On the surface Robinson Crusoe (1954, Luis Buñuel) is the heroic tale of a castaway surviving being marooned on an island for 28 years. But when have I ever cared about what’s on the surface? Before I get into it though, I will concede this movie is entertaining even if viewed merely as a survival adventure.
On the macro level, this movie is about imperialism. When FRIDAY speaks in his foreign tongue and with hand gestures points to his heart and mind, this shows CRUSOE’S success in subjugating him. That’s the macro arc. The English hero whose ship encounters a storm as he’s on his way to Africa to buy negro slaves for his fellow planters in Brazil, then becomes governor of a foreign land appears noble here.
Throughout the movie, when savages shore up on the island, Crusoe’s first instinct is to murder them. And in the third act, when preparing to do so once more, he finds that instead there are now armed white men on the beach—so he reacts with diplomacy.
Whereas on the micro, especially the first half of the film, Robinson Crusoe actually is Buñuel material. The standout has got to be the extended dream sequence as vision of Crusoe’s father appearing to him in his quarters. We get the character contextualized through social class when his father describes to the son his middle state between low: misery/labors/hardships; and high, pride/envy/luxury/ambition. So the film is about Crusoe’s trial through experiencing both.
But this dream sequence also features the same actor playing Crusoe and his father. And as his delirium is induced from dying of thirst (perishing from lack of knowledge?), we get all this surrealist imagery like his father bathing a wild boar, and himself drowning or possibly also a form of baptism/rebirth. The whole first half has a dreamlike quality, then when Crusoe first encounters other humans the second half begins. The fantasy sequence where Crusoe imagines detonating a bomb and we see the explosion with projectile body pieces and limbs of the savages thrust into the air is wild.
What seems most at stake here is Buñuel’s specialty in depicting not only Crusoe’s increasing suspicions, jealousy, and objectification of Friday, but also his selfish fear of abandonment. Buñuel is a master at illuminating this dark side of a man they’d never allow anyone to see. This is man’s confusion when in pursuit of love, be it romantic or in this case towards that of a friend. In the second half it becomes clear there’s no way you can take anything Crusoe says as noble, and it becomes a matter of how stubbornly his values are based on self-deception and hypocrisy.
The nature of this dynamic is evident in the scene where Crusoe succumbs to his paranoia that Friday has conceived to betray him. Crusoe goes to retrieve some manacles and chains he recalls originally having obtained with the original intentions of using on some slaves he was going to buy—it even seems as he’s like fondly bemoaning this missed opportunity.This is how man can be betrayed by his heart. When he sees no difference between owning a slave, or a dog, or a friend, what can be done for him?
I think this film is scary. And again, as so often, Buñuel shows how resonant a line of dialogue can be: that same dream sequence Crusoe’s father’s ominous chagrined lament “God will not fogive you. You will die like a dog,” could be read as a key to the more truthful ending that’s not shown for the hero.
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