Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

How to name the anonymous? How to see the invisible? Buñuel’s oneiric insistence has this sense: to imagine an exacerbated desire. Through dreams, men and women (and children, of course: do animals dream?) attain the marvelous and terrible perception of what will never be. But the dream, if it becomes the reality of the dream, also becomes the being of an impossible reality, another, hidden, but no less true facet of reality, one of the most potent anchors of desire. Buñuel’s films are an act of trust in the first and fragile encounter of desire and freedom in dream.

In Wuthering Heights (1954), Heathcliff descends into Cathy’s tomb, beckoned by the dead woman’s voice. The casket is before him. Behind him appears Cathy’s brother armed with a shotgun. As he fires at Heathcliff, Heathcliff turns, mortally wounded, and imposes on the murderer the face of the lover, the woman, the sister.

In one dazzling image in this otherwise unsuccessful film, Buñuel makes us see how desire can assume and transfigure incest, sodomy, crime, and necrophilia so that the impossible love can take place, at least, in impossibility. And in Nazarín (1959), a girl dies in a plague-ridden village but refuses the priest’s spiritual consolation, with the words: “Juan sí, cielo no”: Give me Juan, not heaven.

The contiguous nature of love and death makes Buñuel reflect that in our world it is easier to die than to love; death, the realm of the impossible, is much more possible than love, the very crux of all possibility. Thus, the demonic characters in Buñuel take on a cloak of evil, since death is the supreme expression of a supreme absence, in order to attain love. Evil is forbidden yet it brings us to the certainly of death. Good is endorsed yet it does not assure the possibility of love.

Buñuel, who throughout his career constantly came under attack by censors, clergymen, the police, housewives, and talk-show hosts for fostering evil, and undermining morality, and defying conventional rationality, only indicates that good is not where society says it is; and neither is evil. Buñuel’s eternal question is in fact a sadly severe one: You who judge as monstrous anomalies what you yourselves are not — the fetishist, the necrophiliac, the rebel, the lover, the dreamer — aren’t you merely covering up your own repressions and seeking to deny — to eradicate — the other’s experience? And if, physically and psychologically, the other is the strange one — the madman, the homosexual, the dwarf — politically he is the exterminable — the red, the Jew, the black, the rebel.

The first possibility (desire and freedom) of any human being is to approach another human being. The cinema of Luis Buñuel is one vast metaphor on the triumphs and defeats of being with others. Hell is other people, said a character in Sartre. But there is no other heaven, answers Buñuel.

Who fails? Perhaps Saint Simeon Stylites in Simon of the Desert (1965), whipped by rain and wind high up on his splendid column in the middle of the wilderness. I don’t know. Is he not, useless as it might seem, accomplishing his mad desire in pain, solitude, and the turning away of temptation? Who shall judge him?

But Buñuel prefers the paradox of those who triumph through failure: Nazarín and Viridiana. Perhaps the two most interesting characters in the Buñuel canon are this complementary and very Spanish pair: Viridiana, the young novice who seeks to save the poor through prayer, cleanliness, and good manners; and Nazarín, the priest who takes to the road in imitation of Christ. Both partake of the quintessential Spanish prototype: Don Quixote.

Don Quixote frees the galley slaves, who immediately stone their savior; Viridiana is mocked, dispossessed, and violated by the beggars she tries to save. Buñuel is faithful to the Surrealist slogan: Poetry shall be convulsive, or it shall not be. He extends this to the social and especially the religious realm: Fraternity shall be convulsive, or it shall not be; fraternity cannot be when it is but a disguise for our good conscience — repugnant, condescending, philanthropic.

Viridiana does not really wish to save the poor: she wishes to save her own bright image of sanctity. Viridiana/Quixote loves an abstract Christ/Dulcinea. The true Christ, in the parody of Leonardo’s Last Supper (which happens to be the First Supper of the beggars), is a blind mendicant who cannot offer the novice (the bride of Christ) the erotic sustenance of her celestial vision.

Everyone, even a thief, a leper, or the physically handicapped, can be Christ. But Viridiana refuses the universality of redemption. Viridiana would not tolerate Christ incarnate, so she ends up accepting incarnation without Christ. Viridiana is initiated into the pot luck of sex by an elegant card shark, her cousin, and his lover, an erotic chambermaid. Viridiana, the female Don Quixote, has encountered the other two great Spanish archetypes, Don Juan and La Celestina, in a broken-down feudal manor where they form an unsanctified ménage à trois, playing cards and listening to records. Perhaps one day, having lived through the experiences of the flesh, Viridiana can return to the roads of La Mancha to redress torts, renounce the hell of innocence, and attain paradise.

Behind Buñuel, all of Spain. Kings and go-betweens, saints and lovers, monsters, madmen, and buffoons of the Spanish delirium ascend on the steps of Buñuel’s films to the penthouses of Western progress. The figures of Western health, security, and optimism are lost in the baroque labyrinths of Spain.

A group of French gourmets can never sit together for a meal in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

Two perfectly decent, rational pilgrims in The Milky Way would like to interpolate the experience of religion into the assimilated sequence of Western history; but faith proves to be a swirling, nonsequential reality of the imagination: if it is to be faith at all, it cannot be, by definition, proven: history is no history if it is not, in its turn, imagined: no one was present in the past, the past is an act of memory in the present: meet the ghosts, they are all here.

The linear progression of the narrative in The Phantom, of Liberty (1974) is constantly violated by accident, non sequitur, tale-within-tale, dream, madness: time, culture, thought, have as many faces as there are different civilizations; the future has the name of a desire now.

Nazarín, saint, buffoon, and madman, decides to imitate Christ. And this decision, which at first glance would appear to be his greatest virtue, soon proves to be his supreme transgression. The imitation of Christ promptly leads the good Father Nazarín to brawls, scorn, superstition, mockery, jealousy, hate, injustice, and jail.

Before he sets his faith to the proof of experience, Nazarín believes that Christ individualizes redemption, makes it available to all. But, after the fact, he only knows that the imitation of Christ entails scandal, disorder, revolution. The Christian Way of Nazarín transforms him into an enemy of the established order.

He is accompanied in his pilgrimage by two women, two Sancho Panzas in skirts. The secret of this great film by Buñuel is its hidden eroticism. The two female squires of this holy Quixote do not allow Nazarín to idealize them: rather, they seduce and unsettle him as they substitute him for their lovers: a dwarf and a criminal. Don Quixote as witness to the monstrous and criminal loves of Dulcinea; Jesus, the voyeur before Mary Magdalene.

One of the possible ways of seeing the cinema of Buñuel, as I have indicated, is through this contemporary dilemma, adventure, or phenomenon: the religious temperament without religious conviction. Nazarín’s solution seems at first rather obvious. The priest loses his faith in God but attains a faith in men. Only men shall redeem men. That is the important thing — whether they do it in the name of God or even against God.