the Open University, 1999) pp. 27–49.
63. Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 164.
64. James Tobias uses Foucault’s dialectical relationship between power and pleasure
to argue that Buñuel’s films challenge the idea of separation of spaces, which is at
the core of bourgeois morality. James Tobias, ‘Buñuel’s Net Work: The Detour
Trilogy’, in Marsha Kinder (ed.) Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 141–75.
65. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, p. 79.
66. Ibid., p. 87.
67. Ibid., p. 60.
68. Cited in Briony Fer’s splendid psychoanalytic approach to abstract art in On Abstract
Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) p. 148. Extimité is the term that Lacan
uses to refer to that emptiness to which the subject is too close or too far.
69. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, p. 93.
70. For an excellent discussion of the sociocultural heterogeneity that characterizes
Latin American culture, see Néstor García Canclini, ‘Modernity after Post-
modernity’, in Gerardo Mosquera (ed.) Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism
from Latin America (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995) pp. 20–51.
71. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (London: Verso,
1989) p. 153.
72. For an excellent discussion of the association of the human body with the urban
body in this film, see Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados’,
pp. 69–89.
73. A pioneering study of the relationship between homoeroticism and homosociality
in literature is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
74. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, pp. 85–6.
75. Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996) p. 70.
76. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados’, p. 87.
77. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, pp. 47–8.
78. I am indebted to Žižek who makes this connection between the Enlightenment and
the repudiation of the monster in ‘Grimaces of the Real, or when the Phallus
Appears’, October, 58 (1991) pp. 44–68.
79. Mladen Dolar, ‘I Shall Be With You On Your Wedding Night: Lacan and the
Uncanny’, October, vol. 58 (Fall 1991) p. 19.
80. Lillo, Género y trangresión, p. 49.
81. Ibid.
82. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 133.
83. See Richard Henke, ‘Imitation of Life: Imitation world of vaudeville’, Jump Cut, vol.
39 (1994) pp. 31–9.

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84. During this period, there was a strong emphasis on creating schools and promoting
technical education for the popular classes.
85. For an analysis of this concept in relation to Chicano communities in the USA, see
Tomás Almaguer, ‘Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and
Behaviour’, in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (eds)
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 255–73.
86. See Annick Prieur, ‘Domination and Desire: Male Homosexuality and the Con-
struction of Masculinity in Mexico’, in Kristi Anne Stolen (ed.) Machos, Mistresses
and Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery (London: Verso,
1996) p. 97.
87. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 312.
88. Ibid., p. 311.
89. Jack Babuscio, ‘Camp and the Gay Sensibility’, in Richard Dyer (ed.) Gays and Film
(London: British Film Institute, 1977) p. 44.
90. In her book, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), Marsha Kinder discusses how this narrative is
inscribed in many examples of Spanish cinema.
91. This term may not have meaning in Mexico. Arguably, ‘Sanborns’ would be a more
appropriate Mexican space. My thanks to Geoffrey Kantaris for pointing out this
issue to me.
92. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).
93. In conventional Mexican sexual ideology, marianismo is associated with women who
are identified as virgins. In contrast, fallen women are associated with La Malinche.
See Joanne Hershfield, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940–1950 (Tucson:
Arizona University Press, 1996).
94. See Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neo-realism to the Present (New York:
Continuum, 1996) p. 70.
95. For an in-depth study of Visconti, see Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti
(London: British Film Institute, 2003).
96. Marvin D’Lugo, ‘The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Transnational Buñuel in
Mexico’, in Gastón Lillo (ed.) Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary (Ottawa: University
of Ottawa, 2003) p. 57.
97. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 311.
98. Cros, ‘De Piero della Francesca a Los olvidados ’, p. 31.
99. Buñuel shared with his surrealist friends the rejection of a Soviet film, Le Chemin de
la vie (1931) by Nicolas Ekk for its redemptive character. See Marcel Oms, ‘Une
problématique de l’enfance’, Co-textes, vol. 12 (1987) pp. 111–19.
100. See José Carlos Avellar, ‘Backwards Blindness: Brazilian Cinema of the 1980s’, in
Ann Marie Stock (ed.) Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p. 35.
101. Franco, Plotting Women, p. 155.
102. Ibid., p. 148.
103. Cros, ‘De Piero della Francesca a Los olvidados ’, p. 30.
104. For a fine revision of these psychoanalytic theories of gendered spectatorship, see
Paul Julian Smith, ‘Pornography, Masculinity, Homosexuality: Almodóvar’s Matador
and La ley del deseo’, in Marsha Kinder (ed.) Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media,
Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) pp. 178–95.

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105. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, p. 80.

106. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 153.
107. Barbara Creed, ‘Phallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers ’, Screen, vol. 31, no. 2
(1990) pp. 125–46.
108. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the idealization of this pre-Oedipal stage of
subjectivity might neglect the psychic punishment that is implied in this inter-
subjective relationship.
109. My thanks to Peter Evans and Geoffrey Kantaris for sharing with me their
knowledge of 1950s fashion in Mexico.
110. Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar
Straus, 1980) pp. 73–105.
111. The actor playing Jaibo, Roberto Cobo, who was a famous dancer, later played a
transvestite named La Manuela in Arturo Ripstein’s 1977 social drama, El lugar sin
límites. I would like to suggest that my theoretical argument about the character’s
potential for gender destabilization might coincide with Buñuel’s and Ripstein’s
choice of actor to play a character who is not fixed in any gender position.
112. Cros, ‘De Piero della Francesca a Los olvidados ’, p. 30.
113. See Žižek’s ‘Grimaces of the Real’, pp. 44–68.
114. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 163.
115. See Ellis Hanson, ‘Lesbians Who Bite’, in Ellis Hanson (ed.) Out Takes: Essays on
Queer Theory and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) pp. 183–222.
116. Lillo, Género y transgresión, pp. 12–13.
117. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (1975) pp. 6–18.
118. Keown, ‘The Critique of Reification’, p. 62.
119. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Joan Copjec has criticized this tendency in film theory
to equate identification with (narcissistic) recognition of the self in the image on
the screen.
120. Jo Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal in Spanish Cinema of the Early Franco
Period’, Screen, vol. 38, no. 3 (1997) p. 218.
121. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Ecrits:
A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977) p. 4.
122. Jacques Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, vol. 34 (1953) p. 15.
123. Thus, the fragmentation of the body may introduce this radical disarticulating force
into a more conventional association of Buñuel’s films with fetishism.
124. Seymour Chatman, ‘From Coming to Terms: The Cinematic Narrator’, in Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 476.
125. Ibid., p. 484.
126. For a discussion of these mechanisms of transgression, see Gastón Lillo,
‘Pragmática de la transgresión en el cine Mexicano de Luis Buñuel’, Co-textes, vol.
26 (1994) pp. 5–23. See also Antonio Gómez-Moriana and Catherine Poupeney
Hart (eds) Parole exclusive, parole exclue, parole transgressive: marginalisation et marginalité
dans les practiques discursives (Longueuil: Le Préambule, 1990).
127. Lillo, Género y transgresión, p. 16.
128. Lawrence R. Schehr, Gay Discourses in French Literature (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995) p. 62.

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 NOTES

129. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde

and Gide’, Genders, vol. 2 (1988) p. 32.
130. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, p. 81.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid., p. 86.
133. For a fine discussion of the tactility and viscerality of cinematic experience, see
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
134. Ibid., p. 55.
135. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Unconscious and Repetition’, in Jacques Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1978) p. 55.
136. Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 132.
137. These arguments are inspired by Briony Fer’s fine essay on Bataille. See Briony Fer,
‘Poussière/peinture: Bataille on Painting’, in Carolyn Gill (ed.) Bataille: Writing the
Sacred (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 154–71.
138. Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 67.
139. See Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 264.
140. Edelman, ‘Rear Window’s Glasshole’, p. 95.
141. Tuñón, ‘Cuerpo humano y cuerpo urbano en Los olvidados ’, p. 86.
142. See Dawn Ades, ‘Internationalism and Eclecticism: Surrealism and the Avant-
Garde in Painting and Film 1920–1930’, in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (eds)
Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995) p. 74.
143. See Elizabeth Bronfen, ‘Killing Gazes, Killing in the Gaze: On Michael Powell’s
Peeping Tom’, in Renata Saleci and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) pp. 59–89.
144. Cited by Briony Fer, ‘Poussière/peinture’, p. 157.
145. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 165.
146. See Hal Foster, ‘Blind Spots: The Art of Joachim Koester’, Artforum, vol. 44, no. 8
(2006) pp. 212–17.

2. Pleasure or Punishment? Abjection, The Vampire Trope, and Masochistic

Perversions in Viridiana
1. Annette Michelson, ‘Heterology and the Critique of Instrumental Reason’, October,
vol. 36 (1986) p. 113. Issue dedicated to Georges Bataille.
2. In this chapter, I shall not be concerned with providing an historical account of the
film. For a history of Spanish cinema under Francoism and democracy, see Peter
Besas’s pioneering book, Behind the Spanish Lens: Spanish Cinema Under Fascism and
Democracy (Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1985).
3. Michelson, ‘Heterology and the Critique of Instrumental Reason’, p. 112.
4. However, many feminists have strongly criticized Kristeva. For instance, in ‘The
Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva’, Jennifer Stone shows how Kristeva
supports Freudian notions of ‘nothing to be seen’. See Jennifer Stone, ‘The
Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva’, in Francis Barker (ed.) The Politics of
Theory (Colchester: Essex University, 1983) pp. 38–48.
5. Fer, On Abstract Art, p. 185.

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p. 72.
7. Stephen Frosh, The Politics of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987)
p. 180.
8. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993) p. 3.
9. Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 156.
10. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13.
11. Ibid., p. 2.
12. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993).
13. Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’,
Screen, vol. 27 (1986) p. 70.
14. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, p. 9.
15. See Simon Taylor, ‘The Phobic Object’, in Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, Simon
Taylor, and Jack Ben-Levi, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993) pp. 59–84.
16. Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 149.
17. I am indebted to Jan-Ove Steihaug’s research on contemporary American art. See
his Abject, Informe, Trauma: Discourses on the Body in American Art of the 1990s (Oslo:
Institute for Research within International Contemporary Art, 1999).
18. This is the way in which contemporary artists, such as Robert Gober or Mike
Kelley, have reappropriated the abject.
19. Gwynne Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel (London: Marion Boyars
Publishers, 1982) p. 144.
20. Robert Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel: Authority, Desire, and the Absurd’, in Walter
Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick (eds) Hitchcock’s Re-released Films from Rope to
Vertigo (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) p. 128.
21. Peter Evans, ‘Viridiana and the Death Instinct’, in Peter Evans and Robin Fiddian
(eds) Challenges to Authority: Fiction and Film in Contemporary Spain (London: Tamesis,
1988) p. 66.
22. Cited by Agustín Sánchez Vidal, El mundo de Luis Buñuel (Zaragoza: Caja de
Ahorros de la Inmaculada Concepción, 1993) p. 221.
23. Michael Wood, ‘God Never Dies: Buñuel and Catholicism’, Renaissance and Modern
Studies, vol. 36 (1993) p. 94.
24. The conscious intention of Buñuel here would be to use Viridiana’s body as an
object of desire for the heterosexual male spectator. However, my analysis goes
beyond the intentionality of the author.
25. Allen Jones emerged in the early 1960s as part of the pop art movement that
dominated the art of the decade. He held his first solo exhibition in 1963 at Tooth
& Sons, London where he continued to exhibit until 1970.
26. Laura Mulvey’s ‘Fears, Fantasies, and the Male Unconscious’, in Laura Mulvey,
Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) p. 7.
27. For a discussion of death, femininity and aesthetics, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over
Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1992).
28. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) p. 84.
29. Gastón Lillo and Alejandro Yarza, ‘El demonio, el mundo y la carne: la

198
 NOTES

construcción del sujeto en Viridiana ’, in Gastón Lillo (ed.) Buñuel: The Transcultural
Imaginary (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2003) pp. 149–50.
30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 3–4.
31. See the catalogue of the exhibition, Catherine de Zeguer (ed.) Inside the Visible
(London: Whitechapel, 1996).
32. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s’, Art History, vol. 20, no. 2
(1997) p. 202.
33. Raymond Durgnat, Luis Buñuel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) p. 123.
34. See D. A. Miller’s article, ‘Anal Rope’, Representations, vol. 32 (1990) pp. 114–33.
35. I am indebted to Bataille’s discussion of the association of death with sexuality in
his Eroticism.
36. Jo Labanyi, ‘Fetishism and the Problem of Sexual Difference in Buñuel’s Tristana
(1970)’, in Peter William Evans (ed.) Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 82.
37. Ibid., p. 82.
38. Cited by Lillo and Yarza, ‘El demonio, el mundo y la carne’, p. 147.
39. Noël Herpe, ‘Viridiana: autour du retour’, Nouvelle Revue Française, vol. 477 (1992)
pp. 77–86.
40. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 314.
41. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, p. 69.
42. According to Elisabeth Bronfen, vampirism preserves a fluid boundary with the
unconscious. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, pp. 314–15.
43. Copjec, ‘Vampires, breast-feeding and anxiety’, p. 31.
44. Taken from Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October, vol. 43 (1987) p. 203.
For a fine analysis of the politics of AIDS in relation to visual representation in
Spain, see Paul Julian Smith’s piece on the Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú, who died
from AIDS. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid organized a major solo exhibition
of Espaliú in 2003. Paul Julian Smith, Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature and
Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983–1993 (London: Verso, 1996).
45. Harry Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1997) p. 243. Nonetheless, due to the soundtrack from Bauhaus and the new
romantic look of Deneuve and David Bowie, the film became a cult movie among
gay subcultural communities.
46. Hanson, ‘Lesbians Who Bite’, p. 193.
47. Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Tracking the Vampire’, Differences, vol. 3, no. 2 (1991) p. 3.
48. Krzywinska, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, p. 109.
49. Lillo and Yarza, ‘El demonio, el mundo y la carne’, p. 154.
50. See Douglas B. Saylor, The Sadomasochistic Homotext (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 1993) p. 5.
51. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in James Strachey (ed.)
Civilization, Society and Religion: The Penguin Freud Library, 24 vols (London: Penguin,
1985) vol. XII (1930) pp. 251–340.
52. Gertrud Lenzer, ‘On Masochism: A Contribution to the History of a Fantasy and
its Theory’, Signs, vol. 1, no. 2 (1975) p. 302.
53. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 213.
54. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs, translated by Jean
McNeil (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) p. 131.
55. Cited by Douglas B. Saylor, The Sadomasochistic Homotext, p. 16.

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56. Ronald Schwartz, The Great Spanish Films, 1950–1990 (Methchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1991) p. 14.
57. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, Viridiana, estudio crítico (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 1999) p.
66. My analysis of this sequence is indebted to Sánchez-Biosca’s reading of the film.
58. Derek Malcolm, ‘Luis Buñuel: Viridiana’, Guardian Unlimited, 1 April 1999 <http://
film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,4135,38922,00.html> (accessed 3
April 2004).
59. Emilio G. Riera’s review of the film in Joan Mellen (ed.) The World of Luis Buñuel:
Essays in Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 221.
60. Buñuel’s son, Juan Luis Buñuel, with whom I spoke in London in May 2003, told
me about this fact.
61. In Diversions of Pleasures: Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1987) p. 13, Paul Sandro explains the significance of the
technique of parallel montage for producing images in surrealist cinema.
62. Lillo and Yarza, ‘El demonio, el mundo y la carne’, p. 159.
63. In Under Construction: The Body in Spanish Novels (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1994) p. 170, Elizabeth Scarlett argues that to yield fragments that lend
themselves to collage is characteristic of the postmodern subject. Buñuel may be
considered a postmodern subject avant-la-lettre.
64. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) p. 319.
65. Christine Battersby, ‘Her Blood and His Mirror: Mary Coleridge, Luce Irigaray, and
the Female Self’, in Richard Eldridge (ed.) Beyond Representation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 264.
66. Kinder inadequately translates this piece of dialogue from Spanish into English.
Instead of translating ‘mis papás’ as ‘my parents’, she translates it as ‘my father’.
67. See Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October, vol. 34 (1985) p. 87.
68. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 316.
69. Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel’, p. 132.
70. Battersby, ‘Her Blood and His Mirror’, p. 263.
71. For an excellent application of Irigaray’s theory to the field of Hispanic studies, see
Paul Julian Smith’s Representing the Other: ‘Race’, Text, and Gender in Spanish and
Spanish American Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
72. Lillo and Yarza, ‘El demonio, el mundo y la carne’, p. 149.
73. Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) p.
101.
74. An interesting book that explores the issues of ambivalence and homosexuality in
Leonardo da Vinci is Bradley I. Collins, Leonardo, Psychoanalysis and Art History: A
Critical Study of Psychobiographical Approaches to Leonardo da Vinci (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1997).
75. See Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985) p. 177. See also Buñuel’s autobiography,
My Last Breath, translated by Abigail Israel (London: Fontana, 1985) pp. 83–4. Buñuel
explains that he always went to the café Closerie des Lilas in disguise. He even put on
false eyelashes and lipstick. Rucar’s memoirs contain a photograph of Buñuel dressed
up as a nun, showing Buñuel’s fascination with masquerading.
76. Felix Guattari, ‘A Liberation of Desire’, in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks
(eds) Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1979) pp. 57–8.

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77. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 151.
78. Jones, Postmodernism, p. 160.
79. Ibid., p. 171.
80. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, The Penguin
Freud Library, translated by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Penguin, 1985) vol.
XIX (1919) pp. 339–76.
81. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London:
Routledge, 1992) p. 17.
82. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in S. Freud (ed.) On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library, 24
vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981) vol. VII (1927) pp. 345–58.
83. Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences
(London: Routledge, 1996) p. 31.
84. Cited by Suleiman, Subversive Intent, p. 158.
85. Gallop, Thinking Through the Body, p. 107.
86. Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982) p. 67.
87. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, translated by Daniella Dangoor (London:
Allison & Busby, 1978) pp. 60–1.
88. According to John Fletcher, it was American psychoanalytic institutions that used
Freudian theories to sanction and pathologize homosexuality. See John Fletcher,
‘Freud and his Uses: Psychoanalysis and Gay Theory’, in Simon Shepherd and Mick
Wallis (eds) Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
pp. 90–118.
89. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meaning, Myths and Modern Sexualities
(London: Routledge, 1985) pp. 144–5.
90. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in S. Freud, The
Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. VII (1905) p. 150.
91. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) p. 32.
92. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 198.
93. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘Perversion and the Universal Law’, International Review
of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10 (1983) pp. 293–301.
94. Ibid., p. 299.
95. According to Dollimore, the polymorphous perverse is a notion that has been
exhausted as a pure source of the revolutionary impulse. Dollimore identifies it as
nostalgic and utopian. However, perversion as a kind of narrative of queer
affirmation has not been theorized in the case of the Spanish or Mexican cinema of
Luis Buñuel.
96. Adams, The Emptiness of the Image, p. 41.
97. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 198.
98. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 147.

3. The Fall from Grace: Anality, the Horizontal Body, and Anti-Oedipus in El ángel
exterminador
1. See Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, translated by
Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) p. 126.

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2. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984).
3. There is a tendency to read Anti-Oedipus as an unequivocal denunciation of the
Freudo–Lacanian tradition. However, Guattari had been trained by Lacan and
remained both a member of his École Freudienne de Paris and a practising analyst
even after the publication of Anti-Oedipus.
4. In his second manifesto of surrealism (1930), André Breton, following Hegelian
metaphysics and Freudian metapsychology, claimed that the goal of surrealism was to
reach the point in the mind where contradictions ceased to exist. It was on this point
that Bataille and Breton disagreed, thereby provoking the expulsion of Bataille from
the surrealist movement. See Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s
Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History, IX’, in Hannah Arendt
(ed.) Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) p. 257.
6. Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro (Barcelona: P&J, 1982) p. 288.
7. Charles Ramírez Berg, Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) p. 15.
8. Cited by Andrew G. Wood, ‘One Hundred Years of Cinema: Redefining
Mexicanidad ’ <http://ucmexus.ucr.edu/ucmnews/100_years_of_cinema~wood.htm>
(accessed 16 February 2003).
9. See Maximiliano Maza, Más de cien años de cine mexicano <http://cinemexicano.mty.
itesm.mx/front.html> (accessed 7 January 2003).
10. Georges Bataille, ‘L’Art primitif’, Documents, vol. 7 (1930) pp. 389–98; reproduced
in Bernard Noël (ed.) Documents (Paris: Mercure de France and Éditions Gallimard,
1968) pp. 129–41.
11. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) p. 54.
12. Virginia Higginbotham, Luis Buñuel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979) p. 149.
13. Nancy J. Mémbrez, ‘El ángel exterminador de Luis Buñuel: auto sacramental
cinematográfico’, in George Cabello Castellet, Jaume Martí-Olivella and Guy H.
Wood (eds) Cine-Lit: Essays on Peninsular Film and Fiction (Oregon: Oregon State
University, 1992) p. 31.
14. See Carolyn Dean, ‘Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the
Subject’, Representations, vol. 13 (1986) pp. 42–62.
15. This argument is informed by Nietzsche’s search for a philosophy that transgresses
rational categories. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, 1973).
16. Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, p. 184.
17. See O. K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of
the Revolutionary into the Historian’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996)
<http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/v22/v22n2.werckmeister.html>
(accessed 18 February 2003).
18. See Allen Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess (New York: SUNY, 1989) p. 178.
19. Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel, p. 172.
20. Indeed, Bakhtin states that carnival is licensed. My argument draws on Bakhtin’s
concept as a way of thinking of that disruptive moment which is even more
exhilarating because it is temporary and provisional.

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21. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
22. Keith Booker, Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection,
Carnivalesque (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1991) p. 126.
23. Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, p. 167.
24. Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesque: Carnival and Theory’, in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.)
Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (London: Macmillan Press, 1988) p. 218.
25. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 118.
26. Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, p. 167.
27. For a fine discussion on the notion of ‘synchronicity’ as a principle of narrative
organization, see Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Irony, Nihilism, and the New American “Smart”
Film’, Screen, vol. 43, no. 4 (2002) pp. 349–69.
28. Cited by Hugo Santander, ‘Luis Buñuel: Existential Filmmaker’, Espéculo: Revista de
Estudios Literarios, 20 (2002) <http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero20/index.html>
(accessed 8 May 2003).
29. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 128.
30. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 169.
31. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000) p. 241.
32. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 11.
33. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985) p. 207.
34. See Ian Olney, ‘Repetition (with Difference) and Ludic Deferral in the Later Films
of Luis Buñuel’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 18, no. 1 (2001) p. 71.
35. See Paul Sandro’s reading of the film through Deleuze’s theory. Paul Sandro,
‘Putting the Squeeze on Thought: Buñuel’s Naturalism and the Threshold of the
Imagination’, in Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary (see Lillo, above), pp. 33–46.
36. Olney, ‘Repetition’, p. 73.
37. Higginbotham, Luis Buñuel, p. 155.
38. See Peter Evans’s discussion of Belle de jour in The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 159.
39. For an excellent discussion of surrealist cinema, see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis,
‘Surrealist Cinema: Politics, History, and the Language of Dreams’, American Imago:
Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, vol. 50, no. 4 (1993) pp. 441–56.
40. Robert T. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1984) p. 183.
41. In Nazarín (1958), Buñuel pays special attention to the saint’s excrement flowing
down the column.
42. This argument is informed by Paul Julian Smith’s essay ‘Fatal Strategies: The
Representation of AIDS in the Spanish State’, in his Vision Machines, p. 104.
43. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(London: Routledge, 1984) pp. 1–7.
44. Jonathan Weinberg, ‘Jasper Johns and the Anal Society’, Genders, vol. 1 (1988)
p. 54.
45. Moreover, the discourse of hygiene has historically been associated with the logic
of racial exclusion: from Counter-Reformation Spain, where it is identified as
limpieza de sangre, to more contemporary links between neo-racist ideologies and the
ideology of capitalist modernization. See Kristin Ross, ‘Starting Afresh: Hygiene
and Modernization in Post-war France’, October, vol. 67 (1994) p. 24.
46. Lynne Cooke, ‘Disputed Terrain’, in Judith Nesbitt (ed.) Robert Gober (London:

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QUEERING BUÑUEL

Serpentine Gallery, 1993) p. 21. I am indebted to Fer’s excellent analysis of Hesse’s

sculpture.
47. Weinberg, ‘Jasper Johns’, p. 46.
48. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1887), Richard von Krafft-Ebing categorized coprophilia as
a perversion. The book was known to the surrealists, including Bataille and Buñuel.
In Buñuel’s archive, Psychopathia Sexualis is listed as one of his favourite books. See
the catalogue of the exhibition on Buñuel organized by the Residencia de
Estudiantes in Madrid from February to May 2000, Anon., Luis Buñuel: el ojo de la
libertad (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2000).
49. Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, p. 287.
50. Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of
Love’, in Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, The Penguin Freud Library, translated by
James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Penguin, 1985) vol. VII (1912) p. 254.
51. Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October, vol. 78 (1996) p. 118.
52. See Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire.
53. Fletcher, ‘Freud and his Uses’, pp. 90–118.
54. Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Preface to the 1978 Edition’, in Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual
Desire, translated by Daniella Dangoor (London: Allison & Busby, 1978) p. 32.
55. However, Dalí, under Breton’s influence, withdrew his permission to use the
painting in Georges Bataille, ‘Le Jeu lugubre’, Documents, vol. 7 (December 1929)
pp. 297–302, reproduced in Denis Hollier (ed.) Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard,
1970) pp. 211–16.
56. Cited by Anna Lovatt, ‘“Abject” Art: A Critical Reevaluation’ (unpublished
master’s thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2000) p. 5.
57. Cited in Virginia Higginbotham’s discussion of the abject in relation to the
interconnection between Buñuel and Goytisolo in ‘Luis Buñuel as Intertext in the
Narrative Prose of Juan Goytisolo’, in Manuel Delgado Morales and Alice J. Poust
(eds) Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí: Art and Theory (Lewisburg, PA : Buckwell University Press,
2001) p. 115.
58. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Informe without Conclusion’, October, vol. 78 (1996) p. 89.
59. For an analysis of the way in which contemporary American artists have
reappropriated the abject, see the catalogue of the exhibition: Craig Houser, Leslie
C. Jones, Simon Taylor, and Jack Ben-Levi, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in
American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993).
60. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Sexual Disgust’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 20 (1998) pp.
58–9.
61. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, p. 165.
62. Cited by Acquarello, ‘The Exterminating Angel’, Senses of Cinema, vol. 8 (2000)
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/miff/bunuel.html> (accessed
12 January 2004).
63. Higginbotham, Luis Buñuel, p. 149.
64. Michel Estève, ‘On The Exterminating Angel: No Exit from the Human Condition’,
in Joan Mellen (ed.) The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978) p. 246.
65. Julio says that he studied in a Jesuit college. Buñuel also studied under this religious
order when he lived in Spain. See Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical
Biography, edited by David Robinson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975) or
Buñuel’s own autobiography Mi último suspiro.

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66. See Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
67. See Marsha Kinder, ‘The Disastrous Escape’, in Frank N. Magill (ed.) Contemporary
Literary Scene II (Epping, Essex: Bowker Publishing Company, 1979) p. 180.
68. Sandro, Diversions of Pleasure, p. 1.
69. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in Rosalind E. Krauss; Jane Livingston and
Dawn Ades, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press,
1985) p. 57.
70. Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel, p. 177.
71. Sandro, ‘Putting the Squeeze on Thought’, p. 37.
72. Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, p. 278.
73. Estève, ‘On The Exterminating Angel ’, p. 248.
74. Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, p. 176.
75. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 21.
76. Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, p. 60. In this chapter of the book, I have not dealt deeply
with an historical account of the influence of surrealism on Buñuel’s cinema.
However, I am attempting to situate Buñuel’s cinema within the kinds of fantasies
and anxieties that were at stake in the surrealist movement. In this book I shall
attempt to demonstrate the unspoken queer fantasies at the core of this
homophobic historical avant-garde led by André Breton. In an essay on gender
performance and photography, Sarah Wilson acknowledges that surrealism
emerged in the centre of the Parisian gay and lesbian subcultural milieu. See Sarah
Wilson, ‘Femininities and Masquerades’, in Jennifer Blessing (ed.) Rrose is a Rrose is
a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997)
pp. 135–55.
77. Georges Bataille, ‘Le Gros orteil’, Documents, vol. 6 (1929) pp. 297–302, reproduced
in Bernard Noël (ed.) Documents (Paris: Mercure de France and Éditions Gallimard,
1968) pp. 75–82.
78. Cited by James Lastra, ‘Why is this Absurd Picture Here?’ p. 57.
79. Fer, On Abstract Art, p. 126. I am indebted to Fer’s excellent analysis of Hesse’s
sculpture.
80. Leslie Jones, ‘Transgressive Femininity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and
Seventies’, in Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, Simon Taylor and Jack Ben-Levi,
Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1993) p. 41.
81. Margaret Iversen, ‘The Deflationary Impulse: Postmodernism, Feminism and the
Anti-Aesthetic’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds) Thinking Art: Beyond
Traditional Aesthetics (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991) pp. 81–93.
82. For a fine historical study of the connections between surrealism and psycho-
analysis, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in
France, 1925–1985, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association,
1990) p. 160.
83. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Allan Stoekl (ed.) Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) p. 83.
84. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 100.
85. I am indebted to Krauss whose brilliant use of gestalt psychology is crucial for the
development of the argument being put forward here.
86. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, pp. 72–73.
87. Jerry Aline Flieger, ‘Becoming Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular

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Identification’, in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds) Deleuze and Feminist
Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) p. 54.
88. Allen Weiss, Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (New York: SUNY, 1994) p. 66.
89. Ibid., p. 67.
90. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 19.

4. The Invisible Trauma: Violent Fantasies, Repetitions and Flashbacks in Ensayo

de un crimen
1. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 107.
2. The word ensayo means rehearsal in English. This term relates both to the field of
performance and to the field of psychoanalysis. It also implies a repetitive or
iterative action, which is one of the major concerns in this chapter. Thus psycho-
analysis and performance can be seen to be parallel enterprises.
3. Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001) p. 103. Lichtenstein’s analysis of Bellmer’s
dolls allows us to create a connection between the latter’s art and Buñuel’s cinema
both from a historical perspective (both artists shared some of the aesthetics of
surrealism) and through an intertextual relationship that is staged by the
spectator.
4. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Sigmund Freud, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, translated by John Reddick (London: Penguin
Books, 2003) p. 56.
5. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
6. See Higginbotham’s discussion of the abject in ‘Luis Buñuel as Intertext in the
Narrative Prose of Juan Goytisolo’.
7. This description refers to the title of Buñuel’s last film, Cet obscur objet du désir
(1977).
8. See Sidney Donnell, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on the Baroque in
Luis Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz ’, in Barbara Simerka and
Christopher Weimer (eds) Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early
Modern Spanish Literatures (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000) p. 79.
Donnell’s analysis retraces the references to Mexican history in the film.
9. Donnell, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, p. 94.
10. Ibid., p. 74.
11. See Robert Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983).
12. Cited by Francisco Sánchez, Siglo Buñuel (México DF: Cineteca Nacional, 2000)
p. 80.
13. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 107.
14. This artist had a great influence on Dalí.
15. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 91.
16. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, p. 145.
17. Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel: Obra cinematográfica, p. 201.
18. See the catalogue of the exhibition edited by Jennifer Blessing (ed.) Rrose is a Rrose
is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography.
19. Cited by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real, p. 271.

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 NOTES

20. Sidney Donnell, ‘Quixotic Desire and the Avoidance of Closure in Luis Buñuel’s
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz ’, Modern Languages Notes, vol. 114, no. 2
(1999) pp. 269–96.
21. Although my analysis is concerned with the instability and ambiguity at the level of
representation, I read the complexity of the psychic processes in relation to my
concern with queer identity and subject positions.
22. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 98.
23. Lillo, Género y transgresión, p. 93.
24. Manuel López Villegas, Sade y Buñuel: El marqués de Sade en la obra cinematográfica de
Luis Buñuel (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 1998) p. 142.
25. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen, p. 176.
26. Michael Wood, ‘Double Lives’, Sight & Sound, vol. 1, no. 9 (1992) p. 22.
27. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen, p. 176.
28. Buñuel explains that the apparently absurd ‘happy ending’ was imposed by neither
commercial imperatives nor censorship laws. I follow Buñuel’s statement in order
to reinterpret the meaning of the sequence. See Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel.
29. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen, p. 191.
30. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
(eds) Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982) pp.
208–26.
31. Cited by Scarlett, Under Construction, p. 13.
32. Jean-Louis Leutrat, ‘La Vie criminelle d’Archibald de la Cruz: sept femmes pour
l’assassin’, Positif (1993) p. 91.
33. Janet Bergstrom, ‘Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond
Bellour’, Camera Obscura, vols 3–4 (1979) pp. 71–103.
34. Ibid., p. 90.
35. Ibid., p. 93.
36. Kaja Silverman, ‘Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.)
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 113.
37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. xiii.
38. Víctor Fuentes, Buñuel en México: Iluminaciones sobre una pantalla pobre (Teruel:
Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 1993) p. 124.
39. François Truffaut, ‘Buñuel, le constructeur’, in François Truffaut, Les Films de ma
vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975) pp. 272–81.
40. Leutrat, ‘La Vie criminelle’, p. 90.
41. Suleiman, Subversive Intent, p. 65.
42. See Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment. For more references on the subject of camp,
see Chapter 1 of this book, pp. 31–5.
43. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen, p. 182.
44. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 128.
45. See Kirsten Strom, ‘Resurrecting the Stylite Simon: Buñuel’s surrealist History
Film’, Papers of surrealism, 1 (2003) <http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
publications/papers/journal1/index.htm> (accessed 2 February 2004).
46. See Marcel Oms, Don Luis Buñuel (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985).
47. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) p. 238. In this
chapter, I am inspired by Foster’s excellent reconsideration of the formal and the
psychoanalytic in surrealism using Freudian theories of the Uncanny and
Fetishism.

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48. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 101.

49. Silverman, ‘Historical Trauma’, p. 116.
50. This argument is informed by Lacan’s seminar, ‘The Unconscious and Repetition’.
Lacan’s essay has received less attention from film critics than his seminar on the
gaze. However, in my attempt to establish an intertextual relationship between the
film and surrealist and contemporary art, I read both these essays together.
51. Cited by Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 89.
52. Janice Lane, ‘The Voice on the Skin: Self-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory
of Language’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 4 (1996) p. 115.
53. These reversals, inversions, or conflations of positions characterize Derrida’s
writing and mark the organization of his text. See Lee Edelman, ‘Seeing Things:
Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex’, in
Diana Fuss (ed.) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge, 1991)
pp. 93–119.
54. Dean, ‘Law and Sacrifice’, p. 56.
55. Lane, ‘The Voice on the Skin’, p. 116.
56. Thomas Elsaesser, cited by Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, p. 61.
57. See Mignon Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, October, vol. 71 (1995) pp. 71–92.
58. Ibid., p. 73.
59. Ibid., p. 89.
60. See Robert Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan’s Reconstruction of
Freud (London: Routledge, 1993).
61. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 302.
62. This argument is inspired by Parveen Adams’s excellent psychoanalytic reading of
Michael Powell’s film, Peeping Tom (1960). Parveen Adams, ‘Father, Can’t You See
I’m Filming?’ in Joan Copjec (ed.) Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994) pp.
185–200.
63. Donnell, ‘Quixotic Desire’, p. 271.
64. Ibid., p. 284.
65. José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis
Buñuel, translated by Paul Lenti (New York: Marsilio, 1992) p. 121.
66. Donnell, ‘Quixotic Desire’, p. 282.
67. Harold Beaver, ‘Homosexual Signs’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8 (1981) p. 117.
68. My theoretical association of the term psychotic with that of dissident has to do
with the way in which both subject positions, in their search for unconscious
desires that are effaced by the symbolic order of language, transgress the subject of
language. What is considered a ‘pathological’ subject position by hegemonic
discourses, for example psychosis, could be reinterpreted as a politically dissident
subject position through the resignification of the systematic creation or classifi-
cation and control of anomalies in the social and psychic body.
69. Anon., La Révolution surréaliste, issue 2 (January 1925).
70. See Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge,
1989) p. 148. Turim suggests that in many film noirs, such as Out of the Past (1947),
the male protagonist is compulsively attached to a woman from the past who
functions as a figure of death.
71. See Judith Halberstam’s and Ann Cvetkovich’s references for a fine association of
queer theory with the death drive.
72. See Therese Lichtenstein, ‘Games of the Doll’, Art in America, vol. 87 (1999) pp. 96–9.

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73. For a fine account of Dalí’s fascism, see Robin Greeley, ‘Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s
Paranoia’, Art History, vol. 24, no. 4 (2001) pp. 465–92.
74. Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, p. 80.
75. Ibid., p. 72.
76. See Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the
Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
77. Dean, ‘Law and Sacrifice’, p. 52.
78. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 65.
79. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 96.
80. A very useful application of Freud’s essay to literary and filmic texts is found in
Robert D. Newman, Transgressions of Reading: Narrative Engagement as Exile and Return
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
81. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 5. Drawing on Laplanche,
Bersani celebrates those failures in Freud’s thought that, according to Bersani,
depend on a process of theoretical collapse. See his The Freudian Body.
82. Bersani, The Freudian Body, p. 60.
83. This argument is based on both books by Robert Samuels. See his Hitchcock’s Bi-
Textuality and his Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.
84. Samuel refers to the Fort-Da game discussed by Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure
Principle’.
85. See Orlan, Ceci est mon corps – ceci est mon logiciel – This is my Body – This is my Software
(London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996). My reading of Orlan’s performance art is
indebted to Parveen Adams’s excellent analysis of this female performance artist in
The Emptiness of the Image.
86. For a thorough historical study of the connection between Fautrier and Georges
Bataille, see Sarah Wilson, ‘Fêting the Wound’, in Caroline Gill (ed.) Bataille: Writing
the Sacred (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 172–92.
87. For an excellent analysis of this concept, see Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the
Image.
88. Drawing on the philosophy of Aristotle, Lacan defines the tychic point as the failed
encounter between the subject and the Real.
89. This argument aligns itself with that proposed by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real.
90. Bersani, The Freudian Body, p. 11.
91. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997)
p. 135.
92. See Tom Cohen, Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
93. I am trying to reconcile theoretical discussions of the impact of traumatic events upon
the self with my theorization of pre-Oedipal traumatic subjectivity in the film. It is
interesting to point out that Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ has to be con-
textualized within the destruction that was experienced during the First World War.
94. See Cathy Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’,
Yale French Studies, vol. 79 (1991) pp. 181–92.
95. See Neil Bartlett, The Uses of Monotony: Repetition in the Language of Oscar Wilde, Jean
Genet, Edmund White and Juan Goytisolo (London: Birkbeck College, 1994).
96. Judith Butler suggests an alternative point of departure, which is pheno-
menological, for understanding the pleasures of repetition. See Judith Butler, ‘The

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Pleasures of Repetition’, in Robert Glick and Stanley Bone (eds) Pleasure Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) pp. 259–75.
97. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Postmodernism as Mourning Work’, Screen, vol. 42, no. 2
(Summer 2001) pp. 193–205.
98. Allen Weiss, ‘Structures of Exchange, Acts of Transgression’, in David Allison,
Mark Roberts and Allen Weiss (eds) Sade and the Narrative of Transgression
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 199–212. At this point in the
chapter I am concerned with the influences of Sade on Buñuel’s films. For a
historical study of that subject see Manuel López Villegas, Sade y Buñuel.
99. Cited by Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 56.
100. This term is borrowed from Leo Bersani, ‘“The Culture of Redemption”: Marcel
Proust and Melanie Klein’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 12 (1986) pp. 399–421.
101. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1981) p. 143.
102. Turim, Flashbacks in Film, p. 15.
103. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 115.
104. Bonnie Burns, ‘Cassandra’s Eyes’, in Ellis Hanson (ed.) Out Takes (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999) pp. 129–50.
105. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 59.
106. Cited by Ann Cvetkovich, ‘Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and
Therapeutic Culture’, GLQ, vol. 2 (1995) pp. 351–77.
107. Burns, ‘Cassandra’s Eyes’, p. 139.
108. For a fine critique of the association of cinematic narrative with Oedipal logic, see
Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Oedipus Interruptus’, in Sue Thornham (ed.) Feminist Film
Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) pp. 83–96.
109. See Ian Olney, ‘Repetition (with Difference)’.

5. The Refusal of Visual Mastery: Paranoia, the Scream and the Gaze in Él
1. Octave Mannoni, ‘La part du jeu’, quoted in Stephen Melville and Bill Readings
(eds) Vision and Textuality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) p. 361.
2. I am indebted to Robin Greeley’s analysis of Dalí and Lacan. See Greeley, ‘Dalí’s
Fascism’. See also, Jacques Lacan, ‘Motifs du crime paranoïaque’, Minotaure, vols
3–4 (1933) pp. 25–8.
3. See Jorge Ruffinelli, ‘Francisco y Archibaldo: los santos perversos de Luis Buñuel’,
in Gastón Lillo (ed.) Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary (Ottawa: University of
Ottawa, 2003) p. 138.
4. Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel: Obra cinematográfica, p. 168.
5. Positif, vol. 10 (1954).
6. Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case
of Paranoia’, in James Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. 12 (1911)
pp. 1–82.
7. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, pp. 111–24.
8. Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, p. 12.
9. For an excellent historical study of the relationship between surrealism and psycho-
analysis, see David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
10. Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, p. 159.

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 NOTES

11. Charles Tesson, Él, Luis Buñuel: étude critique (Paris: Nathan, 1995) p. 50.
12. Lee Edelman, ‘Tea-rooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water
Closet’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (eds) The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 569.
13. Roger Cardinal, Expressionism (London: Paladin, 1984) p. 125.
14. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 120.
15. See John Berger, ‘Caravaggio: A Contemporary View’, Studio International,
196.998 (1983) <http://www.studio-international.co.uk/archive/Caravaggio_1983
_ 196_998. htm> (accessed 13 December 2002).
16. Briony Fer, ‘The Work of Salvage: Eva Hesse’s Latex Works’, in Elisabeth Sussman
(ed.) Eva Hesse (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2002) p. 93.
17. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: BFI Modern Classics, 1999)
p. 57.
18. Fer, ‘The Work of Salvage’, p. 93.
19. In Chapter 2, I discussed how fetishism saves the subject from becoming a
homosexual by endowing women with the attribute that makes them acceptable as
sexual objects.
20. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 309.
21. In Freud’s notion of inversion, homosexuality is the boy’s failure to disidentify
with the mother and identify with the father.
22. I am indebted to José Luis Gallego Llorente, ‘La mirada de Luis Buñuel sobre la
paranoia’, Revista de la Sociedad de Psiquiatría de la Comunidad Valenciana, vol. 5 (2001)
<http://www.red-farmamedica.com/spcv/revista/colaboraciones/col_44.htm>
(accessed 21 October 2002).
23. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 112.
24. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 75.
25. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal
Eroticism’, in James Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. 17 (1917)
127–33 (p. 131).
26. Él directed by Luis Buñuel, Ultramar Films, 1952.
27. Donald Chankin, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Hitchcock’s Vertigo ’, in Hitchcock
Annual (Ohio: Gambier, 1993) p. 34.
28. This argument is inspired by Ellis Hanson’s discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s La
ley del deseo (1986). See Ellis Hanson, ‘Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice’,
Screen, vol. 34, no. 2 (1993) pp. 137–61.
29. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge, 1998) p. xvii.
30. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic
Theory of the Disease’, in James Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol.
14 (1915) pp. 261–72.
31. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Lee Edelman, ‘Piss Elegant: Freud,
Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis’, GLQ, vol. 2, nos 1–2 (1995) pp. 149–77.
32. Gallego Llorente, ‘La mirada de Luis Buñuel’.
33. Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, p. 78.
34. For a fine discussion of Lacan’s theory of paranoia, see David Vilaseca, The Apocryphal
Subject: Masochism, Identification, and Paranoia (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).

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35. Cited by Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 118.

36. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of homoeroticism, we discussed
this dynamic with regard to the relationship between Pedro and Jaibo in Chapter
1.
37. See Lauren Berlant, ‘Love, A Queer Feeling’, in Tim Dean and Christopher Lane
(eds) Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) p.
443.
38. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, translated by Ida Macalpine and
Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) pp. 147–48.
See also David B. Allison, Prado De Oliveira, Mark S. Roberts and Allen S. Weiss
(eds) Psychosis and Sexual Identity: Toward a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case (New
York: SUNY Press, 1988).
39. This argument is inspired by Kobena Mercer’s essay, ‘Imaging the Black Man’s
Sex’, in Patricia Holland, Jo Spence and Simon Watney (eds) Photography/Politics
(London: Comedia, 1986) pp. 61–9.
40. The term nothingness is taken from Lacan’s phenomenological account of
consciousness in his chapter, ‘A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of
Consciousness’, in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II:
The Ego in Freud’s Theory, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1988) pp. 40–52.
41. It is important to point out that the negativity of the psychic in Lacanian psycho-
analysis is part of a critique of ego psychology.
42. Kobena Mercer, ‘Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic
Imaginary’, in Bad Object Choices (ed.) How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1991) p. 174.
43. The concept of the gaze follows, in this context, Laura Mulvey’s association of the
gaze with the control of the visual field. In this chapter I shall shortly discuss the
Lacanian notion of the gaze in relation to that part of the visual world that refuses
to be controlled or mastered. For an excellent critique of film theory’s
‘misconceptions’ of the term gaze and screen as mirror, particularly in apparatus
film theory, see Joan Copjec, ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the
Reception of Lacan’, in her Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995) pp. 15–38.
44. Robert Mapplethorpe, Black Book (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986).
45. In Chapter 3, we discussed such an anxiety in relation to anality. See Guy
Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire.
46. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 25.
47. See Sabrina Barton, ‘“Crisscross”: Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train ’,
in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (eds) Male Trouble (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993) p. 249.
48. Hanson, ‘Technology, Paranoia’, p. 139.
49. Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel’, p. 144.
50. For a discussion of some psychological aspects of the mother–child relationship in
the history of Western art, see Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (New
York: Icon Editions, 1994).
51. Cited by Eunice Lipton in her discussion of the representation of women in the
eighteenth-century French paintings of François Boucher. Eunice Lipton, ‘Women,
Pleasure and Painting’, Genders, vol. 7 (1990) p. 75.

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 NOTES

52. See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Mutilation and Meaning’, in David Hillman and Carla
Mazzio (eds) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe
(London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 221–42.
53. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 286.
54. In Chapter 3, I discussed such an axial rotation in relation to Bataille’s concept of
bassesse and the photographic devices in surrealist photography.
55. Nonetheless, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), a dead narrator floating in a
swimming pool tells the story in flashback. Through this innovative technique,
Wilder creates an ambiguous relationship between the materialization of death and
at the same time its denial.
56. Tesson, Él, p. 60.
57. Charles Tesson, Luis Buñuel (Paris: Éditions de l’étoile, 1995) p. 81.
58. See Linda Williams, ‘The Critical Grasp: Buñuelian Cinema and its Critics’, in
Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.) Dada and surrealist Film (New York: Willis Locker & Owens,
1987) pp. 199–206.
59. Following the argument of Weiss, in a different context, we could interpret the
silence in this sequence as the allusion to what Nietzsche defines as the Eternal
Return, which is considered by Weiss to be a contestation rather than a con-
firmation of the reality principle. The Eternal Return reconstitutes experience
according to libidinal difference. This evocation of the history of the subject’s
‘destruction’ in Nietzsche marks a radical separation from Western metaphysical
thought that is centred on the cogito and the history of being as presence. The
Eternal Return ‘is never directly enunciated, it is only alluded to, expressed
obliquely, in dreams, whispers, feverish hallucinations, circumlocutions, silences,
[as in the lack of sound in the sequence behind the window] and ellipses’. See Allen
S. Weiss, ‘Impossible Sovereignty: Between The Will to Power and The Will to Chance ’,
October, vol. 36 (1986) p. 136.
60. Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant and Jim Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary
(London: Arnold, 2001).
61. Tesson, Luis Buñuel, p. 82.
62. See Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
63. Tesson, Luis Buñuel, p. 83.
64. Tesson (Él, p. 49) suggests ‘il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur l’utilisation d’images d’archives
dans l’œuvre de Buñuel ’, namely that there would be a lot to say about the use of
archival images in Buñuel’s work.
65. For a discussion of alternative visual forms in politically avant-garde films, see
Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision
and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) pp. 115–27.
66. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 309.
67. In 1957, Edward Fitzgerald was the art director of Edward Ludwig’s science fiction
film, Black Scorpion produced by Warner Bros. Although Él does not fall into the
genre of the fantastic, its set design does provoke similar dramatic effects.
68. As a child, Buñuel spent his summers in the small village of Calanda, Aragón. His
father had built a house and decorated it in an art-nouveau style to follow the
fashion of the epoch. Buñuel considered this architectural and decorative style
kitsch. He also identified the Catalan Gaudí as one of the most important
representatives of this kitsch fashion. See Luis Buñuel, Mon dernier soupir (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1982) p. 24.

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69. This analysis derives from looking at de Chirico’s paintings. See James Thrall, The
Early Chirico (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
70. Hans Dieter Schaal, ‘Spaces of the Psyche in German Expressionist Film’,
Architectural Design, vol. 70, no. 1 (January 2000) pp. 12–15.
71. See Maurice Tuchamna and Carol S. Eliel (eds) Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and
Outsider Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Princeton
University Press, 1992).
72. Michel Thévoz, Art Brut (New York: Rizzoli, 1976) pp. 25–7.
73. See Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 244–58.
74. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, p. 116.
75. See Shulamith Behr, David Fanning and Douglas Jarman (eds) Expressionism
Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
76. During the 1920s Buñuel wrote film reviews for the Spanish avant-garde journal,
Gaceta literaria. He wrote very favourably about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. See Luis
Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, translated by Garrett
White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
77. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) p. 218.
78. Hollier, Against Architecture, p. xi.
79. See Bhaskar Sarkar, ‘Sound Bites: Fragments on Cinema, Sound, Subjectivity’,
Spectator, vol. 17, no. 2 (1997) pp. 22–35.
80. Philip Friedheim, ‘Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream’, Nineteenth Century
Music, vol. 7, no. 1 (1983) p. 67.
81. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project’, in Hal Foster (ed.) The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983)
p. 9.
82. Schaal, ‘Spaces of the Psyche’, p. 13.
83. Friedheim, ‘Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream’, p. 70.
84. Jeffrey Howe (ed.) Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, and Expression (Chestnut Hill,
MA: Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art/University of Chicago Press,
2001) p. 84.
85. Maureen Turim, Abstraction in Avant-garde Films (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan
University Press, 1985) p. 3.
86. Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 1 (1982) pp.
77–92.
87. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 138.
88. See Susan Bordo, ‘Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism’, in Linda
Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990) pp. 133–56.
89. Sarkar, ‘Sound Bites’, p. 25.
90. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, p. 110.
91. B. Ruby Rich, ‘Meet Jeanne Buñuel’, Sight and Sound, vol. 5, no. 8 (1995) pp. 20–3.
92. Cited by Jean-Michel Goutier, ‘La hydra de Roma’, in Emmanuel Guigon (ed.) Luis
Buñuel y el surrealismo (Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 2000) p. 230.
93. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 305.
94. See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
(Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1987).
95. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, ‘Le Plaisir de l’escalier’, Positif (September 1993) p. 87.
96. Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel’, p. 144.

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 NOTES

97. In 1996, Valeria Sarmiento, a Chilean film director living in France, made a film,
entitled Elle, which was also based on Mercedes Pinto’s novel. It would be
interesting to pursue research on Sarmiento’s film to explore how a female
filmmaker reinterprets the question of sexual politics in the novel.
98. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics,
see Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
99. See Lacan’s discussion of Das Ding in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) pp. 43–70. Samuels’s book offers a clear
explanation of these Lacanian concepts.
100. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) pp. 230–43.
101. See Rico Franses, ‘In the Picture, but out of Place: The Lacanian Gaze, Again’, For
Da, vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall 2001) <http://www.fortda.org/fall_01/picture.html>
(accessed 18 November 2002).
102. For an excellent discussion of the connection between the Real and the uncanny,
see Mladen Dolar, ‘I Shall Be With You On Your Wedding Night’, pp. 5–23.
103. Parveen Adams, ‘The Art of Analysis: Mary Kelly’s Interim and the Discourse of the
Analyst’, October, vol. 58 (1991) p. 93.
104. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bitextuality, p. 31.
105. Tesson, Él, p. 47.
106. See Joan Copjec, ‘The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine’, October, vol. 23 (Winter
1982) pp. 43–59.
107. For a feminist account of the relationship between the visible and desublimatory
narcissism, see Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
108. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 72.
109. Copjec, Read my Desire, p. 21.
110. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible, p. 125.
111. See Christian Metz, ‘Le film de fiction et son spectateur’, Communications, vol. 23
(1975) pp. 108–35.
112. Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 34.
113. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 109.
114. The terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ denote a performative state of activity and
passivity, control and being controlled. Mulvey’s binary opposition does not take
into account more hybridized forms of sexuality and identification.
115. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible, pp. 140–42.
116. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 73.
117. For a critique of the Sartrean je, see Norman Bryson, ‘The Gaze in the Expanded
Field’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) pp. 86–108.
118. Facticity is the contingent condition of an individual human life. In the
existentialism of Sartre, facticity includes the prospect of death against which
human freedom is to be exercised.
119. Bryson, ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’, p. 91.
120. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 74.
121. Ibid., pp. 88–9.
122. Franses, ‘In the Picture’.

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123. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 105–6.

124. Ibid., p. 106.
125. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible, p. 174.
126. Lacan draws on Roger Caillois’s essay on animal mimicry, which had an extra-
ordinary resonance within the psychoanalytic circle that developed in Paris in the
1930s. See Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, pp. 17–32. I
discuss Caillois’s notion of mimicry in Chapter 1. For a history of psychoanalysis in
France, see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.
127. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Looking Awry’, October, vol. 50 (1989) pp. 31–56.
128. See Jacqueline Rose, ‘Paranoia and the Film System’, in Constance Penley (ed.)
Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988) pp. 141–58.
129. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 309.
130. Freddy Buache, Luis Buñuel (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1975) p. 62.
131. This insistence on windows and on looking through them will be the central theme
in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Once again, we can detect the kind of
intertextual dialogue that these two filmmakers established. For a fine discussion of
the gaze in Rear Window, see Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality.
132. In Chapter 1, we discussed how Buñuel’s films challenge this privileged spectatorial
position.
133. Turim, Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films, p. 53.
134. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 75.
135. Ibid., p. 116.
136. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 305.
137. See Judith Halberstam, ‘Imagined Violence, Queer Violence Representation, Rage,
and Resistance’, Social Text, vol. 37 (Winter 1993) p. 198.
138. Rose, ‘Paranoia and the Film System’, p. 145.
139. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, p. 5.
140. Ibid., p. 121.
141. Freddy Buache, The Cinema of Luis Buñuel, translated by Peter Graham (London:
The Tantivy Press, 1973) pp. 66–7.
142. Tesson, Él, p. 92.
143. See Heather Puttock, ‘Vsevolod Pudovkin and the Theory of Montage’, Architectural
Design, vol. 70, no. 1 (2000) pp. 9–11.
144. Víctor Fuentes, Los mundos de Buñuel (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2000) p. 93.
145. Barton, ‘Crisscross’, p. 245.
146. Rose, ‘Paranoia and the Film System’, p. 152.
147. I am indebted to Edelman’s ‘Tea-rooms and Sympathy’ which establishes this
important connection between the sexual and the visual.
148. See Leo Bersani, ‘Sociality and Sexuality’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4 (2000) pp.
641–56.

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235
INDEX
___________
abject, 2, 24, 29, 30–3, 41–2, 54–8,
62–3, 65, 86, 105, 107, 117, 119,
198 n.18, 204 n.57 n.59; abjection,
2, 13, 24–5, 31–2, 42, 52–4, 56–7,
61–2, 68, 105, 107, 112, 116–17,
136, 149, 160, 181
abstract expressionism, 112
Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto, 3, 4, 191
n.36
Adams, Parveen, 82, 134, 141, 170,
208 n.62
AIDS, 58, 67, 199 n.44
Alatriste, Gustavo, 91, 185, 186
Alejandro (in Ensayo de un crimen),
123, 187
Alemán, Miguel, 16, 30, 52
alienation, 108, 148, 158, 169, 171,
179
altération, 51, 92, 141
alterity, 15, 20, 99, 167
Althusser, Louis, 19, 172
Amalio, don (in Viridiana), 75
ambivalence, 44, 49, 54, 79–80, 84,
92, 121, 137, 200 n.74
anal stage, 13, 88, 106
anality, 13, 49, 88, 100, 103, 105,
106, 181, 212 n.45
apparatus film theory, 14, 172–3
Archi, 120
Archibaldo, 126
Archibaldo de la Cruz (in Ensayo
de un crimen), 118–24, 126,
128–31, 133–5, 137, 139,
144, 146, 182, 186–7
Argentina, 21
Artaud, Antonin, 94
auteur films, 10–12, 128
auteurist critical tradition, 3, 5,
10, 21, 128, 147
Babenco, Hector, 27
Babuscio, Jack, 35
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 94, 95, 202
n.20
baroque, 65, 119, 150
Barthes, Roland, 9, 13, 17–18, 22,
49, 58, 77
Barton, Sabrina, 179
base materialism, 58, 109
bassesse, 111, 213 n.54
Bataille, Georges, 6, 13, 18, 51, 53,
57–8, 63, 88, 91–3, 101, 105, 107,
109–13, 117, 122, 141, 164, 190
n.17, 202 n.4, 204 n.48 n.55, 209
n.86, 213 n.54
Battersby, Christine, 77
Baudelaire, Charles, 121
Baylie, Claude, 147
Bazin, André, 10, 190 n.32, 191
n.36
237
QUEERING BUÑUEL
Belle de jour, 5, 39–41, 67, 124,
136, 159
Bellmer, Hans, 111, 118, 136,
206 n.3
Bellour, Raymond, 18, 127
Benjamin, Jessica, 153
Benjamin, Walter, 94
Benshoff, Harry M., 67
Bentham, Jeremy, 164
Bergson, Henri, 100
Bergstrom, Janet, 127
Berlin, 164
Bersani, Leo, 42, 84, 139, 142,
144, 209 n.81
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 40
Bhabha, Homo, 44, 49
Bilbao, 90
Blangis, Duke of, 75
Boiffard, Jacques-André, 111,
112
Bois, Yves-Alain, 110
Booker, Keith, 95
Bordo, Susan, 167
Bordwell, David, 98, 113
Bourgeois, Louis, 73, 134
Bowie, David, 199 n.45
Brazil, 21, 27
Brecht, Berthold, 108
Breton, André, 58, 202 n.4,
204 n.55, 205 n.76
Bryson, Norman, 174
Buache, Freddy, 178
Buñuel, Juan-Luis, 99
Butler, Judith, 2, 24, 25, 142,
191 n.16, 209 n.96
Cacarizo (Los olvidados), 36, 185
Cahiers du Cinéma, 10
Caillois, Roger, 16, 216 n.126
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 93
Camera Lucida, 17
camp, 33–7, 67, 207 n.42
Canada, 141
Cannes, 10, 72, 99
238
Cannes Film Festival, 10, 72, 147,
192 n.22
capitalism, 97, 104
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Mirisi da,
150
Carlota (in Ensayo de un crimen), 120,
121–3, 126, 128–9, 187
carnivalesque, 94–6
Cartesian thought, 14, 93, 138, 149,
162, 167, 171, 174
Caruth, Cathy, 143, 145
Case, Sue-Ellen, 68
castration, 14, 40, 42, 54–5, 70, 80,
82, 86, 115, 127, 132, 134, 151–3,
160, 173, 175, 182
Catholicism, 3
Centro Universitario de Estudios
Cinematográficos (CUEC), 91
Cet obscur objet du désir, 4
Champagne, Rosaria, 26
Chankin, Donald, 153
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 81, 85
Chatman, Seymour, 45, 135
chiaroscuro, 65, 150
Chirico, Giorgio de, 162, 214 n.69
Christ, 37, 68, 71, 72, 75, 159
Cidade de Deus, 27, 28, 194 n.60
Clementi, Pierre (in Belle de jour), 39,
40, 41
close-ups, 39, 42, 44–5, 60, 101, 112,
154
Cobo, Roberto, 39, 41, 196 n.111
Cocteau, Jean, 79, 121, 192 n.22
coming out, 26, 38
compulsion, 1, 49, 102, 115, 119,
139–40, 143
confession, 125–6
consumption, 16, 32, 43, 162
Cooke, Lynne, 103
Copjec, Joan, 65, 66, 172
Córdova, Arturo de, 158
Coward, Rosalind, 71
Creed, Barbara, 31, 39, 56–7, 121
Cros, Edmond, 23, 37, 41

cross-dressing, 79, 81
Crowther, Bosley, 27
Cuba, 21
D’Lugo, Marvin, 37
Dada, 83, 95
Dalí, Salvador, 36, 78, 105, 148, 204,
n.55, 206 n.14, 209 n.73
Davis, Brad (in Querelle), 40, 41
de Sica, Vittorio, 21
Dean, Carolyn, 93
Dean, Tim, 25, 132, 138
death drive, 105, 115, 118, 135, 139,
140, 142
del Río, Dolores, 37
Deleuze, Gilles, 13–14, 54, 69–71,
85, 88–9, 99, 114–15, 203 n.35
Deneuve, Cathérine, 64, 67, 136,
199, n.45
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 58, 208 n.53
desire, 2–5, 7–8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 24–5,
31, 34, 39–40, 42, 49, 51, 56–7, 60,
63, 65, 68, 70, 73, 76–7, 80, 82–4,
86, 89, 98, 101, 104, 106, 113–16,
118–19, 121, 129–33, 135–6, 138,
141, 144, 146–8, 150, 153–8, 162,
168, 170, 174–5
desublimation, 14, 94, 105, 113
diegetic time, 118, 123–4, 126, 144
Dionysus, 94
dirt, 102, 103
disgust, 66, 101, 106, 111
Dolar, Mladen, 33
Dollimore, Jonathan, 6, 22, 34, 37,
46, 85–6, 106, 160, 201 n.95
Donnell, Sidney, 119, 134, 135
Dordsay, Michel, 168
Douglas, Mary, 102
Dracula, Count, 64
Dresden, 156
Drouzy, Maurice, 10
Duchamp, Marcel, 78–9, 81–2, 110,
121
Durgnat, Raymond, 63
INDEX
Dyer, Richard, 34, 129, 158
Eberwein, Robert, 100, 124
écriture, 6, 46
Edelman, Lee, 49
Edwards, Gwynne, 3, 88, 94, 109
ego, 3, 18, 33, 41, 44, 70–1,
77–81, 105–6, 115, 126, 137, 139,
148–9, 157, 162, 171, 179;
complete, 65; fragmented, 45;
ideal, 43, 44; psychology, 25, 212
n.41
Él, 14, 147–51, 154, 156–8, 162–3,
165, 167, 169–70, 172–4, 176,
178–80, 187
El ángel exterminador, 13, 88–98, 101,
106, 108–9, 111–13, 115–16, 186
El Poca (in Viridiana), 73
Elsaesser, Thomas, 133
Endgame, 94
Enedina (in Viridiana), 54, 72–3,
75–81, 86
Enlightenment, 30, 33, 42, 165–8
Ensayo de un crimen, 14, 117–19, 121,
127, 130–2, 134, 136–9, 141,
143–5, 186, 206 n.2
entrapment, 94, 97, 98
Evans, Peter, 3, 5, 22, 31–2, 39, 59,
64–5, 120, 122, 131, 148, 150,
163–4
existentialism, 93, 215 n.118
facticity, 174, 215 n.118
fascism, 40, 109, 209 n.73
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 40–1
Faulkner, Sally, 3
Fautrier, Jean, 141, 209 n.86
Félix, María, 37
femininity, 32, 37, 40, 57, 60, 62, 79,
81, 120, 129, 153
feminism, 12, 25, 83
Fer, Briony, 112, 151
Fernández, Emilio, 10, 21, 26, 191
n.36
239
QUEERING BUÑUEL
fetish, 32, 60, 81–2, 134, 151
fetishism, 32, 76, 82, 137, 148–9,
151, 173, 196 n.123, 211 n.19
Figueroa, Gabriel, 10, 26
film noir, 125, 136, 164
Fitzgerald, Edward, 26, 162, 213
n.67
Flaubert, Gustave, 121
Fletcher, John, 104
Foster, Hal, 55, 57, 104, 131, 142,
207 n.47
Foucault, Michel, 1–2, 58, 114,
125–6, 164, 194 n.64
fragmentation, 43–5, 52, 85–6, 138,
143, 162, 166, 181
fragmented body, 13, 18, 33, 44, 66,
137
France, 10, 141, 147, 216, n.126
Francisco (in Él), 148–60, 162–5,
169, 176–9, 182, 187–8
Franco, Francisco, 72
Franco, Jean, 30, 32, 38
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 14, 31–2, 39,
54, 56, 70, 78, 80, 82–4, 86, 88,
103–6, 110, 114–15, 118, 131, 137,
139–40, 142–3, 148, 151–6, 209
n.81 n.93, 211 n.21
Freudian, 12–13, 31–2, 54–5, 69, 71,
81, 85, 88–9, 104, 106, 114–15,
154–5, 158, 170, 197 n.4, 201 n.88,
202 n.4, 207 n.47
Fried, Michael, 113
Friedheim, Philip, 165
Frosh, Stephen, 55
Fuentes, Carlos, 9, 179
Fuentes, Victor, 127
Galindo, Alejandro, 22
Gallego Llorente, José Luis, 154
Gallop, Jane, 78, 83
garbage, 27, 28
Garber, Marjorie, 81
García Canclini, Néstor, 30
García Riera, Emilio, 23
240
gaze, 39, 43, 48, 57, 64, 76–7, 142,
149–50, 155, 157, 171–9, 181, 208
n.50, 212 n.43, 216 n.131
Genet, Jean, 40, 95
Genette, Gérard, 135
genital sexuality, 56, 70, 71, 84
German Expressionism, 130, 149,
164–5; German Expressionist,
149–50, 163–5
Germany, 137, 165
Gestalt, 75, 113
Giacometti, Alberto, 132
Gloria (in Él), 148, 150–5, 158–62,
165, 167–9, 171, 176–8, 187–8
Gober, Robert, 58, 102, 198 n.18
Golden Age of cinema, 91, 93
Gothic, 22, 64, 65, 67
Greenberg, Clement, 88, 113
Guanajuato, 155, 188
Guattari, Félix, 14, 79, 88–9, 114–15,
202 n.3
Hallas, Roger, 8
Hanson, Ellis, 67, 158
Hart, Lynda, 48
Hatoum, Mona, 62, 63
Heidegger, Martin, 117
Hesse, Eva, 112–13, 115
hétérologie, 53
heteronormativity, 2, 24, 34, 85
heterosexuality, 1, 24, 77, 85, 116,
154, 157
Higginbotham, Virginia, 4, 88, 92–3,
99, 108, 204 n.57
Hispanism, 5, 11
Hitchcock, Alfred, 49, 59–60, 97,
153, 164, 178, 216 n.131
Hoberman, J., 22, 194
Hocquenghem, Guy, 84, 104, 106,
114
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 80
Hollier, Denis, 164
Hollywood, 7, 21–2, 43, 56, 91,
98–100, 119, 125, 164, 179

homoeroticism, 13, 18, 34–6, 194
n.73, 212 n.36
homophobia, 2, 24–5, 34, 107
Homos, 42
homosexuality, 1, 14, 24, 71, 78,
82–3, 116, 125, 148, 156, 158, 200
n.74, 201 n.88, 211 n.21
horizontality, 113, 181
hysteria, 39, 121
ideal ego, 148
identity, 2–3, 7–8, 16, 19, 25–6, 34,
37–8, 40, 45, 48, 52, 55–6, 78, 80,
83, 86, 91, 104–7, 118, 121, 132,
138, 141, 155, 171, 207 n.21
Il conformista, 40
incest, 64
Inda, Estela, 37
informe, 13, 88, 94, 105, 107, 109–11,
117, 181
interpellation, 19, 76
Irigaray, Luce, 77
Irigaray, Luce, n.71, 200
Italy, 36
Iversen, Margaret, 113
Jaibo (in Los olvidados), 18, 20, 30–1,
34–5, 38–43, 46, 184, 196 n.111,
212 n.36
Jaime, don (in Viridiana), 54,
58–61, 63–6, 68–9, 73, 81, 185
Jay, Martin, 164
Joan of Arc, 121
Johns, Jasper, 102
Jones, Allen, 60, 80, 113, 198 n.25
Jones, Amelia, 79
jouissance, 18–19, 52, 54, 57, 65, 71,
79, 98, 115, 134–7, 139, 171
Julián (in Los olvidados), 30–1, 36, 184
Julio (in El ángel exterminador), 108,
204 n.65
Kant, Immanuel, 77
Kantaris, Geoffrey, 21
INDEX
Kelley, Mike, 198 n.18
Kelly, Mary, 121
Keown, Dominic, 19, 43
Kinder, Marsha, 5, 64, 76, 134, 152,
162, 169, 178, 200 n.66
Klein, Melanie, 54
Kopelson, Kevin, 19
Krauss, Rosalind, 57, 74, 88, 92, 105,
109–10, 113
Kristeva, Julia, 8, 13, 24, 44, 53–6,
58, 61, 69, 105, 107, 117, 119, 159,
167, 197 n.4
L’Age d’or, 4, 75, 94
l’amour fou, 156, 163
L’informe, mode d’emploi (exhibition),
110
La terra trema, 36
Labanyi, Jo, 18, 44, 64
Lacan, Gilles, 202 n.3
Lacan, Jacques, 3, 13, 17, 20, 23–6,
30, 44, 48, 54–6, 66, 74, 77, 83, 93,
98, 113–14, 117, 142, 144, 147–9,
161, 169–73, 175, 179, 191 n.1,
194 n.68, 208 n.50, 209 n.88, 216
n.126
Lacanian psychoanalysis, 23, 24, 88,
212 n.41
Lacanian Real, 3, 13–14, 16–17, 20,
23–6, 30, 32–3, 42, 46, 48–9, 51–2,
64–6, 68, 77, 85, 97–8, 115,
117–18, 130–1, 134–5, 140, 142–4,
146, 155, 161, 170–1, 176, 178,
180–1, 209 n.88
Lajer-Burchart, Ewa, 62, 63
Lane, Janice, 132, 133
Lang, Fritz, 164
Laplanche, Jean, 139, 142
Lastra, James, 193 n.40
Latin America, 21, 30, 90
Lavinia (in Ensayo de un crimen),
125–6, 129, 134–9, 187
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 5
Le Fantôme de la liberté, 4
241
QUEERING BUÑUEL
Leonardo da Vinci, 69, 72–3, 75,
78–9, 81–3, 185, 200 n.74
Leutrat, Jean-Louis, 126
LHOOQ, 78
Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, 169
libido, 84, 129, 156
Lichtenstein, Therese, 118, 137,
206 n.3
Lillo, Gastón, 4, 10, 33, 45, 61, 69,
74, 77
linearity, 45, 98, 99, 160
London, 28, 90, 201
López, Ana, 22
Lorca, Federico García, 79, 120
Los olvidados, 10, 13, 16, 18–22,
26–30, 32–4, 36–9, 41–6, 49,
51–2, 109, 184, 192 n.22,
194 n.60
Ludwig, Edward, n.67, 213
machismo, 39, 158
Madonna de Port Lligat, 36
Madonna in trono col bambino e santi,
36
Manrique, Jorge, 93
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 157
María Candelaria, 10
marianismo, 36, 195 n.93
Marta (in Los olvidados), 31, 36,
184
Marx, Karl, 32
Marxist, 19, 20, 32, 73
masculinity, 34–5, 39–40, 43, 79,
153, 159, 173
masochism, 13, 54, 69–71, 78, 85–6,
137, 160, 181
May 1968 student revolts, 90, 104
Mayne, Judith, 7
Maza, Maximiliano, 91
Meche (in Los olvidados), 39, 42–3,
45, 50, 185
Meirelles, Fernando, 27
melodrama, 11, 21, 125, 136
Mémbrez, Nancy J., 88, 93
242
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 151
Metropolis, 164
Metz, Christian, 76
Mexican period, 10, 11, 26
Mexico, 4, 20–1, 26, 30, 33, 90–1,
119, 147, 192 n.22
Mexico City, 22, 28–9, 52, 178, 184,
187–8
Miklitsch, Robert, 25
Miller, John, 58, 105
Millet, Jean François, 74, 120
Miró, Joan, 51
mirror stage, 3, 75, 172
modernism, 110, 113
Mona Lisa, 78
Monsiváis, Carlos, 91
Mulvey, Laura, 18, 31, 32, 43, 60,
172, 173, 212 n.43, 215 n.114
Munch, Edvard, 165, 166, 167
Murnau, F. W., 164
name of the father, 98, 170
narcissism, 68, 149, 153
Nazi, 40, 137
neorealism, 21, 27, 36
neurosis, 82, 89, 118, 140,
142–3
New Latin American Cinema, 21
New York, 27, 28
Nixon, Mignon, 134, 138
No Exit, 94
Nobilé, Monsieur, 109
Nobilé family, 99, 107, 186
Norway, 165
Nosferatu, 164
Nosotros los pobres, 22
Oedipal, 2, 14, 35, 40, 54, 69, 71,
82–4, 89, 104, 106, 114–15, 122,
127, 130–1, 133–4, 146, 153, 159,
170
Oedipus, 13, 35, 55, 83–4, 86, 89,
104, 114–16, 127, 140, 144, 159,
170, 202 n.3

Oliver, Kelly, 55
Olney, Ian, 99
Oms, Marcel, 130
opticality, 88, 110, 113
oral-sadistic fantasy, 134
Orlan, 141, 146
Pablo (in Él), 155, 157, 188
paranoia, 14, 114, 147–8, 154, 156,
158, 179, 181
Paris, 28, 90, 110, 141, 162, 216
n.126
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 50
Patricia (in Ensayo de un crimen),
123–4, 126, 129, 187
Pavis, Patrice, 8, 9
Pedro (in Los olvidados), 28, 31–2,
35–40, 42–3, 45–8, 50, 184, 212
n.36
persecution, 80, 147, 154–6, 179,
188
phallocentrism, 32, 158
phallus, 24–5, 78, 82, 86–7, 104,
152
pictorial realism, 36
Piero della Francesca, 36
Pietro (in Teorema), 50
Pinto, Mercedes, 147, 215 n.97
Pixote, 27
Pompidou Centre, 141
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 142
Porfiriato years, 30
pornography, 40, 137
post-structuralism, 12, 58
pre-Oedipal, 13–14, 40, 48, 54,
69–71, 130, 133–4, 137–8, 140,
153, 159, 161, 169, 177, 180, 182,
209 n.93
Prévert, Jacques, 192 n.22
Prieur, Annick, 34
prohibition, 6, 55, 58, 86, 118, 131,
145, 159, 183
projection, 35, 80, 98, 111, 118, 130,
149, 151, 153, 157, 163, 172, 179
INDEX
psychoanalysis, 1, 3, 5, 11–12, 14, 17,
24–5, 55, 70, 77, 81, 83–4, 86,
88–9, 104, 114–15, 138–9, 146,
156, 169, 172, 179, 191 n.16, 205
n.82, 206 n.2, 210 n.9, 216 n.126
psychosis, 118, 148, 158, 208 n.68
punctum, 13, 17–18, 49, 142, 191 n.14
queer theory, 5, 8, 11–12, 19, 25, 36
queerness, 2, 11, 13, 19, 23, 42,
68–9, 78
Querelle, 40, 41
Raúl (in Él), 148, 155, 160, 176, 178,
187–8
Ray, Man, 78, 110, 111, 121
Reagan, Ronald, 67
Rear Window, 49, 216 n.131
Recollection, 62
Renaissance, 36, 75, 78, 101, 172,
175, 186
repetition, 14, 59, 78, 99, 124, 130–1,
139–46, 181
repression, 24, 38, 49, 70, 83, 88, 98,
103, 105, 107, 132, 136, 146, 148,
170
reproduction, 6, 64, 78, 104, 157
Rich, B. Ruby, 168
Riera, Emilio, 72
Rimbaud, Arthur, 121
Rita (in Viridiana), 63–4
Rodríguez, Ismael, 22
Rucar, Jeanne, 168
Russo, Mary, 95
Sade, Marquis de, 59, 129, 162
sadism, 69, 92, 137
sadomasochism, 137
Samuels, Robert, 97–8, 140, 142,
173, 178
Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente, 75
Sandro, Paul, 4, 109, 203 n.35
Santander, Hugo, 96
Sarandon, Susan, 67
243
QUEERING BUÑUEL
Sarkar, Bhaskar, 168
Sarmiento, Valeria, 215 n.97
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 94, 174–5,
215 n.118
Satan, 37, 38
scatology, 88, 100, 101, 106
schizoanalysis, 115
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 165
Schor, Naomi, 9
Schreber, Paul, 156
Schwartz, Ronald, 72
Sciuscià, 21
Scott, Tony, 67
Second World War, 93
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 145,
212 n.36
Sélavy, Rose, 78, 79
semiotic chora, 54, 66, 69
Sévérine (in Belle de jour), 39
shame, 103–4, 106, 145
Shaviro, Steven, 48, 114
Sherman, Cindy, 31, 58, 110
Silverman, Kaja, 70, 127, 131,
167, 174, 176
Smith, Paul Julian, 27
social exclusion, 19, 98
Sontag, Susan, 40
Spain, 30, 58, 72, 199 n.44
spectatorship, 4–5, 7, 12, 15,
17, 34, 39, 135, 172, 195
n.104
speculum, 77
Stam, Robert, 59, 77, 79, 88, 92,
94–7, 108, 110, 158, 169
Steihaug, Jan-Ove, 57
Stewart, Susan, 25
studium, 17
sublimation, 2, 28, 51, 55, 60–1,
66, 70, 86, 103, 113, 118, 172
subversion, 5–6, 15, 37, 51, 56, 59,
73, 75, 85, 96, 105, 164, 167, 174,
179
Suleiman, Susan, 5, 78, 81–3, 191
n.39
244
superego, 70–1, 86, 169
surrealism, 3, 6, 8, 58, 95, 111, 119,
164, 192 n.26, 202 n.4, 205 n.76
n.82, 206 n.3, 207 n.47, 210 n.9
surrealist, 4–6, 12–13, 21, 31, 48, 59,
72, 75, 78–9, 83, 88, 91–3, 96, 100,
105, 110–11, 118, 120–1, 123, 129,
136, 144, 156, 168–9, 182, 208
n.50, 213 n.54
suture, 20, 76, 100, 162, 172,
177
taboo/taboos, 6, 12, 38, 46, 54, 58,
62, 102–3, 107
Taylor, Simon, 57
Teorema, 50
Tesson, Charles, 148, 160, 161, 179,
213 n.64
textuality, 5, 146, 170
The Bald Soprano, 94
The Birds, 97
The Hunger, 67
The Last Supper, 69, 72, 74–5, 78–9,
83, 86, 185
theatre of the absurd, 94
Third World, 20, 21
Tobias, James, 194 n.64
Tom of Finland, 40
transgression, 5–6, 10, 12, 26–7, 44,
54, 68, 83, 85, 95, 106, 113, 120,
183, 196 n.126
transvestism, 81, 95
transvestite, 81, 156
trauma, 14, 26, 32, 42, 86, 117–18,
124, 130–2, 135–6, 139, 142–6
Trinidad, Sister (in Ensayo de un
crimen), 122, 125, 126, 187
Tristana, 64, 67
Truffaut, François, 128
tuché, 142, 144
Tuñón, Julia, 29–30, 39, 46–8,
50
Turim, Maureen, 144, 167, 177,
208 n.70

tychic point, 142, 209 n.88
Ubac, Raoul, 111
Un chien andalou, 4, 48, 105, 123, 151,
160
UNAM, 91
uncanny, 33, 40, 41, 44, 58, 65, 80,
131, 132, 182, 215 n.102
unconscious, 1, 3, 4, 9, 14, 25, 26,
31, 51, 57, 71, 82, 89, 92, 98, 99,
114, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138,
141, 144, 149, 151, 152, 154, 163,
170, 178, 179, 181, 199 n.42, 208
n.68
United Kingdom, 67
United States, 21, 58, 67, 104, 112
Usigli, Rodolfo, 119
vampire, 13, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68
Vatican, 72
Velasco, Father (in Él), 148, 150,
159, 178, 187, 188
Vertigo, 59, 60, 153
Vilaseca, David, 12
INDEX
Viridiana, 13, 53–4, 56, 58–66, 68–9,
71–4, 78, 83, 86, 91, 109, 185
Visconti, Luchino, 36, 195 n.95
voyeurism, 69, 76, 149, 173, 177,
178
Wagner, Richard, 165
Watney, Simon, 67
Weeks, Jeffrey, 84
Weinberg, Jonathan, 102, 103
Weiss, Allen, 88, 106, 115
Weiss, Allen S., n.59, 213
Whitman, Walt, 120
Wilder, Billy, n.55, 213
Williams, Linda, 4, 144
Wilson, Sarah, n.76, 205
Wood, Michael, 124
Wu, Harmony H., 5
Yarza, Alejandro, 61, 69, 74, 77
Žižek, Slavoj, 20, 41, 60–1, 97, 130,
152, 176
Zupančič, Alenka, 98
245