The World Beneath the World

The impulse-image sits, in Deleuze's scheme, between the affection-image and the action-image: not yet organized into purposeful deeds, no longer mere feeling, but the eruption of pure drive — appetite, cruelty, fetish, compulsion — through the crust of civilization. Its home is naturalism, the tradition (from Zola onward) that sees the social world as a thin layer over a brutal "originary world" of instinct and degradation, and that delights in tearing the layer open. Deleuze's exemplar is Luis Buñuel, the surrealist who spent a career exposing the savagery beneath bourgeois decorum, and Erich von Stroheim, whose Greed watches civilized people rot into pure animal avarice in a desert.

Buñuel is the great anatomist of the world beneath the world. From the eye sliced open in Un Chien Andalou to the street children's casual savagery in Los Olvidados, the holy masochism of Viridiana, the fetishistic compulsions of Belle de Jour, and the dinner guests who simply cannot leave the room in The Exterminating Angel, Buñuel's whole project is the impulse-image: the revelation that drives — sexual, violent, irrational, compulsive — are always erupting beneath the social performance, that the dinner party and the convent and the marriage are masks over an originary world of appetite that the surrealist camera takes savage pleasure in unmasking. His people are governed not by their stated values but by impulses they cannot name or control, and the films are the spectacle of the crust cracking.

Deleuze noted that the impulse-image has a thinner afterlife than his other concepts, but its modern descendants are unmistakable and have given it a chilling new register. Yorgos Lanthimos films originary worlds with a clinical, deadpan cruelty — Dogtooth builds an entire family as a closed system of warped drives and invented rules, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer treat human compulsion and ritual cruelty with an affectless precision that is more disturbing than Buñuel's surrealist glee. The Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems is pure impulse — a man driven by a compulsion he cannot govern straight off a cliff, the originary world of addiction and appetite filmed as relentless anxiety. The modern impulse-image trades Buñuel's mischief for a cold, naturalist horror: the same revelation that drive rules beneath the surface, now filmed without the wink.

This is the impulse-image's permanent power and its discomfort: it insists that the social world is a performance over a substrate of raw drive, and it films the substrate breaking through. We like to believe in our reasons, our values, our civilized control — and this strand of cinema, from Buñuel's slashed eye to Lanthimos's deadpan cruelty, keeps showing us the appetites and compulsions and cruelties that actually move us beneath the reasons we give. It is the cinema of the beast under the manners, the world beneath the world, and its enduring provocation is the suggestion that the beast is not an aberration but the foundation — that the manners are the costume, and the impulse is the body wearing it.

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The line: Greed → Un Chien Andalou → Los Olvidados → The Exterminating Angel → Belle de Jour → That Obscure Object of Desire → Dogtooth → Uncut Gems

This line crosses:

• The Film That Accuses You — Haneke's cold anatomies of cruelty and complicity share the impulse-image's clinical naturalism, the social crust pulled back to show the drive beneath.
• When Nothing Happens — both are Deleuzian image-types being carried forward to films he never saw; the opsign drains action into seeing, the impulse-image floods it with drive.

Read through: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (the impulse-image; the originary world) · writing on Buñuel and surrealist cinema.

A note on the argument: the impulse-image and the "originary world" are Deleuze's, anchored in Buñuel and Stroheim. The line forward to Lanthimos and the Safdies is this atlas's mapping (Deleuze noted the concept's thin scholarly afterlife); it is argued as ours, not attributed to him.