Abstract
Simón del desierto (1965), one of Luis Buñuel’s most original Mexican films, is perhaps also one of the most misunderstood. Of the relatively little scholarly work on this film in comparison with certain other Buñuel movies, much has read the ending of the film in the discotheque as an allegorical hell. Through a spatial reading of the film, this article shows this to be an erroneous view. The concept of liminality — the state of being between definitive spatial referents, in limbo — is used to connect the modern discotheque of the film’s conclusion to the ancient desert seen in the bulk of the narrative. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of smooth/striated space and the originary world within naturalist cinema, elaborated by Deleuze, are here related specifically to the liminal, situating this article within the recent trend towards a greater consideration of space within Buñuel’s cinema. In this way, an alternative reading to the traditional allegorical interpretation of Simón’s fall from grace is suggested — one which has the desert and the disco as contiguous planes where the protagonist’s cycle of repetition is perpetuated into infinity, precluding any attempt to posit a conclusive narrative telos.
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