Buñuel’s The Young One

Luis Buñuel’s The Young One is a sweaty, gritty, uncomfortable portrait of the South in 1960. It takes place on a tiny island off the coast of the Carolinas. Evvie is a young teenage girl whose grandfather dies, leaving her orphaned and in the care of Miller, who oversees the private game reserve that the island functions as. Although Miller had promised to send Evvie away to be raised in a church and attend school on the mainland after her grandfather died, he changes his mind when he realizes she is beginning to physically transform into a woman. His intention shifts to making her his sexual subservient and housekeeper. Meanwhile, Traver is a black man falsely accused of rape on the mainland who washes up on the island in search of a way to repair his boat as well as find gas and food. He stumbles upon Evvie while Miller is away for the day and she feeds him and sells him Miller’s old shotgun and some gas. Traver eventually encounters Miller and Traver’s life and safety are both threatened for the majority of the film. Along the way, Miller’s intent for Evvie is made clear as he isolates her one night in his cabin and rapes her. 

Both Evvie and Traver are the victim-heros of this film. They both suffer and as a result are portrayed as having more virtue than anyone else in the film. Evvie is an innocent child, left alone with no control over her life or surroundings and nothing to fend off the advances of Miller or any other men who might stumble across her. Through her abuse and lack of agency we see the reality and result of men’s basest instincts in regards to women’s bodies. Traver, another victim, demonstrates another set of social problems. Through the treatment of his character, we see the dehumanization of black people by poor southern whites, struggling to keep blacks in their place. 

Richard Dyer, in his essay “White,” writes “If blacks have more ‘life’ than whites, then it must follow that whites have more ‘death’ than blacks” (Dyer 59). Buñuel’s film presents this by starkly contrasting the morally bankrupt, uneducated whites of the film against the thoughtful, intelligent, energetic jazz musician character of Traver. The whites in this film, even the “innocent” Evvie and the “good” preacher, have an emptiness about them whereas Traver is full of determination and self-preservation. This film predates George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but the overall social/political implications feel similar. 

Linda Williams writes in her chapter of Playing the Race Card,  “The American Melodramatic Mode,” that “the key function of victimization is to orchestrate the moral legibility crucial to the mode” (Williams 29). Both Evvie and Traver suffer bodily harm, Evvie by being raped, Traver by being treated as an animal, hunted, tied up, and physically threatened to the very end of the film. Their virtue is staged through adversity and suffering and further, their suffering highlights the injustices present in society at that time. This particular film is striving to reconcile more than one important idea. The first being that although black people may be free and no longer enslaved to whites, the inherent and unflinching racism of the southern whites prevents any true social progress from happening. The other is the matter of the powerlessness of the young girl Evvie, and how young girls, when left unprotected, have no safety against the will of men. 

In the end of this film both Traver and Evvie might escape a certain tragedy, however, nothing is truly resolved. Miller is left standing on the island alone, with no consequences for his actions and Traver, while he is allowed to leave the island, is presumably heading back to the mainland for a most uncertain fate. Who will believe him? Will justice truly be served for either of these two people? Like many melodramas, the questions are certainly posed but they are not necessarily answered.

Works Cited

Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen, Vol. 29: No. 4 (October 2, 1988), pp. 44-64.

Williams, Linda. “The American Melodramatic Mode.” Playing the Race Card: Melodramas ofBlack and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. pp 10-44.