Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

1955 · Luis Buñuel · The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz on Sightlines

A man carries a life-size wax woman across his own workshop and feeds her into a pottery kiln. He stands and watches the face go. The mouth runs first, then the whole head folds into itself. He is doing this instead of committing a murder, and the woman the figure copies is in no danger at all. Buñuel films it in the same even light he used for the drawing rooms.

Archibaldo de la Cruz wants to be a murderer. Not a killer of anyone in particular, but a murderer, the way other men want to be surgeons. He has wanted it since childhood, when a music box persuaded him he could kill by wishing and his governess obligingly dropped dead of a stray bullet at the moment he wished it, her thigh exposed as she fell. He was a boy. The two things fused and never came apart. The film then walks him past a series of women and denies him every one. Somebody else kills them, or they slip out of reach. Ninety minutes of crime picture in which no crime occurs.

Deleuze has a precise name for films built out of appetite rather than decision: the impulse-image, the cinema he called naturalist. It works on two layers. There is the derived milieu, the furnished and socially legible place: bourgeois Mexico City, its drawing rooms, its casino, its ceramics studio, photographed by Agustín Jiménez with a clarity that declines to editorialize. And there is the originary world, which is not underground or symbolic but the same place seen as raw, a hunting ground of pure drives where objects are prey. The kiln is an originary world sitting inside a gentleman's hobby. So is the street during the Revolution. So is the waltz.

In that world desire never takes a whole person. It takes pieces. Deleuze's term is the fetish, the part-object torn loose and overcharged. A thigh. A stockinged leg the frame isolates until the fixation is yours as much as his. The music box. The wax face. Buñuel's camera does the tearing: when he wants an object to rule a scene, he simply gives it the frame, and your eye goes where Archibaldo's goes before you have agreed to anything. That method is inherited whole from Un Chien Andalou, where a razor and a column of ants were cut free of narrative cause and left to carry dream charge inside otherwise legible shots; L'Âge d'Or codified the eroticized part-object and the displacement of desire onto inert things that Archibaldo restages with his effigy.

Why bother with this vocabulary? Because the alternative reading is thinner. Without it, Archibaldo is a case study: trauma, repression, a diagnosis, a man with a problem. Deleuze's naturalism moves the drives out of the character and into the world he moves through. The appetites were running before he arrived. He is not a sick man in a healthy society. He is the one member of his class tasteless enough to say out loud what the furniture already wants.

Naturalism normally runs downhill. Deleuze calls it the line of slope, the irreversible descent toward exhaustion and death. The joke here is that the slope is in perfect working order. Women die on schedule. Archibaldo is simply never its agent; he keeps arriving after the fact with his razor still clean.

That failure is the film's real invention. Most movies run a circuit: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. Deleuze dated the collapse of that circuit to postwar Europe, to rubble and wandering and people who could only look. Buñuel reaches the same collapse by farce, on a studio floor, on a Golden Age schedule, in 1955. The editing carries it. Each killing is built with mounting deliberation and then cut away from, or resolved by a death that arrives through some unrelated door. Suspense is set up correctly and then refused, over and over, until the refusal becomes the form. A crime film whose engine is the non-arrival of the act: that is a structural idea, not a gag.

Two smaller machines make it work. The music box is what Deleuze calls a mark, an object that means by habit, the way a gun on a mantel means a shot later. Its waltz functions almost as a Pavlovian cue, and the film installs the chain only to break it every single time. And every death in the film is an index of equivocity: one event that fits two situations at once, accident and answered wish, with nothing in the image to tell them apart. Cinema's oldest contract is that the photographed thing testifies. Buñuel gives you the wish and the corpse in the same continuous world under the same high-key light, and declines to arbitrate.

This is the powers of the false, worked out through structure rather than argument. Archibaldo confesses his criminal life to a magistrate, and the film dramatizes his account, reveries included, some of them exposed afterward as fantasy. The burning effigy is the purest case of what Deleuze calls a crystalline description, an image that composes its object so completely it can stand in for it and be destroyed in its place. (Miroslava, who plays Lavinia, died in the same period as the film's release, which gave that scene an afterlife in Mexican memory that no one intended.) And Archibaldo is a forger in Deleuze's sense, a man who manufactures a truth by insisting on it. He is not lying to the magistrate. He is trying to become guilty. The title is the forgery: a criminal life that never took place.

He learned the tone from his neighbors. Él gave Buñuel the urbane bourgeois maniac played dead straight instead of as horror. Susana taught him to hollow out Mexican melodrama from inside by loading it with perverse eros. Los Olvidados proved that a frankly surreal insert survives inside studio realism as long as the lighting does not flinch. Monsieur Verdoux supplied the dapper respectable murderer and, more important, the comedy of botched and accidentally thwarted killings. Buñuel's addition is the philosophical one. Verdoux kills. Archibaldo cannot. Chaplin made a satire of capital; Buñuel made a comedy about the distance between wanting and doing, which is where most people actually live, and handed it to you without a wink. The mode he settled here, atrocity photographed at room temperature with the camera refusing to signal, is now standard equipment for any film trying to be funny and frightening in the same shot.

Watch the music box next time. It does not announce deaths. It announces wishes. The film's cruelty, and its odd mercy, is that it never lets the two share a frame.

Concepts in play

impulse-image — Archibaldo is driven not by decisions but by an appetite seeded in childhood: the music box that convinces him he can kill by wishing, and a lifelong project of becoming a connoisseur of murder pursued through a succession of women.
derived-milieu — Jiménez photographs bourgeois Mexico City — drawing rooms, a casino, a ceramics studio — in clean medium shots and high-key studio realism, a matter-of-fact social surface that never editorializes.
originary-world — The pottery kiln where the wax Lavinia melts, and the Revolution street where the governess falls, reveal the same bourgeois world as a hunting ground of raw appetite; the music box's waltz is its recurring signal.
fetish — Desire attaches to part-objects: the governess's exposed thigh at the moment of death, a stockinged leg isolated by the framing, the music box, the mannequin's face — Buñuel frames each so the fixation becomes the viewer's.
entropy / degradation — The descent toward death runs perfectly well — each intended victim dies — but always by some other agency, so the slope operates without Archibaldo ever being its agent.
crisis-of-the-action-image — The editing builds each killing with mounting deliberation and then cuts away or lets the death arrive by unrelated means; the desire to kill repeatedly outruns the capacity to act, until Archibaldo recognizes he is no murderer at all.
index-of-equivocity — The governess dies of a stray bullet at the exact moment the child wishes it; the film supplies both the accident and the wish and never arbitrates between them, a pattern it repeats with every subsequent death.
mark — The music box's tinkling waltz functions almost as a Pavlovian cue linking the toy to the wish to kill, installing a customary chain the film then breaks on every occasion.
crystalline-description — The life-size wax mannequin modeled on Lavinia so fully composes its object that it can be burned in her place, its face melting and collapsing while she remains alive and out of reach.
le faussaire — The confessional framing device: Archibaldo narrates a criminal life to a magistrate, reveries included, manufacturing a guilt he never earned — the title itself naming a criminal life that never happened.

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