There is a scene fairly well into Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty in which a professor walks into a room to lecture a classroom full of French police officers who had previously been partying. As they quiet down and take their seats, the professor turns around to see some obscene phrases that had been scribbled on the chalkboard. He then chastises the men for being like children. It was at this moment that I realized, quite seriously, that Luis Bunuel inspired the Police Academy movies. Well, Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, specifically, inspired the Police Academy movies. The police are a fairly easy target to make ridiculous. They are very serious people for one, and for two it is a very prestigious job. Policemen have dignity. And so taking away their dignity logically should be funny. I mean, making the police look like idiots, that should be good for an easy laugh, shouldn't it? The police seem to get more shit than any other group in the film (aside from white French people of course).

The reason that Bunuel picks on them is in part because they represent law and order. As Bunuel is an anarchist, or rather he isn't promoting anarchy as much as acknowledging that it is the ultimate reality of our universe, the destruction of the institution of the police is one of his main targets. These people are holding onto an illusion of a controlled universe. The film is also filled with attacks towards the Church and the court system, which makes perfect sense in that aspect.

Let's first talk about the former. It is entirely reasonable that men would create the concept of God, as we wouldn't want to acknowledge that our lives are meaningless and void of any cosmically significant purpose. It's a belief that has been argued by a good number of atheists. Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre have established some sort of version of this. And it makes some sense in The Phantom of Liberty. Bunuel is mostly just a simple blasphemer; he has some monks smoke, drink, gamble and leer at women. You know, he's implying that they are hypocrites. That's enough, though. The blasphemy destroys the piety of the monks, and we are able to see that their belief system is meaningless. There is a parallel interpretation for the gambling. Essentially faith in this circumstance is a bit of a gamble. One is hoping that devoting a life to God will make it a life with meaning and purpose, and as is the case with all gambles, there is an implication that it could fail. Having dipped my toe in theology, I have personally come to the conclusion that a life devoted to God can be meaningful even if God does not exist. Even if God doesn't exist, I don't think that any religious person would really want to have lived their lives any differently come death. I think that I can buy the idea that a good deed is its own reward.

Bunuel's attack towards religion still works, however, in that he would probably say that the idea of a "good deed being its own reward" is a very nice idea, but it doesn't correspond with reality. The religious are a largely egotistical and greedy bunch, and what they get from their religiosity is gratification for their egos and their greed. Bunuel names one of his characters, a doctor, Pasolini, and the attack towards the church is somewhat similar to Pasolini's The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Looking back at my reviews, I see that I wrote of the former: "The Church is pretty much as sinful as everyone else, more greedy and wrathful than lustful or slothful, I suppose. They exist more as a political institution than a philosophical institution. Their interaction with the rest of society is more of a battle for power than for really restraining human nature. Their position is that of an authoritative force of order in an instinctively Dionysian society. That image of monks being Satan's shit is more out of hatred for monks then because of any particular hatred towards their philosophy. Because, after all, they don't really have one." Well, Bunuel is not that mean. The approaches differ in that Bunuel's universe is without any political institutions, and so they do not try to obtain any power. And the monks really do seem to believe in their faith. Here, the Church is philosophical. But the part about them being sinners just like everyone else, in that they are de-emphasized in importance and are just as hungry as everyone else, that is part of both universes. The difference is just that the Catholics in the Pasolini films were all cynics. Here they are using their religion sincerely, as a means to getting all the petty things that we all want. That justifies the gag of having them gamble. They are gaining gratification wholly wrong-headedly.

The court system is satirized in a sequence where a man who we had previously seen shooting random people from a clock tower is sentenced to death. Relieved, the police take off his handcuffs and shake his hand. As the man leaves, people gather around him asking for his autograph. The gag here is in part that having been sentenced to death, he is in fact being sentenced to death. He is going to die some time or another. The fact that a court of law is deciding whether he will live or not is part of the absurdity of the sequence. The murders that he committed were random. His actions were not controlled, but a product of Bunuel’s anarchic universe. It's a concept that I fear corresponds to a decent portion of murders in this day and age. People are killed for really no good reason at all. Perhaps if they died for a reason, then we wouldn't be able to acknowledge that they were victims. On the other hand, knowing that the murder was utterly impersonal may very well ease the anger towards the murderer. The victim was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. I could understand, however, that the thought would trigger the exact opposite response from some families of victims.

The idea that the state can kill people in a calculated way, while the murderers themselves killed in a passionate unthinking way was the basis for the anti-capital punishment films Dekalog 5 aka A Short Film About Killing and Dead Man Walking, both excellent films by the way. The message is that killing is wrong, but the killer isn't able to fully wrap their brain around that idea until it's far too late, whereas the state is able to from the very beginning. The argument makes some sense to me, but so does the pro-capital punishment argument that anything less than capital punishment will not sufficiently acknowledge the crime that has been inflicted on the victim's families. (I feel that if we do have capital punishment, then the option should be dropped at the request of the victim's families. I have heard it argued that it's not the family who should seek justice but the deceased. That made no sense to me. Dead people don't care what happens. They're dead.) The problem with the whole concept of capital punishment, and the traditional arguments about it, is that it is treated as an ideological and philosophical issue. And yet sociology teaches us that it does not work at all as a deterrent, and as all death penalty cases require a trial and there are sure to be appeals, well then, it becomes very expensive and cumbersome to put somebody to death. At what point do we defer these idealistic concepts of justice to plain practicality? Essentially the death penalty is for the comfort of the victim and the ideological well-being of the state as opposed to maintaining a functional society.

Going along with everything that we have been saying, the concept of justice is inherently insane in Bunuel's universe, as it implies order and meaning. Justice as defined through the death penalty never seems to achieve its purpose. That feeling of closure is never really established. As justice is really the antithesis to reason, as either side of the capital punishment debate attempt to uphold some realization of an ultimately abstract ideal, it makes sense that these characters would attempt to seek it. The quest for justice is as futile and absurd as the quest for God. It doesn't work, in other words, and living your life under it is insane.

If these characters live lives without purpose, what does that title mean? I have read that it is an obscure allusion to Marx. I don't know anything about that, so I'm afraid that I am unable to respond. My interpretation is that it is a reference to the thorny concept of men who are "condemned to be free.” These concepts of religion and justice are of course ways to artificially deny the agony of our freedom. The phrase "condemned to be free" of course doesn't make any logical sense, but I think you can get a good grasp on it. (Not making logical sense is what it is all about.) Looking in an online dictionary, I see that the word “phantom” has at least two relevant definitions. The first is “an image that appears only in the mind; an illusion.” And so this would mean that the concept of liberty exists only in the mind, but not in actuality. The second definition of phantom is “something dreaded or despised.” Which clearly means that these characters actually hate freedom. While these characters believe that they are free then, they can never truly be, as they want lives with purpose and meaning. As soon as your life is defined, can you continue to be free? It doesn’t seem to be possible. We value purpose and meaning for their narrow selectivity. (Strangely, the word phantom has two rather different meanings that nonetheless can go together. One may hate something that exists only in the mind, but it is not necessary. The word liberty seems to have only one basic meaning: freedom basically in a political/philosophical connotation. “Phantom” is more liberated than “liberty.” It works that way in the English language, and I think it might also in the French.)

The French themselves are a major target for Bunuel. As I have indicated previously, Paris and the other cities and towns featured in the film are white-washed. Bunuel gets away with it whereas Jean-Pierre Jeunet did not in Amelie, because Amelie was a celebration of Paris and The Phantom of Liberty obviously is not. The first shot in the film is of Goya's 1808 painting The Third of May portraying the execution of Spaniards by the Napoleonic armies. The film then cuts into a reenactment of the scene with Bunuel himself as one of the shot Spaniards. We later see the painting hanging in the police station. I'm not sure that the point is to get back at the French for executing his countrymen… well, not exactly. In the painting the executed are in rags, without firearms. The French soldiers are a faceless line. Goya does not indicate that there is any personality in them. Their guns are lined up fairly perfectly. The moment of the kill passes without thought. The soldiers are a machine. Try and filter out the implication that Spaniards are "holier" than the French, and just look at how it negatively reflects on the French, as that is what the film is about. (The film doesn't have any Spaniards, or any really fully developed characters.)

If anything, I think that Bunuel is satirizing the very concept of atrocity. Idealized victimhood did not get that Spaniard in the middle anywhere. That may have been Goya's contention from the beginning. "The Third of May" is not a romantic painting in the least. You think of the momentous nature of the violence and the anonymity of the victims rather than any feelings of rapture, purity, or even pity as indicated by that glowing white shirt. That Spaniard is not going to be shot, he is being shot. He hasn't any semblance of a chance. The French in The Phantom of Liberty live within a machine, again largely of their own choosing. In one of the more talked-about sequences in the film, two parents are trying to find their daughter. They go to her school and admonish the administrator. The little girl goes up to her mother and asks what the matter is. She tells her daughter to be quiet. They then take the girl to the police station, where they look at her, taking down her description to find her. The police take months to find the girl. You may find yourself being more irritated than amused at the unnecessary bureaucracy involved in searching for children that we never really notice to begin with. They aren't fighting bureaucracy; the bureaucracy is of their choosing! This gag is probably the most lucid attack towards the infamous "bourgeoisie,” which is a topic that I think I will otherwise ignore for a while simply because I have to admit that I am growing exhausted.

The film argues that all structure is essentially arbitrary. The professor at the police station talks about Margaret Mead and how the taboo against polygamy is not consistent among all cultures. Part of Bunuel's technique is treating absurd customs, fetishes, et cetera completely normally. Some girls are given obscene photos from a guy in the park. Their parents get a hold of them, and they are simultaneously shocked and aroused by them. The photos are of historical landmarks. The film's most famous sequence is of the professor going to a defecation with another family. Yeah, instead of having dinner with them he defecates with them. The defecation conversation is about poop and pee, as those are highly appropriate topics for discussion. The man then excuses himself to the dining room to eat a plate of chicken. Somebody knocks on the door and he yells out “occupied”! Well, why not? Eating and defecating are both biological functions. While there are certainly practical reasons that we eat with other people and shit in private, they aren't strong enough that we can argue that the scene is irrational. I would say that it is more shocking. The same can be said for the incest in the picture. A boy has sex with his aunt, and a man is extremely attracted to his sister. The incest in the film is purely for shock value, but of course by shocking us Bunuel is acknowledging the social and moral limits that we have confined ourselves with. Intentionally, the characters live in different realms of social customs. After the defecation scene we hear a doctor invite a patient over for dinner. Some people actually celebrate dinner. It's inconsistent because it is arbitrary.

Going into the film, thinking of things that I would later put into my review, I wanted to point out that I think that it is a little shallow and overly simple to say that Bunuel hates his characters and is making fun of them. There is a good degree of terror in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when you realize that these characters will never get better. After actually writing this review, I realize that I have been talking mostly about how he hates the characters. Of course, the reality of the situation is that it is a bit of both. The characters are certainly trapped and they are doomed. But that is their own fault.

Strangely enough, not much seems to have been written about The Phantom of Liberty. The Internet Movie Database does not list many "external reviews.” Roger Ebert never wrote a review of it in the Great Movies section of his website. I checked out my copy of Ebert's 1992 movie guide (after 1998 he came out with "yearbooks,” instead of compilations of reviews that he wrote from 1970 onward. His website only lists reviews written in 1985. But you already knew that, didn't you?!) and didn't find anything. I looked in Pauline Kael's compilation "For Keeps" and didn't find it there. I did find something in "5001 Nights at the Movies.” She panned it. Much much more popular is Bunuel’s previous film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. That was the first full-length film that I had seen from Bunuel and, until now, was the only full-length film of his that I have seen. (I had checked out that Un Chien Andalou/Land Without Bread package mostly to see the eye getting sliced open. I wasn't really that impressed with the films.) The Phantom of Liberty has some fairly strong defenders, but I think that it wasn't written about as much because it had come right after Discreet Charm and seemed to repeat a lot of it. (Discreet Charm was said to be a mirror image of The Exterminating Angel. Do we really have that much more to say?)

The film is also probably not as good. It's bawdier and sillier than Discreet Charm; just as surreal, but leaning more to the side of farce. It seems a little more direct and a little less poetic. The last shot of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, of all the characters walking up a hill, was haunting. The last shot of The Phantom of Liberty, of an ostrich, is not. The Phantom of Liberty is a more meaningless film than The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the emotions that it provokes are less complex (remember that we are talking comparatively). In that way, that may make it the better film. Meaninglessness has been our goal from the very beginning.