Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation

4. Don Jaime’s Laughter: Humor and Perversion in Viridiana

66 4 Don Jaime’s Laughter Humor and Perversion in Viridiana In reality, Viridiana is a picture of black humor. Luis Buñuel Just as he is about to write his last words before committing suicide, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), Viridiana’s scheming uncle, pauses for a moment to stroke his beard and reflect on what he is about to do (see fig. 10). He seems to be contemplating what his decision, whatever it is, will bring about. And he chuckles. The future that his words on a white piece of paper will help materialize seems to amuse this man. His most recent past, what has just happened, is nothing but deadly serious. He has asked his niece, a novice nun, to dress in his late wife’s wedding gown. He has proposed to her, and, with the help of his servant , he has drugged her, kissed her in her sleep, and made her believe that she is not a virgin anymore. Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) leaves in spite of the many lies and truths Don Jaime produces in a desperate attempt to make her stay. Now the old man can only look out from his office window as the carriage that takes her back to the convent drives away. When he turns away from that window, on his way to his writing desk, he is already smiling. We will be able to conclude later that what Don Jaime is about to write is his last will and testament. His estate is to be shared between Viridiana and his long-estranged natural son, Jorge (Fernando Rabal). It would be hard to argue that, in writing this will, Humor and Perversion in Viridiana  67 Don Jaime can anticipate all that will befall innocent Viridiana. She will share her uncle’s mansion with a womanizing cousin who wants to modernize their property, while her plan is to turn the estate into a homeless shelter. She will be sexually attacked by one of the beggars she has helped. Finally, she will end up falling into Jorge’s clutches in a famous final scene where an ironic ménage à trois with Jorge and the servant Ramona (Margarita Lozano) is implied. This chain of events may not be what Don Jaime foresees as he chuckles, yet he is certainly envisioning a situation in which two individuals who signify two opposite views of life and who hold conflicting moral codes will have to live together. This is, incidentally, one of the original ideas Buñuel and Julio Alejandro used to write the screenplay.1 Hence one could say that Don Jaime is not so much writing his last will as he is authoring a script or, at least, coming up with a scenario. According to Tom Conley, in Don Jaime’s “scene of writing . . . he is seeing, hearing, and soon writing as might a director staging the very sequence as it might appear in the film.”2 As a stand-in for the screenwriter or the filmmaker, Don Jaime seems to be as perverse a character as any character could be in the first part of the story. He is also as perverse as many spectators have imagined the man behind the camera to be, a notion that never ceased to perplex Buñuel. Since Freud, of course, perversion has always been measured against the standard notion of normalcy.3 Since Lacan, Kant cannot be understood without Sade. Even though the Spanish director recognized his debt to the latter, Buñuel’s “perversion” as a filmmaker can be related simply to the way he makes us derive pleasure from the moving image, a way that challenges the pleasure conventional filmic narratives are supposed to provide. This is in essence the thesis of Paul Sandro’s Diversions of Pleasure.4 In contrast, it is more complicated to gauge the transgressive pleasures involved in Don Jaime’s perversion as a fetishistic, necrophilic metteur en scène because of his manipulation of Viridiana and Jorge. If perversion is indeed “a specific mode of desiring and making sense of the Figure 10. Don Jaime, or the “pervert ” screenwriter 68  Don Jaime’s Laughter world,” if it is most of all a practice that exposes “the fantasy of the other and the various social lies that such fantasy necessarily enforces,” then the question regarding perversion in Viridiana (1961) becomes: From what moral order do the various...