Tears for Simone

One considers the fate of Simone Mareuil.

Famously, her eyeball is sliced in half as the cloud slices in half the moon; Simone's eye is sliced by a demented barber (Luis Bunuel), mysterious and first seen smoking. Outrage follows the public mutilation of Simone Mareuil by the audience; who, in that era, could expect to be horrified by such graphic scenes of sadistic butchery. What were Bunuel and Dali attempting to convey by foisting upon the viewer this outrage?

And to what extent can one trace a lineal descent from the public mutilation of Simone Mareuil, to her actual public death by self-immolation, in the manner of a Buddhist monk, many years later? Life imitates art, in some fashion? Does one event mirror, presage, as a prism bends the shaft of light into variant rainbow possibilities, a future event--the IS TO BE?

To be specific, actress Simone Mareuil died in a public square, in Perigueux, in 1954, at the age of fifty-one. Simone doused herself with petrol and then set herself on fire. We can speculate as to the mundane forces that drove her to this unconscionable, irrational act. Yet, we cannot help but puzzle, too, over the suicide of co-star Pierre Batcheff, who died many years earlier of a possible intentional drug overdose, in 1932. Can a film, then, be cursed?

There are those who feel that a curse hangs over the modern film Poltergeist (1982), owing to the film's occult subject matter. The deaths of stars such as the murdered Dominque Dunne, her tiny, child co-star Heather O'Rourke; Will Sampson; Zelda Rubinstein; and even Tobe Hooper and stock player Lou Perryman, who was murdered by an axe-wielding killer, indicate to some that the film has somehow ripped a hole in the nature of reality, allowing whatever multifarious offended spirits out through the portal, and allowing them to prey upon, or enact revenge, on those who participated in the cinematic fantasy; in casting the flickering image that is a spell, a visualization; a dream awakened.

And this is what Un Chien Andalou is as well. It is, much as the decorated box in the film that is opened to contain hollowness (what is its purpose in the picture?), only a puzzling "box within a box." If you open it on one side, something smaller, stranger, yet, less curiously defined awaits on the other side of that door. The ritualizing image that charges the film, that begins the process of its psychic investigations, is the slicing open of the eyeball with the barber's razor. The audience recoils in horror. They have not recoiled in horror as a razor-thin streak of cloud passes over the moon, dividing it into two spheres.

Wherein does Simone's eye lead, in a chain of association, to this moon-like image? The audience does not know, yet can only act in visceral disgust.

***

Curiously, the beginning of the film, which features, again and again, public displays of mutilation, accident and murder, has Simone laying out clothing in a fashion that would suggest a body lying in bed. In a famous poltergeist case in Amherst New York, clothing was also positioned and formulated, presumably by ghosts, to represent people--in this case, people in prayer. It was assumed that this was in mockery of religion.

Mockery of religion plays a significant role in Un Chien Andalou. Again, could the film be cursed? Did Bunuel or Dali know, when they dreamed the clothing scene, that the actions of Simone would mirror the actions of supposed evil forces?

Is it possible that film images, the process of dreaming awake, can release or unleash psychic forces from beyond, in so much as what is seen on the screen mirrors the illogical absurdity of our mad, universal conscious awareness? That is the question we are hovering around.

***

A whole theme or thread of mutilation--

(In the words of the rock group The Pixies, who have a famous song about Un Chien Andalou, it is a "wave of mutilation.")

In the start of the film, we see a curious man riding a bicycle, dressed in a skirt and headscarf, with some other feminine garment around his shoulders; peddling, with his own image superimposed over him, as if suspended in space. Around his neck, he wears a strap with a rectangular wooden box attached to it. The box is decorated with a diagonal pattern of black and white lines, as if representing the polar opposites, or the "mirror" of light and darkness--the idea of mirroring worlds here is the idea of the universe as a series of boxes, each smaller and fitting inside the other like a trick or puzzle; and the same pattern is on the tie that Simone later arranges, along with shirt and collar in mock-human fashion, on the old-style bed with iron, bar-like headboard.

Simone is reading. She seems to listen for something, perhaps a signal, an outer voice, to remind her that she is here not tied to linear reality. She throws down the book in disgust, gets up, goes to the window.

The book itself shows the image of the man peddling his bicycle outside. He is simply a thought, an idea, a concept; his weird appearance makes little sense. Yet, in truth, stripped of context, in no way can any image of our daily lives be said to, ultimately, make any logical sense.

At the window, she sees the bicyclist fall to the curb below. She races outside to retrieve the box.

This is Pandora's Box, of course, an entryway into another world; or an escape hatch for the demons within to come shrieking out. And those demons are bloodthirsty.

We see an attractive young woman in the street below, who is dressed in a curiously boyish fashion. She is surrounded on all sides by an eager, alarmed crowd, being pushed back by police. She is poking a hand severed at the wrist, lying on the street, with a stick. A policeman comes up to her eventually, handing her the striped box, and the hand is put inside.

She then is run down in the street by a speeding car.

More public death; more tragedy, mutilation, accident; the public spectacle of pain. Is this Simone's fantasy?

***

Pierre Batcheff is staring at his hand. His hand looks as waxen and dead as, we must assume, the severed hand in the street. Was that display to remind us of the stripped-away fashion in which bourgeois society can be ripped asunder; or the fact that, beneath the surface, like the ants burrowing into the center of Pierre's palm, there is a corruption, a hunger that causes ALL things to consume other living things.

The woman killed in the streets below, her beauty sullied by the eternal undercurrent of death that walks through Un Chien Andalou, is as much an example of this as anything; beauty cannot be spared the ultimate rapacious hunger of the Universe; the most absurd idea that one can conceive, then, is not the dream-like, unreliable nature of memory, the interplay of it with fantasy and idea and what we perceive to be our "reality," but the fact that we live in a universe that must be made cruel and unstable if we are to sustain ourselves.

Simone's playing with her underarm hair, her association of it and her armpit and herself with a vast strip of arid land, is also telling: consciousness dislocated, a free-association of dreams and reality, of mathematical contours and the living, breathing, pulsating world as an extension of our own bodies, seems to be at the foreplay of her fantasies. And this is ALL a fantasy of hers perhaps; that realization alone being the skeleton key.

Pierre Batcheff, while staring out the window, becomes possessed with sexual excitement. Chasing Simone around the room (she threatens him with a tennis racket she pulls from the wall), we see that the murder has aroused him.

He corners her, sexually molesting her. Rubbing her breasts, he imagines them nude; he then imagines her breasts as her buttocks. One could plume the psychological subtext here, but it should be apparent that what is hinted is both the oral and anally fixated theories of personality development Freud postulated.

His eyes roll up into his head, and a thin trickle of spittle, or even blood, rolls from his chin. Simone runs into the next room, attempts to close the door against him. His hand is caught in the door. It is being eaten, again, from the inside-out; by the ants. (The ants are another microcosmic form of life, a stand-in for the teeming crowds in the street below--life within life. The crowd forms a ring about a hand as well; the ants are eating a corpse-like hand from the inside out. One situation, in the ever-prismatic mirror of self-actualization followed by fantasy and dream, reflects another.)

Before though, comes the central set-piece that makes Un Chien Andalou so incredibly memorable. Pierre is seen to take up two lengths of rope, and in a scene that can barely be described, is seen to pull both sections of plaster (each hanging from the rope), as well as two of what appear to be priests (they are lying worriedly on their backs), and then twin pianos; atop of which is the bleeding carcass of some animal I cannot readily identify; it might be a calf.

What is one to make of this?

An allegory of huge struggle, of course, against titanic forces; religious, obviously, as denoted by the priests. The plaster sections of wall appear to be the disintegration of the "fourth wall" of bourgeois conventionalism; or, just the psychic distance of the viewer against the "reality" (or lack thereof) displayed upon the screen.

Pierre drags his priests (morality, law, the Church) with him. The pianos? Back to back, they seem to mirror each other...but this is the "dark backward" of reality, expressed in the symbolism of metaphor, allegory and dream. Perhaps music imposes order naturally upon chaos? As regards the slaughtered animal, the carcass dripping blood, it seems a dig at religion too; in a more pointed, subversive comic reference, it might imply that the film has dispensed with the "sacred cow."

Death's Head

We next see the man from the beginning, lying in bed, still dressed as a milk maid. Through holes in the wall, a tumbler is shaken by mysterious arms. A man, possibly his enraged romantic lover, comes in and begins to berate him, chasing him around the room. He takes from him his weird, girlish articles of clothing, and casts them outside, into the street below. The men approach and then come apart in slow motion; their weird scene together mirroring the previous scene between Simone and Pierre. Suddenly the Bicycle Man is holding two guns. He shoots the man that came in to throw his garments out the window, and the man falls dead, as the surroundings change and we find ourselves in a wooded area. The man, now dead, is surrounded by a small party that carries his body off.

We then are taken to a huge image of a Acherontia atropos, or "death's head moth," which Simone is staring at intently. Another mysterious man comes in; his face is a rotted black space in the vague shape of a spider; or, perhaps, this suggests a vagina. The insectile nature of hunger (the ants eating the palm of the hand) is again here invoked. But our Simone is having none of it; she makes faces at him, and disappears out the door. She is mocking the Man Who Would Be Death.

Lastly, Simone and Pierre are walking across a rocky coast. They discover the box--Pandora's Box-- that has had the severed hand in it that has previously heralded death for the woman in the crowd below, who was poking a stick at the hand; likewise, for Simone, whose laying-out of the clothing after her own opening of the box suggests a burial rite, or an act performed by a poltergeist or angry spirit. This entire theme of sudden violence, of death delivered, even in the form of a moth, is finally brought full-circle.

Death, it seems to suggest, is the hunger of the Universe (the ants devouring the human palm--but also the Hand of God, who brought the vast food chain into existence). In the world of dreams and visions, of course, there is NO death; an hairy armpit can be transformed into an arid, desert plain. We are dislocated in time and space, are everywhere and no where in dreams. We have an identity, but it proceeds inward and outward, as if we have broken the "fourth wall" (Pierre pulling pieces of the wall in his ropes); we can easily change viewpoint with the audience, becoming the performer, or the one who passively watches the performance. In the poetic, cryptic language of dreams, we can become the field and the sower of the field--what the Bhagavad Gita might call "the Knower and that which is Known."

(The Upanishads, as David Lynch has quoted, make reference to ourselves, spider-like, spinning our own web--or being the Dreamer and the weaver of the dream.)

We are the All, Infinite. And yet, we are also a particulate; a water-droplet in the vast body of Universal Oneness.

Monkey Business

Can a film, like an omen, or even a spell, presage the death of its star?

In the film Monkey Business (1931), starring Thelma Todd and Groucho Marx, Groucho tells Thelma, "...You seem like a woman who has had a lot of tough breaks. We can fix your breaks, but you'll have to sleep in the garage all night." Thelma Todd was later found dead, in her garage, after mysteriously having lied there all night. Life imitates art?

In the case of a popular song, we have the death spell reportedly conjured up by "Gloomy Sunday," a song by Rezso Seress made famous by Billie Holiday. The song HAS been covered by many, many artists; but most famously, Billie Herself ended up dying at an early age. Seress committed suicide (the lyrical content of the song suggests this); and so, reportedly, did a wave of suicides follow the initial release of..."Gloomy Sunday."

In modern times, singer Amy Winehouse, who (as Kurt Cobain and so many others), died at the uncanny age of 27, set her last video, for the song "Back to Black," in a cemetery; she is, in fact, officiating at a funeral. Her own?

We use all of these as small examples, but the question still stands: Can a work of art, a song, book, film, or even music video, presage, or even, create, a future event? Can a movie be cursed, so that its actors and actresses, producers, directors and technicians, all, eventually, seem to meet a sorry fate? Did the vast psychic vortex opened by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, in which they claimed to "intuit," or divine the scenes of their film, almost as a medium in a trance-like state, lead to the suicide of BOTH of its unfortunate stars? Simone Mareuil stares at a death's head moth, looking into the grinning maw of the man whose mouth is a vast black hole in time and space. She is, undoubtedly, the most famous actress ever to have her eyeball sliced in half in front of an outraged audience.

In reality, Simone Mareuil doused herself with petrol in a public square in Perigueux, France, in 1951... and lit a match. She died a horrific death few minds can conceive. What role, if any, did Un Chien Andalou, with its constant invoking of the death image, its undercurrent and spectacle of public death and mutilation, play? After all, someone has said: "Cinema is dreaming awake."

We, ourselves, do not know. However, until we find an answer (which will be never), we will continue to feel compelled to weep our...tears for Simone.

Un Chien Andalou (Dir. Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali)