A Film Canon

The Young And The Damned reconfigures the mystical, erotic maternalism endemic to Mexican cinema into the mere epicentre of a spectrum of sexually transgressive possibilities - from relatively overt conjunctions of bodies (the tactile, paedophilic rapport between a blind man and his guide boy), to uncannily fragmented bodies (the legless busker who is persistently taunted and manipulated), to those animal bodies and substances that, in Buñuel's surrealist universe, represent so many ciphers for the fully sexualised human body (the chickens that populate a young boy's dream, and form the pretext for the film's central acts of barbarity; the milk that balms it). Not only does this demystify and undermine the mother's cultic, virginal presence - most memorably in an extraordinary denunciation that blames her for the corruption of Mexican youth - but, by extending this uncanny fragmentation to Mexico City itself - particularly through the skeletal apartment block around which the action revolves - deepens the opening assertion that impoverished children constitute the hidden populus of the modern city, such that their presence merely reifies the pervasiveness of those deeper urges that are given more freedom in a third-world, urban mileu (as opposed to the third-world rural mileu of Land Without Bread, where the sheer shortage of physical resources also quelled the sexual instincts). From this perspective, the film represents an uneasy, if interesting, conflict between Buñuel's duel programs of social revolution and sexual liberation, as if it had taken the final, resonant images of a little boy's body being unceremoniously dumped on the city outskirts for the full implications of bodily objectification to make themselves clear.