Surrealism and the avant-garde are revolutionary artistic movements that subverted conventional aesthetics and notions of art, bringing irrational perceptions and the subconscious to the surface, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, and exploring human desire.
Surrealism
Surrealism is a literary and artistic movement that opposes rationalism and naturalism, bringing to the surface the world of irrational perception and the subconscious, and innovating expression regardless of conventional aesthetic standards. This higher concept is called “avant-garde,” which refers to revolutionary artistic movements that aim to change existing concepts of art. Today, it’s also used as a generic term for any cutting-edge artistic trend, as specific schools or criteria have become blurred. Surrealism and abstract art would later form the two main currents of the avant-garde.
Louis Bunuel made his films based on unconscious associations, based on his own memories, and focused on how the images came to him. It’s important to remember that his work is not about trying to understand the narrative, but about accepting the images for what they make you feel, without prejudice.
The ambiguous object of desire
The movie features a middle-aged man named Mathieu. Like other middle-aged characters in Buñuel’s films, he is attracted to Conchita, a beautiful woman from a socially disadvantaged background. However, Conchita rejects him, revealing the flawed perceptions of authoritarian men who misunderstand and dismiss women for who they really are. More than an attempt to reflect on male desire for women, the film reveals the layers of meaning of female desire. Mathieu’s perseverance in the face of rejection is reminiscent of the feminine masochism described by Freud in The Economic Problem of Mesmerism: He shows a desire to place himself in the position of a woman, in passivity. There is also an element of sadism in Conchita’s attitude, as she constantly mocks him. To say that what she wants is simply freedom is only one side of the story.
There is a symbolic scene that hints at how the twisting desires of these two characters will unfold. Toward the end of the movie, they watch as a woman picks up a fallen hole in her bloody gown. They are confronted with their deep-seated fears of deficiency, and so their attempts to fulfill their desires, like the attempt to patch up the hole, are incomplete sutures that forever imprint deficiency and absence. Unlike most commercial and classical directors who sought to manipulate the audience’s consciousness by reinforcing the illusion of the imaginary world that makes fiction appear real, Buñuel sought to pull the audience out of the illusion by stripping it bare and exposing it, as seen in this film.
Mulholland Drive
When we talk about movies, we usually refer to the overall plot of a movie. The overall story of a movie follows a cause-and-effect progression, and there are connections between events, so we feel like we understand the movie by following the story. In Mulholland Drive, however, there is no cause-and-effect relationship between events, and the characters are multiple.
Betty and Rita, Camilla and Diane, the main characters of the movie, are played by the same person. Some say it’s a satire of the Hollywood system, while others say it blurs the line between dreams and reality. Like Mobius’s sash, each incident does not allow for a single coherent interpretation. The director says, “Don’t try to understand his films, feel them,” but that’s no easy task. We’ve been conditioned to watch a movie to understand it and only then to feel it.
Pay attention to an important motif in the movie: the blue box. At the beginning of the movie, Rita has a blue key in her bag, and in the middle of the movie, blue boxes are found in Betty’s apartment and Diane’s house. When these blue boxes are opened, the characters become 180 degrees different. What is the significance of the blue box in the movie? Like Pandora’s box, when you open it, everything changes. I see this box as being in the same vein as Pandora’s box. When Pandora opened her box, all the evil in the world that was locked inside came out. Similarly, when the box is opened, the characters are transformed into twisted, lust-filled figures. Was the key to the blue box the key to unlocking evil desires after all? It doesn’t make sense to interpret the time before opening the box as a dream and the time after opening the box as reality. The line between dream and reality is blurred anyway. As we see in the first scene of the movie, dreams soon become reality, and we don’t know if the dream we’re having is really a dream or if we’re mistaking what we’re dreaming for reality.
The two women in the movie
The two Conchita’s in The Ambiguous Object of Desire are Mathieu’s perceptions of her. Mathieu, who sees one Conchita as two, is not in love with her, but desires an imaginary being that is absent. He sees her as the absent woman of his fantasies, the rational, sensual side of his mind. To borrow Lacan’s phrase, desire arises out of absence. Desire arises because it cannot be fulfilled. By identifying oneself with the object one desires in order to fill the lack, a structure of illusion is created. For Mathieu, who cannot have Conchita, Conchita becomes the object of his desire, and he fantasizes about imaginatively uniting with Conchita to create two Conchitas. Conchita is the object of his desire, and this fantasy is not realized. As Conchita says that if Mathieu had everything she wanted, he would no longer love her, so without lack, desire disappears. Thus, Conchita, the symbol of lack, appears as a double until the end, and Mathieu cannot escape the structure of illusion.
Conclusion
The Ambiguous Object of Desire, in which two actresses play one character, and Mulholland Drive, in which two women play two characters, freely move between reality and fantasy. The former deals with human desire, while the latter uses actresses to blur the lines between reality, fantasy, and dreams, asking whether what we see is truly real. Surrealist films have in common that they challenge our perception of reality, shattering it, unsettling and sometimes infuriating audiences, shaking up their sensibilities and mindsets to see reality in a new light.
