Ordinary Strangeness in Luis Buñuel's Movies (Part 4) Buñuel returns the surrealist aesthetic to its origins: superrealism provides an opportunity to touch another reality, the reality of the human unconscious and imaginary. For this reason, it is not surprising that He attracted the attention of the prominent psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, becoming the subject of the master’s reflections at one of his seminars. The main character of this film exists at the intersection of two realities - real and imaginary, it is the violation of the symbolic exchange between them that causes his mental disorder. In this sense, "He" is not about jealousy, which, if you look at it, is always surreal, nor even about possessiveness (although Buñuel pays much attention to Francisco's predatory aspirations in business). This film is about the loss of a sense of reality, the loss of a sense of the very material one-dimensionality that almost all Surrealists despised.
He also makes visible those conceptual springs that have made madness one of the constant and beloved themes of surrealist art. Fantastic, strange, unusual, mysterious grows, according to Buñuel, from everyday life, from boring everyday life, they just need to be considered, for this it is worth looking at the essence of human desires, ousted by culture and morality into the subconscious. Again, as in The Forgotten, in the film He, women’s legs become a sexual fetish for a man in a buttoned social role (at the time when Buñuel began filming, they were the only part of the female body along with the face that was allowed to be naked). A virgin in his forties, and even a believer, the character of Arturo de Cordova gives free rein to his passion in a socially acceptable form, that is, in marriage.
"He" shows very well that the flywheel of madness unfolds in the mind of a socially successful man, not some deviant marginal. Moreover, the director demonstrates how step by step and gradually (from breakdown to breakdown) this happens. Sometimes Francisco reminds Pozdnyshev from Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata: he is also torn by love passion, tormented by jealousy and is ready to literally curse the call of sex, causing such suffering to a person. For a long time, the victim in the film “He” looks like the hero’s wife, forced to endure his mania, however, when the viewer finally understands that the hero of Cordoba is insane, he begins to feel compassion for him. The great merit of Buñuel in this picture is a demonstration of how jealousy turns into paranoia, that is, begins to produce mental pathology. In this sense, Cordova performed a true acting feat, showing the sliding of his hero into the abyss of madness (which, as you can see, is very difficult to do without going crazy himself).
“He” is an extremely important picture in Buñuel’s filmography: filmed in Mexico during the period of “little picture” peculiar to this director, it determines an important vector of all his work. "He" shows how another, fantastic, strange reality - the reality of dreams, hallucinations, visions, revelations (that is, in fact, the mystical mirror of all our lives) grows out of everyday life, rationality, visible and understandable materiality. Buñuel already looks here not only a surrealist to the bone, but also an outstanding self-taught psychoanalyst, for for him everything strange in life is not a fiction, but the property of the human imagination and the unconscious, that is, that which exists on a par with reason and consciousness. The task of the artist, according to Buñuel, is to be able to lure this Secret out of the nooks of the human psyche and make it a property of art.