The other night, a cool but pleasant Sunday, Barnaby found himself struck in the afternoon by a numb wave either of caffeine overdose or profound melancholy, he couldn’t say which, and so he leaped up out of his easy chair—scattering dried sardines all over the floor—put his underpants back on, tied his shoes, and went out for a walk. After a brisk thirty or forty minutes of sweaty, twitching speed-walking, during which he muttered to himself about North Korea and the Congo and scratched more than was strictly necessary, Barnaby happened upon the Film Forum, on Houston Street, and noticed that a movie was beginning in only two minutes.

“A movie!” he said to himself. “Just the thing to calm my frazzled nerves, worn as they are by the strain in living in a sick, sick culture that teeters on the yawning precipice. One, please!”

“The line begins over there, fatso,” someone said in reply, and Barnaby sheepishly took his place. Two pretty, trashy blonde girls approached the ticket window.

“Are you playing Employee of the Month?” the slightly less trashy girl asked, naming a comedy—a vehicle for another trashy blonde girl with big bazooms—currently in wide release. The young man in the AC/DC t-shirt in the ticket window explained to this slightly less trashy girl that the Film Forum only plays independent films. The two girls walked out the door and had the following conversation:

Slightly less trashy girl: “Oh, yeah, I forgot. They only play independent films.”

Slightly more trashy girl: “What does that mean?”

Slightly less trashy girl: “It means they’re shitty.”

A bit shaken, but still manfully holding onto his faith in the transformative and cathartic power of art and, to a lesser extent, cinema, Barnaby approached the ticket window when his turn came and asked for one ticket to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; he handed over his money, and then his ticket, in turn, and walked into the darkened theater and found a seat on the aisle as the opening credits were beginning.

Buñuel’s movie about three empty, corrupt, hateful couples who have dinner together, commit adultery, smuggle cocaine, and dress ever so nicely, about people so vapid and so completely hostage to their various lusts that they do not—with the possible exception of the bishop—rise even to the dignity of hypocrisy, amounts to nothing so much as an enormous “fuck you!” to the sort of people—not exactly the sort of people, but more or less the sort of people—who attend foreign films at the Film Forum. It could not be much more direct if it had been a two-hour film of the director himself, sitting on a stool in front of a brick wall, and saying over and over, “Your culture is simultaneously disgusting and absurd; and please do not deceive yourself, gentle audience—I am talking to you!”

But did the accused and condemned audience protest? Mutter? Walk out? Certainly not—they behaved as they would have at any screening in that theater. That is, between a quarter and a third of them made a loud point of laughing whenever possible, to spread the news far and wide that they “got it,” and, when the end credits rolled and the lights came up, several men said, “Hm,” very emphatically, as if the director of the movie, not to mention two film critics from the New Yorker, were waiting in the wings, peering out nervously to see what each of these stalwart men had thought. And then, as they filed out, the audience discussed the previous occasions on which they had seen the movie, one older man remarking that he had seen it with Swedish subtitles, and one very pretty girl telling her somewhat less pretty friend that she had tried to listen to the French and not read the subtitles. Barnaby, for his part, stalked into the bathroom, took a loud piss, and then careened off down Varick Street, once again muttering to himself and scratching.

At first he muttered angrily, despairingly, and at length about the hopeless position of the artist in a bourgeois society: they cannot win, Barnaby declared, because the bourgeois audience possesses an absolutely insurmountable power of being infinitely unreflective. “You could walk right up to one of those moviegoers,” Barnaby railed angrily at a black SUV speeding down Varick Street and blaring out the Ying-Yang Twins, “deliver a long, impassioned, point-by-point indictment of all the basic premises of his life, and end by screaming at the top of your lungs that his mother was a dirty syphilitic whore, and he would grimace, look thoughtful, tap his nose and say, ‘Yes, I get it, but will it play in Peoria?’ Money, the sons of bitches! They eat, breathe, shit, fart, and make love in greenback American dollars!”

Later, when Barnaby got home and had calmed himself down with a nice tisane of verbena (just like Mme. Sénéchal tries to order in the Buñuel movie!), he realized that he had been confused. He had been yelling into the night about the position of the artist in bourgeois society, but after all, he had not been in a gallery, or a bookstore, or a political action meeting—he had been in a movie theater, and movies, whatever their pretensions or high intent, are collaborative efforts that cost millions and millions of dollars to make. They are all indissolubly entangled with the status quo—at best they may aspire to be windows looking out, but mere windows they remain, lodged solidly in the firmament. Buñuel is no Wat Tyler—he is, rather, a bourgeois moviegoer like the rest of them; and the audience was right to laugh and take no notice, because why should a group of dirty birds wallowing in the mud be upset when one of their very own number points out how dirty they are? On the contrary, taking amoral pleasure in the very hollowness of your privilege is the icing on the foie gras, so to speak, and Barnaby’s mistake was buying a ticket in the first place. He should have stayed on the sidewalk with a bottle of hooch.