Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Young One
1960 · Luis Buñuel · The Young One on Sightlines
A man running from a lynch mob brings his clarinet.
That one detail tells you what kind of film you are in. Traver is a jazz musician somewhere in the American South, fleeing a rape accusation he knows is false, and when he reaches the island he still has the horn. The music in the film comes through him, played, diegetic, a working musician's sound rather than a score instructing you how to feel. Buñuel gives his hunted Black protagonist a trade, an appetite, a temper and an instrument. He does not give him a halo. That refusal is the whole method, and it is why a cheap English-language picture shot in Mexico in 1960 is stranger and harder than nearly anything Hollywood made about race that decade.
The island is a game preserve. It has a warden, Miller, who is a bigot and who wants the recently orphaned adolescent in his care, Evvie. Zachary Scott plays him with no villain cues at all. No relish, no sneer. There are moments that look like tenderness and a rough capacity to change. This makes him worse, not easier, because you cannot file him and move on.
Deleuze has a name for the region of cinema Buñuel is working in, and Buñuel is one of the three directors he builds it from, with Stroheim and Losey. He calls it the impulse-image, and it sits in the sour gap between the two things cinema mostly does. In the ordinary action film a character reads a situation and does something that changes it. In the impulse-image what drives the character is not a situation at all. It is a drive: hunger, lust, cruelty, the need to possess. A drive does not respond to a world. It tears pieces off one.
Deleuze's term for the torn-off piece is the part-object, or fetish. Watch what this film holds the camera on. Food. The girl's clothing. A bed. Weapons. Buñuel notices each of them and underlines none of them, and they never graduate into symbols. That is the point. A fetish in this sense is not a metaphor for an appetite, it is the appetite's property, the bit of world a drive has claimed. Once you see the objects that way, Miller's acts stop being choices and become symptoms. His racism and his designs on Evvie are not two traits. They are one drive with two outlets, and Buñuel presents both the way a doctor presents a rash, without heat.
Deleuze pairs this kind of film with two layers of place, and Buñuel gets both out of a single location. The derived milieu is the ordinary social surface with its rules: a licensed preserve, a visiting clergyman, property, the law waiting on the mainland. The originary world is what shows through it, a place of raw beginnings where nothing operates but appetite. The island is administered, and it is also marsh, scrub, shoreline, weather. Figueroa shoots it with tactile clarity instead of romance, monumental skies over a squalid story, the golden-age Mexican idiom he helped invent turned to a purpose it was never built for. And the setting is a vicious joke. A game preserve is nature with a bureaucracy attached, and the man paid to protect what lives there is the predator.
Why bother with this vocabulary? Because the obvious readings flatten the film. Call it a message picture and you have to decide who is good, and it will not let you. Call it a thriller and you notice the plot barely moves. Naturalism in Deleuze's sense explains why. The engine is not situation and action. Nothing Traver does resolves anything. Nothing Miller does either. What advances is exposure. The drives keep surfacing, in different weather.
The finest tool in the film has a dry technical name: the index of equivocity, a gesture that could belong to two different situations with no way to tell which. The Young One runs on these. Clothing for the girl is care and it is appetite. A meal is hospitality and it is a claim. The image is identical either way, and Buñuel will not cut to the reaction shot that would settle it. Figueroa's deep focus and Buñuel's plain classical découpage keep both readings alive inside one frame. That is precisely what Bazin argued depth of field was for: it hands judgment back to the viewer rather than delivering a verdict by montage. Bazin wanted that ambiguity for humanist reasons. Buñuel uses it to implicate you.
One more piece of the design. The mob never arrives. Deleuze separates the out-of-field you could pan to, the next room or the road, from the absolute out-of-field, which presses on the frame without having a location. The mainland is the first kind, and you could take a boat. Whatever assembled a mob around a false accusation is the second. When Jackson, the bigot from outside, comes onto the island he is not a visitor. He is a sample. Buñuel's real off-screen space is a country.
The craft debts are specific. Robinson Crusoe (1954), his only other English-language film, had already taught him the island as sealed laboratory and the lean, plain shooting that suits it. Los Olvidados (1950) set the Mexican method: Figueroa's hard monochrome kept legible and unshowy while all the radicalism lives in the refusal to sentimentalize people at the bottom. Nazarín (1959), finished immediately before, hands over its austere light and its protagonist-as-moral-experiment. Behind Figueroa stands María Candelaria (1943) and the Fernández–Figueroa grammar of low horizons, sculpted skies and deep-focus rural naturalism, which is why the island looks monumental while the story stays mean. Zachary Scott arrives carrying The Southerner (1945), Renoir's chamber of rural hardship, a Southern man played for difficulty rather than villainy, which is exactly why Buñuel cast him. And Intruder in the Dust (1949) had already withheld the blameless victim and the legible villain. This film takes that withholding somewhere American cinema would not follow for years.
Forward, the honest answer is small. The film was dumped into exploitation houses as Island of Shame, went largely unseen for decades, and seeded almost nothing outside its own director. Inside him it seeded plenty. The sealed microcosm goes straight to The Exterminating Angel. Claudio Brook's compromised clergyman begins a long association. And Viridiana, the next year, runs the same machine, a moral experiment on a closed group with charity and appetite indistinguishable, and becomes famous for it. This is the rehearsal nobody watched.
What it did to the art is easy to state and hard to do. It took the most morally legible subject available in 1960, racism and a child at risk, and removed every position from which a viewer could feel good. The liberal problem picture is a form built to deliver a verdict. Buñuel keeps the case and withholds the verdict, which leaves the image posing a question it will not answer for you.
He also leaves something genuinely open. His naturalism usually runs downhill; once a drive is exposed the slope goes one way, toward exhaustion, as it does in Los Olvidados. Here it wobbles. Miller is allowed to change, a little, roughly, late. Is that mercy? Or is it the colder idea, that a man can improve at no cost, and the preserve stays a preserve? Watch the objects next time. The plate, the clothes, the bed, the gun. Buñuel never tells you what they mean, and that silence is the most precise thing the film says.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Miller's racism and his sexual appetite for the underage Evvie are presented without villain-signaling; the narrative advances through moral reversals rather than plot mechanics, so what moves the characters is appetite, not situation.
- naturalism — Buñuelian anti-melodrama: a false rape charge, a lynch mob, a child endangered by an older man, systematically drained of easy affect so that drives erupt beneath the social surface of preserve, church and property.
- originary-world — The island game preserve — marsh, shoreline, scrubby woods, rendered by Figueroa with tactile clarity — functions as a moral pressure-cooker where only appetite operates.
- derived-milieu — The administered surface of that same place: a licensed game preserve with a warden and a shack, a visiting clergyman, and the law of the mainland the fugitive has fled.
- fetish — Objects and small domestic details — food, the girl's clothing, a bed, weapons — carry weight, in Buñuel's typically materialist manner, without being underlined as symbols (dossier, mise-en-scène).
- symptom — Zachary Scott plays Miller so that his bigotry and his appetite read as one drive surfacing twice rather than as villainy; Scott's refusal to make him a simple monster is central to the film's disquiet.
- index-of-equivocity — Blocking repeatedly places Traver, Miller and Evvie in shifting triangulations of threat, dependency and desire, and the charged domestic objects sit in two situations at once — care and appetite — with the lucid classical découpage refusing the cut that would settle it.
- out-of-field-absolute — The false accusation and the lynch mob stay on the mainland and are never seen; Jackson, the viciously racist outsider, arrives as a sample of a pressure that has no location on the island.
- discourse-image — The film sits inside the postwar liberal race-issue cycle but refuses its consolations: it poses the problem the genre exists to resolve and withholds the resolution, leaving the viewer without stable footing.