Todd Solondz's Palindromes: Hopeless Times Eight - Page 3

It's interesting to think of Solondz as a potential American counterpart to the Spanish super-ironist Luis Buñuel. At times Buñuel did show signs of unironic ideological commitment. The spirit of Los Olvidados (1950), for instance, lies with the liberal superintendent of the juvenile-penal farm who wants to save young criminals by teaching them the value of work and showing his faith in them. And in The Exterminating Angel (1962) the anti-bourgeois comedy of his earlier surrealist masterpiece L'Âge d'or (1930) verges on a more explicitly Marxist disdain. But otherwise Buñuel displays what can seem like the ideal cool detachment for irony, which, more than any ideology, expresses universal dubiousness about human character and about the romantic projections we flatter ourselves with in art.

Viridiana (1961) is perhaps the purest expression of Buñuel's ironic outlook; in it he turns the crusading do-gooder of Los Olvidados into a postulant who loses her sense of vocation after her uncle dopes her coffee in a rape attempt he then can't bring himself to carry out. (In Los Olvidados we never see how the superintendent reacts after the well-intentioned boy is prevented from returning with the money entrusted to him.) Viridiana's uncle hangs himself with a jump rope and she, having come into his estate along with her cousin Jorge, brings beggars from the village to live decently on the inherited land by honest labor. When Viridiana and Jorge go into town, however, the beggars break into the manor house for a drunken debauch (during which they imitate the composition of Leonardo's Last Supper so that a woman can take their picture with "the camera her parents gave her," i.e., by lifting her skirts and flashing them). When Viridiana and Jorge return two of the men try to rape her, which Jorge prevents by bribing one rapist to murder the other.

The man who made Los Olvidados believes in working for reform. In Viridiana he more fully, and comically, acknowledges the immense hurdles to reform set up by human corruption. As anyone who has spent time with young children knows, we are born in need of correction. In Viridiana the housekeeper helps the uncle drug Viridiana; later her little girl insists on playing with the jump rope given to her by the master who has since hanged himself with it. Like mother, like daughter, like everybody else. No wonder the world is teeming with things in need of reform.

In a famous episode, Jorge sees a dog tied to the axle of a wagon trotting wearily down the road. Since the owner won't let the dog ride on the wagon Jorge buys him. (The carter advises Jorge to underfeed the dog so he'll be an eager hunter.) As Jorge continues down the road with the dog, a wagon passes in the opposite direction with a dog tied to its axle. It's possible to infer from this, as Pauline Kael, in her 15 February 1969 New Yorker review of Simon of the Desert (1965), claims the audience did, that Buñuel's point is the futility of trying to ameliorate suffering. But Kael left out the payoff to this vignette, when Jorge a moment later tells Viridiana he'd prefer the beggars did not live on the estate with them and advises, "Helping a few beggars does nothing for the thousands of others." Buñuel is not "saying" that good deeds are foolish but simply setting those good deeds in a world in which there's more evil than the best-intentioned people could ever get around to, in no small part because bad acts arise spontaneously, naturally from humans themselves. And yet charity arises naturally, too, even in someone like Jorge who is skeptical about Viridiana's generosity and optimism. (It arises naturally along with Buñuel's, and the audience's, dismay and harsh laughter at the incongruity between the world as most movies show it and the aspects of reality those movies exclude.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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