Luis Bunuel collection

Oh the lunacy! It's all mad on the western front. We live in an age of inversion, and of two distinct forms of lunacy. One is the lunacy endemic to all humans, that of the unconscious unconstrained by conventional morality and behaviour that most strive to inhibit and some don't. The other type is inculcated behaviour imposed by external authorities. The lunacy of the latter manifests itself through ritualised verbal and physical behaviour and the complacent belief that they are living in a prelapsarian epoch, that everything they have learned through the conditioning of festering institutions and absurd moral values is right and proper. Through habit the knowledge of the absurdity of this behaviour deadens, and people delude themselves about the propriety of their actions and world views, and this is of course one of the governing auteur themes throughout Bunuel's oeuvre, the lack of cognisance about their ignorance and fatuity. The former are punished, even institutionalised for their failure to adhere to the rigid principles which permeate Bourgeois society. It is just some of this lunacy which Bunuel seems to communicate in this trenchant satire of Western society, although to attempt to reduce this palimpsestic work of genius to one authoritative interpretation would in itself be lunacy. The film is episodic in structure, and conventional logic is thrown to the wind, so the person of a more slavish mental predisposition should probably steer well clear, because Bunuel was operating on a much higher plane to the prostitutes that work in the film industries worldwide. One of the cliche responses to this movie is befuddlement, rationalised by the egotistic, sophistical thought processes of these people as a natural response to a juvenile, pretentious, logic-defying mess, laughing all the while to deaden their anxiety. Well, the joke is on these people, and thankfully, these are never the people whose opinions you will read about in scholarly textbooks, and their bite-sized reactions to great masterpieces like this are merely unwitting manifestations of their mental laziness and unwillingness to challenge what they so fatuously hold to be absolute truths. It is not just the madness, socio-economic inequities, hypocrisy and double standards inherent in society that Bunuel attacks in this film, but also this strange mixture of cretinism, vanity and complacency that allows the institutions and moral values of our society, including our conventional attitudes towards film culture, to persist into the future. The less enlightened will comfort themselves with platitudes when confronted with the sight of people collectively going to the toilet at table, but let's look at an analogue in the real world, shall we? As I write this, one of the highest if not the highest grossing books is a fictional autobiography of an anthropomorphised Meerkat! This is one of innumerable reasons why I believe Bunuel to have been the pre-eminent diagnostician of the madness governing Western society and why I also believe Bunuel would laugh heartily at the overweening smugness and complacency of the reactions of many to this, at worst, great film!