Film-Philosophy 16.

1 (2012)

Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buuels Late Films Chad Trevitte1

Luis Buuel is rightly praised as a political filmmaker, yet his films are often difficult to assess in their broader implications. This is perhaps most true in the late films of the bourgeois trilogy, in which the filmmakers surrealist style appears to have an uneasy relationship with his broadly leftist sympathies. For if these films extensively employ the loose syntax of dream or fantasy, such a creative strategy can be seen as both liberating and oppressiveliberating in that it suggests some imaginative space beyond the blind rituals of bourgeois life, yet oppressive in that it suggests that such rituals are themselves determined by unconscious psychic drives.2 When taken together with the filmmakers skepticism towards social reform, such a refracted, oneiric vision may register more as free-floating cynicism than incisive political critique.3 However, as Buuels most insightful critics have recognized, this problem requires a shift in perspective. Rather than providing solutions to political problems, Buuels films must be seen simultaneously in diagnostic and symptomatic terms: they both expose and embody the ways in which arbitrary, irrational forms of power are maintained within the social imagination. In this sense the dreamscape is what constitutes political reality in Buuels films, and it is only through further reflection on the dreamscape that one can gain a fuller sense of what his films reveal about political ideology. It is this aspect of Buuel, too, that has led Marsha Kinder (1999) to observe that his films explore ideological questions in ways that anticipate contemporary approaches in critical theory. Among these approaches, a valuable path can be found in the work of Slavoj !i"ek, whose reflections have very strong affinities with the
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Bridgewater College: ctrevitt@bridgewater.edu While Buuel retained a broadly leftist political attitude in his late years, he expressed disdain for doctrinaire Marxism: I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the end of the 1950s, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticism of any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception; it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. In the 1930s, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention of the unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychological forces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said, by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisory to me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the human being (1984, 166). 3 See for example the early reviews of Discreet Charm by John Simon (1978) and Charles Thomas Samuels (1978), each of which criticize Buuel for his self-indulgence and discount any significant treatment of political themes in the film.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) filmmakers vision.4 In what follows I will discuss how certain aspects of Buuels final three filmsThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972), The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantme de la Libert, 1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Dsir, 1977)may be evaluated within the framework of !i"eks mode of ideology critique, and thereby situate Buuels concern with the perverse within what might be broadly termed a post-Marxian perspective. Such a vantage point will do justice to the mixture of irreverence and seriousness that characterizes all of Buuels work, while also suggesting how his films can still speak to us today. !i"ek: Hegel, Lacan, and the Perverse Core of Ideology !i"eks contribution to post-Marxian theory has come from his attempt to formulate a model of ideology critique based on his readings of Hegel and Lacan, thereby offering a corrective to what he regards as the theoretical limitations of traditional Marxism as well as the political deficiencies of much postmodernist thought. A preliminary sketch of these ideas will provide a fuller context for their value in understanding Buuels late films. First, in his commentary on Hegel, !i"ek argues that the philosophers approach to dialectical reason is not structured so that conceptual conflicts are always effaced in the form of some higher concept or mode of thought. In making this claim he thus responds to a typical criticism by many commentators: namely, that Hegel always grants victory to an all-consuming Absolute Spirit that turns contradiction into the engine of its own self-expansion and thereby fosters an evolutionary, teleological notion of history. For !i"ek this claim has become a misguided assumption regarding Hegel.5 Instead, he argues, Hegel sufficiently recognizes how a dialectical understanding of any concept always entails the persistence of
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See !i"eks brief references to Buuel in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989, 194195), as well as his comments on That Obscure Object of Desire in The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994, 95). While Linda Williams (1981) has provided the quintessential Lacanian reading of Buuel, I believe that !i"ek provides a vital bridge between her groundbreaking work and a fuller appreciation of the filmmaker as a post-Marxian avant la lettre. 5 !i"ek thus distinguishes himself from Theodor Adorno, whose work in other respects has strong parallels with his own. Whereas Adorno sought to rescue the critical impulse of dialectical thought from what he saw as Hegels lapse into a totalizing visionemploying Hegel contra Hegel!i"ek maintains that the same goal can be reached through a return to Hegel qua Hegel. (Compare, for example, Adornos critique of positive negation [1983, 158-161] and !i"eks account of Hegels negation of the negation [1989, 176-178].) While it seems fair enough to recognize that !i"eks unconventional reading of Hegel already unfolds through a Lacanian lensfor which he has been both criticized (Horowitz 2005; Dews 1996) and defended (Gunkel 2008)his own variant of negative dialectics nevertheless has much value when considering the fuller implications of Buuels late films.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) antagonismthe persistence of a fundamental negativity that prevents any complete, self-sufficient synthesis: Hegelian reconciliation is not a panlogicist sublation of all reality in the Concept but a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is not all (...) absolute knowledge itself is nothing but a name for the acknowledgement of a certain radical loss. (!i"ek 1989, 7) Such a loss, !i"ek maintains, is radical for Hegel insofar as it exists prior to any positive representation; it involves an irreducible split in subjective experience that opens a space for any subsequent concept of identity, while simultaneously preventing any such concept from achieving full consistency. In turn, !i"ek argues that a similar way of thinking may be discerned in Lacanparticularly in Lacans notion of the Real and its relationship to the symbolic structures through which individual subjects constitute themselves as subjects within any political system. While !i"ek also draws upon other aspects of Lacanian theory, the distinctly perverse effect of the Real has the fullest implications for our consideration of Buuels late films. The perverse effect of the Lacanian Real arises from the fact that it does not designate any form of reality that we can directly access; rather, the Real is an impossible beyond that lies outside the symbolic framework that informs our consciousness. 6 However, the Real does manifest itself indirectly within such a frameworkand it does so at those key moments when any symbolic system reveals its own internal inconsistencies, its own fundamental limits, or its own impossibility as a scandalous feature of its own structure. This return of the Real is described in various ways by !i"ek: it may assume the form of some uncanny, externalized entity that inspires both horror and fascination; it may arise through some persistent yet impossible demand that informs ones sense of political commitment; or it may arise from the way that some compulsive, excessive form of enjoyment arises from an underlying disavowal of impotence or lack. In each instance, the Real leaves its mark insofar as the symbolic structure remains compelled, in spite of itself, to give symptomatic expression to its own deficiency; it is as if the Real inevitably returns through the very drive of the
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This impossible beyond involves various inherent paradoxes, not the least of which is the way in which the Real designates both the hard impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency (!i"ek 1989, 169). If it suggests some Kantian thing in itself (Ding an sich) that exists prior to symbolization, it is not a transcendental object because it can only be encountered in a negative, retroactive mode via its distorting, disruptive effects in the symbolic order: the Real is nothing but this impossibility of its inscription (...) in itself it is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness of the symbolic structure marking some central impossibility (!i"ek 1989, 173).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) symbolic order to encompass everythingeverything including its own inability to encompass everything. In this regard any ideology is in some sense radically perverse, insofar as it remains both a cure and a symptom of its own perpetually failed encounter with the impossible Real. With this in mind, !i"ek in turn argues that the critique of ideology cannot rest with a simple gesture towards some immediate, transparent reality that lies beyond the fantasy space that such ideology creates. That is, if ideology does entail fantasy, it is only effective insofar as our everyday, mundane sense of reality is itself already pervasively structured through the fantasy space of the symbolic order. It is for this reason that any direct appeal to some objective realm presumably outside ideological fantasy can always be re-assimilated within such a fantasy space. As one example, !i"ek offers a scenario in which one seeks to convince an anti-Semite that Jews are really not like that by offering concrete examples of Jews who are not scheming, manipulative, or exploitative. The anti-Semite all too easily replies: You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearanceand it is exactly this hiding of ones real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature. (!i"ek 1989, 47) Thus for !i"ek the key strategy is not simply to posit a new notion of Jews as they really are; instead, the critic must enter the fantasy space of such ideology to reveal its hidden dynamics: We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the Jew is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock in our desire. (1989, 49) Accordingly, !i"ek proposes that the Jew within Fascism serves as a sort of externalized displacement of antagonisms that already characterize the social framework at large: the contradictory, excessive qualities attributed to Jews (capitalist greed and leftist radicalism, impotence and sexual degeneracy, intellectual elitism and primitive barbarism) all serve as projected symptoms of the inherent conflicts that already prevent the Fascist fantasy of social wholeness from being realized. The figure of the Jew thus provides a way for Fascism to take its own failure into account; it is for this reason that the figure serves as a source of symbolic excess and perverse enjoyment within the Fascist imagination. The Jew essentially gives positive substance to the lack, the non-identity, or the limits that already Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 216

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) characterize the impossible Fascist project of a perfectly unified social body (!i"ek 1989, 124-128). Yet how does this critical approach involve a distinctly post-Marxian sensibility? On one level, !i"ek maintains that Marx was able to recognize the symptomatic nature of antagonism in the capitalist social framework.7 However, the problem with traditional Marxism can be explained in Hegelian terms and Lacanian terms. With regard to Hegel, Marx eventually succumbed to an evolutionary reading of the dialectic that presumed that such symptoms would lead to their eventual overcoming in a new society of transparent social relationships. For !i"ek, this is itself an ideological fantasy that fails to recognize the constitutive role of antagonism as such in any form of social organization. Similarly, with reference to Lacan, !i"ek believes that Marx failed to account for surplus enjoymentthe way in which capitalism turns its own limit into a source of renewed desire, and turns its own internal contradictions into a force of further transformation and development (!i"ek 1989, 48-53). In short, Marx underestimated the extent to which the perverse features of capitalism also remain vital to its own expansion.8 For these reasons !i"ek adopts the dictum of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: that all struggles to promote social justice must be understood as provisional rather than utopian, global, and total in the classical Marxian sense (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). That is, the political left needs to account for its own Lacanian lackthe radical impossibility of democracy as a complete state of transparent social relationsif it is to avoid lapsing into ideological blindness; such an attitude also echoes Stuart Halls notion of a Marxism without guarantees (Hall 1996, 24). And as we will see, it is just such a vantage point that Buuels late films project through their various narrative detours, reversals of perspective, and complex tropes.

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!i"ek states that Marxs greatest achievement was to demonstrate how all phenomena which appear to everyday bourgeois consciousness as simple deviations, contingent deformations and degenerations of the normal functioning of society (economic crises, wars, and so on) and as such abolishable through amelioration of the system, are necessary products of the system itselfthe points at which the truth, the immanent antagonistic character of the system, erupts. To identify with a symptom means to recognize in the excesses, in the disruptions of the normal way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning (1989, 128). 8 As !i"ek explains: Herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism is capable of transforming its very limit, its very impotence, [into] the source of its power the more it putrefies, the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionize itself to survive (1989, 52).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie What constitutes the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie? A fuller consideration of the film suggests one answer: the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie arises from how bourgeois decorum inevitably gives way to perversity and excess on the one hand, while such perversity and excess also serve as necessary components of bourgeois ideology on the other hand. This is what makes the bourgeois class utterly absurd in its existence, yet it is also what seems to underlie the enigmatic persistence of this class. Most of the film centers on six charactersthe most prominent of which is Don Rafael Acosta, an ambassador of the fictional Latin American nation of Miranda. Rafael is using his position as a front while he is engaged in a narcotics ring with his wealthy friend Francois; meanwhile, Don Rafael is having an affair with Francoiss bored wife Simone, while also engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse with revolutionaries from his home country. The other members of the group include Simones vapid sister Florence, an amateur astrologist and dipsomaniac; Alice, a prim and proper hostess; and her rather bland husband Henri. As the film unfolds we witness a series of encounters between these six characters and other diplomats, members of the French military, the police, would-be assassins from Miranda, and a bishop named Monsignor Dufour. Amidst the banal chatter of his social interactions, Don Rafael remains wary of the potential of the police to discover his narcotics trafficking, while also maintaining vigilance against the revolutionaries that hope to assassinate him. In terms of its narrative structure, the film is best known for three traits: 1. First, the film is structured around a series of dinner parties that become interrupted by unforeseen, often bizarre events: a funeral wake being conducted in an adjoining room, the arrival of a French battalion conducting military exercises, the realization that the characters are sitting on the stage of a theater in front of an audience, the arrest of the entire ensemble by the French police, and eventually the arrival of armed gunmen who kill them. 2. In turn, Buuel incorporates scenes that re-situate previous episodes within the dreamscape of one of the characters. For example, shortly after the scene in which the characters realize that they are on a theatrical stage, Henri wakes up suddenly and tells his wife Alice that he has had a strange dream...in turn, we see similar moments in which Francois, a French police captain, and eventually Don Rafael himself wake up from the dream we have been witnessing in the previous scene. By the time we reach the end, the mise-en-abyme structure of the film suggests that virtually everything we have seen consists of dreams within dreams. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 218

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) 3. Finally, interspersed at other intervals, Buuel provides enigmatic scenes that consist of nothing but the six main characters strolling aimlessly down a deserted road; the film eventually ends with a sustained variant of this scene that leads to the closing credits. This structure clearly provides ample opportunities for Buuel to expose the empty norms that govern the lives of his characters. At one point we see Henri and Alice planning to make love; with the arrival of their friends, however, they are concerned that they will make too much noise and climb out of the window to copulate in the bushes. (Later, when the group attends a restaurant and discovers a wake in progress in the next room, the natural world similarly erupts within the orderly space of their social event.) In another scene Francois calls in his chauffer to join the group in a toast, but only to demonstrate that the lower classes are incapable of drinking a martini properly. When Monsignor Dufour arrives wearing gardening clothesas a man of the spirit, he has developed a fetish for the physical world of gardeningHenri dismisses him only to accept him later when hes wearing his priestly garb. Later, when Dufour takes confession from a dying man, he learns that the man was responsible for the death of Dufours parents; after granting the man absolution, the Monsignor calmly kills him with a hunting rifle. Meanwhile, Don Rafael is the personification of patriarchal smugness as he disarms a female revolutionary and tells her that shes better equipped for love than war. After being asked embarrassing questions about the poverty and corruption in his home country, Don Rafael defends the honor of Miranda by shooting a diplomat in cold blood. There is certainly no shortage of scenes that suggest that the veneer of bourgeois charm is a thin one at best, and that the social graces of the characters mask an essential hollowness at their core. On one level, then, one may consider the perverse qualities of the film as testifying to how the unpredictable, disorderly or violent impulses of human nature always remain to disrupt the closed sphere of bourgeois life; when such order becomes violated, Buuels satirical humor essentially exposes the shallowness of this social class and aligns itself with either a broadly Marxian, revolutionary ethos or an otherwise anarchic view of all social arrangements as artificial and false (see Pauly 1994). In fact it would seem virtually impossible not to reach this conclusion in response to Buuels frequent subversions of narrative convention throughout the film. Yet at the same time, the irony of the film cuts another way. For it is clear that these disruptive momentsthe intrusion of the natural forces of sex and death, the French army maneuvers in the countryside, Don Rafaels murder of a French diplomat, the plot of the Mirandan revolutionaries, and even the murder of the entire group by armed men with machine gunsdo not involve the direct intrusion of some non-ideological waking life within the dream space of the characters. Rather, these moments all arise within the Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 219

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) fantasy space of bourgeois consciousness itself. As such, they may be seen as indirect manifestations of the Lacanian Real that becomes registered through its disjunctive effects within the symbolic domain. What are the broader implications of this twist? We may recall a common reading of the co-eatus interruptus trope: by incorporating repeated obstacles in their plans for dinner, Buuel makes the characters the victims of their own sterile decorum, thereby exposing the decadence of the bourgeois class.9 If this reading is understandable enough, it fails to consider how the trope also appears as an excessive, exaggerated reflection of how consumer society already sustains itself through both the persistent promise and persistent deferral of full satisfaction; from this vantage point, what appears to emerge as a rupture within bourgeois ideology also designates a lack that is in fact constitutive of its normative, functional, self-perpetuating state. Thus if such repeated interruptions of the dinner party are symptomatic of an irreducible deadlock that characterizes the cultivation of desire in capitalism, such a deadlock simultaneously marks the limits of such ideology and rehearses the perverse logic of its persistence.10 Much the same can be said regarding the last scene of awakening in the film. In this memorable scene, the gunmen kill Don Rafaels friends and begin looking for him. They soon find him when an arm reaches up from under the table to grab a lamb chop from a dinner plate; they lift the tablecloth and see him hunched under the table, chewing the meat with a fierce look in his eyes. As they shoot him, he wakes up from his dream and then takes a trip down to the kitchen, removes a plate of cold cuts, and begins eating them. Buuel then cuts to his closing image of the bourgeois characters calmly walking down an empty road. Buuels humor here is anything but arbitrary: Don Rafael was troubled by his dream, yet it has also given him a vigorous appetite and he can now enjoy his meal without needing to reflect further upon what his dream might have meant; rather than marking a final return to reality, it is
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Simon coined the term co-eatus interruptus (1978, 363). In counterpoint to my reading here, Marsha Kinder adopts Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the desiring machine to suggest the liberating potential of Buuels narrative structure in Discreet Charm: the subversive power of this desiring machine is not restricted to the domestic realm of the patriarchal family; rather, it is a mode of imagination that permits total freedom and is capable of threatening the whole bourgeois order (Kinder 1999, 8); see also Kinder (2000). Such a view rightly echoes the revolutionary aspirations of the early surrealist movement, although it may underestimate Buuels recognition of the failure of surrealisms desiring machine to inaugurate radical political change: There's no doubt that surrealism was a cultural and artistic success; but these were precisely the areas of least importance to most surrealists. Their aim was not to establish a glorious place for themselves in the annals of art and literature, but to change the world, to transform life itself. This was our essential purpose, but one good look around is evidence enough of our failure (Buuel 1984, 123). In turn, the failure of the May 1968 student protests also provides context for this film, both in terms of Buuels similar liberating agenda as well as his inability to share Herbert Marcuse's belief in the metanarrative of political or cultural revolution (Fuentes 1999, 87-89).
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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) this very disavowal that ensures that he will remain within the fantasy-space of bourgeois ideology.11 And in much the same way, it would seem that while the other characters have been troubled by their dreams of destruction, mortification or exposure, such dreams may also be seen as involving a sort of unconscious enjoyment in their own right. What is truly perverse in Buuels film is precisely the compulsive tendency of bourgeois consciousness to re-constitute images of its own failure, its own fraudulence, and even its own destruction as symbolic fantasy projections for renewed desire and vitality. In light of the fact that this film would win Buuel an Academy Award, one might well conclude that the film anticipated its own reception.12 The Phantom of Liberty In The Phantom of Liberty, a similar dialectical irony arises in a more volatile, erratic fashion through the tropes and situations of the film.13 For what seems to characterize the various episodes is the sense that the desire for political or sexual freedom and the desire for law, order, and social hierarchy are not stable opposites so much as perverse counterparts of one another. That is, just as the desire for order is undercut by a certain unconscious awareness of its own arbitrariness, its own impotence or lack of foundation, the desire for freedom is undercut by a certain unconscious awareness of its own impossibility. It is their mutual lack that drives both forms of desire, ensures their perpetual interplay, and prevents dialectical closure in the film.14 It would be impossible to provide a full synopsis of the film, but most of the scenes have the quality of jokes, even as their relationship to one another
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In his commentary on Lacans Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysisin particular, Lacans re-reading of the burning child dream in Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams!i"ek makes the distinction between the dreamer who awakens due to an external irritation from the waking world, and the proper Lacanian notion of the dreamer who awakens in order to escape the Real of his desire by retreating into the more familiar fantasy-construction of waking reality (!i"ek 1989, 44-47). The latter seems to apply in the case of the awakenings we see in Buuels film. 12 Thus Samuels, who disavows any significant meaning in the film, nevertheless comes closest to its meaning in his final sentence: For people in search of titillating diversion from their daily lives, swicheroos may seem exciting; but such trifling doesnt deserve to be taken as a reflection of anything significant, unlessowing to its successful receptionit reflects a middle class whose most salient fault may turn out to be a tolerance for insult (1978, 373). 13 Buuel confirms that the title was indeed coined as an ironic homage to Marxs opening to The Communist Manifesto: A spectre is haunting Europethe spectre of Communism (Buuel 1984, 249). 14 For a comprehensive Lacanian reading of the film, see Williams (1981, 151-185); see also Reynold Humphries (1995). The political ironies of the film are mapped out well in Joan Mellen (1978).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) can enhance any given joke beyond its function on a local level.15 A good example would be the sequence of scenes that take place at an inn: a) A nurse who is concerned about the health of her father arrives and meets a group of monks, one of whom gives her an icon of Saint Joseph to pray with; immediately thereafter, she joins them in a game of cards in which religious medals serve as chips for the bets. b) In another room, a young man and his aunt are engaged in an incestuous courtship; the devoted young man wants to gaze upon the naked body of his aunt, who is hesitant to follow through on her own sexual desire for her nephew. c) In another room, a man invites the nurse, monks and nephew to visit him and his female partner; while the nurse and the monks discuss the likelihood of certain saints losing their formal status as saints, the man and his partner stage a scene in which she flogs him with a riding crop while he berates himself. Mortified at this spectacle, the other characters flee from the room. In this particular cross-section, the situations provide variations on the theme of freedom and law that both parallel and contrast with one another. First, in observing that the status of any saint can be retracted by the Vatican, the monks acknowledge the fluctuating value of the sacred while finding no discrepancy in their theology since the judgment of the Vatican is regarded as infallible; their ability to reconcile contingency with necessity in this fashion thus finds its counterpart in the gambling with religious tokens, which serves as a symbolic excess that betrays the conceptual gap that they have prematurely resolved in their religious doctrine. In the case of the incestuous nephew, his desire for erotic freedom appears all too determined by the very taboo it seeks to violate; in seeking to view her body, his fixation has overtones of religious as well as sexual fetishism, and thus also serves as a rather ironic counterpart to the contingent yet necessary value of the sacred we see in the case of the monks. Finally, in the case of the masochist, the impossible desire for freedom and the arbitrary status of law obviously takes its most excessive form as he solicits the monks and the nurse to witness his abasement. What arises through this cluster of scenes, then, might best be seen as variations of symbolic deadlock, variations of dialectical conflict between the desire for freedom and the desire for law that do not become resolved but rather erupt into mutually perverse forms of enjoyment. We may recall the monks response to the masochist: If its the cane he wants, Ill give it to him! The Buuelian punch line is an apt one:
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Aside from the episodic breakdown by Williams (1981), the two most thorough attempts to analyze the structure of this film have made by Susan Suleiman (1978) and James Tobias (1998).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) the threat of punishment here appears to extend the perverse scenario, not only for the masochist but also by way of the surplus enjoyment betrayed by the outraged monk. The most interesting variation, however, occurs in the opening and closing scenes. In the opening scene, Buuel first includes a shot of Goyas The Third of May, 1808, a well-known painting of Spanish prisoners being executed by French soldiers in the Peninsular War. We then see the painting reenacted within the film, and as the Spaniards face the firing squad, we hear one of them cry Vivan las caenas! (Long live the chains!). The historical context of this scene is important; while Goya and other Spanish liberals initially embraced the ideals of the French revolution, Napoleons betrayal of these ideals led them to prefer the authority of the Spanish monarchy as the lesser of two evils (Jones 2003).16 Thus we encounter another deadlock: rather than evoking some higher, coherent meta-concept of freedom, the cry from the dying Spaniard can only provide a perverse affirmation of its opposite, which in turn implies the renunciation of its perverse form in the French occupation. As such, the slogan can be regarded not only as a repudiation of the soldiers, but also as an ironic mirroring of the soldiers themselves, whose fight for freedom entails its own coercive quality. Long live the chains in this sense serves as a way of saying: In our perverse embrace of oppression, see the hidden truth of your own perverse desire! In turn, Buuels echo of this scene at the end of the film pursues its paradoxical logic with even greater intensity. In this case, two police commissioners (who appear as curious doubles of one another) need to quell a revolt at the zoo. The nature of the revolt is obscure: one commissioner mentions that the rioters must be kept away from the cages, and that if some animals are killed, tough luck. His double agrees. As the commissioners arrive at the zoo, they hear from off screen the same cry that the French soldiers heard in the beginning of the film: Long live the chains! In response, the commissioners issue a twofold command: Charge!/ Let em have it! At this point Buuel initiates a spinning, disorienting swish pan that eventually displays an ostrich; the bird gazes at the viewer and begins to wander away amid the sound of gunfire and chaos. From where does the renewed cry of Long live the chains originate, and how might it be re-integrated within this scene? We might consider several possible answers, each of which recapitulates the impasse of the first scene: a) the cry may designate the desire of the off-screen dissidents whether right-wing or left-wingto embrace the chains of their own
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See also Williams (1981, 157) and Michael Wood (2000) on the political ironies arising from this historical allusion in the film.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) ideology as a lesser evil than (or an ironic reflection of) the false freedoms of bourgeois society; b) in turn, the cry may designate the desire of the off-screen dissidents to join the animals in their cages as a lesser evil than (or an ironic reflection of) the false freedoms of bourgeois society; c) more fancifully, perhaps, the cry may designate the desire of the offscreen animals to remain in their cages as a lesser evil than (or an ironic reflection of) the false freedoms of all ideologies maintained by their human counterparts: the bourgeoisie who want to keep them caged as well as any dissidents seeking either to join or liberate them.17 Yet such attempts at re-integration must remain tentative due Buuels conspicuous refusal to depict the source of the off-screen voice, which causes a certain excess of symbolization through the persistent lack it marks in the diegetic space of the film.18 If this lack implies a fundamental impossibility that both undercuts and generates a revolutionary desire for freedom, it implies a fundamental fissure within the bourgeois order as well. For example, as Reynold Humphries has observed, the absurd image of two police commissioners involves its own Lacanian split subject-position (Humphries 1995, 200): the figurehead of law can only maintain its power through a prior disavowal of its own deficiency.19 This in turn suggests a new way to regard the shared plan of the doubles to quell the revolt: they only constitute a semblance of identity by projecting their mutual lack in the form of an externalized, outside threat of dissident forces. From this vantage point, the off-screen slogan becomes truly radical in that Buuels refusal to re-link the sound with a positive visual image suggests that it entails nothing more than the phantasmal projection and misrecognition of an inherent void within the
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However fanciful the third option may be, I confess that when I first saw the film almost twenty years ago, I couldnt escape the surreal sense that the shouts may be coming from the animals themselves (even as it seemed, strictly speaking, ridiculous). Even if considered a misreading, this impression has its own logic in light of the themes at play in this film, as well as Buuels tendency to remind his viewers of the blurred line between the human and animal domains. 18 Harmony H. Wu examines similar moments of the invisible off-screen voice in Belle de Jour: By alternately withholding and subverting the assurances of the voice-off operation, the created and impossible space of the film text (and Sverines subjectivity) is exposed, revealing everything to be constructed rather than organically whole, nakedly betraying the truth of cinematic lack, which all conventional rules of filmmaking obsessively seek to conceal (Wu 1999, 130). For Wu this involves exposing the inherent lack in the full (phallic) viewing subject as well (1999, 130). 19 Humphries also notes that the two commissioners represent the two interdependent forces of psychic and political repression (1995, 200). Meanwhile, Williams notes that the first commissioner's incestuous memory of his sister in a prior scene makes him only one of several examples of how readily the roles of erotic transgressor and political oppressor are interchangeable in the film (1981, 178).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) symbolic structure of bourgeois order. In this fashion the bizarre scene shows how the forces of law and order must generate their own perverse fantasy of revolt in order to avoid confronting their own illegitimacy, their own essential inability to fully reconcile law and the desire for freedom or social justice. As a negative effect of the Real, then, the phantom of liberty essentially cuts both ways: it designates the desire for liberty that in some sense will always remain frustrated, undermined and unrealized in ones attempts to achieve it politically or sexually; it also designates the desire for liberty that in some sense will always re-emerge in a distorted, alien or misrecognized form within any ideological framework that pretends to encompass the social whole. That Obscure Object of Desire That Obscure Object of Desire is Buuels most overtly Lacanian film in its treatment of a familiar theme in his work: the pathological dimension of male desire and jealousy that seems to respond to some external threat while also serving as its own self-justification regardless of what one might postulate as objective reality.20 A review of Buuels scenario will reveal some of its implications in light of the patterns already noted in the previous two films. Most of the films narrative is encapsulated through flashbacks as the protagonist, an aging aristocrat named Mathieu, seeks to explain to a group of fellow train passengers why he poured a bucket of water on a mysterious woman. As he tells the story of his perpetually frustrated relationship with Conchita, a young woman from the working class, he thus seeks to justify his antipathy towards her. At the same time, his account (in spite of itself) leaves open considerable room for the viewer to judge his own faults. For example, we see repeated instances which betray Mathieus patronizing position with regard to Conchita: in giving gifts to her as well as her mother, his gestures reveal his thinly veiled hope to buy her love; in his attraction to her charms there is often an undertone of fetishism (such as when he inhales the smell of a handkerchief she leaves behind, or when his face erupts with delight when she tells him she is a virgin); even in his tolerance of her idiosyncrasies there is the smug assurance of his eventual possession of her as a mistress. Meanwhile, Conchita veers between expressions of sincere devotion and sudden revulsion, a desire to make him happy and a desire to hurt and
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20

In Metastases of Enjoyment, !i"ek regards Mathieu as one of several Lacanian case studies of courtly love (!i"ek 1994, 95). For a more sustained Lacanian reading, see Williams (1981, 185-209); the deconstructive reading of Ronnie Scharfman (1980) also partially draws upon Lacanian theory.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) humiliate him; we see repeated instances in which Mathieus desire for sexual fulfillment is denied or deferred by Conchita. In turn, to make matters even more interestingor more frustrating, or bothBuuel has the character of Conchita played by two different actresses who alternate throughout the film, even as none of the characters acknowledge this frequent change in her appearance. Amidst all of this, Buuel also inserts scenes that periodically remind the viewer of random bombings perpetrated by the R.A.B.J.: The Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus. Thus we have another situation that may best be seen within the scope of !i"eks Hegelian/Lacanian perspective: the uncanny shifting of Conchitas appearance and behavior, her excessive vacillation between attraction and repulsion, serves as an eruption of the Real from within the fantasy space of Mathieus consciousness; in her twofold form she is the projected image of the deficiency that already resides within his ideological mindset, even as his own frustration is in some sense a perverse prolongation of his desire that allows him to avoid confronting the traumatic reality of his own impotence.21 The more he seeks to appropriate her as an object, the more she eludes him, which in turn intensifies his desire for her; it is both a closed and a perpetually open economy at work here that feeds upon its internal contradictions without resolving them.22 Meanwhile, as an
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21

In this context we may note Conchitas double designation of the protagonist as Mathieu/Matteo, as well as how his doubles may be configured in two other ways: first by his brother, the judge who is presiding over trials of terrorist suspects, and in turn by his valet. In the case of his brother, the portrayal of this character by Julien Bertheau offers a partial echo of the actors co-appearance with Michel Piccoli as the two police commissioners in Phantom; thus Obscure Object appears to provide a further variation of the same Lacanian trope of the laws misrecognition of its own non-identity with regard to the distinct, yet complicit ideologies of bourgeois patriarchy in the private sphere (Mathieu) and bourgeois law in the public sphere (the Judge). In turn, the valet not only plays a dual role as hired employee/confidante that involves a displaced, masculine variation of Conchitas dual role as hired mistress/lover, he also serves as Mathieus perverse counterpart insofar as his inadequately sublimated misogyny indirectly betrays that of Mathieu himself. Of course this is most strongly conveyed in the valets reference to women as sacks of excrement, which he attributes to a friend rather than himself; just as the valet simultaneously affirms and discreetly displaces this sentiment, his more blatant hypocrisy both affirms and displaces a more refined hypocrisy in Mathieus thinking. Meanwhile, if excrement may be taken as the trope of something that cannot be assimilatedan obscene leftoverthen the valets comment (like the trope of iliac passion in Phantom) indeed provides an all-too excessive projection of the inherent failure of patriarchal ideology to realize its own flawed concept of woman. 22 Conchitas dual name merits reflection as well: Even Conchitas names fuse physicality and spirituality. Her real name is Concepcion as in the immaculate conception, but conchita, in colloquial Spanish, means cunt. Once again religion (the law) anoints sex with a halo of tantalizing interdiction (Stam 1983, 19). Here we may also recall Buuels recognition in The Milky Way (La Voie Lacte, 1969) that the concept of Immaculate Conception is far from immaculate in Christian theology. In turn, insofar as conception is indeed a semantically loaded termsignifying both a biological process of idea becoming substance as well as a cognitive process of substance becoming ideathe word is no less reminiscent of the Hegelian dictum, contra Kant, that the very dichotomy between idea (or Notion) and substance (or transcendental object) arises from a radical split

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) ominous backdrop, Buuel continues to provide images of terrorist violence erupting in the streets, which suggests that this psychosexual logic of mutually dependent yet mutually antagonistic perversity also informs the broader realm of political conflict. The final scene of the film is most memorable due to how it highlights the unresolved nature of this dialectic. At the end of the film, we see Mathieu and Conchita reunited after the train tripoutside the frame of Mathieus own narrationand we see them approach a store window. Within the window a woman has a sack in her lap that echoes the image of a burlap sack that we have seen Mathieu holding during an argument with Conchita earlier in the film. As Ronnie Scharfman notes, the burlap sack in the previous scene is itself an obscure object that suggests both the lack that underlies Mathieus subjectivity as well as his instinctive awareness that he can only possess Conchita in the corresponding form of such a lack (Scharfman 1980, 356).23 In turn, in the final scene the woman with the sack opens it, withdraws a torn and bloodied lace nightgown, and begins to mend it. Mathieu watches with a wistful smile on his face as the tear is mended. We see his lips moving through the window but we cannot hear what he is saying: an obverse approach to the non-synchronization of sound and image that characterized the cry of Long live the chains! in Phantom of Liberty. In this case, too, the tear that Buuel situates within the diegetic fabric of the film gives way to a condensed excess of extra-diegetic meaning. The image suggests Mathieus fantasy of mending the gap within himself, and thereby overcoming the barrier between himself and Conchita as the projected/misrecognized image of this gap; at the same time, through its suggestion of a restored hymen (as well as its visual echo of Conchitas tightly laced corset earlier in the film), the image also suggests his fantasy of retaining Conchita as a perpetually inviolable, inaccessible, and obscure object of desire. Such an ambiguityevoking a
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within the Notion itself in subjective experience (see !i"ek 1993, 18-22). In other words, no concept is completely immaculate in the sense of being entirely self-contained and self-consistent, just as any positing of pure substance entirely outside the realm of conceptual thought is always itself a sort of abstraction. Translating this dictum back into the terms of Buuels wordplay, one might figuratively say that the immaculate conception (theological or philosophical) is always in some sense a cunt, just as the pure, material reality of the cunt is always in some sense only a concept. In this sense Conchitas dual name not only evokes the Buuelian dialectic between the mutually interdependent perversities of religious taboo and erotic desireit also reflects Mathieus inability to fully conceive of Conchitas difference from him either by idealizing her as an abstract object or debasing her as a material object. Meanwhile, with Lacan in mind, one need not look far to detect in conchita the symptom of a misrecognized, projected lack that underlies Matthieu/Matteos (phallic) desire to assimilate this obscure object within his own ideological fantasy. Whether considered in Hegelian or Lacanian terms, then, Buuels word play seems to have a striking resonance within the broader texture of the film. (In this context, too, the fact that Buuels sister was also named Conchita may not be entirely coincidental.) 23 See also Williams (1981, 201-209).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) desire at once to transcend and re-cultivate the perversehas both Hegelian and Lacanian overtones: if one posits an entirely self-contained, immaculate meta-concept to reconcile a dialectical conflict, it does not nullify this conflict but rather retains it in a new form; if the desire to annul the lack cannot be separated from the desire to maintain the lack, it is because the lack precedes and generates desire. Meanwhile, a public loudspeaker has announced a new development in the terrorist subplot. An assortment of left-wing groups have formed a strange alliance with the presumably Christian fundamentalist R.A.B.J., which is now directing a new bombing campaign; moreover, certain rightwing groups claim that they will meet the challenge of the other groups with their own bombings. One might interpret this as Buuels satirical comment on the essential sameness of all forms of terrorism, yet there are further implications to the directors joke. For if this new terrorist alliance appears as an alien enemy, its blatant absurdity (much like that of Conchitas twofold appearance and inconsistent behavior) also marks it as an excessive symptom of inherent schisms within the dominant social order. The terrorists who converge in this provisional yet impossible coalition against the prevailing system are an uncanny, externalized embodiment of the provisional yet impossible coalition of the system itself; in this sense the micro-political perversities of the Mathieu/Conchita relationship indeed have their counterpart in the macro-political perversities in the world around them. As Mathieu and Conchita resume their walk, an explosion from a terrorist bomb veils the couple from our view; whether they survive the blast is a question that Buuel leaves open. In much the same way, if we wish for a complete, total cure to the ideological perversities we have seen throughout the bourgeois trilogy, then it would appear that apocalypse is the only option. Aside from this, however, may be a much more limited source of hope: the recognition that if the dialectical deadlock of ideological desire will always persist in the world as we know it, it is also for this same reason that it can never remain fixed in its condition. Indeed, the possibility for Mathieu and Conchita to find some measure of new awarenessif only through a fuller recognition of themselves and one another through the lack that they shareremains a provisional one, obscured as it may be behind the screen of smoke that ends the film.24 Although it may be perverse of Buuel himself to offer no more hope than this, such a final gesture suggests the filmmakers sober, yet playful awareness of his own limits.
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24

In light of the patterns noted previously (see footnotes 20 and 21), one might at least hope that Mathieu and those of us like him would gain a vulgar wisdom best expressed in a jargon consistent with the Aragonese side of Buuel's humor: When a cunt acts like a prick, he will only end up with shit.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Our Buuel If Buuel continues to speak to us, it is no doubt due to how the conflicting political agendas that characterize our epochin their own arbitrary, radically compromised demands for order and their own impossible, radically self-defeating demands for freedomseem all the more caught in their own destructive cycles of perverse projection, disavowal and mimicry. To watch Buuel is not to find any solutions to these dilemmas, and it may seem to provide no more than a bleak confirmation of symptoms that persist all too vigorously in the ideological fantasies of our world. However, a critical engagement with Buuels films not only allows us to see what is serious in all their idiosyncratic humor, but may also compel us to pose broader political questions with greater nuance and self-reflection, so that whatever contingent answers we do find might at least avoid the trap of making matters even worse than they already are. This is the redemptive possibility that resides in all of Buuels films and one that makes him so worth watching with new eyes today.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1983) Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum. Buuel, Luis (1984) My Last Sigh. New York: Vintage. Dews, Peter (1996) The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy. London: Verso. Fuentes, Victor (1999) The Discreet Charm of the Postmodern: Negotiating the Great Divide with the Ultimate Modernist, Luis Buuel in Luis Buuels The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Marsha Kinder, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82 98. Gunkel, David J. (2008) !i"ek and the Real Hegel. International Journal of !i"ek Studies, v. 2, n. 2. [http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/137/210]. Accessed April 4, 2012. Hall, Stuart. (1996) The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. New York: Routledge, 24 45. Horwitz, Noah (2005) Contra the Slovenians: Returning to Lacan and Away from Hegel. Philosophy Today, v. 49, n. 1: 24 32. Humphries, Reynold (1995) Lacan and the Ostrich: Desire and Narration in Buuels Le Fantme de la Libert. American Imago, v. 52, n. 2: 191 203.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Jones, Julie (2003) Long Live Death!: The End of Revolution in Luis Buuels The Phantom of Liberty. Cinema Journal, v. 42, n. 4: 63 75. Kinder, Marsha (1999) The Nomadic Discourse of Luis Buuel: A Rambling Overview in Luis Buuels The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Marsha Kinder, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 11. Kinder, Marsha (2000) Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buuel's Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative. Film Quarterly, v. 55, n. 4: 2 15. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Mellen, Joan (1978) The Phantom of Liberty: Further Investigations into the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in The World of Luis Buuel. Joan Mellen, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 318 331. Pauly, Rebecca (1994) A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party: The Discrete Charm of Buuels Bourgeoisie. Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 22, n. 4: 232 237. Samuels, Charles Thomas (1978) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in The World of Luis Buuel. Joan Mellen, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 369 373. Scharfman, Ronnie (1980) Deconstruction Goes to the Movies: Buuels Cet Obscur Objet du Dsir. !"#$ %&#'("$ )#*+#,, v. 53, n. 3: 351 358. Simon, John (1978) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: Why Is the Co-Eatus Always Interruptus? in The World of Luis Buuel. Joan Mellen, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 363 368. Stam, Robert (1983) Hitchcock and Buuel: Desire and the Law. Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. 16, n. 1: 7 27. Suleiman, Susan (1978) Freedom and Necessity: Narrative Structure in The Phantom of Liberty. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, v. 3, n. 3: 277 295. Tobias, James (1998) Buuels Net Work: Performative Doubles in the Impossible Narrative of The Phantom of Liberty. Film Quarterly, v. 52, n. 2: 10 22. Williams, Linda (1981) Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Wood, Michael (2000) Down with Liberty. Sight and Sound, v. 10, n. 9: 30 33. [http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/460/]. Accessed April 4, 2012. Wu, Harmony H. (1999) Unraveling Entanglements of Sex, Narrative, Sound, and Gender: The Discreet Charm of Belle de Jour in Luis Buuels The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Marsha Kinder, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 111 140. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 230

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) !i"ek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. !i"ek, Slavoj (1993) Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press. !i"ek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso. Filmography Buuel, Luis (1972) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie). France / Italy / Spain. Buuel, Luis (1974) The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantme de la Libert). France / Italy. Buuel, Luis (1977) That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Dsir). France / Spain. Buuel, Luis (1969) The Milky Way (La Voie Lacte). France / West Germany / Italy.
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