Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Repetition (with difference) and Ludic Deferral in

the later films of Luis Buñuel

Ian Olney

To cite this article: Ian Olney (2001) Repetition (with difference) and Ludic Deferral in
the later films of Luis Buñuel, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 18:1, 71-82, DOI:
10.1080/10509200109361513

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Repetition (with difference) and Ludic Deferral

in the Later Films of Luis Buñuel
Ian Olney

Legend has it that Luis Bunuel, anticipating puzzlement over the numerous repe-
titions in his new film El angel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel 1962), instructed
his son, Juan-Luis, to tell critics at Cannes that '"when I finished the film I
decided it was still short, so to lengthen i t . . . ' " (qtd. in Aranda, 212). A mischiev-
ous response—and one very much in keeping with Bunuel's contempt for the
media in general and commentators who tried to pin down the meaning of his
films in particular. He preferred to leave such questions unanswered: "This rage
to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only
find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mys-
tery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with
innocence" (Bunuel, 174).
In spite of this eloquent plea—or perhaps because of it—my curiosity persists. I am
intrigued by the implication that the filmmaker should salvage the "fundamental
mystery of our lives" by thwarting the spectator's "rage to understand," and,
more specifically, by the idea that the repetitions in The Exterminating Angel are a
means of accomplishing this purposeful obfuscation. Bunuel himself admits that
the inclusion of the repetitions in the film was the result of a personal fascination
and a conscious, informed decision on his part. "Repetition," he tells Jose de la
Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent, "is an idea of mine, something personal" (De la
Colina and Turrent, 170). The repetitions are not accidental or excessive (as he dis-
ingenuously communicated to critics at Cannes); they represent a language central
to the film, calculated to evoke a sense of mystery by effecting a suspension in the
production of meaning. Two important questions follow this conclusion: How
can repetition (generally considered—apart from its power as a rhetorical or
poetic trope—the antithesis of progressive or evolving modes of discourse) be
effectively linked with the dynamic, unpredictable play of mystery and chance;
and, assuming such a paradoxical linkage is possible, how can we account for its
appearance in The Exterminating Angel and other Bunuel films?

IAN OLNEY teaches film studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in the Department of English. He is
currently working on a study of the impact of contemporary, posthuman technologies on representations of the
body in popular literature and film.

71
72 Ian Olney

Indeed, in order to answer these questions, I need to extend my inquiry beyond

The Exterminating Angel. When I look at many of the key films Bunuel made during
1960s—Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid 1963), Simon
del desierto (Simon of the Desert 1965), Belle de Jour (1966), Tristana (1970)—I am
struck by the omnipresence of repetition. In fact, I would argue that it is often the
obsessive foregrounding of repetition that differentiates Bunuel's later work from
earlier directorial forays into orthodox Surrealism and the Mexican mainstream.
In many cases, he uses instances of repetition to mark the propagation or perpetu-
ation of a misguided "will to truth" in religious or political rhetoric—think of the
marching fascists at the end of The Diary of a Chambermaid who gamely chant slogans
they do not understand, or the anchorite of Simon of the Desert who attempts to
draw closer to God by literally retreating to an ivory tower and performing
empty, self-involved rituals. The repetition in these films is double-edged, however;
it can also celebrate the return of the repressed, subversive forces of the uncon-
scious, which more often than not are associated in these films with "femaleness."
If conservative forms of repetition are linked with the male characters in The Diary
of a Chambermaid and Simon of the Desert, as well as in Belle de Jour and Tristana,
there are also instances of transgressive repetition associated with the key female
characters: Celestine, the Temptress and Simon's mother, Severine, and Tristana.
These women work contrary to static, masculine modes of repetition by performing
repetition with difference: Celestine parodies the oft-repeated instructions of her
mistress, Mme. Monteil; the Temptress and Simon's mother repeatedly confront
Simon with the pleasures and the inescapable necessities of the flesh, respectively;
Severine's erotic, self-fulfilling reveries increase in frequency and potency until
they overwhelm the patriarchal reality she has longed to transform; and Tristana
simultaneously maintains her own freedom and challenges Don Lope's tendency
to erase difference by repeatedly insisting on the meaningfulness of choosing a
favorite among pairs of seemingly identical objects: columns, peas, streets. Repetition
therefore encompasses, in these films, both the conservative and the transgressive—
repetition of the same and repetition with difference.
As fascinating as these different manifestations of repetition are, however, they
strike me as being somewhat over-determined. In each case, the repetitions are
produced by and bound to a single subjectivity, which limits their subversive
potential and implies a problematic (essentialist) construction of gender. In the
later Bunuel films that interest me the most—The Exterminating Angel, Le Charme
discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972), and Cet obscur
objet du desire (That Obscure Object of Desire 1977)—the repressed principle of repe-
tition with difference emerges more richly in connection with the idea of ludic
deferral. These three films depict the inability of male and female characters to
satisfy their most fundamental desires—to move freely, to eat, to possess one
another completely—despite repeated attempts to do so. However, they also suggest
that the chain of deferrals inaugurated by such frustrations paradoxically opens
the way for liberation from the constraints that prevent the satisfaction of those
desires in the first place. I'm not interested in resolving this apparent contradiction
in a Hegelian or dialectical fashion. Instead, I'd like to demonstrate how the filmic
language of repetition can embody the paradoxical dialogic formulated above,
explore the roots of this dialogic in Bunuel's own cultural identity (or identities),
 Luis Bunuel 73

and illustrate the ways in which differing modes of repetition and deferral play
off of and deepen one another in certain of Bunuel's later films.
In order to explain how the filmic language of repetition can embody a seemingly
paradoxical dialogic of enchainment and liberation, I turn to Gilles Deleuze's classic
study of philosophy, Difference et Repetition (Difference and Repetition 1968). In Dif-
ference and Repetition, Deleuze points out that at the inception of Western thought
Plato sought to eliminate simulacra—copies or repetitions of Ideal forms—
because "in the figure of the simulacra [sic] is the state of free, oceanic differences,
of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice which
challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy" (265). Originally
then, for Plato, repetition paradoxically carried difference within itself: one may
repeat or copy an Ideal form, but the copy is not accorded the same exalted status
as the original. This open recognition of the subversive "otherness" or difference of
the simulacrum was finally displaced, however, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century philosophies of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, which attempt to subsume or
categorize difference, and claim—in the spirit of synthesis or the science of classi-
fication—to represent it. Deleuze maintains that modern philosophy has denied
the existence of pure difference; it has co-opted and domesticated difference by
reducing it to an opposition or contradiction and "resolving" the opposition or
contradiction through analogy under the aegis of "infinite representation." The
sociopolitical consequences of this philosophical tradition, this erasure of pure
difference, have been profound:

Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie
defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems
are. Contradictions are not 'resolved/ they are dissipated by capturing the problem of which they
reflect only the shadow. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 268)

In other words, the dominant sociopolitical orders of the West—which typically

favor one race (white), one gender (male), one sexual orientation (heterosexual),
and one class (the wealthy)—flourish by representing "difference" (which dies
when represented) in the form of nominal alternatives. By superficially representing
difference in this way, they are able to maintain the appearance of heteroglossia
and forestall serious opposition or dissent, effectively preserving the status quo.
Because of the erasure of difference that has attended modern philosophy and
politics in the West, repetition has become simply another tool at the disposal of
dominant sociopolitical orders, often used to confirm the identity and stability of
existing ideological precepts. Deleuze argues, however, that there is in reality,
given "the state of free, oceanic differences" originally embodied by the figure of
the simulacrum, a dialogic of repetition: a "bare" or material, habitual, and static
repetition, grounded in traditional notions of identity and self; and a "clothed" or
metaphysical, transgressive, and dynamic repetition, attended by alterity and
excess:
The first repetition is repetition of the Same, explained by the identity of the concept or representation;
the second includes difference, and includes itself in the alterity of the Idea, in the heterogeneity of an
'a-presentation.' One is negative, occurring by default in the concept; the other affirmative, occurring
by excess in the Idea One is inanimate, the other carries the secret of our deaths and our lives, of
our enchainments and our liberations, the demonic and the divine. One is a 'bare' repetition, the other
74 Ian Olney

a covered repetition, which forms itself in covering itself, in masking and disguising itself. (Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, 23-24)

These two forms of repetition exist together simultaneously; Deleuze cautions

that we must not think of them in opposition. Rather, the "clothed and living, vertical
repetition which includes difference should be regarded as the cause, of which
the bare, material and horizontal repetition (from which difference is merely
drawn off) is only an effect" (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 289). They form
together a dynamic interplay of enchainment and liberation, which Deleuze terms
(borrowing from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustm) the "eternal return." The
eternal return "cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a
world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished
and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming" (Deleuze, Dif-
ference and Repetition, 41). Repetition is, for Deleuze, inherently contradictory—
simultaneously denoting enchainment (being) and liberation (becoming), sameness
and difference—and thus spells the undoing, or opening, of any closed system
that relies on it for support.
What I find fascinating is that because of his unique position as a subject working
between different cultures, Bufiuel was able to come to similar conclusions about
the internal dialogic of repetition. In his classic critical biography of Bufiuel, Francisco
Aranda maintains that an appreciation of Bunuel's essential Spanishness is
requisite for a true understanding of his films:
It is impossible to understand his cinema without taking into account his character as a Spaniard and
an Aragonese, and all that goes with these things. Most of the errors and the elaborate and difficult
interpretations put upon Bunuel's work come from this ignorance: indeed, for many years most critics
thought that they were dealing with a Frenchman. (Aranda, 16)

This argument certainly has its merits: it is important to realize the role Spanish
culture of the early twentieth-century played in the early formation of Bunuel's
identity. His staunch Catholic upbringing in rural Calanda, his introduction to
Spanish modern art and involvement with the Spanish intelligentsia at the Res-
idencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and his later political involvement in the Spanish
Civil War stand behind all of his films. However, it is reductive to insist that the
significant amount of time Bufiuel spent in France, the United States, and Mexico,
living and working in those diverse cultures, had no real impact on his life and
career as a filmmaker. I will suggest, instead, that an alternate theory of identity
as the ongoing production of multiple selves much more closely approximates the
reality of Bunuel's cultural identity (or identities), and, moreover, that this alternate
theory of identity has important ramifications for way we read the (re)occurrence
of repetition in his later films.
"Aranda's conception of Bunuel's cultural identity is problematic because it
assumes a fundamental stability at the core of the self: a quintessential Spanishness,
in this case. Stuart Hall and others in the field of cultural studies question such
artificial and over-determined definitions of identity, which traditionally have
been deployed in the service of philosophical and scientific identification and
classification: "Every identity has at its 'margin', an excess, something more. The
unity, the internal homogeneity, which the term identity treats as foundational is
not a natural, but a constructed form of closure, every identity naming as its
 Luis Bunuel 75

necessary, even if silenced and unspoken other, that which it 'lacks'" (Hall, 5).
Homi K. Bhabha's theory of partial culture—"the contaminated yet connective
tissue between cultures" that represents "at once the impossibility of culture's
containedness and the boundary between" (Bhabha, 54)—as well as his argument
that the postcolonial social subject is constituted through "cultural hybridization"
become relevant here. Hybridization, for Bhabha, "opens up a space of negotiation"
at the point at which a "precept attempts to objectify itself as a generalized know-
ledge or a normalizing, hegemonic practice" (Bhabha, 58). Thus there is an important
connection between the hybridity of partial cultures—which reflects the multiplicity
of individual subjectivity—and the subversive, heteroglossiac nature of the discourse
they produce. Vietnamese filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, speaking to
Judith Mayne, also emphasizes this connection: "In the complex reality of post-
coloniality it is therefore vital to assume one's radical 'impurity' and to recognize
the necessity of speaking from a hybrid place, hence of saying at least two, three
things at a time" (Minh-ha, 140). I believe that repetition became, in Bunuel's later
films, an expression of his partial culture—a means of "speaking from a hybrid
place," of "saying two, three things at a time"—and an inherently subversive,
double language designed to challenge the conventional binary oppositions upon
which normalizing, hegemonic discourses are founded.
Bunuel made no secret of the fact that he was someone who accepted and even
took great satisfaction in the unresolved contradictions and ambiguities of his cultural
identity. In a particularly telling passage of his autobiography Mon dernier soupir
(My Last Sigh 1982), he describes his complex reaction to the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War: "As usual, I was torn between my intellectual (and emotional)
attraction to anarchy and my fundamental need for order and peace" (154). This
internal, dialogic tension between dynamism and inertia surfaces earlier in the
memoir, as well, when he reflects at length on his privileged childhood in rural
Spain. He presents with the picture of his native village, Calanda, as it was at the
time of his birth in 1900:

It was a closed and isolated society, with clear and unchanging distinctions among the
classes We were undoubtedly the last scions of an ancient way of life characterized by the rare
business transactions, a strict obedience to natural cycles, and a completely fossilized mode of
thought. (Bufiuel, 8,17)

Here repetition and repetitive behavior is linked negatively with stagnation and a
lack of vision. Bunuel speaks as a member of the Spanish and French intelligent-
sia, drawn to Surrealism, anarchism, and Communism, and profoundly commit-
ted to the struggle against a decrepit and repressive social order. However, he
goes on:

Today, in Calanda, there are no more poor people sitting outside the church on Fridays begging for
bread. The village has become quite comfortable; people live well. The traditional costume disappeared
a long time ago—the wide belt, the cachirulo on the head, the tight pants There are cars, refrigerators,
motorcycles—all the elements of a meticulously designed material well-being... Chaos, in the form of
entropy, has assumed the demonic disguise of population explosion.
I'm lucky to have spent my childhood in the Middle Ages, or, as Huysmans described it, that "painful
and exquisite" epoch—painful in terms of its material aspects perhaps, but exquisite in its spiritual
life. What a contrast to the world today! (Bunuel, 18)
76 Ian Olney

Here repetition is linked positively with spirituality and tradition—despite the

author's professed atheism and attraction to subversive and unconventional
behavior. This passage is problematic for critics who associate Bunuel definitively
with'a profound materialism (Aranda) or a virulent rejection of bourgeois roman-
ticism and mores (Edwards). However, I suggest that when taken together with
the preceding excerpts, it can help us see his films from another perspective. It
strikes me, in particular, that the dialogical tension in Bunuel's feelings for
Calanda and the Spanish Civil War—the simultaneous attraction to order and
anarchy, bare repetition and pure difference resulting from cultural hybridization—
represents a private working through of the philosophical issues Deleuze explores
in Difference and Repetition, and provides an explanation for his seemingly contra-
dictory use of repetition in The Exterminating Angel and other, later films. Bunuel,
working from a position of cultural hybridity, initiates in these films what Bhabha
calls "strategies of hybridization" and what Gloria Anzaldua has called a "border
tongue" by strategically using the filmic language of repetition to indicate visually
the interplay between the conventional binary oppositions of being and becoming,
past and present, order and anarchy, conscious and unconscious, reality and
dream. The end result is a cinema that explores the spaces between these opposing
terms, places where the distinctions between them become blurred.
Many critics find that the use of repetition in The Exterminating Angel serves to
emphasize the stultified, convention-bound behavior of the bourgeois characters.
Gwynne Edwards is representative of this tendency when he notes that the repe-
titions in The Exterminating Angel convey, "of course, in their very stylization, the
repetitions and duplications of actions that are the very stuff of everyday life and
which, in the peculiarly mannered society of the bourgeoisie, acquire that extra
dimension of stiltedness" (Edwards, 190). Such an explanation seems reasonable;
however, it does not take into account the fact that there are no exact repetitions in
The Exterminating Angel, only repetitions with difference: different reactions to the
same introduction or toast, different people uttering the same lines, even the same
scene shot from slightly different angles. Moreover, I find it intriguing that it is
through repetition (or, more precisely, through recognition, recollection, and repetition
with difference) that the guests are able to free themselves from their original
imprisonment. Bruce F. Kawin has briefly remarked upon this apparent paradox:

The guests consciously repeat their actions while in [their] positions... but with a difference. If they
repeated exactly what they had done before... the circle would be completed; the game would continue
until they were at these positions again, when presumably they would do the same things ad
infinitum Their action consists in doing the opposite of what they had done before, but in what
looks very like a recreation of the original scene: repetition in reverse, breaking the spell: a succession
of slightly changed instants constituting the movement of time (Kawin, 81-82)

We could apply what Kawin says here about the "repetition in reverse" and
"slightly changed instants in time" at the end of The Exterminating Angel to each
instance of repetition in the film. They all represent moments in which repetition
and difference co-exist.
Repetition in The Exterminating Angel thus seems to operate in a dialogic fashion.
On one hand, it is symptomatic of the meaningless traditions, conventions, and
habits of bourgeois society; alternatively (and simultaneously), however, it represents
 Luis Bunuel 77

providence, play, and liberation. William V. Spanos associates this concept of

repetition with the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Heidegger: "a circularity that
repeats the same to disclose, retrieve, deepen, and extend the cultural and socio-
political implications of the unnameable [sic] primordial Ontological Difference
repressed or concealed by the sedimented archival representations of being"
(Spanos, 4). M. M. Bakhtin's concept of "centripetal" and "centrifugal" language
might also be a helpful correlate. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin writes that:
Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work;
alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization
and disunification go forward. (Bakhtin, 272)

I want to argue that The Exterminating Angel (and, I intend to show, other of Bunuel's
key later films) operates, like the novel, on the "border between the dominant literary
language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia" (Bakhtin, 67).
The film represents a mediation between the centripetal tendencies of the "com-
pleted, dominant" language and the centrifugal tendencies of open, heteroglossic
languages.
This dialogic is perhaps best represented in The Exterminating Angel by the
image of the cathedral. It is well known that Bunuel begins and ends the film with
a lingering shot of a baroque cathedral and the sound of organ music and prayer.
These visual and aural images are, again, often taken to signify the stolid compla-
cency of religious convention. However, we should recall what Minh-ha would
term Bunuel's radical "impurity." It is true that as an adult Bunuel cherished a
deep animosity for the church as an institution (despite his fervent religiosity as a
child), but it is also true that he was very attracted to the aura of mystery attending
places of worship:
... I love Romanesque and Gothic art, particularly the cathedrals of Segovia and Toledo, which for me
are living worlds in themselves. Where French cathedrals have only the icy beauty of their architectural
forms, the Spanish cathedral has that incomparable spectacle of the retablo with its baroque labyrinths,
where your fantasies can wander endlessly in the minute detours. (Bunuel, 222-223)

Far from inhibiting fantasy and creativity, these structures, in their very excess
and extravagance, encourage what Deleuze has termed "nomadic" modes of thought
by opening various "lines of flight."
Given that the image of a cathedral could mean two very different things to
Bunuel, we should look at the context of both shots. At the film's opening, the
shot of the cathedral fades and we cut to a street scene with a sign reading "Calle
de La Providencia" foregrounded (the film was originally titled Los Ndufragos de la
calle Providencia or The Castaways of Providence Street). We track down and dolly
left to a pair of heavy gates that crash shut and we cut to the interior of an elaborately
furnished, bourgeois home, where Lucas, the valet, is telling the majordomo,
Julio, that he must go for a walk despite the imminent arrival of dinner guests.
Also inspired by an inexplicable urge to leave, the other household servants (with
the exception of Julio, who has bourgeois pretensions) soon follow suit. In this
brief sequence, inaugurated by the image of the cathedral, I see two tendencies at
work: one conservative and centripetal, associated with the studio interior of
the house and the arrival of the guests, and the other liberating and centrifugal,
78 Ian Olney

associated with the street exterior and the (literally) providential departure of the
servants.
It seems to me that the same interplay of forces occurs at the end of the film, as
well. The final image of the cathedral initiates a centripetal sequence in which we
track down the aisle of the church, track from one familiar face to the next, zoom
in on the trio of priests who are unable to leave the sanctuary, and cut to a flock of
lambs entering the church. This centripetal sequence is followed by a centrifugal
sequence in which we cut to the exterior of the church and dolly back from it, cut
to a shot of ringing bells, then a shot of a flag, and finally a shot of police firing
into a rioting mob. It appears from these opening and closing sequences that
Bunuel has developed a filmic language, built around the ambiguous image of the
cathedral, to express the dynamic interplay of "contradictory" forces: order and
anarchy, repetition and difference, being and becoming.
Perhaps, as Kawin implies, the best metaphor for the intervening narrative is
that of a game. When the guests' desire to leave the salon is mysteriously
deferred, their efforts to maintain social decorum through bourgeois ritual soon
disintegrate, causing permutations in the rules of the game. Even in the midst of
their degradation, the guests experience moments of metaphysical beauty—for
example, of the repeated use of the china closet as a lavatory, and the hallucinatory
exhilaration experienced by Silvia, Ana, and Rita when they use it—and eventually,
through no conscious endeavor on their part, a sort of cosmic epiphany. Indeed,
when Letitia discovers that the guests have unconsciously reassumed their original
positions after their interminable confinement in the salon, she wonders at this
improbable repetition after all the "possible combinations" and "changes of position
as in a game." Deleuze captures the essence of this moment when he writes about
the "human game," which is governed by moral necessity and a fixed system of
rules, becoming the "divine game":
The divine game is quite different First, there is no pre-existent rule, since the game includes its
own rules.... A pure Idea of play—in other words, of a game which would be nothing else but play
instead of being fragmented, limited and undercut with the work of men This is the point at which
the ultimate origin is overturned into an absence of origin (in the always displaced circle of the eternal
return). (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 283)

Their liberation comes at the moment when Nobile is ready to offer himself as a
sacrificial scapegoat, and represents a complete denial of the efficacy of such
behavior; the complete fortuity and illogicality of their release demonstrates that
no responsibility for their imprisonment can be assigned—"ultimate origin is
overturned into an absence of origin." In a moment of pure repetition, pure
becoming, they play the divine game—they enter fully into the spirit of ludic
deferral. Finally, of course, the guests revert to the all-too-human in their visit to
the church; however, the final shot of the police and the rioting crowd (presumably
the same people we've seen earlier in exterior shots, lounging festively outside
the walls of the enchanted mansion, watching and waiting) shows us that the chaotic
process of being and becoming has spread, unabated, to the streets.
One can see that the parallels between The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and
The Exterminating Angel are strong, though the two films are separated by a decade.
Bunuel writes that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie "evoke[s] the search for
 Luis Bufiuel 79

truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you've found it

[and] the importance of coincidence, of a personal morality, and of the essential
mystery in all things, which must be maintained and respected" (Bufiuel, 249).
Just as in The Exterminating Angel, we have a group of bourgeois characters who
are unable to satisfy a seemingly simple desire—the desire to have a meal
together, this time—despite their heroic efforts to do so. Again we see the centripetal
tendencies of bourgeois normality warp when exposed to the centrifugal tendencies
of reverie, dreams, and desire, opening a space for the negotiation of new sub-
jectivities. During the film, the six bourgeois characters gradually throw off the
chains of convention as they respond more and more eagerly to the transgressive
urges of the unconscious.
The misunderstanding at the beginning of the film sets off a chain of events
leading to the eruption of fantasy in reality. The opening sequence of the film—
the arrival of the Ambassador's limousine, the words between the Ambassador
and his chauffeur—is repeated twice, but already with difference (first the car
arrives at the Senechals, then it arrives at the restaurant), indicating that the chain
of deferral has already begun. The film begins with a disruption of normality (the
unexpected misunderstanding about the date of the dinner party, the death of the
restaurant manager) and becomes a series of repetitive arrivals and deferrals,
appointments and interruptions. Like Nobile's guests in The Exterminating Angel,
the bourgeoisie of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie somehow get "off track"
and careen headlong into a world of mystery and chance where desire rather than
rationality is paramount: Alice and Henri Senechal sneak out of their house to
make love while their guests wait in the salon; Don Raphael attempts to seduce
Simone Thevenot while her husband waits outside in the car; Florence becomes
inebriated at every opportunity, though she inevitably gets sick. Causal linkages
in the film are undermined, as when extra-diegetic sound drowns out the voices
of various characters who attempt to explain their motivations. Spatiality and
temporality, and the difference between reality and dream begin to break down:
at one point the friends find themselves on stage before an audience, surrounding
by the props of bourgeois life, trying to remember their lines. By the end of the
film, after a succession of dreams and dreams within dreams, reality and fantasy
have run together to the point where they are no longer distinguishable. It is, as
Deleuze has written, as though a "succession of cycles" has given away to "a plurality
of simultaneous worlds" (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 103).
As in The Exterminating Angel, there is a repeated image in The Discreet Charm of
the Bourgeoisie that serves to foreground the dialogic of repetition: a sequence in
which the six friends walk down a deserted country road with no destination in
sight. Critics tend to read this sequence as monolithically as the shot of the
cathedral in The Exterminating Angel discussed above. In this case,
[It's] as though the six characters in search of a meal are doomed to journey together forever [T]he
shot creates a sense of the characters' suspension in space and time, of their universality, and also of
their bewilderment and isolation Whatever the other implications of the shot, it suggests that the
bourgeoisie marches on forever (Edwards, 255, 263,267).

Peter William Evans partially challenges this consensus when he suggests that the
characters' stroll down the open road might represent "urgent flight from rational
80 Ian Olney

urbanity"—though he also worries that "the road seems to be leading the friends
nowhere, and we are never allowed to see their journey's end" (Evans, 13). I
would argue that the evidence Edwards and Evans give for reading the scene
negatively is actually cause to read it positively: the friends are on an open road,
they are moving through space and time, there are no signs, there is no stated des-
tination, they are definitively out of their habitual element. The repetition of this
shot, the way it metaphorically punctuates the narrative—and the fact that the
film ends with it, effectively defeating the viewer's expectation of closure—sustains
and ultimately privileges the familiar dialogic of being and becoming. It literally
evokes, as Bufiuel put it, "the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning
it as soon as you've found it." If the film opens with the centripetal tendencies of
arrival and the intrusion of death, it "ends" with the centrifugal tendency of voyage
and the postmodern affirmation of differance.
Like The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That
Obscure Object of Desire is a study of deferral—in this case, the deferral of sexual
intercourse, of bodies conjoining. The title of the film seems almost Lacanian in its
evocation of the realm of the Symbolic, where desire is formulated as "lack": the
object of desire is obscure because it can never be attained. However, Peter William
Evans suggests that That Obscure Object of Desire ultimately transcends lack; the
film's narrative, he explains, which "start[s] out as a project of male justification
eventually becomes the medium of the return of the female repressed, a text freed
from the constraints of Symbolic law" (Evans, 125). This argument is persuasive,
especially if we read Conchita, the young female protagonist of the film who
alternately seduces and scorns the older Mathieu Fabert, as the obscure object of
desire. Conchita is often a fiercely independent woman: "I am I," she says, echoing
God's words to Moses, "I'm nobody's I'm mine and I keep it that way." She
could embody a repressed female difference by denying Mathieu the traditional
patriarchal privilege of sexual possession.
However, I read Conchita as being more complex. Her on-again, off-again
reciprocation of Mathieu's affection (the efforts on her part to keep the "romance"
alive) indicates her unwillingness or inability to reject the mystery of his difference
completely. Conchita is at least two different women, each of different minds—an
idea that Bufiuel brilliantly actualizes by having two different actors, one French
and one Spanish (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), play the role. Mathieu,
though he appears to be of one body and one mind (perhaps because he is the
narrator and is thus able to create this illusion), demonstrates a similar schizo-
phrenia in his feelings toward Conchita. The two are fated to remain together,
loving and hating one another simultaneously. In my mind, their relationship
evokes the dialogic tension I have read into The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It is tempting to see That Obscure Object of Desire as
Bunuel's meditation on his own turbulent relationships with France and Spain,
and in fact I would argue that the concept of hybridity itself is the object of
scrutiny here—that Bufiuel is less interested in creating essentialist gender con-
structs than in evoking the tension engendered by the Gordian knot of contradic-
tions at the "core" of the self.
Bufiuel suggests that in addition to emphasizing the irreducible and ultimately
unknowable differences that exist between human beings, That Obscure Object of
 Luis Bunuel 81

Desire "insists upon maintaining [a] climate of insecurity and imminent disaster—
an atmosphere we all recognize, because it is our own" (Bunuel, 250). The "climate
of insecurity and imminent disaster" is at least partially maintained by the terrorist
activity—the hijackings, murders, and bombings enacted and reported over the
radio—that punctuates the film. However, it is also possible that the uneasy
atmosphere that pervades That Obscure Object of Desire is a product of the dialogic
tension engendered by the relationship between Mathieu and Conchita, or, rather,
that the acts of terrorism are somehow a violent exteriorization of that tension. The
explosion of the car bomb at the beginning of the film, the trial of the R.A.I.J.
terrorists, the several carjackings, and, of course, the explosion that kills Mathieu
and Conchita at the end of the film are, perhaps, a surreal manifestation of the
tempestuous relationship at its center. These acts of terrorism are akin to the riots
that take place at the end of The Exterminating Angel; both are a commentary on
the dynamic tension between the centripetal tendencies of the dominant ideology
and the centrifugal tendencies of heteroglossia. In That Obscure Object of Desire,
however, these public conflagrations also point to the irreducible differences that
haunt the private relationships between human beings. In Bunuel's last film, the
"disaster" is metaphorical as well as literal; it is, as Maurice Blanchot writes, that
which "disorients the absolute" and "bears the ultimate away in the disaster"
(Blanchot, 4,28).
In her definitive book on French feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman, Ivone
Margulies reaches a conclusion that I think is entirely relevant to the reading of
repetition in Bunuel's later films I have offered in this paper:
While the underlying sense pervading Akerman's films is one of cyclical homeostasis, her defiance of
telos and of logical certainty is radical and at times clearly upbeat. We need, then, to find whatever
does not quite repeat in her repetitions. Akerman is drawn to those strategies and elements that halt
and defer If logical meaning is corroded, other meanings subsist in layered or hybrid forms
These forms suggest a dense stratification, but its strata resist hierarchical determination. In Aker-
man's films meaning is nomadic. (Margulies, 211-212)

Like Akerman, Bunuel creates hybrid forms and nomadic meanings in his later
films through his use of repetitions that do not quite repeat and strategies that
halt and defer; however, while the repetitions in a film like Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) serve to inaugurate a "hyperrealist," anti-
illusionist cinema (much like that of Godard and Warhol), repetitions in Bunuel's
films, I would argue, are surrealist—that is, they are linked with the dynamic,
unpredictable play of mystery, and chance, with the eruption of subjective fantasy
and unconscious desires into "reality." The end result is a cinema that explores the
spaces between these conventional binary oppositions, opening avenues of artistic
and cultural negotiation. Bunuel thought of repetition as a personal language,
a means of expressing the hybrid nature of his own cultural identity and critiquing
normalizing, hegemonic discourses that tend to erase difference under the aegis of
"infinite representation." In fact, I do not think that it too presumptuous to imagine
Bunuel pronouncing, as Deleuze does at the conclusion of Difference and Repetition:
the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all these repetitions which may attain
the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory,
and then the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out. (293)
82 Ian Olney

It is in the face of such profound repetition that we surrender our "rage to under-
stand," confront and perhaps ultimately accept the "fundamental mystery of our
lives." Finally, if we recall Bunuel's mischievous message to critics at Cannes that
the repetitions in The Exterminating Angel were merely to lengthen a film that was
too short, we see that his words are only partly facetious. Bunuel does indeed employ
repetition in his later films to combat the finality that accompanies traditional nar-
rative closure; through repetition with difference, he playfully defers such closure
indefinitely, extending the process of being and becoming beyond the boundaries
of filmic space, into the streets and our very lives, where he invites us to follow.

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