In July 1954, Buñuel’s adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe premiered in North America.1 In terms of the mechanics of the film’s production and its subsequent reception, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, to give the film its full title, constitutes a unique work among his films made in Mexico. It was his first colour production; Buñuel even went as far as to claim it was the first film made outside the USA to use the Eastmancolor process (see de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 92) which, when coupled with the aesthetically arresting mise-en-scène and shot composition by Buñuel’s Canadian cinematographer and colour film specialist Alex Phillips, culminates in what Tony Richardson sees as man and environment in harmony, ultimately leading to the realisation of a ‘mature and beautiful work’ (1978: 135). Robinson Crusoe was aimed at the Anglophone, principally North American, market, the audience most likely to possess a more familiar grasp of the English literary canon, and as Marvin D’Lugo explains, of all Buñuel’s films made in Mexico, none enjoyed a wider distribution or greater box office success (2004: 80).2
Six years later, Buñuel began work on The Young One, released in Mexico under the title La joven. In many ways this can be considered the companion film to Robinson Crusoe. As Buñuel’s only English-language productions, the two have frequently been mentioned in conjunction with one another. Indeed, Buñuel writes about the two films together in his autobiography precisely for this reason (2003: 191–3). Beyond the question of the language of the dialogue, both films were inspired by literary sources. The Young One is a liberal adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s short story ‘Travelin’ Man’, first published in 1957.3 Matthiessen’s story depicts the racial struggle between an escaped black convict who flees to Ocean Island, off the coast of the US Deep South, and the white man who resides there. Like Robinson Crusoe, this film is often omitted from the Buñuel canon. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, its unpalatable subject matter undoubtedly contributed to its decidedly tepid reception and subsequent moderate takings at the box office.4 This is echoed in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s appraisal of the film, though he ultimately attributes its commercial failure in the USA to the fact that Buñuel ‘still hadn’t become a “brand-name” director, a recognized auteur’ (2004: 258). What little attention has been paid to the film, as Santaolalla affirms (2004: 97), has invariably been caught up in the film’s treatment of racial tension in the Deep South prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Lastly, both films are given as Mexican-US co-productions and both were projects involving the Canadian screenwriter Hugo Butler and American producer George Pepper. Butler and Pepper were blacklisted within Hollywood circles under McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare sweeping US institutions in the 1950s and their identities are disguised under pseudonyms in the films’ credits. The pair had found work south of the border, in Mexico. According to Conrad, at the time ‘Mexico […] was courting American projects, partly to help offset rising production costs. “They want foreign production now,” observed blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 1958, “and are laying out the red carpet for all kinds of politically soiled artisans”’ (1994: 31). The spatial analysis I set out in this chapter will concentrate on what is arguably the most obvious of the parallels between the two films: the island as narrative setting. The importance of islands in these two films – and in Buñuel’s cinema more generally – cannot be underestimated. Fresh readings of the films can be achieved through a discussion of the spatial characteristics of the films’ island spaces, with a specific focus on the ways in which these islands can be seen as representative of an Other space whose identity is constituted in the islands’ alterity. This state of alterity is a contestation of the everyday space we inhabit and is what allows Buñuel’s island spaces to be viewed within Foucault’s framework of heterotopias.
Buñuel and the island as setting
We do not have to look very hard for evidence of the significance of the island as narrative setting in Buñuel’s cinema. La Fièvre monte à El Pao takes place on a fictitious island near a totalitarian South American state and the location for Cela s’appelle l’aurore (1956) is the Mediterranean island of Corsica. Additionally, the alternative title for El ángel exterminador in English was to be The Shipwrecked on Providence Street. The island as mise-en-scène was also intended to form part of Ilegible, hijo de flauta, the surrealist screenplay that Buñuel wrote with Spanish poet Juan Larrea in 1948 and modified in 1957, but which he never filmed.5 In the two present films, Buñuel’s preoccupation with what Fernando Gabriel Martín (2010: 742–45) describes as spaces of isolation drives him to emphasise the physicality of these spaces through cinematography, as I will show. Martín’s term is pertinent here: the island trope as an insular prison is a symptom of the unresolved dualism of freedom and isolation identified by Carlos Fuentes and Michel in chapter one, which is the primary focus of the spatial readings I carry out of Buñuel’s films in this book. D’Lugo (2004: 98) draws attention to the fact that the island as setting really begins with the arrival of the Mallorcans in L’Âge d’or and later continues as the Mexican Pacific coast forms the backdrop to a number of Buñuel’s international co-productions, functioning as a blank canvass to morph from Crusoe’s solitary home into the nondescript game-preserve of Miller in The Young One. Juan Luis Buñuel states that his father ‘always liked the idea of people being separated from the rest of society and how they would react in this new ambience’ (1978: 254–55). Punning in the original Spanish, the two-fold nature of the island as both a self-enclosed site (or prison) and a secluded environment yet to be touched by commodification is encapsulated in the pithy term salón en la selva [salon in the jungle]. This expression first arises in de la Colina and Pérez Turrent’s conversations with Buñuel about La Mort en ce jardin (1992: 126–130), though it is easily reworked for other Buñuel films with literal or metaphorical jungles, such as Robinson Crusoe and El ángel exterminador. The duality between the commodification impulse and the island as a site of banishment underscores both Robinson Crusoe and The Young One, marking the island spaces of the narratives as Other, yet permeated by the cultural influence of the mainland societies to which these islands are bound. As I will explain, it is often the conflict between what can be considered opposing spatial modes that constitutes these islands as Foucauldian heterotopias.
Heterotopias
Outlined in a lecture given to architecture students in 1967, Foucault’s concept of heterotopias has gained substantial currency in considerations of space in the arts and social sciences since its inclusion in a 1984 exhibition intended to stimulate the urban regeneration of West Berlin, and subsequent publication in 1986. The literal meaning of the term is ‘other spaces’ and postmodernist approaches within the discipline of geography have encouraged the use of the concept to support and affirm difference and resistance in feminist, postcolonial or queer strands of geography and their interrogation of hegemonic power structures.6 Moreover, evidencing the trend I outlined in chapter one towards human geography as an exporter rather than an importer of ideas, Foucault’s analysis and its elaboration by geographical researchers has bled into literary and cultural studies and is a potent and fruitful tool for analysis in the arts, given its wide-ranging applications to the analysis of space and the ways that this is produced. Indeed, according to Derek Hook and Michele Vrdoljak, although specific spaces can be considered as heterotopias, the term itself can be used as a mode of analysis, as a ‘particular way to look at space, place or text’ (2002: 207).
In Foucault’s words, heterotopias are ‘counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’. He prefaces his discussion of heterotopias with observations on utopias: both spaces are separated from the surrounding space and remain ‘outside of all places’, but whereas the latter are ultimately imaginary, impossible spaces, heterotopias are culturally specific, able to be located in reality and are a ‘constant of every human group’ (1986: 24). Peter Johnson has explored the relationship between heterotopias and utopias, affirming that the former are abortive utopias or, to be more specific, they are utopias ‘come unstitched’, sites with a utopian intent that fails in practice (2006: 85). I should make clear the relevance of Johnson’s particular conception of spaces that can be considered heterotopias, for, more than any other definition, this speaks directly to Buñuel’s anti-utopian cinematic impulse. It is clear that the island spaces of both films in this chapter are failed utopias. However, heterotopias are not necessarily dystopias, since according to Hetherington they transcend the utopia-dystopia paradigm by problematising the etymological and homonymic ambiguity of the Greek term utopia as both a ou-topic no-place and a eu-topic good-place, existing ‘in this space-between, in this relationship between spaces, in particular between eu-topia and ou-topia’ (1997: ix). Furthermore, they require the presence of another space, an outsider viewpoint from which the counter-site can be seen as a heterotopia, as these are established as such ‘by their difference in a relationship between sites rather than their Otherness deriving from a site itself ‘ (Hetherington 1997: 43). The islands in Robinson Crusoe and The Young One are caught within a network of relations with the off-screen mainland, which is conspicuous through its absence in both films. In addition, the films’ protagonists attempt to constitute their own elements of utopia that are shown to fail, influencing their interaction with their environment.
Robinson Crusoe
Off the map: Crusoe’s desert island
An island is, by definition, a site of isolation and exile. In many ways, however, it functions as a metaphysical aperture which leads to experiences of self-discovery or self-realisation, facilitated paradoxically by its very nature as an insular site, in a physical and a psychological sense. For director and screenwriter John Truby, the island as setting constitutes a ‘laboratory of man, a solitary paradise or hell, the place where a special world can be built and where new forms of living can be created and tested’ (2007: 160). His description clearly chimes with the island as an alternate space par excellence in the form of Thomas More’s Utopia. Significantly, in film and literature islands have frequently been located outside the perimeters of traditional geographical cartography, with castaways often chancing upon an island rather than following a deliberate trajectory, as in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and its subsequent cinematic adaptation by Peter Brook in 1963, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and the film adaptation by Don Taylor in 1977, and Robert Zemeckis’s film Castaway (2000). This element of contingency imbues an island space with a mysterious quality when we consider Foucault’s opinion that contemporary space
is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. […] Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. (1986: 23)
A site, then, is defined in terms of its spatial coordinates – for example, latitude/ longitude – in order to relate it to neighbouring sites; however, an island’s location in film and literature is regularly shrouded in mystery, augmenting the element of serendipity, or misfortune, in its discovery. This element of mystery underscores the opening sequence of Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe, as the precise position of Crusoe’s island is never fully elaborated: it lacks any relationality from the very beginning. Following the opening credits, as the camera focuses on a copy of Defoe’s novel and a rudimentary seventeenth-century map, the voice-over narration gives Crusoe’s location as ‘in the latitude of twelve degrees eighteen minutes’ before he is swept off course by the storm. The contrasting spatial modalities that Buñuel gives us here – contingency versus cartography – leading to Crusoe’s shipwreck and arrival on the island are important, as ‘[i]t is in this sense that many traditional island narratives start to reveal tensions regarding space and possible shifts in organization due to heterotopic elements’ (Storment 2008: 10). Crusoe’s island exists, yet paradoxically it lies beyond the parameters of traditional cartography, at least beyond those of the elementary map shown in the opening sequence of Buñuel’s film. The very inclusion of the map in this sequence is interesting as it marks a point of departure from the realist, empirical world into the unknown. Given that the archetypal image of the desert island is of a quasi-Edenic, unspoiled site completely closed in on itself, its precise location matters little. What is being stressed in the film’s opening is the romanticised theme of adventure associated with the desert island trope in seminal works such as Defoe’s novel, or Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the kind of swashbuckling escapades on the high seas that Foucault himself alludes to in the conclusion to his original lecture on heterotopias, where he writes: ‘in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the form of pirates’ (1986: 27).
This is a decidedly romantic ideal, of course, and Walter de la Mare sees this. He suggests the entire globe can be viewed as a collection of islands, yet there is an intrinsic quality to the desert island in particular that ‘invites the soul’ (1932: 18). Paralleling Truby’s opinion that the island represents a malleable space fraught with dangers and bestowed with hidden pleasures – namely, that it swings between utopia and dystopia – de la Mare writes:
Short of the subterranean, the submarine, and the wild vacancies of space, however, the conditions of an ideal retreat from the tumult and artificialities of man are fulfilled – solitude, danger, strangeness, the unknown, the discoverable, the eventual means of escape – if our hermitage is an island (1932: 16).
In the light of Buñuel’s choice to adapt Robinson Crusoe and the subject matter of The Young One, it is significant that de la Mare considers an island as a space of opposition to the institutions of modern civilisation. This resonates with Martínez Herranz’s argument that Buñuel’s selective adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, which focuses exclusively on the hero’s time on the island, suggests that ‘the castaway’s exile was not a form of atonement but rather an opportunity to discover himself and rid himself of social and moral ties that prevented him from freedom’ (2013: 284).
Nevertheless, liberty, as Buñuel clearly suggested, is a phantom. Quite how far Buñuel’s Crusoe achieves freedom is questionable when we consider the film’s representation of what I have termed contrasting spatial modes. It is clear that the island archetype, and its representation in Buñuel’s film, is ‘[a space] in which an alternate social ordering is performed […] that stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society’ (Hetherington 1997: 40). Turning again to literature, Hetherington illustrates these spaces using the Marquis de Sade’s castle of debauchery and death in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, and Franz Kafka’s Castle, a space of absolute bureaucratic authority. Hetherington views both spaces as heterotopic by means of their implementation of an alternative social ordering: in the former, a system based on unbridled sovereignty; in the latter, the supremacy of faceless bureaucracy. The point is that the respective spaces’ heterotopic qualities therefore derive from their ability to contest the ordinary, everyday space that we inhabit, either by ‘creat[ing] a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory’, patently the subversive space of de Sade’s castle, or by ‘creat[ing] a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled’, akin to Kafka’s Castle (Foucault 1986: 27). Cinematically, Buñuel achieves both of these effects in Robinson Crusoe, as Crusoe’s island comes to encourage a conflation of real and illusory spatial modes.
Crusoe’s island as a simulacrum and heterotopia of illusion
Illusory spaces are a veritable trope in Buñuel’s cinema and they come into their own during the more explicitly surrealist and illogical sequences in his films. I think of the strange country inn that fosters incest and bondage in Le Fantôme de la liberté, the quasi-oneiric mansion of the Sénéchals in Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie and the country-road walking sequences of the same film. In Robinson Crusoe, a contrast of spatial modalities underscores the narrative due to Buñuel’s representation of the island space: the island both erases the world beyond its shores and is the place of its reconstruction in miniature. For island spaces in film and literature, it is fundamental to ‘recognize and interpret the competing spatial regimes being juxtaposed upon [sic], contested, and renegotiated’ in those spaces (Storment 2008: 14). The spatial mode marked most dramatically in this film is the island’s cultivation of illusion. Referring to the opening sequence of the movie, D’Lugo contends that the shadow of Crusoe over the book and the map, and the disembodied narration ‘affirms the Eurocentric cultural-economical position that relegates the New World experience to an object status’ (2004: 87–88). His postcolonial reading certainly holds weight; however, this is precisely the paradigmatic schema of control as represented by and contained within the centre as opposed to the periphery that Buñuel problematises in Robinson Crusoe. The dominant cultural space in Buñuel’s adaptation (England) remains unseen. Primacy is given to space on the margins. Concerning the Mexican co-productions of the 1950s, D’Lugo continues that the raft of shady characters that appear in these – plunderers, fortune seekers and political schemers among them – are on a trajectory of ‘subversive travel’. These are characters who
by virtue of the plotting of these films, are brought to the same essential site of primitive tropical space that leads in each work to an implicit critique – often more visual than verbal – of the presumed superiority of civilisation over the culture of the periphery. (2004: 85)7
In Robinson Crusoe, though, Buñuel arguably does more than question the dominance of civilisation over the culture of the periphery. In its exploration of the island as a heterotopia of illusion, the film poses a challenge to de la Mare’s Edenic image of desert islands. The consequence of this inversion of cultural hegemony is taken to its extreme halfway through the film, where we see the reality of Crusoe’s bitter despair and solitude as a vehicle through which the outside world, the supposedly dominant Eurocentric model, can be viewed as little more than an illusion, as I will show.
First, however, the term requires some explanation. As its name indicates, a heterotopia of illusion has the function of rendering ‘every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory’ (Foucault 1986: 27). Foucault’s example of this illusory counter-space is the traditional brothel. This is a self-enclosed site with a distinct social and moral ordering based on hedonistic rather than repressive drives. Though obviously dissimilar in their function, both the brothel and Crusoe’s island-home subsume the surrounding space – all the sites in which human life is routinely carried out, as Foucault puts it – heightening the element of pleasure in the former and despair in the latter. Put simply, Crusoe’s island-world becomes overwhelming in its totality. As its own self-contained world, Disneyland can be considered as another such space. For David Shane, Disneyland as the apogee of utopian consumerism is a notable example of a heterotopia of illusion (Shane 2008: 259–71). Jean Baudrillard’s writing on simulacra sheds more light on Disneyland’s – and the island’s – constitution as a heterotopia of illusion. Baudrillard’s taxonomy of what he terms the order of simulacra helps to explain the way in which the proliferation of visual images – from analogue and digital media – distorts the boundary between the real and the illusory in the postmodern world through the creation of a hyperreality, acting as a simulation, rather than an inferior representation, of an original image or object. Disneyland belongs to the third stage of the sign, that is, ‘[the sign] masks the absence of a profound reality’. Disneyland, as a sign, as a place, is ‘a play of illusions and phantoms’. It ‘exists in order to make us think that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real’ (Baudrillard 1994: 6; 12). This theme is taken up also by Umberto Eco. According to Eco, in the culture of North America the absolute fake, the simulacrum, is invested with more meaning than the original. In this way, ‘Disneyland not only produces illusion, but – in confessing it – stimulates the desire for it’ (1987: 44). James Connor contends that Eco’s voyage through the hyperreal derives from the collapse of the Platonic distance between image and thing, allowing Eco’s hyperreality to unfold whilst ‘enfold[ing] two ontological levels, collapsing the gap between illusion and reality’ (1993: 71). This is precisely the effect that Buñuel shows to influence Crusoe on his island and which is compounded by the hero’s solitude: in its total subsuming of all other reality, the island leads Crusoe to the brink of a profound ontological crisis.
Crusoe’s existential crisis derives from his loneliness, of course. The theme of solitude figures within predictable pseudo-religious readings of Buñuel’s film as ‘a moral rebirth’ (Durgnat 1977: 80). Freddy Buache takes this further, contending that from Crusoe’s lowest ebb, as he runs into the sea screaming for help, he is ‘devoid of cumbersome laws and rituals, and has emerged reborn’ (1973: 71). D’Lugo avoids rehashing this parabolic reading by focusing on Buñuel’s interesting use of sound in the film. He posits that sound is configured by Crusoe as a ‘liberating power of acoustic imagination’, as ‘[Crusoe’s] response to his fear and loneliness is […] acoustic. When he speaks within the diegetic space, for instance, it is invariably to fill the void of his solitude’ (2004: 89; 86–87). Buñuel renders Crusoe’s solitude as much through audio techniques as through visual techniques, and sound features prominently in the three sequences of the film that depict the nadir of Crusoe’s loneliness. Rather than functioning as a liberating power, as D’Lugo suggests, the sound here points directly towards the dominance of illusion and hyperreality, whereby the island effectively becomes a totalising microcosm of the world at large. This is evident in three sequences in particular.
Following the death of his dog, Rex, Crusoe, in his desperation for the reassuring sound of another human voice, charges towards his so-called valley of the echo in order to recite Psalm Twenty Three. The sequence is visually arresting as the camera pans the vast green wilderness, interspersed with three-quarter shots and distance shots of Crusoe, suggesting not only a sense of scale in which Crusoe is dwarfed by his environment, but also his uneasy attitude towards his hyperreality where illusion, or simulacrum – here in the form of his own voice reverberating – has taken the place of reality. Disembodied vocalisation stands not as a comfort to Crusoe, but as a relentless onslaught, and the reverberations link with the camera’s panning of the valley of illusion as if seeking the source of these utterances even after we have clearly seen Crusoe producing the sounds. The longed-for onslaught of disembodied vocal simulacra in the valley of the echo filmically evidences the principle behind Eco’s view that, in announcing itself as illusion, Disneyland (and Crusoe’s island) actually stimulates the need for that illusion. This sequence pre-empts Crusoe’s profound ontological crisis. Later, attempting in vain to take comfort from his Bible, a remnant from his milieu, Crusoe indicates that space beyond the island has now been divested of all meaning. The dialogue switches here from Crusoe’s diegetic utterances as he tries to make sense of the scripture to an extra-diegetic voice-over, used to communicate Crusoe’s inner confusion, which laments: ‘the scriptures became meaningless to my eyes. The world seemed like a whirling ball with oceans and continents of green scum. And myself, of no purpose, of no meaning.’ This recalls the film’s opening image of the map, highlighting the fragility of epistemological security as it unmasks this as an illusion. The switch from Crusoe’s outer voice to inner voice is more than just a device for filmic narration. The island as a Baudrillardian third order simulacrum lacks any corresponding reality underneath; it is a subsuming totality that renders signs from elsewhere – Crusoe’s Bible and spoken voice – insignificant, emerging as a heterotopia of illusion in its rendering of the world beyond its impassable borders as an even greater illusion. The following sequence, as Crusoe runs headlong into the roaring surf, is the representation of the height of Crusoe’s dejection and in which, according to Fuentes (1993: 97), Crusoe’s image becomes that of an anti-Prometheus, fleeing from the reality of his illusion into the sea, his torch, his voice and his hope drowned by the waves (see Figure 1). Therefore, at the culmination of Crusoe’s despondency, his island-home succeeds in shaking the hero’s worldview, dissociating the space beyond its borders with meaning by virtue of its uncontested hyperreality. The result is that Crusoe’s despair is compounded by an ‘exaggerated universe where nothing holds it back’ (Doniol-Valcroze in García-Abrines 1956: 62).
Figure 1: Fanning the flames: the anti-Prometheus running from the illusion. (Producciones Tepeyac/ Ultramar Films)
Towards a heterotopia of compensation
There is a paradox at the heart of Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe, however. The island is the site of contradictory spatial modes that undermine its constitution as purely a heterotopia of illusion. Crusoe’s island is also unchartered and mystified territory – a potential threat to the hero’s survival – and he therefore feels compelled to establish a taxonomy of flora and fauna. Soon after his arrival on the island, Buñuel introduces a series of almost documentary-style shots of the variety of vegetation and wildlife as Crusoe narrates his findings. This can be considered the foundation of what Foucault terms a heterotopia of compensation, the space that Hetherington associates with Kafka’s Castle and which, contrary to that of a heterotopia of illusion, is ‘as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled’ (Foucault 1986: 27). The alternation of despair and resignation with the quest for knowledge and self-preservation is one example of what Durgnat terms the dialectics of Buñuel’s cinema, ‘in that every character, every event, is not an assertion of any one point, but is a synthesis between opposing polarities’ (1977: 17). In this way, Crusoe’s island is able to concurrently constitute both a heterotopia of illusion and a heterotopia of compensation. This duality of spatial modes is symbolised by Crusoe’s attachment to certain objects on his island. We could contrast Crusoe’s extinguished torch in the scene in which he runs screaming into the sea with his telescope that he uses frequently on top of his vantage point to survey his surroundings. Fittingly, D’Lugo suggests that empowerment for Crusoe is contained within ‘the fetishism of the look’ (2003: 99). To this end, the montage of the island’s wildlife is presented in the style of an objective documentary and the voice-over narration seems like a quasi-zoological instruction rather than a free indirect discourse of Crusoe’s uncertainty and existential crisis.
As the name suggests, then, a heterotopia of compensation acts to compensate and counteract the disorganised space in which our everyday lives are played out. These particular types of counter-spaces perhaps best display the characteristics of an effectively enacted utopic social order, one based on the enforcement of a system of organisation and regimentation that contrives to construct a place for everyone and to keep everyone in their place. Notable examples of such operational counter-spaces were the bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s república de indios [Republic of Indians] in sixteenth-century colonial Mexico. De Quiroga attempted to establish the economic and political system of More’s Utopia through the creation of so-called hospital-villages of Santa Fe, settlements founded on
the common ownership of property; the integration of large families; the systematic alternation between the urban and the rural people; work for women; the six-hour working day; the liberal distribution of the fruits of common labor according to the needs of the inhabitants. (Zavala 1947: 347)
Although de Quiroga’s regime may have modelled itself on More’s theoretical notion of his utopic good-place, it is necessary to signal that, viewed as a space of alternative social ordering, the hospital-village of Santa Fe acted as a Panopticon for social control through the natives’ conversion to Christianity (Verástique 2000: 124). For Crusoe’s part, his desire to demarcate the island space is driven by a desire to impose a sense of order and stability on fundamentally unpredictable space, a hierarchy which emulates the modern Western spatial model judged by Foucault to operate on a series of binaries – the division between public and private space, for instance, or between the space of leisure and that of labour (1986: 23). Crusoe is shown herding his goats into a pen, sewing corn seeds in a field and making pottery. He takes pride in his demarcation of spaces: ‘I built a barn, so that I fancied I was lord of the whole manor, and had my country house and sea-coast house, too. In short, I learned to master everything in my island except myself.’ Though obviously evidencing the bourgeois, mercantile attitude towards property, this differentiation of spaces is telling of Crusoe’s endeavour to counterbalance the feelings of confusion and disempowerment associated with the island as a heterotopia of illusion. To this end, David Melbye argues that this film depicts a ‘landscape allegory of the “Western megalomaniac” pitted against an exotic wilderness and its native inhabitants’ (2010: 17), categorising this film as an imperialist allegory that underscores later films such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972).
Crusoe’s unexpected encounter with Friday also helps to counter the island’s role as an illusory other space and, to a large extent, Crusoe’s ontological crisis. Friday is effectively the other to Crusoe’s same, a physical manifestation and reminder of the space beyond the insular landmass on which Crusoe has been trapped for eighteen years. Buñuel’s treatment of the colonialist trope and portrayal of the subaltern in Robinson Crusoe has featured in numerous analyses of the film and I will not add to this discussion here.8 However, the allusion to the colony is pertinent to Crusoe’s move towards a heterotopia of compensation. Significantly, for Foucault, the paradigm of such an other space was the colony, specifically the seventeenth-century Jesuit colonies of the Americas. The layout of these villages was designed to replicate the sign of the cross, with the various buildings and areas clearly positioned within this symbolic plan (1986: 27). The ambivalent atheist Buñuel does not overstate the reference to the role of religion within the colony of mutineers who arrive on the island at the end of the film; his protestant Crusoe merely suggests that they live according to his instructions gained through his extensive knowledge of the island’s ecosystem and how this can best be manipulated to avoid a ‘sacrilegious waste’. Of course, even if it were successful, Crusoe’s colony would act as such in a very loose sense, to mention nothing of the fact that the group of mutineers are all male, suggesting theirs will be an abortive endeavour. What is fundamental here, though, is that their existence is to be regulated spatially and temporally: the time to sew crops, how to care for livestock, the places of concealment for weapons and gunpowder.
Crusoe’s island as heterochrony
It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to say that Robinson Crusoe is the film of Buñuel’s most overtly concerned with the passage of time. The many scenes in which time is alluded to in Crusoe’s dialogue, or via visual clues such as Crusoe’s growing beard and changing attire, find their culmination in the last words spoken by the protagonist, as he sails away from his home of ‘twenty-eight years, two months and nineteen days’. For Foucault, many forms of heterotopias were intrinsically linked to time. Indeed, that Foucault acknowledges the ‘fatal intersection of time with space’ is a precursor to what he later goes on to describe as heterochronies, places linked to time in its fluid, ephemeral aspect, such as the festival, or, alternatively, places concerned with the material accumulation of time, such as the museum or the library (Foucault 1986: 26). The colony, a heterotopia of compensation in its utopic ordering, was an exercise not only in spatial regimentation but also its temporal equivalent, organised around times of work, prayer and reproduction. Even before the appearance of Friday and the mutineers, Crusoe is shown constructing his own existence around spaces and activities of labour, as well as periods of spiritual reflection in an elementary colonial system.9 The division of time according to various spheres of activity is an attempt to impose order on an unknown space, in much the same way as Crusoe’s rigorous documentation of time is an attempt to catalogue it.
The documentation of time in the film is communicated principally through Crusoe’s attachment to his date-post and his diary, and the numerous shots in which these two objects figure is testimony to their importance in the narrative. They are instrumental in driving the chronology and they function as a visual point of correspondence with the narrative voice-over. On a symbolic level their significance lies in their object status as physical manifestations of time and of the intersection of time with space. The composition of the various shots of Crusoe documenting his life on the island in his diary are identical, with Crusoe’s book and hand filling the frame. Time and space are inextricably linked within the pages of the diary as Crusoe narrates his written words: ‘My eleventh month. Days passed in hunting wild foal, preparing food, trips to my lookout hill in search for sight of ships, one day much like another.’ More explicitly, his date-post acts as an accretion of time juxtaposed with space. Its plaque reads: ‘I came on shore here the 30th of September 1659.’ This object features in one of the most notable shot compositions in the entire film (see Figure 2). For all its significance in terms of my argument, this scene lasts a mere eight seconds. It follows the beginning of Crusoe’s despair, as he laments that he is imprisoned by ‘the eternal bars and bolts of the sea’. It is essentially a self-contained time-space montage, with the temporal metaphor of Crusoe’s date-post twirling in the centre of the frame, superimposed on to a spatial backdrop of the island’s coastline as the sun sets. When compared with other remarkable instances of superimposition in Buñuel’s films, this scene may appear much less significant. Buñuel’s superimposed images are often constructed as a mechanism to foreground a particular sequence within a surrealist aesthetic. In Los olvidados, in Jaibo’s death throes, the superimposition of the advancing mangy dog is read by Libia Stella Gómez as a possible example of the Freudian uncanny (2003: 131). Similarly, the collective dream sequence in El ángel exterminador and its various superimposed images are unsurprisingly read as ‘the interior world – thoughts, daydreams, nightmares – of the protagonists’ (Poyato 2011: 161).10 In Robinson Crusoe, this scene acts as a narrative device on the one hand, communicating the passage of time along with the accompanying voice-over. However, it also inextricably links time with space, especially when we consider the previous sequence in the film.
Figure 2: Superimposed space-time. (Producciones Tepeyac/Ultramar Films)
As Crusoe stares out to sea, he regrets bitterly his imprisonment on the island. The succession of shots of the roaring waves that follows and which leads to the time-space montage I have described above, makes clear that the ocean is a constant prison guard and suggests Crusoe’s attempt to document his time spent on the island is useless. The numerous scenes in which the ocean figures in the film look towards The Young One and evoke Santaolalla’s observation of this latter film as ‘hysterically accumulat[ing] images of water’ (2004: 107). As a symbol of stasis, the sea thus stands opposite Crusoe’s adherence to Westernised time and its measurement in terms of days, weeks and years, evoked visually in terms of the date-post and diary, as well as aurally in the voice-over. Moreover, the makeshift grave of Crusoe’s dog, Rex, inflects Crusoe’s documentation of time ironically. This brief scene as Crusoe buries his companion shows the protagonist hammering the wooden headstone into the ground in close up, before the camera zooms out to frame Crusoe and the grave against the backdrop of the sea. The inscription ‘Rex 1673’ freezes this specific moment in time, opposing the ever-changing yet constant waves of the ocean in the background of the shot, the frontier separating the island from Crusoe’s home milieu, in a spatial and temporal sense.
According to Foucault, the heterotopia functions at full capacity ‘when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’ (1986: 26). It is unsurprising, then, that Foucault deems the cemetery to be a heterochrony in that it symbolises both the end of life and death eternal. The links between the cemetery and Crusoe’s island are clear throughout the film. Besides Rex’s grave, Crusoe’s effort to document his time spent on the island is both a testimony and a testament. Estranged from the outside world, Crusoe more acutely feels the accumulation of time and this is accentuated by his solitude. In an echo of island’s constitution of alternating spatial modes, Crusoe’s voiceover periodically suggests an indefinite sense of time, in the example given above, for instance, and later in the film when Crusoe likens the island to a tomb and a prison, belying his dogmatic categorisation of units of time. As the paradigm of the late seventeenth-century bourgeois male estranged from his social milieu, Crusoe’s date-post and diary are vital tools in keeping alive a link with his culture while simultaneously attempting to impose a Westernised framework of time on a potentially perilous space. The tension between spatial regimes – the ordered reconstruction of the bourgeois labour/leisure dichotomy to counteract the island’s potential to render all other space meaningless – therefore has its counterpart in the juxtaposition of static and transitory time.
The overall effect, then, of the desert island on Crusoe is ultimately the driving force of the narrative. At its simplest level, it is a documentation of a man’s negotiation of his environment and space is at the heart of this film. The ambiguity contained within the portrayal of spatial and temporal modalities leads to the island being a space that ‘exist[s] out of step and meddle[s] with our sense of interiority’ (Johnson 2006: 84). This tension underlies the entire film. It therefore seems fitting that D’Lugo, commenting on the film’s ending where Crusoe seemingly returns to his place and time, and his man-servant Friday is taken from him, views the conclusion as ‘only a beginning for Buñuel, leading him to the subsequent series of films […] that will enable him to rework that utopian myth’ (2003: 100). Like Robinson Crusoe, The Young One is a film that accomplishes just this.
An island of shame: undoing Eden
Recounting the critical reception of The Young One, Rosenbaum outlines the plot of the film and frames his introduction with a hypothetical scenario. He asks us to imagine that a daring film were made about racism in the Deep South, with a storyline that ‘fairly sizzles’, championing a brave Buñuel for ‘taking on [these] volatile American materials’. But the scenario is not hypothetical and, breaking his rhetoric, Rosenbaum acknowledges: ‘Buñuel did all the things I’ve mentioned in 1960, but hardly anyone noticed – and most of those who did were far from pleased’ (2004: 257). In terms of the difficult thematic matter of the film – its depiction of a parasitic racism alongside the sexual abuse of Evvie, the film’s teenage protagonist, at the hands of Miller, the older caretaker of the island game-preserve – Buñuel repeatedly affirmed his desire to eschew a Manichean stance and to avoid making a thesis film, stating that he wanted to ‘understand – not defend – the racist characters’ (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 146).11 The subject matter of the original story is no less provocative in spite of the substantial alterations made by Buñuel, Butler and Pepper. Though the character of Evvie and therefore the sexual exploitation of a minor was their addition to a narrative essentially concerned with a racial violence, Matthiessen’s short story is littered with physical violence, more so than the film itself, with vivid descriptive passages exposing the latent bestial instincts of man and the human drive towards annihilation. Buñuel’s predilection for the island as setting allows him to explore these tropes within a contained environment in The Young One. Rosenbaum encapsulates this idea:
The island itself – where all the action, apart from a brief, early flashback, transpires – is a palpable, living presence […] a character in its own right, closely identified with Evvie. Buñuel establishes this universe as elemental and predatory from the start. (2004: 261)
As shown in Robinson Crusoe, an island functions on a basic level as a microcosm of the world at large and can be both an extension of, and the opposite of, the mainland that governs it, working simultaneously on principles of mimetic representation and antithetical inversion. Additionally, the iconography of a secluded island is often imbued with poetic overtones in the vein of an Edenic shelter. Santaolalla evokes the allegory of the Garden of Eden when discussing the island game-preserve in The Young One. For Santaolalla, the island of the film is Eden destroyed, a view that recalls the alternative English title of the film: Island of Shame. In contrast to the Biblical garden, Miller’s island has never known innocence:
This is no Garden of Eden – at least not one without irony. In fact, the man, woman and snake all reappear, but their part in the story modifies the Christian myth: neither does the snake whisper in the woman’s ear (though it bites and kills her dog), nor is Evvie the defiant, seductive bearer of fruit personified by her namesake. (Santaolalla 2004: 101–02)
In addition to the Bible, Santaolalla considers that the island as setting, together with the film’s depiction of ‘patriarchal control, subordination and restitution’, links The Young One with Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2004: 109). Kara Zimmerman views the island on which the shipwrecked Duke of Milan and his cohorts find themselves as a heterotopia for the same reason that Foucault considers the garden as such. Zimmerman ventures that the heterotopia in The Tempest is, of course, the island itself, due to its position as a ‘homogenization of two incompatible natures – utopia and dystopia – being created simultaneously in the same heterocosm’ (2010: 38). That which to the subjugated Caliban is an autocratic dystopia is likewise to Traver, the black fugitive fleeing a lynch mob on the mainland after being falsely accused of raping a white woman, while both Shakespeare’s Prospero and Buñuel’s Miller attempt to constitute their own utopia as governors of their respective islands.12 Crucial to an understanding of the significance of the island in The Young One is therefore the question of power.
‘You can’t keep a man cooped up on this stinkin’ island!’: Miller’s island as a heterotopia of deviation
Exploring the relationship between modernity and the heterotopia, Hetherington analyses the influence of Foucault’s discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon design for penal institutions. Sites reserved for members of society whose behaviour has attracted the label of ‘deviant’, such as mental institutes or prisons, are profoundly heterotopic, given the residents’ or inmates’ deviance from the behavioural norm and the consequent need for surveillance, as I explore here with regards to Miller. Hetherington asserts that the Panopticon ‘was indeed an example of a heterotopic space associated with the alternate ordering of deviance, in contrast to earlier regimes of incarceration and punishment’ (1997: 42). The advantage of the Panopticon is its ability to move beyond the traditional observe/observed, subject/ object dyad, as the observer, or penitentiary guard in Bentham’s original design, possesses a unique vantage point, enabling them to watch their subjects without themselves being watched. The name is not euphemistic: it is clearly an exercise in omniscience and omnipresence. Indeed, the French title of Foucault’s account of the historical development of the modern prison is Surveiller et punir, which has been translated as ‘discipline and punish’.13 The original French suggests that the notion of surveillance, or inspection, is intrinsically allied with castigation, itself necessitated by some form of deviant behaviour. With a specific emphasis on the character of Miller, I now examine the island game-preserve of The Young One specifically as a heterotopia of deviation.
For the caretaker of the game-preserve who plans to induct the barely adolescent Evvie into the world of adult sexuality, the island is the secluded environ that allows him to do so. Miller assumes the role of his own prison warden, permitting himself an authoritarian freedom on the game-preserve he guards, perhaps in an effort to counter-balance his ostensibly self-imposed exile. We could view his island in much the same way as the island on which Prospero has attempted to administer his own brand of autocratic utopia: Miller is a law unto himself, controlling who is permitted to visit and who is not. As acquaintances and representatives of the mainland, the racist boatman Jackson and the Reverend Fleetwood are allowed to stay on the island, while the clandestine Traver is shot at by Miller when he learns of his presence. As the game-preserve’s caretaker, Miller’s authority is challenged only by his boss, the owner of the island, Mr. Hargreave. When Miller’s friend Jackson informs him that his presence is required on the mainland by Mr. Hargreave, Miller replies, ‘If Mr Hargreave says come to town, I gotta come to town’. Although the game-preserve’s owner is never seen throughout the narrative, the allusion to his influence evidences the precarious nature of Miller’s longed-for utopia; Mr. Hargreave is one of several reminders throughout the film that the island’s power system is intimately woven together with that of the mainland.
The sole link between the island and the mainland, a small motor-powered boat, comes only once per week, and throughout the course of the narrative Miller ventures to this off-screen space only once, although its presence is continually felt throughout the narrative. There are numerous verbal references to the mainland: Miller points out the educational opportunities available to Evvie had her grandfather, Pee Wee, who dies at the start of the film, opted to send her to school (an idea he abandons as his lust for Evvie increases); in addition, he remarks that, though she can ‘be out here looking like a swamp rat’, this is not the case in town, alluding to the island’s nature as a space of alternate social ordering where normal rules do not apply. The unseen other space even becomes visible for an instant during Traver’s flashback when he first arrives on the island in a rowing boat as he flees the mainland lynch-mob hunting him down for the false rape allegation made by a white woman. However, like the influence of the unseen Mr. Hargreave, it is the physical presence of visitors from the mainland to the island in the form of Miller’s ultra-racist counterpart, Jackson, and the well-meaning but ineffective Reverend Fleetwood that recalls the silent influence of mainland society on the island’s micro system of power. Though there is no denying the ideological differences between these two characters, ultimately they both function to a certain extent as external vehicles of surveillance, as Jackson scours the island, desperate for any trace of Traver, or, ‘that dirty nigger’, and Reverend Fleetwood admonishes Miller when he learns that he has sexually violated Evvie. Indeed, Santaolalla argues that ‘the island of [Matthiessen’s] original story obviously remained an appropriate location for a narrative about characters placed under scrutiny’ (2004: 99). In the same way as the island can be seen paradoxically both as Miller’s sanctuary and his prison, the outsiders Reverend Fleetwood and Jackson are akin to the invisible, scrutinising watchman of the Panopticon. What is more, this analogy is reflected in the name of the town on the mainland from which they come: Hammerville. Martín notes that this name ‘must have been chosen with a certain intention’ (2013: 768),14 alluding to its relentless violence against Traver; though, as the instigator of his own space of deviation, Miller can also feel its force.
Foucault acknowledges the growing presence of heterotopias of deviation in modern society, providing examples such as the prison, the mental asylum, and even care homes. Given their purpose as spaces of confinement, the subject is placed there because their behaviour is deemed ‘deviant in relation to the required mean or norm’ (Foucault 1986: 25). While it is true that, to some extent, the island is Miller’s refuge, it is dualistic in its function and serves simultaneously as a site of banishment. After Miller has forced himself on Evvie for the second time and Reverend Fleetwood asks him probing questions regarding his relationship with the girl, Miller, out of sheer exasperation, retorts: ‘You can’t keep a man cooped up on this stinkin’ island! It had to happen!’ That which becomes a heterotopia of deviation for Miller begins as an abortive pseudo-utopia where adolescent girls serve to alleviate the pent-up sexual desires of an alpha-male. With Miller’s first violation of Evvie, as Traver unwittingly plays the clarinet outside the cabin, the island is transformed into a space of deviance, becoming further detached from the mainland by means of its alternate social ordering. The irony of this is not lost on the viewer, either. Traver, the persecuted black man innocent of the offence alleged against him on the mainland is unaware of the same crime being committed a few feet away from him by Miller, the white man privileged within the social system.
The rape of Evvie is a patent attempt on Miller’s part to constitute his own form of social ordering in what he and, disturbingly, some early reviewers and scholars of the film, clearly view as his space. Writing during the film’s showing at Cannes in 1960, one review in the Italian press centres on the theme of lolitismo as ‘Ewie [sic] makes her guardian fall in love with her, provoking reactions in him that are far from favourable to the black man’ (Press cuttings on La joven by Luis Buñuel, 1960-62, item 140).15 It is even more perturbing that Buache is adamant that ‘Ewie [sic] fully consented to make love and as a result the film does not […] centre on a rape but on an act of love’ (1973: 114). The film’s original shooting script is revealing here, exposing the perversion and gender bias underscoring those patriarchal readings of lolitismo. This script, in the Buñuel archive at the Filmoteca Española, Madrid, includes a scene from the morning after Miller’s first assault on Evvie, cut from the final version of the film. Miller approaches her menacingly:
Miller: One thing, Evvie. What I said. How I acted. Don’t tell ‘em in town. Okay? […] Because Evvie, if you do, I’m just liable to take that rifle, put it here [touches her temple] and pull the trigger. Hear me? Now hear me? (Buñuel and Addis 1960: 76)
In the final version of the film, after the close-up shot of Miller lying on top of the teenager, forcibly kissing her, the dawning of a new day is heralded by a dissolve into a high-angle shot of the island’s coastline. The shift to the spatial aspect of the island is significant here; it emphasises the nature of the island as a space of alternate ordering for both Miller and Evvie, though albeit for different reasons, which I will come to explain. The dual aspect of the island for Miller, the liberation-imprisonment dyad, is what constitutes the island as a heterotopia; for Evvie, however, though it also represents a kind of confinement, it derives its heterotopic qualities principally from its function as a site of crisis.
‘You’re a woman now, Evvie’: Evvie’s island as a crisis heterotopia
Like Los olvidados, The Young One is also a film fascinated with life crises and both films could be said to deal with the difficult theme of failed adolescence. Durgnat believes Evvie is ‘one of Buñuel’s most haunting creations, innocent, therefore enigmatic; free, therefore calm. Physically she recalls Gin [sic] in La Mort en ce jardin. She might even be Gin [sic] before her corruption’ (1977: 118). Likewise, Fuentes considers Evvie as a veritable magna mater, intrinsically linked to the sense of adventure that the island-environ presents (1993: 100). Though they are interesting, neither Fuentes nor Durgnat’s considerations of Evvie capture the crisis that is so patently associated with her. Santaolalla is more perceptive of the turbulence facing not only Evvie, but the entire cohort on the island. She points out that many of the characters are undergoing their own transformations:
Pee Wee from life to death, Evvie from childhood to womanhood, Traver from alleged guilt to proven innocence, and Miller, perhaps above all, from a high-handed sexual and racial mindset to greater sensitivity and moral awareness. (2004: 99)
Although it is certainly true that most characters in the film are faced with, and challenged by, stages of transition, in a biological sense it is Evvie who undergoes the most significant alteration.
Foucault’s discussion of a crisis heterotopia is somewhat limited. He suggests that such categories of heterotopia featured more prominently in ancient societies, where the various biological stages of life were imbued with greater importance, and perhaps also viewed with greater suspicion, necessitating their temporary segregation from the mainstream, as in the case of menstruating women (1986: 24). Save a few examples such as the boarding school, or the early twentieth-century honeymoon trip, the crisis heterotopia has all but vanished in modern society. The Young One’s island game-preserve, I believe, constitutes for Evvie a crisis heterotopia, one in which her budding sexuality and adolescence are at once private and made public.
Evvie is first introduced sitting on a swing – a childlike activity – in the space directly in front of the two cabins, having just made the sobering discovery of her grandfather’s dead body. She is initially described in the film script as ‘blonde, thirteen, unkempt’ (Buñuel and Addis 1960: 4). Throughout the film she is clearly more comfortable in her tomboy image despite her biological transition from girl to woman. This is demonstrated most acutely in the scene where Evvie, having just finished showering herself in the yard, meets Traver for the second time. Wrapped in a towel, Evvie’s body is fragmented by the camera, first via a close up shot of her legs as she dries them and later via a point-of-view shot from Traver’s perspective, who, no doubt aware of her age and the false accusations of rape made against him on the mainland, swiftly encourages her to better cover her pubescent body. The point-of-view shot seems to suggest that the young one’s sexuality is confronted and constructed through Traver’s male gaze, recalling Miller’s discovery of her pubescence as she hands Miller an apple after dinner. This particular scene with Miller arguably marks the point at which her surroundings are transformed into a crisis heterotopia, as this is the point where Miller perceives her as ‘beginning to bud out’ (Buñuel and Addis 1960: 13). The reverse angle zoom shot, first showing Evvie’s face and hair as she hands Miller the apple, then showing Miller’s reaction as he sees Evvie in her dress, is unsettlingly suggestive. It is clear that Evvie’s sexuality is projected onto her principally through Miller’s gaze, though as a child she cannot – should not – fulfil what Laura Mulvey sees as the female’s role in narrative cinema as erotic spectacle.
Mulvey’s seminal theorisation of gender expectations within narrative cinema contends that the female character represents ‘to be looked-at-ness’ on an increasing scale: by the camera, by the male protagonists and by the audience. By means of identification, the (male) viewer vicariously possesses the female through the male protagonist (1975: 17). Though Mulvey’s theory certainly has its limitations – most notably, her neglect of female and queer spectators’ positions16 – it is perhaps the barely pubescent female abused by an older male and the unpalatable repercussions this has for spectatorship that led to the early sexist, reactionary and, quite frankly, misogynistic reviews of the film that I have discussed. Indeed, Mulvey suggests that the female connotes castration with her lack of penis and that, as a defence mechanism, the male unconscious can devalue and punish the female or fetishise her to neutralise her threat (1975: 13–14). To this end, Marion Löhndorf writes that Evvie’s biological transition is rendered filmically as ‘an uncomfortable, taboo-evoking combination of innocence and seduction, childhood and sexuality’ (2008: 70) through motifs such as the shot of her lower legs as she skips in high heels on the jetty.17 Nevertheless, Mulvey’s critique of what she terms ‘the determining male gaze project[ing] its phantasy on to the female figure, which is styled accordingly’ (1975: 11) and the (heterosexual male) spectator’s identification with this gaze is interrogated early in the film’s narrative and remains a point of contention throughout the film.
After Evvie hands Miller the apple at dinner, he tries to kiss her. She runs away and sits on the bed before running over to the other side of the cabin. At this point, the camera cuts from its position inside the cabin to outside the window, looking in, where we witness Miller coercing Evvie and picking her up to carry her to the bed. The mise-en-scène here suggests a meta-cinematic comment on voyeurism as the window acts as a visual frame whilst rendering Miller’s dialogue inaudible, giving primacy to the image. Moreover, the camera appears in subjective mode, attempting to track Miller and Evvie as they move out of the frame, as in a point-of-view shot. Throughout this sequence as a whole, however, the focus of the camera’s gaze is Miller rather than Evvie, as the viewer sees him wrestling with his desire while Evvie remains largely off screen. After Miller’s advances, Evvie rushes into her cabin, locking the door. There is no attempt to eroticise Evvie when she is alone in her cabin, which makes the reactionary Lolita narrative read by critics of the film even more surprising: the low-key lighting here acts in contrast to the high-key lighting of Miller’s cabin and Evvie deliberately ruffles up her hair, preferring the so-called ‘swamp rat’, non-sexualised appearance chided by Miller earlier. In fact, the entire sequence is foregrounded in Miller’s deviant gaze, which by nature highlights the artificiality of Evvie’s sexuality as it recurs throughout the narrative, triggering her crisis life-stage, since she cannot willingly fulfil the role of an object of erotic desire that Miller forcefully projects onto her.
On a spatial level, the heterotopic qualities of the island for Evvie are linked to her crisis life-stage. The fade-in shot of the island’s coastline following the first night she spends in Miller’s cabin is significant not only for its delineation of the insular space; for Evvie it marks the conflation of her waning childhood with her premature arrival to adulthood. Buñuel leaves the viewer in no doubt as to Miller’s action here. The close-up shot of the faces of Evvie and Miller as the latter forcibly kisses the girl as she lies on the bed is striking. Significantly, Evvie opens her eyes when she feels Miller’s touch, breaking the fourth wall as she gazes, horrified, into the camera and directly at the audience, again blurring the boundary between spectatorship and voyeurism, and highlighting Miller’s deviant act. It is a moment of believable terror and Buñuel explained that, in this scene, when Zachary Scott (Miller) delivered his line ‘Don’t be afraid, Evvie’, the actor ‘said that more to the actress than to the character because the girl was really afraid’ (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 147). This is the juncture that forces Evvie to behave differently in her surroundings; whereas prior to Miller’s indecent act the viewer comes to associate Evvie with nature, placed as she is so frequently in the island’s natural mise-en-scène – among the trees, petting the deer kept in the yard between the two cabins – afterwards she is often confined within, or just outside, the cabins, augmenting the sense of claustrophobia. For Santaolalla the two cabins are ‘the most conspicuous emblems of Evvie’s entrapment’ (2004: 102). Miller’s cabin is the locus of transgression for Miller, just as it is the locus of the limit-experience for Evvie. According to Foucault, an experience is ‘something you come out of changed’, suggesting a degree of self-discovery and a heightened self-awareness (Foucault 1991: 27). He explains that the perception of experience shared by writers such as Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot attempts to ‘reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme’, or a limit-experience. This concept of experience is categorised by the detachment of the subject from itself in order that it may arrive at its own annihilation and dissociation (Foucault 1991: 31). As Martin Jay explains, this radical experience by necessity ‘undermines the subject […] because it transgresses the limits of coherent subjectivity as it functions in everyday life, indeed threatens the very possibility of life – or rather the life of the individual – itself ‘ (1995: 158). The links to sacrifice here are obvious, and for Bataille, the limit-experience is intrinsically linked to human sacrifice and to death, though, importantly, it also finds representation in various liminal states such as madness and sexuality (Hetherington 1997: 44). Significantly, a substantial number of the sites Foucault names as heterotopias have the function of ‘containing’ the sufferers/perpetrators/former subjects of just such liminal states: the mental asylum, the prison and the cemetery. Hetherington contends that ‘in one important sense heterotopia are the sites of limit-experiences, notably those associated with the freedoms of madness, sexual desire and death in which humans experience the limits of their existence and are confronted by its sublime terror’ (1997: 46).
The island, and more specifically its kernel in the form of the cabins in which the characters reside, are similar in their function to the mental asylum or punitive institution for they both conceal the limit-experience and make it possible in the first place (see Figure 3). In his transgressive act, Miller brings himself consciously to the limit of his desire where we can understand transgression as ‘carry[ing] the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes’ (Foucault 2000: 73). In other words, the transgression implicit in Miller’s act facilitates his own limit-experience during which the subject gravitates towards a seductive, but ephemeral, self-annihilation. This bent towards an egocentric nihilism that finds its culmination in the transgression of the limit is a trait embodied – and enacted – by a good number of Buñuel’s protagonists: I am thinking of Él and Francisco’s attempt to throttle his wife, Gloria, atop the bell tower; the slitting of the eye in Un Chien andalou; or the ‘desperate call for murder’ inherent in Gaston Modot and Lya Lys’s fervent attempts at fornication in L’Âge d’or.18 Needless to say, Buñuel presents such characters without prejudice, remaining impartial to (and perhaps occasionally even revelling in) their exploits.19 In fact, with specific reference to The Young One, M. K. S. of the Monthly Film Bulletin contends that ‘the seduction of the minor […] is in fact presented with a quietness and lack of sensationalism’ (1962: 19). Although this reviewer acknowledges Evvie as a minor, the dubious reference to her ‘seduction’ – something Buñuel himself is guilty of – echoes the reactionary readings of the film with regards to spectator-ship that I have detailed above.
Figure 3: Cabin fever. (Producciones Olmeca)
As a figure of surveillance from the mainland, Reverend Fleetwood prevents Miller from continuing his abuse of Evvie. After he has arrived on the island with Jackson, as he and Evvie are preparing his sleeping quarters in Evvie’s cabin, he discovers the true nature of her relationship with Miller and his dismay is palpable. Responding to the Reverend’s comment that she is a child and will have to share a room in the children’s home on the mainland, Evvie repeats in parrot-fashion Miller’s words: ‘I am not a child. Mr Miller told me yesterday I wasn’t.’ The zoom shot that follows her words clearly fixes the Reverend’s look of dismay with a paradoxical lack of sensationalism highlighted in the film review above.20 With these words Evvie betrays her crisis, sealing her fate as Reverend Fleetwood feels compelled to remove her from the island and to bring the social mores of the mainland to bear on Miller’s behaviour. However, her eventual move to the mainland is ironic: in taking up residence in the children’s home, according to Foucault (1986: 24) one of the few remaining examples of a functioning institutional crisis heterotopia, she is merely perpetuating her crisis life-stage and continuing her experience at the limit of society.
Trespassers will be shot: the open-closed island
Although an island is segregated from the space that surrounds it, it can be approached from any angle. It is at once an open and closed site. This system of opening and closing is the paradox that, for Foucault, is often integral to heterotopias and which allows us to further consider the heterotopic qualities of island game-preserve in The Young One. The emphasis on the demarcation of the island and an obsession with its borders within the film is confirmed in the very first shot of the opening scene: a tracking shot from the shore is focused on a small boat cautiously approaching the island. As Traver traverses the island’s border, the suggestion is of vulnerability and it is clear that for him the island, given the sign erected on the beach – ‘Private game-preserve. Trespassers on this island will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law’ – is foreign territory. The wording of the warning sign betrays the island’s penetrability while affirming that the island functions along an open/ closed dichotomy that welcomes certain groups and excludes others.
In his discussion of the peculiar opening/closing mechanisms of heterotopias, Foucault maintains that, generally, these do not grant the visitor free access. He explains that ‘either the entry [to the heterotopic site] is compulsory […] or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures’ (1986: 26). This has led scholars to propose such organisations as the Freemasons as heterotopic, though Foucault himself refers to the Muslim hammin and the Scandinavian sauna.21 Perhaps not so dissimilar to the selective and esoteric Masonic lodge, the game-preserve is presented as a closed space to the uninitiated such as Traver. Initiation comes in the form of approval by the autocratic Miller and unsurprisingly is dependent on conformity to his personal social model, in its turn derived from the gun-toting patriarchy of 1960s Deep South rural society that renders most forms of difference dangerous. Even after Traver’s presence becomes known to Evvie and Miller, to the latter he remains effectively persona non grata, unwelcome at Miller’s dinner table. The antithesis to Traver is Jackson, who follows Miller’s social model with even more zeal than Miller himself. That Jackson is permitted access to the island without repercussion is evident in his manner of negotiating the space that surrounds him with confidence and ease. Following Miller’s only trip to the mainland, a distance shot shows his arrival back on his territory. The unremarkable jetty is the official entrance, the true site of opening/closure, to the island for the initiated: as Miller disembarks on to the jetty after returning from town the warning sign intended for would-be trespassers looms large in the shot, obscuring a considerable part of the skyline, and, most significantly, reinforcing the inclusion/exclusion dyad (see Figure 4). In the scene prior to this, Traver can be seen peering through the trees from a concealed stretch of beach as he watches Miller’s arrival, an obvious contrast with his own.
Figure 4: ‘Private. Keep out. Trespassers will be shot’. (Producciones Olmeca)
Finally, the island’s function as a game-preserve and resort can cast further light on the impact of the spatial dialectics of the island on Evvie and Traver. When Jackson informs Miller that a decision has been made to construct a clubhouse on the island to attract more guests, Miller boasts that ‘[they] gonna fix me up, too. Butane, hot runnin’ water. Be like livin’ in a hotel’. Nonetheless, behind this façade of modernity, the island’s heterotopic qualities would continue to exist, although in a different form. In his discussion of heterotopias, Foucault employs the analogy of the American motel. The motel is a kind of placeless place, under the radar of society and social convention, where ‘a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden’ (1986: 27). The island, and more specifically Miller’s cabin, functions in the same way as it shelters and hides his lust towards Evvie. Moreover, the frequent positioning of hotels and their derivatives on the outskirts of cities is significant. With a focus on the etymological roots of the words ‘hospital’ and ‘hotel’, Kari Jormakka contends that:
Since the late Middle Ages, for example, heterotopias such as hospitals and hotels were situated at the edge of towns as sites of indefinite social identity. The reason is clearly written in the etymology of the words ‘hospital’ and ‘hotel’. Together with the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’, they derive, via the Latin hospes ‘guest/host’, from the Indo-European ghotis. From the same root we also get the Latin hostis, ‘stranger/ enemy’ […] and hostia ‘sacrifice/victim.’ (1998: 44)
The hotel, through its very function as a site of hospitability, necessitates a deconstruction of the inside/outside friend/stranger binary. In The Young One, the spatial dynamics of the island as a secluded environment and a future commercial venture collude with the characters’ social backgrounds and biological transitions to underpin a perverted triad of hospes, hostis and hostia. Miller is an autocratic hospes, Evvie’s ambiguous biological transition – she is, in Miller’s words, a ‘wild thing’ – renders her hostia and the ethnic outcast Traver is hostis to the social model. In this respect, the originally planned ending according to the film’s shooting script is striking: following their climactic scuffle on the beach, Traver is actually killed by Jackson as the latter strikes him with a rock, recalling Jaibo’s murder of Julián in Los olvidados. The disturbing image of Traver as ‘blood stains the whole front of his white shirt, trickles thinly from his mouth’ leaves Miller alone in the film’s final shot on a non-descript beach, calling out in vain to the travelling man (Buñuel and Addis 1960: 129). Traver’s planned passage off the island from its unofficial exit was intended to cost him his life.
Conclusion: failed utopias
My consideration of The Young One and Robinson Crusoe as companion pieces is in part pragmatic. These two films constitute the sole English language productions in the director’s catalogue. Both are adapted from literary sources and both are set within the confines of an island. In these films, according to Fuentes, Buñuel adheres to the conventions of Hollywood cinema ‘in order to subvert them from within’, in a similar way to his subversions of popular Mexican film genres in his commercial films of the 1950s (1993: 96).22 Fuentes contends that while both films can be read innocently, they each conceal a darker message and this is where we find evidence of Buñuel’s more personal cinema (ibid.). The supposedly neat, happy resolutions of both films are undoubtedly haunted by the spectre of the oppressed and the repressed. Friday returns to Western civilisation with Crusoe as his servant first and friend second, while the sound-image incongruity as Crusoe stares back at his island and hears the phantom barking of Rex complicates the triumphalist narrative resolution. Evvie returns to the US mainland with Reverend Fleetwood as an orphan and Traver returns as a second-class citizen; while the former has undergone a serious ordeal, the latter, according to the intended ending of the film’s shooting script, was never meant to leave the island alive.
Both island spaces derive their heterotopic qualities ultimately from their spatial dynamics. The geographical characteristics of an island can translate into psychological characteristics of insularity through the island’s physical and psychological state of alterity. However, Buñuel does not show alterity positively here, as a space of resistance. The vulnerable and the subaltern characters in the films remain subjected to the influence of the respective dominant cultures on their islands: Traver is almost killed by the racist Jackson and Friday is forcefully ‘civilised’ by Crusoe. Neither island-space remains uncontested. Although the dominant spaces of mainland America and Britain are not given visual representation in the respective films, their presence is markedly felt throughout both narratives. For D’Lugo, Crusoe’s island becomes the site of impulse for commodification, leading him to attempt to appropriate nature and transform it into objects for possession that mimic the ‘closed order of the world he left behind in England’ (2003: 98). In a similar manner, the space of the US mainland pervades the island game-preserve not only through dialogue but also via the commodification impulse. In one notable scene, perhaps in repentance for taking advantage of Evvie, or some misguided attempt to woo her, Miller promises to return from the mainland with some perfume for her. Later, as the film reaches its conclusion and Evvie is about to leave the island, we see her transformed, sporting a hat, dress and high-heeled shoes.
Not only space but also time is fundamental in the narrative of Buñuel’s Crusoe. The contrast between the transit and the stasis of time is marked throughout the film as Crusoe attempts to impose his own system of time onto a space alien to the customs of his milieu. On the one hand, the time setting of The Young One is clearly depicted through its all-too-real depiction of racially motivated violence in the Deep South. Indeed, in a more immediate and visceral way than any of Buñuel’s other films, this film forms part of the cultural zeitgeist: in her astonishing review in 1961, Louise Corby indignantly wrote: ‘after espousing practically every form of degeneracy in his films for thirty years, Luis Buñuel espouses the Negro in this one’ (1961: 111). On the other hand, the game-preserve remains a largely non-descript place which seeks to emphasise its spatial and temporal distance from the mainland, as when Jackson scolds Miller for not accompanying him on the ‘long, cold trip’ to fetch reinforcements to search for Traver. Referring to the duality established in this film via the persecuted and the persecutor, the former representing the city and the latter the country, Fuentes writes, ‘the circular shape of the island, with its symbolism, imposes its turns on the thread of the narrative, which splits into two: dissimilarities and similarities’ (1993: 99),23 though such a statement could easily apply to the idea of time in the film. In each, modernity appears marginalised, reduced largely to commodities, such as Evvie’s high-heeled shoes or the gold coins that Crusoe gives to Friday, explaining that they are of no use to him. To take the point further, we can consider the island spaces as heterotopias of crisis. Clearly, the game-preserve is a site of crisis for Evvie and Traver, just as it is for Crusoe in relation to his solitude and metamorphosis. For both Crusoe and Evvie, their crises entail more than solely a biological alteration and are arguably just as psychological as they are physical. A psychological crisis could be seen to involve a break with traditional perceptions of time, and as Foucault suggests, the heterotopia functions at its peak when there is a break with traditional notions of time.
Ultimately, for Johnson, heterotopias, perhaps like Buñuel’s cinema, ‘offer no resolution or consolation, but disrupt and test our customary notions of ourselves. These different spaces, which contest forms of anticipatory utopianism, hold no promise or space of liberation’ (2006: 87). Two other films from Buñuel’s Mexican period which can be said to hold little promise of liberation and which can be fruitfully examined from a spatial perspective are La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto. Although the settings of these movies are the jungle and the desert respectively, like the companion films discussed in this chapter they evidence Buñuel’s preoccupation with characters ‘in their longitudes and latitudes, their climates – their spaces’ (Rubinstein 1978: 247). Moving from an analytical framework of heterotopias to one of liminality, I will examine the jungle and desert spaces to suggest that the protagonists in each of the films are located in the interstices, and will show how a spatial reading can inform and inflect existing criticism on both works.
1 The film was actually filmed quite early in Buñuel’s Mexican career, after El Bruto, which debuted in 1953. Victor Fuentes tells us that the Mexican première of Robinson Crusoe came in 1955 (1993: 177).
2 Despite being his first English-language film, Buñuel shot a version of the same film in Spanish. See Martínez Herranz (2013).
3 See Matthiessen (1990: 37–56).
4 For a detailed account of the film’s production and reception, see Conrad (1994: 28–31).
5 See Juan Larrea and Luis Buñuel (2007).
6 For a detailed account of the way in which the term has been used by scholars in these fields, see Hetherington (1997: 9–54).
7 Of the twenty-one films that Buñuel made within the Mexican film industry, six were international co-productions: in addition to the two Mexican-US co-productions, La Mort en ce jardin and La Fièvre monte à El Pao were Franco-Mexican co-productions, Cela s’appelle l’aurore was a project involving Mexico, France and Italy, and Viridiana was a Mexican-Spanish co-production.
8 See, for example, Conrad (1978: 332–51) or D’Lugo (2004: 90–2).
9 Distinguishing his adaptation from Defoe’s novel, Buñuel consciously monitored the number of Biblical references in the film, as, in his words, ‘to put in more quotes from the Bible would have seemed too much to me’ (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 89).
10 [el mundo interior – pensamientos, ensoñaciones y pesadillas – de los protagonistas].
11 On this point, see also Buñuel (2003: 224–5).
12 Prospero’s utopia is at the expense of others, as is Miller’s. Speaking of the enslaved Caliban, Prospero says ‘we cannot miss him; he does make our fire / fetch our wood, and serves in offices / that profit us’ (Shakespeare 2011: 1.2.312–14). Similarly, Miller barks his orders to Evvie: ‘Go on over to my cabin and build me a fire. That stove’s as cold as a dog’s nose. Go on, get!’
14 [debió ser elegido con cierta intención].
15 [Ewie [sic] fa innamorare di sé il custode, provocando in costui reazioni non certo favorevoli al negro].
16 Linda Williams outlines the challenges to Mulvey’s argument in subsequent feminist film criticism. For Williams, it is problematic that ‘activity and passivity have been too rigorously assigned to separate gendered spectator positions with little examination of […] the mutability of male and female spectators’ adoption of one or the other subject position and participation in the (perverse) pleasures of both’ (1989: 206).
17 [eine unbequeme, an Tabus rührende Verbindung von Unschuld und Verführung, Kindheit und Sexualität].
18 Echoing Buñuel’s own words about L’Âge d’or, his sons Juan Luis and Rafael Buñuel invoke this term in their afterword to the edited collection of their father’s writings. See Buñuel and Buñuel (2000: 265).
19 André Bazin highlights Buñuel’s objectivity in two of the director’s most ostensibly cruel films, Tierra sin pan and Los olvidados, and warns that we cannot ‘reproach Buñuel for having a perverse taste for cruelty’. Buñuel’s cruelty, he affirms, ‘is entirely objective; it is no more than lucidity’ (1978: 197–98).
20 The lack of sensationalism is due in part to the absence of non-diegetic music in this film. Aranda quotes Buñuel on his opinion of non-diegetic music: ‘Personally, I don’t like film music. It seems to me that it is a false element, a sort of trick, except of course in certain cases’ (Aranda 1976: 91). In this respect, the adventure score of Robinson Crusoe provides a point of contrast with The Young One.
21 For a discussion of Freemasonry as a heterotopic organisation, see Hetherington (1997: 72–108).
22 [para subvertirlos desde dentro].
23 [la figura circular de la isla, con su simbolismo, impone sus vueltas al hilo del relato, el cual se desdobla en dos, disímiles y afines].