The short film starts off with “once upon a time,” and a man played by Bruñel whetting his straight razor. He stares blankly at the moon, to see a thin cloud slicing across its surface. Just as the audience is seemingly spared the gruesomeness of the actual event by this visual metaphor, the razor slices the eye in close-up, spilling its jelly-like contents. The emblematic …show more content…
Freud introduces the Oedipal Complex, or the Oedipus drama in his works. Little boys undergo such excitement and seek love for their mothers, alluding to Oedipus. Since he perceives that his mother already has his father, he desires to kill his father and obtain sexual relations with his own mother. Buñel then cross-cuts to a hand lying in the street, representing the protagonist’s hand, which is the source of his masturbatory shame. When he beings to sexually assault his mother, she resists at first, then gradually gives in, showing the aggressive-submissive nature of human sexual relationships in general. “As his eyes roll back in his head, symbolizing both the blindness aspect of the Oedipal myth and the more modern myth that masturbation causes blindness” (Stead, 2011). The opening scene of the eye slicing foreshadows to