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Surrealist
Luis Buñuel
firmly digs his elbows into the side of organized
religion in his wonderfully satiric Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert). Claudio Brook stars
as San Simeon Stylites, a religious fanatic determined
to live a holy ascetic life on a platform in the
desert. Implying the number of the Beast, he's been
on the same platform for 6 years, 6 months, and
6 days, and the local villagers (including some
priests and monks) trek through the dusty desert
to implore Simon to descend from his pitiful perch
and ascend a new loftier pillar a few yards away.
One pillar is as good as another, so Simon crawls
down and makes his way to the new berth, fending
off people who want to touch his "holy"
garments or receive his blessing. Simon even rebukes
his own mother, refusing to embrace her or give
her special recognition when she expresses desire
to live close by. To Simon, nothing must get between
him and God, so he continues to ignore his own mother
while she camps out near his pillar.
The initial group coming to see the spectacle hope
to see a miracle, giving Buñuel
his first satirical salvo. One man asks Simon to
restore his hands, which punitive priests (who have
now repented of their act) had chopped off for thievery.
Simon states that all he can do is pray, and the
man's hands reappear. The desired miracle! But immediately
afterwards the crowd disperses and continues on
as always--the ungrateful thief now verbally abuses
his wife and slaps his child with his newly-restored
hands.
Simon continues his solitary existence on his pedestal,
eating little but lettuce and continually thinking
of ways to deny himself earthly pleasure--making
little self tests like waiting until sundown to
eat or standing on one foot. He's also tested by
Satan, cleverly played by Mexican musical star Silvia
Pinal in various guises. The funniest occurs when
she comes thinly disguised as the bearded Jesus
Christ, at first fooling Simon until she tells him
to forgo his ascetic ways and live a life with sensual
pleasures. Tempted but puzzled, Simon affirms the
spiritual benefits of his ascetic lifestyle, to
which Pinal responds with an un-Christlike lamb
kick and asks, "What kind of crap is this?"
A pervading question throughout the film is whether
Simon is truly acting from a sense of freedom or
from a slave mentality. Simon's ludicrously spartan
existence certainly violates Buñuel's
values.
Despite Simon's insistence on living a righteous
life of self-denial, Buñuel's
absurd scenario isolates him from humanity in useless
endeavors, and he begins to sound self-righteous
despite his claims of being a lowly sinner. It's
like he's testing God to see if he's significant,
something akin to the way Buñuel
expresses his doubts in his autobiography:
"What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn't pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it's as if he didn't."
Buñuel's
well paced drama ends abruptly after forty-five minutes
with a surreal encounter in the modern world, where
Simon remains as detached from humanity as he was
atop his pedestal. What good does it do for Simon
to deny himself the pleasures of this world if it
leads to nothing? Buñuel
has often affirmed his own brand of atheism, and Simon
of the Desert closely reflects his
issues with organized religion:
"My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I've chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact."
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