The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

Ensayo de un crimen (1955, Luis Buñuel) uses the male ego and its infatuation with women to construct an elaborate system of illusion and confusion. ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ is as mixed up as they said he was. Time has proven so. But to what avail?

     The set-up of the story begins with Archibaldo as a child. He’s a spoiled brat whose governess tells him a tale about a music box that when you play it, has the power to kill whomever you’re thinking about if you wish them dead. He does. And she dies. We get a shot of her body lying on the floor, the frame cutting off her head above the neck—and emphasis on the thigh high stockings she’s wearing. This motif begins to illustrate how mixed up he is into adulthood. His sexual desire for women is linked with the impulse to murder them.

     The film pathologizes infatuation. Archibaldo defines himself as being unable to decide whether he wants to be either a criminal or a saint. And there are other references to this, like when he sees LAVINIA in the nightclub, and the shot of her is framed with flames in the foreground, he says she looks pretty like a witch at the stake or Joan of Arc—a criminal or a saint. This is the foundation of how mixed up he is because of how conflicted he is and confused about his desire for women.

 

The film isn’t meant to be read literally. If Buñuel is expressing through cinema a language of emotions, the urge to kill these women is code for his infatuation over these women. We don’t know what makes up his desire. There’s no inventory to categorize it. But it’s probably something like sexual desire, kink, vanilla, love, beauty, marriage, fear, loyalty, apprehension, jealousy, and paranoia, or something along those lines. 

     And what do we get through the emotional communication if murder is a way to express his conflicted infatuation? By planning the murders, he is willing to give up everything, risk going to prison, and he’s tortured with guilt. When he tries to tell CARLOTA about his drive to murder women (his inner feelings) he can’t. When he turns himself in to the authorities, they don’t believe him and laugh it off. Because this romantic infatuation with women only exists in his head, and he can’t put it into words in any way that anyone would understand and even if he could, they wouldn’t care.

     Because as Buñuel has shown, with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. When I first started working on this claim I meant cinematically Buñuel uses illusions to symbolize the delusions his male leads are obsessed with. And one of the best examples in Ensayo de un crimen is Lavinia and the mannequin modeled after her. It’s not difficult to see that the reason the mannequin looks so much liker her in some shots is because it’s the real actress with effects make-up on, holding very still. The mannequin is important because it shows that Archibaldo objectifies women—especially the scene where he kisses the mannequin on the mouth and then kisses the real Lavinia on the mouth. But by using the real actress as mannequin it’s also as if it’s emphasizing the illusion that for us even Lavinia is fake because cinema is itself an illusion. The camera lies 24 times per second. Think about also in the wedding photo, once Carlota is framed by the camera within the frame, ALEJANDRO shoots her. In this film true love is an illusion, a lie.

     At the wedding there’s that conversation among the PRIEST, THE COLONEL, and THE INSPECTOR where they all agree the presentation is all that matters—this blatant hypocrisy. That there isn’t going to be a bride because she gets murdered, or that the bride doesn’t love the groom doesn’t matter, because what’s important for the priest is that the wedding was held in the Catholic church with its pomp like a blanket of poetry. And the other guys cry over the colors of the regiment as to prove their patriotism. The illusion of a wedding as sanctified institution. The illusion of a flag as patriotism. 

 

Oh yeah this film is also really funny. The ending is completely absurdist and seems to mimic commercial roms. Archibaldo sees that huge grasshopper on a tree in the park and wants to squash it with his cane. But Lavinia happens to randomly show up and they leave happily ever after. Because despite all that he’s been through and how mixed up he is, of course he still wants to fall in love. The illusion can exist in the movies. The illusion can exist in real life.

Death

In middle school I used to think gangs were cool. Most of the kids in those gangs were Mexican. I never knew what they did exactly. They had cool names. CCG (Corpus Christi Gangsters), LE (Los Encinos), NSBS (Northside Bomb Squad), Sureños (13), Latin Kings, Piru. They wore Starter jackets with L.A. Raiders, L.A. Kings, or UNLV. Supposedly they fought each other. 

     I also knew some dudes who could defend themselves pretty good who would say gangs are stupid. I guess there’s always been an appeal to (along with an aversion to) prove your manliness through defending the honor of a larger group. From wars to wannabe gangbangers, it’s been a part of our nature. Apart from defending the colors of your nation’s flag or your set, there’s a separate honor that man can fight to uphold: the blood feud.

 

El río y la muerte (1954, Luis Buñuel) is a Western set in Mexico about the historic transition from savage to civilized. But it also deals with codes of masculinity forcefully conditioning a society of men awaiting the inevitable moment when it’s time for them to defend their honor with guns. El río y la muerte pathologizes the blood feud. It’s a tale of violence. Excessive violence. And it’s imagery is simple. A black canoe ferrying a coffin across the river (to the other side) is what this culture is based on. And tradition also dictates that the dead man in that coffin visit the home of his killer. So really what I mean to say is El río y la muerte is about death.

     The tone of the film is stark. Heavy. Foreboding with doom. And the narrative is told through flashback. The village of Santa Viviana is characterized by isolation, tradition, and ignorance. The framing of the plot is set in the present day and centers on the last two surviving descendants of a blood feud that’s over a hundred years old, between the ANGUIANOS and MENCHACAS. The present day stuff is weak. The bulk of the film is the flashback violent Western that follows FELIPE ANGUIANO. And Buñuel manages to pull it off.

     There are a few laughs though. Like okay there are a few scenes of a man backhand slapping another dude in the face. But in an early scene GERARDO ANGUIANO, this educated doctor, is in an iron lung in the hospital, and his blood feud nemesis RÓMULO MENCHACA pays him a visit and as they argue Rómulo backhand slaps Gerardo in the face; even though Gerardo is in an iron lung! Sorry if I think that’s hilarious. But another one that’s kinda silly is there’s a card game, in the flashback Western, and the pacifist CHINELAS fed up bemoans how the only two guys in the village who don’t own a gun are him and the PADRE, but the priest brandishes his pistol and is like what do you mean? No. Of course I have a gun.

 

Thematically El río y la muerte is totally a Buñuel film. If my main idea about Buñuel is how he depicts the way with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion; then next up I’d add something like as humans we all hate each other and there’s a brutality in us. Yet what Buñuel shows is that this brutality can range from emotional to homicidal. 

     As a Western, El río y la muerte has this unique quality going for it, in that instead of showing law and government as the civilizing agent (i.e. the Hollywood tradition), it places the onus on education. And okay typically I hate when movies have an overt message. And Gerardo has some speeches where he says stuff like the only way to end the cycle of violence is if the gates of education were open to everyone. Please. I don’t see Buñuel as the one who’d be striving to include these kinds of speeches. I’d imagine they were forced upon him. But anyway, I can accept it as showing the movie is trying to be slightly a little more than strictly a genre Western.

     And what matters most to me thematically is how the flashback Western ends. When the wise old TATA NEMESTO dies, Felipe and FILOGONIO actually squash their beef once and for all. They do it for him. And then some bratty little instigator just has to manipulate them through lies to reignite the hostilities. It's the youth that don't want to listen to the aged. That outweighs all the education slogans.

Wuthering Heights

 “For the ungodly have said, reasoning with themselves but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell or from the other world. For we are born from nothing and after this, we shall be as if we had not been. For the breath of our nostrils is smoke, and speech a spark to move our heart, which being put out, our body shall be ashes and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud and be dispersed as mist, which is driven away by the sun beams, and overpowered with the heat. And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.”

Where on earth did Abismos de pasión (1954, Luis Buñuel) come from? And why do I feel like it’s the most moving love story I’ve ever seen? Abismos de pasión is about ALEJANDRO and his undying love for CATALINA. But really it’s about how all of us as humans hate each other and hurt one another. It’s about brutality. What else is there to make movies about?

     The backstory is Alejandro grew up with these rich kids Catalina and RICARDO. And this is where Buñuel gets ahold of the social class dimension to the story. Alejandro was treated as a slave growing up. He was an orphan taken in by Ricardo, who made him sleep in the stables and fed him scraps. Yet Alejandro and Catalina fell in love. And then Catalina married Ricardo. Why didn’t she marry Alejandro, if she loved him? Because everyone, including Ricardo’s sister ISABEL and Catalina’s brother EDUARDO, hate Alejandro. So he left.

     But plot twist, and where our story begins, one rainy night Alejandro returns, now rich, intent on taking back his true love Catalina, and desperate to seek revenge against all—including Catalina! Because in Abismos de pasión Alejandro and Catalina love each other so much that they want to die. But they also constantly call each other out for how much pain they cause each other and seem to be in some competition to prove who loves whom more.

 

Cinematically, no joke this is legit a Buñuel masterpiece. From the moment Alejandro arrives, in a rainstorm, and whose passion of course leads him to breaking and entering the house to find Catalina, cue the soundtrack blasting the Liebestod—oh yeah, get ready because on top of a wall to wall emotional underscoring musical track there’s mostly excerpts from Tristan and Isolde throughout. The tone of this thing is over the top melodrama moody pain romantic.

     But the image system is cruelty to animals. Returning to Buñuel’s fondness for entomology, Ricardo is introduced mounting a live butterfly for dissection. (We’ll see later his collection of butterflies, moths, and other insects in framed cases is huge.) And when Isabel walks up and asks him why he would torture them, it’s clear by his reply he doesn’t see it as torture. Throughout the rest of the film, there’s also the old man dropping the live frog into the incense he's burning; the excruciating slaughter of the hog in front of Isabel; and best of all the scene where Eduardo grabs the live moth and throws it onto the web and the spider emerges from its nest to eat it.

     There’s also a subtle thing going on with dead trees. The first shot is a dead tree full of buzzards that scatter at the sound of a GUNSHOT, offscreen fired by Catalina to scare Isabel. (Seriously, this whole movie is about everyone hurting each other out of hate, spite, love, or fun.) When Alejandro first kisses Isabel, it’s in a ditch and there’s a twisting fallen dead tree next to them. At Catalina’s funeral procession there’s a tall dead tree looming in the foreground.

     Also more having to do with a thematic cinematic touch, early on there’s a line of dialogue Catalina says that’s something like: “…because I say the things I feel.” And it hit me this is another instance of what Buñuel does best. It’s also what he does as a surrealist. It’s what cinema should aspire to do: communicate through the language of emotions. Emotions exist outside of cognition. It’s a contradiction of terms. It’s the greatest strength of art and why we need it so much.

 

My main idea about Buñuel is his depiction of something like with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. And in the ending of Abismos de pasión I found exactly that. When Alejandro breaks into the crypt, prybar ripping the chains open, and he descends below to open Catalina's coffin, once he reaches towards her body and touches her his hand is full of dirt falling away through his fingers—so much meaning in that image. But as he realizes she’s gone forever and so is the only love he’ll ever know, he turns around and sees her behind him. The ghostly apparition of her, as his bride, calls his name. And as he recognizes all he’s ever wanted more than anything, a jump cut flickers and replaces her with Eduardo aiming a rifle firing a full round into his face. The illusion of true love. The delusion of true love.

 

Thoughts on Books I Finished, June 2023

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips

Dang, what an incredible read. Many years back, somewhere before 2008, I remember finding a hardback copy of the longish short story Houston, Houston, Do You Read by James Tiptree, Jr., at the NE Broadway Goodwill, and having it rewire what I felt about science fiction in general. I picked this biography of that author up a few years ago, and have felt guilty about not reading it every time I looked at it on the shelf. Having now finally read it, I now want everybody to read it, in particular me, years ago.

Among the things I liked most about this book:

• The incredible portrait of a life lived largely through correspondence
• Some of the self-descriptions, which really made me think and feel

There's a few things I find powerful about the idea of spending a lot of time reading and writing (sending and receiving) letters (a major minor interest of mine, particularly in the person of C. Wright Mills). One came to me while I was jogging and listening to Rebecca, around the same time I finished this: think about the endorphin hit simple pleasure of a single like on Twitter, or an interesting reaction on your post to the friend Slack or in your fandom Discord; now imagine the rush of returning home ... to a month's worth of letters.

Another is the perspective Tiptree / Sheldon takes on his / her life. There's an interest in that life, but also an enthusiasm for it, that I found very inspiring—the tone Tiptree / Sheldon takes in describing that life is so unlike the tone I ever take here, or elsewhere, usually, describing my Vim projects, or my running, or my drawing, or whatever... I have a sense that this kind of enthusiasm is something that could be—my first thought was "fabricated", or "manufactured" but why not simply say "created"?

Another interesting aspect of writing a lot of letters that comes out in this book is honesty. Here's a couple quotes that hit me hard on this front:

[328, from "On Reading Other People's Thoughts"], "I am a peculiarly transparent person—perhaps 'flat,' lacking some dimension.
[329], ... I am gloomy—perfectly natural. 'Man is in love and loves what vanishes.' I will die, I age. Unpleasant. Man is a member of a species whose triumph is built on the disappointment of the individual. The individual's doomed drives. WE are not descended from the satisfied. Ergo, I hurt. No mystery.
[329, from a letter to Joanna Russ] It's odd, at my nearly-60 age—I feel everybody else, I mean everybody who counts, has Been Through Experience, has lived, while I have only, what, fumbled through unsuccessful apprenticeship, got ready to begin to start, and stand eagerly upon the brink of figuring out How to Live—just as hook from shadows is snaking out to yank me off scene.
(I also have moments of believing I am transparent, something that did not jell. Everyone else seems to have so much density, self-organization. Personality. If asked who they are, they know. I asked myself that the other day—could I write an autobiography just for my own amusement, Ok, who you? And all that formed in my throat was, uh, well, I guess just the something peering out from this totally random manifestation. Something small peering out. [...])

Clearly I don't compare myself with Sheldon / Tiptree, a genuinely great writer, but still, this book made me look at myself, and the little I do, the little I have done, and it made me feel the lack. I don't labor under ambitions, but I do labor under illusions: that I have something to say; that I should say it. Wonderful book.

trans girl suicide museum, hannah baer

Interesting, occasionally irritating account—part memoir, part polemic, part struggle session, part war story, part theory, part part part etc. etc. etc.—of one woman's living as a very dressed, upper-middle-class, political, ketamine-happy person who's had sex, by the way...

The master

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.

     

Goin' down underground

In real life conspiracy theories have never interested me. I could just never trust the sources. Nor could I ever feel like I could trust any evidence enough to buy it as truthful. I do believe the CIA tested LCD on some people in the 60s and I do believe the US government gave some black dudes syphilis—that’s enough to disturb me enough to not want to know anymore. 

     But in movies it’s different. Still, why am I more likely to engage in a fictional story about white people perpetrating some heinous conspiracy against black people? Well, there’s history for one reason.

 

They Cloned Tyrone (2023, Juel Taylor) is a black conspiracy comedy that feels like when Hollywood makes a genre film that reminds you how fun they're supposed to be. When people talk about a good story, that’s stupid—story could mean so many different things. But I really enjoyed the way the first and second acts of They Cloned Tyrone take on a Nancy Drew format. YO-YO’s even got that full collection of Nancy Drew books and SLICK CHARLES says something like damn how many adventures does this bitch go on? Okay a minor possible gripe though is maybe there’s a little too many pop culture references. The number of them is staggering. But they’re mostly all funny.

     And so the best thing about how They Cloned Tyrone does the conspiracy genre is that it doesn’t have a message; instead, it utilizes its subject matter through its plot. The movie is about the white man doing mind control and experiments only on black people in the hood. And through its tone we get this midpoint where we feel how helpless and defeated FONTAINE is. That lottery ticket he scratches says it all: you lose. Also I don’t think this is giving anything away (the movie is about clones) but early on in that drive-by I couldn’t get over how cinematic the set piece became when they gun him down. The way the camera uses an open frame and we don’t see the other car or the gunman, how suspensefully and scary it is to see the glass shatter and the body stagger, struggling in its final throes of death.

 

The three main cast also do so much for why They Cloned Tyrone works. Because despite what they do for a living and the dirt they do, they’re friends. And they do right by one another. So we got a great Nancy Drew premise, protagonists we love, some sci-fi, but more than all—comedy. When I see new releases in the theater, I’m always asking myself why don’t I ever get to see more comedies?

     I found myself letting myself laugh at some stupid shit. Like when ISSAC pulls that gun on Slick Charles in the hair salon, and he shows the piece but gets tripped up because Slick Charles doesn’t react—then he realizes it’s because he’s still got his smock on from getting a haircut. And as messed up as the mystery gets, it only proves to be that much more conducive to all of the race humor. How many ways does Slick Charles have for describing white skin? And way funny when the trio discover the conspiracy and Slick Charles mentions other cover-ups by the white man like the Berenstein Bears.

     They Cloned Tyrone handles its story elements simple but well. And something that I left the theater with was the disturbing memory of those black dudes down in the lab that were subjects of some experiment that turned them white (but they still had a fro). That’s what sci-fi means to me. Relevant. But not overt. And again of course imaginative.

7/14/2023 Midtown Art Cinema

Atlanta, GA

DCP

The discreet charm of the proletariat

Can La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954, Luis Buñuel) be read as an allegory of Buñuel’s travels through the film industry? If the streetcar is Buñuel’s art cinema, then it can be seen as having to hijack the tracks so it can travel its route, because the authorities wouldn’t otherwise allow it to do so. And even though this movie is Buñuel lite, it still really works as a comedy.

     Back to the metaphor. Okay so, the first really big laughs for me are when the streetcar stops at the slaughterhouse and the huge crowd of poor passengers board. These are like Buñuel’s people. All of these Mexicans packed in this space, beggars, butchers, and the shit talking, and slabs of meat and pigs heads hanging from hooks along the aisle is Buñuel’s populist cinema, fondly affectionate towards them. The very next stop, when they pick up the two women in black with their religious icon is of course his criticism of Catholics—they’re full of fear, sorrow, and self pity.

     And later on when the streetcar picks up the kids, it’s Buñuel’s youthful imagination. And here I’ll segue into a perfect example of the kind of Mexican humor at the expense of others I’ve been trying to describe. Yeah there’s a kid calling another kid corpse because he’s skinny. Yeah there’s a kid calling another kid chocolate because he’s dark skinned. But what about the scene where the kids make fun of the boy named LORENZANA for being an orphan; then their teacher is having a conversation with CAIRELES and she mentions an orphan, but looks for the word and spontaneously uses Lorenzana as example of the word she was looking for! And Buñuel films a reaction shot of the little boy perplexed in recognition, pobresito.

     To close, there’s also a lot of talk in this movie about inflation—the scene where the two drunks discuss economics is brilliant. And there’s the masa gouging revolt. But when the streetcar happens upon the smuggling black market maíz, if you think about it, what does the label used to disguise the sacks say? “US fertilizer.” Is this Buñuel saying that the commercial film industry is monopolized by Hollywood shit mediocre product, and he’s taking back what belongs to the people? Okay, and then just gotta mention the Christmas pageant play is such a treat in this movie, especially the angel Lucifer as a Mexican drinking beer and firing a single action rifle at a dove, the Holy Spirit, in heaven. Don Luis with what imagination again delivers some comedy glory.

Poison arrow

The only rule in movies is that they have to have a story. Why? To varying degrees films have proven adept in character, dialogue, genre, setting, and tone; but they can get away with lacking in any of these categories and still work as long as they have a plot. Audiences don’t want cinema for the sake of art. They want a story. Because some part of them is so afraid of the possibility that their own life doesn’t follow a clear path that gets resolved in the end with a specific purpose that they need reassurance, and to buy into these little simulations of meaning to numb their own existential dread.

     What do audiences call a movie without a discernable plot? An art film. What do they call a film that otherwise neglects to tell a clear story with a satisfying resolution? Unreliable narrator. The audience doesn’t have the capacity to process these kinds of narratives. Nor should we be expected to—because they’re always off-putting, conceptual, tedious, or from the perspective of a character losing their grasp on reality.

     But what if there were a film that communicated an emotional truth, while despite breaking these rules nevertheless maintained a cohesion of order through a storytelling that corresponded to its own internal design, and was easy and satisfying to follow? Is to communicate through emotions an impossible contradiction?

 

Él (1953, Luis Buñuel) concisely depicts the masculine ego in relation to its intense sexual desire for a woman. Whereas domestic melodrama, sometimes referred to as woman’s picture, expressionistically utilizes heightened emotion, Él expresses its own delirious reasoning from the perspective of the male genitals. And what makes this satire so much fun is Buñuel puts a bourgeois Catholic who doesn’t have a job or any family—a character who only exists to capture a woman—at the center of this work of art that uses cinema to prove through analogy that with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. 

     The image system used in Él is set up in the first scene. During a Catholic mass, PADRE VELASCO is anointing the feet of a queue of altar boys, adoringly, bestowing each with a soft lingering foot kiss. As DON FRANCSISCO assists him with the holy water, we get a camera dolly of the feet of congregants that halts and doubles back to those of a woman in high heels. The rest of the film will hinge on Don Francisco’s conflict between guilt based repressed sexual desire and its resultant confusion with what to do with GLORIA as object of his amorous lust. 

 

The greatest strength of Él is that each aspect of its form that’s intentionally ambiguous is so in order to convey a sexual/emotional truth. Illusion/delusion. None of this film is meant to be read literally. Of course, there is clearly the possibility to read it as none of it ever even happened. As early as the honeymoon in Guanajuato, in a scene where Gloria snaps a photo of Don Francisco in front of some antique architecture, when it’s his turn to take her picture, he declines. How far would I be reaching if I said maybe it’s because in the diegesis of the narrative he has a picture of himself in front of that building but not one of Gloria because they never actually went there together? Or maybe they did. Intentionally ambiguous.

     Él speaks to me. The scene in the belltower when Don Francisco takes Gloria up there to reconcile after a nasty fight, then looks at the crowd below and tells her they’re all worms and no one would see him if he strangled her and threw her body off the top is so much already, but when he adds “I was only joking,” that’s the Buñuel touch on full display. Él is like one big joke you shouldn’t be allowed to laugh at. And how about when Don Francisco is at his wit’s end, a broken man, crying to his confidante butler PABLO, desperately asking what he should do about his wife Gloria and Pablo says divorce her. Don Francisco replies “What about kill her?” That is the funniest dialogue in the movie for me. That’s what surrealism is for me.

     Él isn’t subject to the healthy morally right way women should be treated that’s deemed fit and approved by society. It’s about the opposite. It’s about how there can be a man who everyone sees only through his public persona, and the difference with which he shows himself to be in the privacy of a woman who entices his sexual desires. Yeah it’s wrong. But Él dares to make a comedy out of it. Maybe it’s okay to laugh at how scary it can be to know the penis wants what the penis wants as long as we know it’s wrong?

Slaughterhouse noir

Film noir is not a genre. Neither is surrealist cinema. Too often, audiences label anything in a movie that seems weirdly incongruous as surreal. It’s not at all the same thing.

     What both of these styles have in common is a way to visually express any parts that a film is constructed of in ways that go beyond any intellectual cognition. The language of emotions. A lexicon of textures. Speaking through the senses.

 

El bruto (1953, Luis Buñuel) depicts the brutality of how it feels to lose your true love. In cinema, a home can signal the image system of one’s heart. It’s an outward manifestation of our willful resistance against our own mortality. We’re here for such a short time, but much like our very identity, we build something to last. Something that we rest assured in knowing will be with us for the rest of our lives.

     The community of poor blue collar wretches being evicted from the barrio slum are an emotional transcription of what it’s like to lose the love of your life. That home was where their inner life was nurtured and safe. And then all of the sudden, without any reason, without knowing what they did wrong, they can be kicked out on the street never to return. When they fight the eviction in that first scene, desperately pleading for any kind of answer as what they’re to do now, think about how their landlord ANDRÉS answers them: “That’s your business. There are plenty of other houses.” After having your heart broke isn’t that all your friends really can offer: there’s someone else out there for you.

     And like the most cynical of film noirs, here humans are no better than cattle, despite any sensitivity, optimism, hope or love they may aspire to. BRUTO works in a slaughterhouse. When he has to leave that job, he goes to work with PALOMA in a butcher shop. The tenement building is too small and has too many people packed in there. And when they finally put him down, it’s fittingly by “one to the head.”

 

El bruto is the first film through which I’ve really fully appreciated the genius of Buñuel’s talent with visual motifs. Most obvious a burning flame as sex. One could read something into the three instances of Bruto having sex as follows: (1.) He could have raped Paloma or at the very least it was rough, not shown at all of course, but what is shown is him putting the candle out by smoldering the wick between his fingers, i.e., through force. (2.) When Paloma visits Bruto with the full intention of seducing him, when they go off to the bed, what is shown are the two raw steaks sizzling on the grill and could be read as more like an animal lust. (3.) When Bruto brings his newlywed bride MECHE back to their hovel, we see the candle melt down to nothing on its own—something like purity.

     The whole length of the narrative where Bruto and Meche fall in love is tenderly romantic. The scene on their wedding night is so simple. She’s a virgin. She’s chaste. She’s shy. And offscreen as the candle melts down we only hear their voices, and she starts crying after they’ve finished. And when Bruto goes to sleep on the floor, leaving her to have the small bed he made for her she adds one last comment: “good night.”

     But most of the film is brutally disturbing. One more note about visual motifs that could be deciphered from the chickens is like, Bruto kills Meche’s father and when Bruto flees the mob of carpenters and unwittingly hides at Meche’s house he kills her hen with his bare hands to keep it from making any noise. But Bruto later brings her a new hen along with a bunch of baby chicks. And the last scene of the movie, after Andrés has been slain, when Paloma is confronted by that ominous apparition rooster of course it feels like Andrés in a scary as shit way.

 

Brutality is the theme of this movie in many ways. Bruto is the beast who takes advantage of his size to intimidate and assert his will through oppressive dominance. But Paloma is his double. She’s emotionally brutal and takes advantage of her sexuality to assert her own will in the same way. She’s cold to her husband Andrés and fends off all of his sexual advances. She manipulates Andrés by making him think Bruto assaulted her. She wants to own and control Bruto, not love him.

     But whereas Bruto internally fights his oppressive nature, Paloma does not. She’s the worst. Another evocatively coded image is how when she puts the idea into Andrés’ head about eliminating the agitators she does so by decapitating the flowers from their stems.

     And just a few scattered notes in closing: the slaughterhouse location is obviously real, and filmed with such a photographic quality it adds so much to the noir canvas, along with the chase scene through the lumberyard with its geometric dark shadowy world. The scene where Meche removes the nail from Bruto is an overt reference to Catholicism, or at the very least a vague allusion to the crucifixion. After Meche’s father dies and she pawns his toolbox with his name on it (Carmelo González), what a tearjerker moment, it can also be read through a Catholic lens in that an innocent carpenter was sacrificed for leading the people of their barrio to salvation.

A cruel picture

Most of the Mexicans who put up such a macho front are also momma’s boys. The foundation of Mexican society is the longsuffering mother. Why do you think they’re so obsessed with their venerable Virgin Mary? 

Una mujer sin amor (1952, Luis Buñuel) is a bourgeois melodrama that centers on how sad it is ROSARIO has to endure the stifling obligations of her domestic role; except for a quick affair she indulges and its long-ranging consequences that her shitty sons rub her face in.

     It’s supposed to attack the hypocrisy of society. I guess. There isn’t much going on here. It’s like a kitten whose claws haven’t grown in yet. I do like the scene early on in their house where the husband’s dinner in the fancy house in the fancy dining room is just tamales on his plate and nothing else on the table.