Luis Bunuel it Takes Two

Luis Bunuel

It Takes Two

How do we know what is real? Because we share our perceptions of what happens with others and their agreement with our own perceptions and beliefs about the nature of even our own personal reality is thus bolstered by the attention of others. Left to our own, embroiled in a world in which we have only our own perceptions and our own memories to help guide us. Luis Bunuel's surrealist 1977 masterpiece That Obscure Object of Desire (or, Cet obscur objet du desir in French, Ese oscuro objeto del deseo in Spanish) is in part an exploration of the ways in which a man tries to make his life understandable to himself. A task in which he fails completely.

The film tells a story of a man in love with a women that he seeks to possess. His desire to possess her -- for the woman is the object of desire -- seems pathetic from the viewer's perspective. Locked in his world, determined to bring about his own reality through sheer force of will, he tries to make the woman he desires conform to private ideals of his own. But the woman easily avoids the trap, the prison of his desire to the extent that she constantly splits into two separate women, something that Mathieu -- the aging, wealthy Frenchman who sees his chance for true love in the poor but beautiful flamenco dancer Conchita.

The dancer is played by two different actresses, very different and appearance in looks, in body language, indeed even in character. Most of the movie is told in the form of flashbacks, and it is hard at first not to be constantly drawn out of the narrative by the fact that this man cannot see that his lover is always in danger of dissolving into her doppelganger.

Bunuel (2003) wrote in his memoirs that he had not originally intended to cast two different actresses to carry the role, but found after initiating shooting that the one actress that he had selected could not do so.

In 1977, in Madrid, when I was in despair after a tempestuous argument with an actress who'd brought the shooting of That Obscure Object of Desire to a halt, the producer, Serge Silberman, decided to abandon the film altogether. The considerable financial loss was depressing us both until one evening, when we were drowning our sorrows in a bar, I suddenly had the idea (after two dry martinis) of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before. Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, and the film was saved (Bunuel 46-7).

Watching the movie as it was made, it is difficult to imagine how it could have held together if there were only a single actress. For each actress supports the other, both their duality and their differences anchor the character in a shared reality. Despite the fact that there is something clearly irregular about the reality of a character who shifts from one embodiment to another with no seeming order or reason, it is Conchita who seems to be the more stable of the two.

She -- they? -- lives in a world in which she is aware of her effect on others and their effect on her. Mathieu seems remarkably blind to his social self: For a man who believes that he is entirely focused on another person, he is in fact living in a solipsistic world. He is not only blind to the constantly shifting visage and character of his lover but of the dangers of the world in which he lives. Colina (1992) interviewed Bunuel extensively and the filmmaker talked to him extensively about how committed he was to Surrealism, noting that his work in Cet obsur objet du desir was an expression of his complete committment to Surrealism, as much an expression of what he believed that he thought Dali was trying to accomplish as anything that he wanted to accomplish as a filmmaker.

There is a certain simultaneity in Bunuel's work that is analogous to the visually dense (and viewer-near) experience of looking at a Dali canvas. As Eisenstein (166, 168), notes, Bunuel forces the viewer into acknowledging a certain simultaneity in which elements that in the hands of another filmmaker might be kept temporally apart in his films come into the frame and the viewer's mind at the same moment, thereby creating new forms of conflict. The viewer sees this in both the initial and closing scenes of Desire, as different perceptions of time (Mathieu's, Conchita's, the onlookers in the film, and the onlookers in th audience) collide.

The movie is set against a background of ill-explained terrorism, and the violence of the world around the lovers serves as frame and justification for the violence of their own relationship, although the violence between them (although arguably horrifying on an emotional level) is a very diluted version of the violence of the world. The movie opens with Mathieu pouring water over Conchita, a gesture that can be read as an attempt to purify her, or to erase her from his life, or to cool his desire for her.

We will find out throughout the rest of the film that Mathieu is attempting to rewrite the narrative of his own life, and then attempting to re-recreate it. As Jones (1999) suggests, he is first attempting to put on the identity of a picaro, a man looking for his identity in a younger self who still has more choices ahead of him. However, as he fights and makes up and then fights again with Conchita, he begins to regret, or at least to question, this backtracking to a time that he cannot change.

But it ends with fire, with desecration, with the world coming apart into blood and terror and bits of flesh sprayed over the street. Terrorism is, like pathological love, a solipsistic activity, one that depends for its survival on the ability of the participants to deny the effect that they are having on the world. (of course, they do want to cause terror, but when one listens to or reads the last words of terrorists, there is a clear pattern of dissociation, a psychological requirement that the terrorist cannot truly face the destruction that he or she will initiate.)

The entire movie is, as Eisenstein (1987) posits, built of layers of conflict, but it is also constructed around the lack of conflict in places where it should be. There is the conflict between Mathieu and Conchita, and (as represented by them), the conflict between men and women, and between age and youth. There is the conflict between the two different embodiments of Conchita, in which the different temperaments of the two women abrade each other like sandpaper over finely planed wood. There is the conflict between the different groups of terrorists and civil society, and so also between stability and chaos, between community and destruction. What there is not is a sense of conflict within Mathieu himself. He has no clear inner voice that allows him to come to inner deeper understanding of his life and his love (William 48).

There is also -- and this reflects a very particularly Spanish form of surrealism -- a sense of Bunuel's pulling a gag. The coming together of dense visual images in the first and last scenes and the (brutal) simplicity of the bombing have an unreality to them, a sort of diabolic legerdemain that we keep expecting to seen undone and explained in the next scene (Russell 2009).