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Quixotic Desire and the Avoidance of Closure in Luis Bunuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.1999.0028

1080-6598

Sidney Donnell,

Spanish Culture and Identity

Quixotic Desire and the Avoidance of Closure in Luis Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz* Sidney Donnell In homage to Luis Buñuel and his comic film noir, Ensayo de un crimen (released internationally as The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Mexico, 1955), François Truffaut writes that one of the film’s most remarkable characteristics may be discovered upon leaving the cinema: “If you question the audience at the end [...] almost everybody will tell you that they’ve just seen the story of a likable guy who kills women. It is absolutely not true; Archibaldo has killed no one” (267). Since literary critics usually treat film almost exclusively as a self-contained “text,” the experience that takes place outside the darkened cinema is often regarded as an elusive, nebulous area beyond the realm of literary theory proper. Truffaut’s observation, however, begs the question: How does a film achieve closure with its audience? According to June Schlueter’s work on the endings of theatrical plays, closure is not the same as an ending (in our case, a film’s final frames) because viewers (whether real or implied) consent to closure based on how well the presentation of a story meets their expectations (24). 1 Truffaut’s comment offers a reading of the audience [End Page 269] rather than the film, and in this regard, informal discussion with first-time spectators at Buñuel retrospectives and in the college classroom indeed echoes the audience reaction Truffaut describes. Could it be, however, that the director’s artistic mastery in telling Archibaldo’s fantastical tale of violent sex crimes leads to other, more open-ended interpretations of the story? Until recently, critical reception of Archibaldo de la Cruz has been reduced to summarizing the plot and offering commentary on its object symbolism, a tendency which ignores the literary merit of the film that in-depth discursive analysis provides. In part, this is due to the predominant perception in the field that the majority of Buñuel’s films produced in Mexico are monolithic and highly conventional. While Peter Evans’s psychoanalytically-informed reading of Archibaldo de la Cruz is truly exceptional, his division of the works from Buñuel’s Mexican period into two classifications—commercial Mexican film and auteurist cinema (36–37)—is representative of a critical bias which equates “Mexican film” with a compromised art form due to overt commercialism. Although Evans elevates Buñuel’s comic film noir to the latter category, such a gesture inadvertently intensifies the suspect distinction between high and low culture, opposing European-styled productions with those meeting the market demands of a Latin American nation. To suggest that Archibaldo de la Cruz is less commercial because it is auteurist—that is, more European and therefore more “artistic”—is to obscure the fact that Buñuel’s auteurist pieces were commercially designed for an international (especially French) market, 2 a point Evans concedes (38). In general, subtle cultural prejudice has led to “definitive” readings of the film which do not account for the brilliant narrative construction that produces interpretative anomalies, 3 such as those reflected in Truffaut’s informal poll of French spectators. The study of narrative structures proves more useful in categorizing films like Archibaldo de la Cruz, a work which, for example, displays an interesting adaptation of the picaresque narrative tradition. In this essay, I apply basic narratological concepts of theorists including Seymour Chatman and Gérard Genette, in order to study the degree [End Page 270] to which the story’s telling challenges the implied viewer’s ability to interpret the story itself. In this context, closure is an inherently subjective topic, especially in regards to a fictional work with multiple diegetic levels from which different viewers may derive any number of legitimate meanings. Wolfgang Iser informs us that, at least in theory, indeterminacy between text and reader “increases the variety of communication possible” (167). Readers fill in textual gaps with projections (Iser 168), and “[w]hat is concealed spurs the reader into action” (Iser 169). Indeed, depending on the passivity or activity of its audience, films like The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la...