The Obscure Object Of Desire Analysis

[Janeth Counter]

Oneach visit, though, I would make sure to stroll through the Asian aisle to steal another glance at the cover of Lan Yu, with its image of two Chinese men standing in pre-kiss proximity. Of course I lacked the nerve to smuggle it home, but in addition to being extremely curious about what simulated sex between two Chinese actors would look like, I was tantalized by the sense that this movie would surely contain some hint of a life or a sensibility I could understand, some alternative to the American gay culture I felt alienated from. I imagine Lan Yu will always toll me back to that initial desire.

Reflecting on this, my mind travels back to my teenage years, when part of the allure of Lan Yu was how forbidden it looked, sitting there on the shelf in that video store, and how foreign and familiar it seemed to me as a Chinese American who had never stepped foot in China. I think about how strange it is that this elegant but also quite modest film should have been so important to me, and about how, for a large portion of its potential audience, the full cut of Lan Yu remains not only inaccessible but illegal, looming indefinitely as an obscure object of desire. It is in such cases that what we wish cinema could give us becomes perhaps even more overpowering than what it does.

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So says Conchita, the mercurial-virginal Spanish dancer mysteriously played by two women in Luis Buuel's final masterpiece Cet Obscur Objet du Dsir. When Conchita says this, she's played by the frigid French actress Carole Bouquet. (Without a warning, Coach Buuel will substitute spicy Spanish senorita Angela Molina in for QB Bouquet.) Bouquet/Molina teases the hapless Mateo (Fernando Rey) all throughout the picture with their unspeakably abstract beauty. But in this one line, we get a sense that the teasing is for a reason. Here, Buuel taps into a universal truth: the tensions that exists between idea and practice, between the conceived image and the tangible reality, between the abstract and the concrete. Paradoxically, if Conchita ends up giving herself to Mateo, he will most likely immediately stop caring for her. What he's in love with is a projection of Conchita--an unquenchable, independent, sexually potent virgin whose cherry is waiting to be plucked--and not at all who she is as a far more interesting being: a mercurial, tempestuous, two-sided walking contradiction.

When we fall in love, we fall in love with an idea of a person, and not necessarily who they are as a complex, living human being. It's the way humans have worked for millennia, and the way humans will continue to work. We simplify our "objects of desire" not because we consciously want to, but because we cannot deal with our own tumultuous and oft-complex passions without simplifying. That's why Mateo beats Conchita to a bloody pulp in the film's gruesome climax, and why he gets so angry at Conchita's wild mood swings (willing sexual partner in one scene, cold virgin in the next) that he throws a bucket of water on her face. We try to tame our loves, but they will inevitably end up escaping us. Why? Because, as Buuel so provocatively and powerfully demonstrates in his "two-actresses-one-woman" metaphor, we are mercurial creatures hard to pin down.

Mateo is a snide, privileged bourgeois who piggishly thinks men should "own" women. He is also hopelessly, admirably in love with Conchita--the first time he's felt love in his life. Such contradictions exist comfortably in the Surrealist Buuelverse.

We have terrorist attacks going on at the periphery of the film, which catch up to our characters in its shockingly explosive finale. (Buuel's friend and fellow Surrealist Andr Breton once noted that "the simplest Surrealist act would be to go into the the street and shoot indiscriminately at the crowd.")

We have a mysterious burlap sack that all the characters--a servant, a chambermaid, a seamstress, and Mateo himself--seem to carry around with them. (The mystery of what's in the sack is, frankly, more intriguing to me than "What's in the box?" in Belle de Jour.)

And, perhaps most subtly, we have two men playing the role of Mateo. Wait...what the what?! Yes: Fernando Rey provides the body of Mateo, but ardent followers of the French New Wave will immediately recognize the voice of Michel Piccoli and his droning, soothing timbre. It's a surrealist gesture unlike any other: a seemingly cohesive reality is presented before us (one man, one voice). But this reality is revealed as highly unreal, constructed and false. It's an unnerving feeling, one that the Master of the Seemingly Mundane Luis "Bunny" Buuel was brilliant at provoking.

When we talk of "surrealism", we often forget the Surrealists' original intention of the word. We think it means "so crazy that it couldn't possibly be real." But the Surrealists (Breton, Dali, Buuel, et al.) conceived their movement as promoting art that was "beyond the real," or, more provocatively, "more real than real." What does that even mean? Bunny's Cet Obscur Objet du Dsir helps us understand. A cinematic world is presented to us in the most mundane, straightforward manner: no fancy camera angles, high-key lighting that resembles a sitcom, flat voices and plateau-like performances of no note. But during the course of 100 minutes, this mundane reality (i.e., what human beings conceive as "reality") is subtly subverted by Buuel. It starts with the "2-girls-1-character" hitch, but it continues on and on with the sack, with Piccoli's voice impossibly tacked on to Rey's body, with terrorists (whose entire modus operandi is to disrupt the normal and strike fear into a populace's soul in places where fear shouldn't be felt), with more and more bizarre camera movements. The most wonderful moment in a Buuel comes when he's following a main character....and his camera will suddenly and fetishistically focus on an element that seemed innocuous but has now become an object of unwarranted attention. It occurs in Belle de Jour (when Bunny tracks the feet of Catherine Deneuve for no apparent reason) and occurs here when the camera stops following our lead characters, pans right, and follows a random passerby carrying a sack walking down the street. The camera lingers on this normal image for an abnormal amount of time. Cut to next scene.

What we've experienced is that queasy sensation that Freud dubbed "the uncanny", that strange feeling you get when something totally normal and innocuous becomes weird and distant in an instant. Why do we follow this passerby? What could be in this sack that, for all intents and purposes, is a mere sack? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

In short, what we have in That Obscure Object of Desire is a haunting paradox: Buuel taps into a reality we all experience (i.e., that disjunct between projected image and concrete reality), but does it in a singularly offputting, bizarre, jarring, unsettling, and Buuealian way. I don't know how Buuel does it, but he once again upends my entire concept of reality with the nonchalance of a cool-cucumber grandpa.

I am old enough to know that there are no discernible rules dictating whom people find attractive; attraction often defies analysis or rational explanation. With wry amusement, I recently became aware of the awful truth that I was rather taken with a minor British TV personality: the ordinary, though not entirely unbeautiful, Philippa Forrester. The closest I have come to comprehending why, is that she appears to have the enthusiasm and overbite reminiscent of a girl I once loved. Anyway, these things happen.

Foolishly deciding to see if anyone else shared my predilection, I was initially relieved to find a mass of Philippa Forrester material on the internet, indicating that I was not alone. This soon turned into disappointment, as my delicious deviancy became less satisfying in direct proportion to the numbers sharing it. The more I read and the more links I followed, the further I was dragged inexorably into a world almost entirely populated by the unsound.

Elaborate websites display her entire career and educational histories; critical appraisals of her abilities as a presenter, including 'often brilliant', 'classic Philippa asides' from her old work with puppet co-presenter Edd The Duck; vital statistics, transcripts of interviews (radio, TV and print); video grabs from television recordings, divided and then subdivided into arbitrary categories. The Unofficial Philippa Forrester Picture Library contains 139 pages, each holding numerous images, and is visited 200 times a day.

There appears to be an inner circle of fanatics responsible for the majority of these sites, and they are also the main participants in the newsgroup alt.fan.philippa.forrester. The most bizarre aspect of these individuals who lord it over their group is that they evidently view themselves as guardians of Ms Forrester's honour. They assert its purpose 'is about treating the lady with respect'. The 'charter' for the group sets out the etiquette demanded in participation and includes the pronouncement that the group should not be used for 'too much personal-life gossip stuff', yet the same people spend their time creating sites crammed with pictures of 'flipper' in compromising positions with a bicycle pump, oblivious of their hypocrisy.

The author of the charter and at least two other websites managed to engage Ms Forrester in correspondence. He proudly explains that she wrote to saying that although the site was 'a bit of a shock' to her, 'you have my support and yes, please carry on'. We also learn that she was quoted in the Sunday Times as saying 'it was done with so much respect, I didn't try to stop it'. In her position I would say the same, not wishing to antagonise a man deranged enough to convince himself that his hundreds of obsessed hours spent idolising, recording and cataloguing a minor TV presenter is 'a bit of fun'. Shortly after this, the BBC requested his site be taken offline, citing some obscure legality relating to image rights. However, the webmaster still believes he is approved of by his desideratum and appears content in this delusion.

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