Stranger Than We Can Imagine (13 page)

In discussing ideas for this first film, Dalí and Buñuel rejected anything based on memories or which was clearly connected to the other images in the film. As Buñuel later explained, writing in the third person, he and Dalí only used scenes which, although they ‘moved them profoundly, had no possible explanation. Naturally,
they dispensed with the restraints of customary morality and of reason.’

Buñuel told Dalí of a dream in which ‘a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor slicing through an eye’, and Dalí told Buñuel of his dream about ‘a hand crawling with ants’. ‘There’s the film,’ said Buñuel, putting those two scenes together. ‘Let’s go and make it.’ They called the finished film, for no clear reason,
Un Chien Andalou
(An Andalusian Dog).

Earlier attempts at translating surrealism to film, notably by Man Ray and Antonin Artaud, had not been successful. Dalí and Buñuel assumed their effort would get a similar reaction. When the film was first screened in Paris, Buñuel, who was playing phonogram records by the side of the screen to provide a soundtrack for his silent movie, kept his pockets full of stones in case he needed to throw things at hecklers. This proved not to be necessary. The film was a triumph and André Breton, the author of the Surrealist Manifesto, formally accepted the Spanish filmmakers into the ranks of the surrealist movement. The film is still screened regularly by film societies to this day, not least because it is short, and surprisingly funny. The opening scene, where a shot of a woman calmly having her eye sliced by a razor is intercut with a thin cloud crossing the moon, is still one of the most striking and powerful images in cinema.

The reaction earned Dalí and Buñuel the opportunity to make a second, longer and more substantial movie, which was financed by a wealthy patron. This was
L’Âge d’or
(1930). A falling-out between the pair meant that Dalí’s involvement did not extend beyond the script. Buñuel was not the only significant figure in Dalí’s life to break with him at this point. His father threw him out of the house following his exhibition of a drawing entitled
Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait
.

Buñuel finished the film himself. As the reviewer in
Le Figaro
put it, ‘A film called
L’Âge d’or
, whose non-existent artistic quality is an insult to any kind of technical standard, combines, as a public spectacle, the most obscene, disgusting and tasteless incidents. Country,
family and religion are dragged through the mud.’ At one screening the audience threw purple ink at the screen before heading to a nearby art gallery in order to vandalise surrealist paintings, and the patrons who financed the film were threatened with excommunication by the Vatican. The scandal resulted in the film being withdrawn. It was not seen again in public for nearly fifty years.

Officially, the reason for the offence was the end sequence. This referenced the Marquis de Sade’s
120 Days of Sodom
, a story about four wealthy libertines who lock themselves away for a winter in an inaccessible castle with dozens of young victims whom they proceed to rape and murder in order to experience the ultimate in sexual gratification. The book was an exploration of the darker extremes of the ‘Do what thou wilt’ philosophy. It was written in 1785 but could not be published until 1905. It was, in Sade’s own estimation, ‘the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began’.
L’Âge d’or
did not depict any of this depravity, with the exception of one off-screen murder, but instead showed the four exhausted libertines exiting the castle at the end of the story. The problem was that one of the four was depicted as Jesus.

This blasphemy was officially the reason for the great scandal. But what was actually shocking about the film was its depiction of female desire. This ran throughout the main section of the film, and culminated in the unnamed female character, unsatisfied and frustrated after the casually violent male character leaves, lustfully licking and sucking the toes of a marble statue.

Not even early cinema pornographers went that far. They may have stripped women naked, but those women were still portrayed as coy and playful. Even depictions of predatory women steered away from such an uninhibited expression of lust. Banning the film on the grounds of the Jesus scene was like jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. It was the easiest way to get the job done, but it was clearly an excuse.

L’Âge d’or
was, in the words of the American novelist Henry Miller, ‘a divine orgy’. Miller had arrived in Paris in 1930, as the film was released, and immediately began to write similarly frank depictions
of sexuality. Like James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Miller’s first published book,
Tropic of Cancer
(1934), was banned from being imported into the United States by the US Customs Service on the grounds of obscenity. Prosecutors won that battle, but they were losing the war. Culture was becoming increasingly open about sexuality and there was no hope of prosecuting everybody.

In 1932 the American actress Tallulah Bankhead shocked many when she said, ‘I’m serious about love … I haven’t had an affair for six months. Six months! … The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! … Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!’ Those offended by female sexuality had to come to terms with both the fact that she made this statement, which would have been unthinkable a generation earlier, and that
Motion Picture
magazine saw it as fit to print.

The 1920s had been the jazz age, a golden era for the wealthy that in retrospect sat in stark contrast to the world war that preceded it and the grinding global depression that followed. Its archetypal image was that of a flapper, a woman with pearls, a straight dress and a short bob, dancing joyfully and freely, kicking her legs and enjoying herself unashamedly. The reason such a simple image came to define that era was because of how unprecedented it was. Such public behaviour by a high-status female would have been unacceptable at any earlier point in the Christian era.

Flappers were not just accepted, they were celebrated. The black Missouri-born dancer Josephine Baker might have been ignored in her homeland due to her colour, but that was not the case in Europe. Her performances in Paris, dressed in nothing more than a skirt made from feathers or bananas, were wild and blatantly sexual and also incredibly funny. They made her one of the most celebrated stars of her day. Baker loved animals and surrounded herself with exotic creatures, including a snake, a chimpanzee and a pet cheetah named Chiquita. She was showered with gifts from wealthy admirers, and claimed to have received approximately fifteen hundred marriage proposals. Following her death in 1975 she became the first American woman to receive full French military honours
at her funeral, thanks to her work with the Resistance during the Second World War.

Jazz music and dances such as the Charleston, the Black Bottom or the Turkey Trot were seen as modern and liberating. Dresses became simpler, and lighter. Skirts became shorter, reaching the previously unimaginable heights of the knee. The amount of fabric in the average dress fell from almost twenty yards before the Great War, to seven. The fashionable body shape was flat-chested and thin, a marked contrast to previous ideals of female beauty. In the nineteenth century lipstick had been associated with prostitutes or, even worse, actresses. By the 1920s it was acceptable for all, and cupid-bow lips were all the rage. In the words of the American journalist Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, women were ‘moved by an inescapable inner compulsion to be individuals in their own right’.

The credit for the power of the
L’Âge d’or
toe-sucking scene must go to Buñuel. Dalí was not comfortable with female sexuality. His personal sexuality was focused more on voyeurism and masturbation. He was devoted to his wife Gala, but preferred her to sleep with other men. ‘Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency,’ he said. ‘Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.’ Dalí was reportedly a virgin on his wedding night, due to his fear of the vagina, and frequently linked seafood with female genitalia or sexuality in his work. His famous 1936 sculpture
Lobster Telephone
, which was a telephone with a plastic lobster attached to the handle, was also known by the alternative name of
The Aphrodisiac Telephone
.

Thanks to his cartoon moustache, his stream-of-consciousness declarations of his own genius and his love of luxury and power, it is tempting to see Dalí’s public persona as some form of calculated performance art. But from descriptions of him by those in his inner circle, there does not appear to have been a private Dalí which differed from the public one. ‘Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask
myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí,’ he once said. Very few people would allow themselves to say such a sentence out loud.

Dalí did not have the self-consciousness filter that most people employ to present a more socially acceptable image of themselves. To use Freud’s model, he lacked the super-ego to stop the id pouring out of him. ‘I am surrealism,’ he once said, as if his ego was unimportant relative to the work that came through him. Freud was certainly impressed. ‘I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has changed my estimate,’ he wrote in 1939. Others were less impressed. As Henry Miller put it, ‘Dalí is the biggest prick of the twentieth century.’

Freud’s model of the id, ego and super-ego was originally only intended to describe individuals. But there is a tradition of using Freudian ideas to help illuminate larger changes in society, for example in works like Wilhelm Reich’s
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
(1933). Freud’s psychological models can be used alongside a sociological concept known as ‘mass society’, which describes how populations of isolated individuals can be manipulated by a small elite. The idea of the ‘mass media’ is related to that of the mass society. Methods of controlling or guiding mass society were of great interest to political leaders.

An example of the subconscious manipulation of mass society was the twisting of people’s reaction to different ethnicities in the 1930s. When political leaders promoted hatred of others, it created one of those rare instances that appealed to both the id and the super-ego at the same time. It was possible to unleash the barbaric, destructive energies of the id while at the same time reassuring the super-ego that you were loyally obeying your masters. With the id and the super-ego in rare agreement, the ego could find it hard to resist the darkness that descended on society.

When the wild energies of the id were manipulated in a precise way, leaders could command their troops to organise genocides. The word ‘genocide’ was coined in 1944 to describe a deliberate
attempt to exterminate an entire race. It hadn’t existed before. There had been no need for it before the twentieth century. Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, but most estimates say that Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler, and that Mao Zedong was responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined. Men such as Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Kim Il Sung all played a part in ensuring that the twentieth century would forever be remembered as a century of genocide.

The off-hand manner in which genocide was shrugged off is chilling. ‘Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?’ Hitler told Wehrmacht commanders in a speech delivered a week before the invasion of Poland. Hitler was aware of how the global community had either accepted the Armenian genocide, in which the Ottoman government killed up to a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923, or had turned a blind eye to it. As Stalin was reported to have remarked to Churchill, ‘When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics.’

Modern technology made all this possible. Hitler kept a portrait of the American car manufacturer Henry Ford on the wall of his office in Munich. Ford was a notorious anti-Semite who had developed assembly-line techniques of mass production based on Chicago slaughterhouses. The application of a modern, industrialised approach to killing was one factor which differentiated modern genocides from the colonisation of the Americas and other such slaughters of the past. But the availability of techniques to industrialise mass killing does not in itself explain why such events occurred.

In 1996 the president of Genocide Watch, Gregory Stanton, identified eight stages that occur in a typical genocide: Classification, Symbolisation, Dehumanisation, Organisation, Polarisation, Preparation, Extermination and Denial. The first of these, Classification, was defined as the division of people into ‘us and them’. This was something that the particular character of the twentieth century was remarkably suited towards. It was a side effect of both nationalism and individualism. Focusing on the self creates a separation of
an individual from the ‘other’ in much the same way as identifying with a flag does.

Genocides arose during the perfect storm of technology, nationalism, individualism and the political rise of psychopaths. They revealed that humans were not the rational actors they prided themselves on being, dutifully building a better world year after year. Rationality was the product of the conscious mind, but that mind rested on the irrational foundations of the unconscious. The individual was more complicated than originally assumed. If there was some form of certainty to be found in the post-omphalos world, it wouldn’t be found in the immaterial world of the mind.

The next question, then, is whether such certainty could be found in the physical world?

Erwin Schrödinger, c.1950
(SSPL/Getty)

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