It was the second time I saw the movie. Forgotten, by the masterful director Luis Buñuel; the first was a few decades ago in an Argentinian cinema. This time he attended a virtual seminar on the topic of violence, and previously he had to analyze a rough Mexican film that won the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. The film, which is considered one of the 100 best of the seventh art, integrates the List of Memories of the World Register as a documentary heritage of UNESCO.

Today I am writing about a film from 73 years ago because the plot has not been shaken by the passage of history. Despite the brutal experiences we have lived as a region and statistics that rank Latin America as the most unequal region in the world, we do not learn. I watched the video and thought that the black and white images are the same ones we witness every day: family rejection and abandonment, sexual abuse, pedophilia, alcoholism, drug addiction, gangs, weapons, robberies, murders, insufficient protection policy.

What we are talking about is extreme poverty, where the most violent child or young person survives, driven by the desire to die that we all carry restrained, by the force of law and culture. Someone will be able to avoid condemnation when an act of love appears, a glimmer of hope in a tragedy: a determined authority, a teacher who trusts you, a friend who protects you, an unexpected kiss. Elasticity. And here the contingent is decisive.

An important post-filmic reflection that distinguishes ‘Oedipal violence’ (a mother gives up her son because he reminds her of the father who abandoned her; a helpless child nurses an emaciated cow; a young man has sex with an older woman), from ‘structural violence’, in which we as a society have little intervention . Violence that begins as verbal aggression and ends as a transition to a violent act, with little possibility of return.

At the gathering, it was discussed that the force of law sometimes over-regulates violence; so much so that, for example, in Japan, violence is expressed against oneself, through suicide. So human beings use escape routes from that latent deadly joy, through jokes, mockery or irony; carnival and demon costumes; bullfighting, hunting or boxing; in an attempt to modulate ourselves in socially accepted ambiguous zones.

In 1929, Freud pointed out three sources from which our sadness comes: the hyperpotency of nature, the fragility of the body, and the inadequacy of the rules that regulate the relationships between family, state, and society. And it is this last suffering that most destroys human subjectivity.

Such is our insensitivity towards others that we sometimes seem like animals without a collar, furious and on the run; however, there are exits that defy fate. Sublimate the death drive through art, sport, work, love; talking to others, in a good way, about those black holes of senseless destructive impulses that plague us are some of them. (OR)