The Young and the Damned · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the egg. Or the raw meat — a slab of it, dripping, floating toward a sleeping boy in the hands of his own mother. Pedro reaches up from his bed in slow motion, hungry for food and for love at once, and Jaibo crawls out from under that same bed to snatch the meat away. The whole film is in this dream: tenderness and appetite are the same drive, the mother withholds, the older boy takes, and what looks like a slum melodrama is revealed, for ninety seconds, as something closer to a furnace.

When Gilles Deleuze went looking for cinema's clearest case of what he called the IMPULSE-IMAGE, he reached for Buñuel — and Los Olvidados is the canonical example. The idea is precise. Between the close-up that registers a pure feeling and the action-film that turns feeling into deeds, there is a degenerate zone where neither holds: a cinema not of reasoned acts but of drives. Hunger, cruelty, lust, the urge to possess and to destroy. The impulse-image shows people in the grip of appetites that use up the world and then use up themselves. Deleuze's word for what such drives carve through their surroundings is the ORIGINARY WORLD — a savage, almost prehistoric field of pure need that shows through the ordinary one like bone through skin.

That doubling is the film's whole method. On the surface, Mexico City circa 1950: a recognizable DERIVED MILIEU of market stalls, tenement courtyards, a half-built apartment block, a reformatory. These are real places, shot on location with documentary flatness — Buñuel had read the case files, walked the districts. But watch what recurs. A chicken. A scrawny dog. Mud, a building site, a blind man's stick, raw meat, eggs. Buñuel plants these objects with ritual insistence until they stop being scenery and start being charges. They are FETISHES in Deleuze's sense — part-objects that concentrate a compulsive force — and the milieu they haunt keeps cracking open to show the originary world beneath: a place where the strong eat the weak and call it nature.

The acts read as SYMPTOMS, never as choices. Jaibo doesn't decide to kill the boy who informed on him; he is driven, and the killing discloses the drive. When the gang tips the legless beggar out of his cart and rolls him into the dust, or pelts the blind musician Don Carmelo with stones, Buñuel stages it flat and unblinking, with no rescuing angle, no music to tell you how to feel. The camera refuses to pity, because pity would convert these people back into the social-problem types the genre wants. They are not symbols of innocence. They are bodies on a LINE OF SLOPE — Deleuze's name for the impulse-image's one inevitable trajectory, the irreversible downward grade toward exhaustion and death. Everything in the film slides. Pedro wants to climb out, wants his mother's love, wants honest work; every rung gives way, until his body is dumped on a garbage heap and dragged off in a sack at dawn, unmourned, unknown. The forgotten are forgotten even as they die.

What keeps this from being mere misery is the one place the film breaks its own naturalist contract: the dream. This is where Buñuel the Surrealist, supposedly buried for two decades, walks back into the room. The splattered lens, the decelerated motion, the mother gliding forward with the meat — Deleuze would call this an ONIROSIGN, a dream-image, a circuit of pure desire untethered from any dateable memory. And the craft debt is exact. The slow-motion procession comes straight out of Vigo's Zéro de conduite; the raw-meat fetish and the assaulted lens come from Buñuel's own Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'or; the alibi-free gaze at the destitute is the discovery of his documentary Las Hurdes. Los Olvidados is the film where Buñuel proves the moral violence of his Surrealist shorts could survive inside a story — that you could detonate the dream-grammar of 1929 inside a 1950 commercial narrative and have the realism and the eruption sharpen each other rather than cancel out.

That is the invention, and it traveled. The slum-as-ecosystem of doomed boys descends from Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces, where Warner Bros. had already argued that environment breeds crime and that a charismatic crook makes a fatal role model — Jaibo is that gangster regrown as a predatory adolescent, his grip on Pedro the engine of the fall. But Buñuel strips out the studio's residual sentiment and its faith that a priest or a judge might intervene. Nobody intervenes. The reformatory's kindly director hands Pedro money and trust, and it changes nothing; the slope wins. After this film the social-problem picture could no longer pretend that understanding poverty was the same as redeeming it.

The achievement is to make a film that thinks with its appetites. Buñuel found a way to let drives — not plots, not lessons — organize a movie, so that the dream and the garbage heap rhyme and you leave unable to separate the boy's hunger for meat from his hunger to be loved. Watch it again for the objects. The chicken, the egg thrown at the camera, the meat. They are the film telling you, in a language under language, what it is really about.