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The Liminal and the Surreal: The Space of  
Limbo and Dreams in Luis Bunuel’s  
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 
 
Miniature Malekpour, Australian National University, miniature.malekpour@anu.edu.au 

 
 

Abstract 
This study explores the connection between the liminal space and Surrealism in Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet 
Charm of the Bourgeoisie. By taking into consideration the relationship between Surrealism, Marxism and 
Freud, this paper identifies the role of the liminality, dream-sequences and Bunuel’s exploration of limbo in 
the ‘in-between’ spaces of the setting and characters in the film. The purpose of this study is to examine the 
use of liminal space and Surrealism to identify the role of the bourgeois and their fears through the lens of 
Bunuel’s Cinema.                                                                                                                                                                              
Keywords: Surrealism; Luis Bunuel; liminal; dreams; limbo 

 

 
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This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part  

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     CINEJ Cinema Journal: The Liminal and the Surreal: The Space of Limbo and Dreams in Luis Bunuel's TDCOB 

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The Liminal and the Surreal: The Space of Limbo and Dreams in  
Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 
 
 
Introduction  

Dreams and visions have been connected to some of the most powerful and direct 

experiences between the living and the dead, and the afterlife or other world (Schmitt, 1994). As 

part of its surreal transparency, the link between the dreams and death has crossed over culture, 

time, and space to manifest itself alongside traditional Shamanic journeys, in which dream states 

cross over into the unknown (Klaniczay & Pócs, 2005). 

 Whether it is the dead who enter the liminal space of dreams or it is humans who 

explore the unknown through their unconscious state, this transient state becomes a rite of passage 

for either group.  

Victor Turner’s definition of liminality is generalized as a “betwixt and between” state, 

where the “individual begins in a state of separation from the community, after which follows the 

liminal state in which the rite is performed” (Turner, 1967). It is after this rite that the individual 

returns to the space of the community, leaving the ambiguous state of the liminal that marks their 

transition “from one status to another (Riviere, 2009, p.109.)  The individual undergoes a state of 

transcendence, neither part of nor exiled from the community until that rite is completed, when 

they then are recognized as a member of that community. Turner himself has alluded to the link 

between liminality and death as belonging to the same condition, claiming that “the essential 



 

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feature of these symbolizations is that the neophytes are neither living nor dead from one aspect, 

both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion 

of all the customary changes (Turner, 1967, p.94) 

In Luis Bunuel’s cinema, the individual (character) is able to transform their experience 

through the functional elements of separation and connection, formed in the spaces of the potential 

of becoming and engendering. This metamorphosis creates a third space, the liminal, which 

induces semantic and sensational feelings and motivations. By enhancing the liminal 

characteristics of these “in-between” spaces, the transitional, layered, temporal, and dynamic are 

explored. Liminality is then universal, as it becomes a transcendental experience for the character, 

who is situated in an in-between space that creates a sense of awakening, separating them from 

conventional life and inputting different alternative social interactions. In The Discreet Charm of 

the Bourgeoisie, this liminal space is adherent in dreams, which are embedded in a lingering state 

of limbo. This limbo is associated with a surrealistic paradigm that recognizes levels of social, 

cultural, and psychological changes associated with early modernity. These between spaces are 

integral to the human processes of ritual and transformation and can be interpreted as a painful 

passage between alternative states that involves “the removal of previously taken-for-granted 

forms and limits” (Szakolczai, 2009, p.148). The horror that occurs in this state of limbo, the horror 

of the bourgeoisie when the characters realize that the material world around them is turning upside 



 

 

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down in Bunuel’s cinema of deception, creates a pattern of rites also seen in Victor Turner’s Ritual 

Process (1969). Turner concurs that in such liminal spaces, a person’s sense of identity dissolves, 

creating disorientation but also the possibility of new perspectives (Szakolczai, 2009, p.156). What 

these characters fear is that this liminal space might become permanent for them. From the 

ambassador’s fear of persecution to the simple breakdown of their normal course of daily life, such 

as no tea or coffee being available at a tearoom, the bourgeois’ fear of losing all traces of their 

culture is a recurring theme in Bunuel’s film.  

The concept of life as a dream is explored through the structure of the film’s 

complexity. As Steven Kovac describes in his review of the film in Film Quarterly, the spectator 

is faced with the gaze of “a group of people who are trying to get for dinner and are prevented 

from doing so by an extraordinary series of unforeseen circumstances (Kovac, 1972, p.14-17). The 

circumstances that disrupt the ritualized event of dinner are overshadowed by the “surreal 

absurdity of movement.” In this case, the period of a ritual, where the person is physically and/or 

symbolically beyond the normal boundaries of society is not only disrupted by circumstances but 

also by dream-realism and the surreal. The position in which the characters find themselves 

through the third space creates a dialogue between two entities: one, which represents fear and 

loss, and the second, which represents stature and power. The purpose of this study is to examine 



 

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the use of liminal space and Surrealism to identify the role of the bourgeois and their fears through 

the lens of Bunuel. 

By exploring their liminal space becomes “transparent thresholds, separation, and 

connection at the same time, enclosing a third space (Bhabha, 2011). Thus, the “reassessment of 

identity” is situated as a third space, interpreted as limbo.  

Death, Dreams and the Bourgeoisie 

In the early 1920s, under the leadership of André Breton, Surrealism explored the 

intuitive decorum of fantasy and dreams. The philosophy behind the movement analyzed the 

human condition and its pursuit of liberation. Although contradictory in nature, the Surrealist 

movement and Marxist political theory both shared similar agendas—to escape the suppression of 

a capitalist society under the guise of civilization and progress (Breton, 1972) Marxist analysis of 

this human condition explained that the proletariat, the sufferer, inevitably becomes an “appendage 

of the machine” and falls under the shiny new boots of the bourgeois elite (Marx, 1994). Therefore, 

the oppression of the mind, in its material and imaginative forms, must be liberated, and the 

surrealist and the communist strive for both freedom of the mind and human form. The Surrealists 

aimed to find resolution for the diametric oppositions of “sleeping and waking, dream and action, 

reason and madness, the conscious and the unconscious…the subjective and the objective” 

(Breton, 1978, p.1.). The artistic practice of the Surrealists combined both surrealist metaphysics 



 

 

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and Marxist material reality, which produced a physical representation of Surrealism’s imagined 

objects (Balakian, 1954). These dream-like objects, known as les objects orniques, mediate the 

contradictory extremes of both reality and dreams. Thus, by embodying both, these objects become 

fundamentally concrete and material as objects and, through Surrealist art, depict the inner 

hallucinations of the mind (Balakian, 1954) 

The quandary between surrealism and communism in their respective realities reminds 

us of the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as one represents a fantasy, and the other 

operates through historical materialism. However, in this case, the surrealist form exists in a state 

that not only denotes the “fortuitous meeting of distant realities” but also is ontologically 

acceptable to both fantasy and historical materialism (Balakian, 1954). 

In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, it is telling that Bunuel’s representation of 

the bourgeois replicated the way he viewed the petit bourgeois classes, some of which had 

“adopted surrealism only after finishing their university studies and experimenting with a 

bohemian phase characteristic of most artists and poets throughout the capitalist epoch” (Klaus, 

2016, p.10). Marx noted that these types of bourgeois elites “have raised themselves to the level 

of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” (Marx, 1994, p.167). Due to 

the foundation on which the fundamentals of surrealism were structured, the surreal aesthetic could 



 

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not immediately oppose the ruling class, as they, too, were affected by social conditions that exist 

in the capitalist power structures and interests. Therefore, instead of combating these capital 

interests head on, the understanding of the surrealistic mind was established in the “infiltrative 

nature of bourgeois oppression” (Klaus, 2016 p.11). By acknowledging this, surrealism separated 

itself from the communist agenda through practice and principle, and the proletariat recognized 

the “standard of their bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law…that these ideas are but the 

outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property” (Marx, 1994, 

p.172).  

In the late 1920s, the surrealist movement drifted from its intuitive epoch and focused 

on a reasoning phase that espoused the introspective works of Sigmund Freud. Freud and the 

Surrealists shared a passion for investigating the world and the way humans perceived it, ignoring 

conventional perceptions and norms as defined by society. André Breton’s Manifestoes, which 

explored the concept of automatism amongst other forms of expression, relies on the Freudian 

psychoanalytic techniques, research methodologies, and, of course, the interpretation of dreams 

(Breton, 1924). This proved to be a stable foundation from which Surrealism evolved.  

By using these Freudian methods of investigation, surrealists were able to agree that 

somatic and organic stimuli contribute to the vivid causes of dreams, which in fact exhibit meaning 

beyond the sedative state (sleeping). The very definition of Surrealism exhibits the dogma of 



 

 

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Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, as André Breton defined in 1924 in the Manifesto of Surrealism, 

which explained surrealism as a “physic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to 

express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning 

of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt 

from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Breton, 1924, p.26). The hypothesis of Freud’s tripartite 

psyche embodied the combination of gratification and repressed urges as textures of desire, and 

that the ego, which conforms to what society deems acceptable, continuously seeks approval, 

which is mediated by the super-ego, a moderator that navigates between the conscious and the 

unconscious, entailing guilt upon the proletariat. Bunuel played with these textures with the 

layering of the bourgeois characters and their dreams.  

Freud (and the Surrealists) deconstructed this behavior through a process that he 

referred to as regression in his psychoanalysis, an act in which patients attempt to defend their 

egos so that they are able to fall into the pretext of socially accepted thought (Williams, 2016). The 

way that Freud inspired and provided confidence to Surrealists to explore the imagination allowed 

for the realm of fantasies, superstitions, and desires to occur in the real (Reuben, 2017 p.6) 

To explain the state of dreaming, Freud used psychoanalytic concepts to theorize that 

when the mind is no longer influenced by the impressions of the day, the stimuli are no longer 



 

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overwhelmed. As surrealists used idealism, outlined by the conscious and the unconscious state of 

mind, Freud theorized that “a dream looks upon the world in a light of strange idealism and often 

enhances the effects of what it sees by its deep understanding of their essential nature” (Freud, 

2010). This “imagination”’ is able to be liberated from any authority of reason and control, and is 

able to position its psychic-like functionality into an absolute freedom. “Though dream-

imagination makes use of recent waking memories for its building material, it erects them into 

structures bearing not the remotest resemblance to those of waking life; it reveals itself in dreams 

as possessing not merely reproductive but productive powers” (Freud, 2010). 

These productive powers, which manifested in the visualizations of dreams, are not 

tainted by moral judgement or suggestion, and so surrealists were able to take these dream-images 

and develop “visual representations of thoughts, states, and dreams” and liberate an imagination 

that does not fall victim to the concept of reality (Reuben, 2017, p.8). “Surrealism used objects of 

art to break down the art barrier between the familiar and conventional and inner visions and as 

part of its broader aim to bring the unconscious and dream energy to the light of day” (Breton, 

2002, p.277). 

Following a less formal mode of psychoanalytic analysis, surrealists considered the 

interpretation of dreams to find various derivations of what the unconscious desires. This 

automatism, as Breton mentioned, disentangles emotions, where the psychic restitutes the external 



 

 

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reality. This regression, which is pulled back to unveil the hidden, or the “pure” reality, is used in 

psychoanalysis by enhancing free association, which can lead to troubling thoughts, resistances, 

associations and patterns, which can be identified in the works of the surrealist painter. For 

example, in the works of Salvador Dali, a “paranoiac critical activity” takes place, where a sense 

of mêlée exists between the ego and the superego in front of an alternative world backdrop. The 

landscape represents the different parts of his psyche, and the super-ego develops a sense of satire-

like humor, which leads to an endearment of catharsis for the painter, as a means to confront or 

perhaps adapt to the oppressive nature of his society (Breton, 2002). 

The differences between Freud’s psychoanalytic methods and Surrealist thought lies in 

how they responded to the “nonsensical and random aspects of the mind and dreams” (Reuben, 

2017, p.13). Freud did not acknowledge a direct translation between dreams and waking 

consciousness. Surrealists, on the other hand, used the interpretation of dreams as a stepping-stone 

to highlight the consciousness and its perceptions. Their aim was to highlight the importance of 

dreams as something highly valuable and important in an effort to view society and its structure. 

Freud avoided any social or political interference, focusing on the biological, rather than the 

hypothetical.  



 

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This caused a division among the surrealists who relied on psychic automatism and 

those who worked hand-in-hand with the French Communist Party (Watson & Polizzotti, 2002). 

Again, the relationship between communism and surrealism became eminent, one that relied on 

the individuals’ own thoughts and consciousness rejecting external realities, the other dependent 

on “collective action and uniform” (Reuben, 2017, p.16). Breton’s surrealism essentially endorsed 

a proletarian revolution, the liberation of humans equals the liberation of the mind, justifying the 

political, which “we consider that this action has its own method in dialectical materialism…we 

hold the liberation of man to be the sine-qua non-condition of the liberation of the mind, and we 

can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian revolution” (Breton, 2012, 

p.120). 

This hypothetical, however, contributed to the relationship between dreams and the 

dead. One reference to death is found in the work of Surrealist Andre Masson. Masson’s 

experience of the First World War led to psychological trauma and the publication of Memoire du 

Monde (1974), a recollection of the horrors he experienced during his time in warfare. Masson’s 

canvases exhibited an aesthetic of trauma and violence, replicating the graphic images in automatic 

drawings. Masson’s time at the battles of Somme not only affected his art but also in his graphic 

accounts of the war, one which he referred to as “the suicide of Europe.” 



 

 

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I shall sing of the stupendous fatigue of the soldiers, of the unwanted consequences of 

action, of the scared human wrecks abandoned on the battlefield. Above all, the physical misery 

of human beings become hideous: covered with mud from head to foot for a week and often longer, 

of “sojourn” on the front line…many of us unable to wash off the carapace of earth and excrement. 

Lacking water to drink…like accompaniments, the pounding of artillery and the increasing fear, 

the one of “gas alert” being not the least distressing (Hubert, 1992). 

The images of the dead emerged in juxtaposition with the post-war years in paintings 

such as The Cemetery (1923) where the image focuses on the mutilated body parts (representing 

the slaughtered of the First World War) “displaced into the branches and stems of a soft, 

anthropomorphic forest which stretches out of the shadows of death towards the warning sun” 

(Baxter, 2016).  What Masson and the surrealists tried to make evident in their illustrations of the 

dead, was that “man-made edifices which are constructed in order to contain historical memory 

can no longer hold because death will always (and paradoxically) spring back to life and force a 

confrontation (Baxter, 2016). This process of remembrance, to which the Surrealists strived to give 

meaning, included a sense of experience loss and giving form to a series of “unconscious 

memories.”  



 

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Extending the notion of Surrealists’ fascination with death and trauma, it is important 

to highlight one of the main collective methods applied by early surrealists, called cadaver exquis, 

the exquisite corpse. These collective exercises, explored as a game, were a particularly important 

part of their artistic production and explored several methods of research, such as collective 

creation, ludic activity, and psychoanalysis. Inspired by the events of the First World War, the 

exquisite corpse games “embodied Surrealist principles such as automatism, chance humor, and 

thought transmissions” (McShane, 2000, p.87). 

During this time, as published in the second series of Littérature, a literary and 

Surrealist magazine edited by Breton where the Period of Sleep was explained. Uncovered by the 

tract entrée des mediums, the Period of Sleep was an extended look into the subconscious 

operations of the surrealist mind based on principles of hypnosis and trance induced automatism. 

Violence prevailed during these experiments, with members attacking one another under hypnosis, 

so it is unsurprising that the surrealists would incorporate the theme in their work. The horrible 

and traumatic effects of World War One lingered in the trances of these sessions, and it was not 

until 1924 that the link between the Surrealist games and WWI was made palpable.  



 

 

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Figure 1: An example of a cadaver exquis, by André Breton, Camille Goemans, 
Jacques Prevert, and Yves Tanguy. 

 

Games such as the cadaver exquis were a means to evade the allusive ennu, a term 

which was derived by Breton, which meant delicate monster. This monster haunted the Surrealists’ 

psyche like the plague, following them to the depths of their adjusting lives in the bourgeois 

society. From mania to lethargy, “the monster of ennui was for the Surrealists, a very real and 

terrifying thing,” and “there is, then, an element of fear for one’s will to live that exists in the terror 

inspired by excessive ennui” (McShane, 2007, p.88-89). To put into simple terms, ennui 

represented terror and association with death, a disease of the mind that overtakes one’s functional 

desire to live and can also be translated to psychoanalytic terms of post-traumatic stress disorder. 

What the Surrealists suffered in the war had followed them back home, and by combining their 

collective experiences, that used games such as cadaver exquis not only to run away from this 



 

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delicate monster but to “research into the collective unconscious” (McShane, 2007, p.88-89). By 

partaking in these drawings, a form of lucid experiment, violence, death, and trauma became the 

pillars of the Surrealist project and the game of the exquisite corpse should be viewed as an escape 

from ennui, in the sense that ennui was perceived as a death by not dying. 

 

The Liminal Architecture of the Bourgeois’ Limbo 

The combination of the rites of death, dreams, and surrealism is prevalent in the liminal structure 

of the mise-en-scene and locations used in the dream sequences of The Discreet Charm of the 

Bourgeoisie. Bunuel’s use of unexpected juxtapositions revealed his intention to not allow the 

bourgeois to enjoy a hospitable dinner.  

What the opening sequence of the film presents the audience through its liminal space 

of death is reminiscent of an old folk joke about the hidden corpse. This cadaver exquis is reversed 

in the sense of its delivery, depicting the bourgeois archetype’s response to death as “business as 

usual.” Starting with a misunderstanding, the guests arrive at their dinner arrangement only to be 

met by their host, who was not expecting them. After a short conversation, the guests and the host 

decide to eat out for dinner. Examining the dichotomy of the bourgeois and the “peasant man,” the 

allegory of death as represented here begins in the verbal pas-de-deux between M. Thevenot, one 

of the guests, and the waitress of the auberge, who appears hesitant to admit the bourgeois party. 



 

 

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By the end of this scene, the characters become well situated in the third space. Unknown to them, 

the body of the owner of the Auberge is laid out in the room next to the dining hall; the scene hints 

at the bourgeois role of “man as carnivore.” The formalist function of this scene acts as a 

“discordant reality based on the juxtaposition of instinctively felt opposites” (Osbourne, 2016, 

p.18) as the bourgeois troupe complains about the lack of expensive wine, “maintaining the social 

façade before passing through the façade of the Auberge” (Osbourne, 2016, p.19). 

 

 

Figure 2: The corpse of the owner of the Auberge. 

Bunuel seeks liberation of mind not through the bourgeois troupe, but through the 

secondary characters, interweaving the pious-like emotions of the bourgeois into a limbo state in 

which the hallucination of the dead exists in its entirety. When the bourgeois ladies visit the tea 

room they find themselves in an unusual dilemma. There is no tea or coffee, which robs them of 



 

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their basic necessities. A soldier, who is overcome by guilt and seeking retribution, interrupts their 

dilemma and provides a confessional-like intercut, a haunting of his childhood repression and 

torture. As we cut to a flashback, a younger soldier is being told by his father that he should prepare 

himself for the military. As the young boy leaves the room, he finds brief happiness in the hallway. 

What is an uncomfortable space between the living and the dead, an apogee of the supernatural, is 

the young boys only refuge, as he dances away, bouncing from wall-to-wall. As he reaches the end 

of his brief liberation, the ghost of his mother appears, instructing him to poison his father. Not 

only do we see the stark contrast between the representation of the bourgeois in the tea-room, we 

find similar elements in his “father’s” character, a bourgeois feudal. The appearance of the 

soldier’s biological father, with his face mutilated, clearly a fallen soldier, exhibits the sacrifice of 

what honor truly is. Yet, the three women he confides in can say nothing, most likely still reveling 

in the fact that there is no tea or coffee available. This dream is lost in limbo, as is the helpless 

soldier.  

This disruption can be juxtaposed with another military interruption, as the colonel and 

his men base themselves at the host’s house in preparation for “maneuvers.” Once again, we see 

another tormented soldier recalling a dream. In the atmosphere fogged atmosphere of limbo, the 

sergeant runs into two of his old friends and a lost love, all of whom are walking the lines of the 

supernatural, not knowing they are indeed dead. The street itself is an indefinite space of searching 



 

 

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for something that is not in fact there. Although told separately, the dreams and memories of the 

lieutenant and sergeant are similarly juxtaposed in a third space. For the lieutenant, this is 

represented by the hall, and for the sergeant, by an empty street filled with shops, both of which 

lead to the ghosts of their pasts and their own frightening fate. 

 

 

Figure 3: The young soldier as a kid walking down the hallway of death. 



 

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Figure 4: Another soldier, alone in the empty street, visited by his memories which 
include his dead friends and an unrequited love. 

 

After being invited to the colonel’s home for dinner, the guests arrive and begin 

exploring the numerous war artifacts their host owns, such as a hat worn by Napoleon in battle. 

After sitting down to await their meal (without the host or his wife in sight), the servants bring out 

the prepared meal composed of “plastic chickens,” which fall to the ground. Regardless, the 

servants continue to serve the faux chickens, with the guests noticing and briefly commenting on 

whether it is a practical joke. That is as the extent to which Bunuel allows the guests to engage in 

this dream-realism before they continue to converse with one another. Suddenly, the curtain behind 

them opens and they are confronted with an awaiting audience as they realize they are on stage. 

Finding themselves in a position of “theatre-verte,” our guests are overpowered by the urge to 

perform for an increasingly impatient audience. This exposure, in which the bourgeois is situated 



 

 

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as puppets of sorts, faced with performing in front of the audience, shows the weakness or perhaps 

flaw in the class-system structure. In the face of exhibitionism, our guests’ “inner emptiness” has 

been exposed, and Bunuel reminds the viewer that “all these gatherings have been social 

performances” (Jones, 1999, p.46). By combining stage fright and anxiety with the preconceived 

idea that the guests know their lines by heart, the stage transforms into a third space where their 

exposure turns into the fear of becoming one with simple peasants, in the lieu of the capitalistic 

system they have created.  

 

Figure 5: Surprise! The bourgeoisie find themselves in their own “theatrical” dreams, 
being looked at and judged by strangers in an uncomfortable setting. 

 
 
 



 

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     As it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish the boundaries of realities and dreams, we 

reach the climax of these disruptions during the ambassador’s dream. Gangsters, who are a part 

of a Marseille gang, interrupt this gathering, claiming to be the rivals of the three bourgeois men 

in the heroin business. They proceed to gun down the guests, execution style, while the 

ambassador finds cover under the dining table. All the dream-sequences lead up to this 

apocalyptic event, facilitated by the ambassador’s greed and hunger. This is translated in not 

only his cowardice as shown not only by his abandonment of his friends to hide under the table 

but also by his continuous hunger for power. Even as he sits there, defeated, the ambassador 

reaches out from beneath the table to grab a piece of lamb, thus showing that he is not yet 

satisfied, whether psychically or mentally.    

 
Figure 6: The Massacre! The Ambassador’s dream, as his rivals arrive and gun down the 

guests. 



 

 

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What we gather from the dream-realisms is several illustrations of how a series of 

dinner parties “can do as little to preserve their participants from the emptiness which society has 

sowed within their hearts as communing with nature could do to redeem the Victorian middle class 

from its materialism” (Durgant, 1975, p. 52). The liminal limbo of the bourgeois blossoms into the 

fear of the material through a raucous atmosphere. These dinner parties conspire to be a form of 

potlatch, although we never see one fully completed, as the open road scenes break in, which show 

the group continuously walking on several occasions in the film. Perhaps this particular liminal 

space of emptiness and uncertainty is a meeting point where their lives intersect. It is noteworthy 

that Bunuel’s own feeling towards open spaces lends its hand to this form of constraint; perhaps 

the horror of this open space is the never-ending road to limbo.  

 

Figure 7: The never-ending road of limbo as the guests never reach their destination. 



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: The Liminal and the Surreal: The Space of Limbo and Dreams in Luis Bunuel's TDCOB 
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343 

Conclusion 

In this film, dreams as liminal spaces represent the limbo state of the bourgeoisie. The third space 

created in between is where these guests precede, aimlessly haunted by their own social 

transparency. The idea of liminal space is not only considered to be the dreams represented in the 

narrative but also as the notion of liminal limbo, a cursed artifact of the bourgeoisie and the result 

of a revolution of the mind. What the film delivers is a form of irony over military paradoxes, a 

sort of gratification of Marxist anarchism that folds into the deck of chaos. Bunuel’s homage to 

the suffering and trauma that the Surrealists endured during the First World War is exhilarating in 

a satire of bourgeois chicness, which whether the loss of material benefit or performance anxiety, 

is nowhere near the same level of the suffering that the soldiers withstood. A total of “nine 

instances of interrupted or no-existent meals” (Osbourne, 2016, p.17), including the soldier’s 

dreams and memories, the “theater” dream and of course, “the massacre.” What these dreams share 

is that even though these characters adhere to bourgeois etiquette, changing circumstances prove 

quite disruptive and threats may arise even from those who are intended to protect them and are 

suffering in their own nightmare. The heretical cinema of Bunuel proclaims that his films are 

indeed representations of morality. The bourgeois and their relationship with materialism are 

identified as a hierarchy of damnation, a combination of greed and heresy, lost in limbo’s third 

space.  



 

 

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