Phantom of Liberty is a film about the impossibility of escaping the tyranny of convention in politics, society, and art…. Buñuel's anarchistic vision has remained constant. Man persists in denying his animal nature and creating a civilized code of laws and manners that only heightens his absurdity and intensifies his oppression. This theme lies at the center of all Buñuel's work; he never escapes it, and neither do we, his audience.

As in earlier films, the central social ritual is the dinner party, for it offers a prime example of how civilized man copes with his basic animal needs…. Using a Swiftian ironic reversal, in Phantom Buñuel reminds us that eating and shitting are merely opposite ends of the same biological process and that our culture's decision to glorify the former and forbid all mention of the latter is totally arbitrary…. [The] power of convention prevents us from seeing that all aspects of our animal nature must be accepted.

This theme is reinforced by the recurring image of animals placed in an elegant setting. (pp. 20-1)

In Phantom of Liberty, Buñuel also explores education, potentially a source of change and freedom. The existing institutions, however, merely reinforce the status quo. (p. 22)

In the incident involving the little girl lost at school, we see that false words, once confirmed by authority and convention, have the power to contradict logic and the direct evidence of our senses. The child, like the horse-drawn cart at the mansion in L'Age d'or, is totally invisible because the adults do not expect to see her. Thus, perception and knowledge are almost totally controlled by cultural expectations. Within the school, no attention is paid to the creative potentialities of the child—individuals are named and numbered, they copy dictation and learn by rote. "Speak only when you're spoken to" and "children should be seen and not heard" are the maxims that prevail; unfortunately they lead to the invisibility of the individual child…. Ultimately, Phantom of Liberty is one gigantic circle of corruption and entrapment. As usual, Buñuel does not tell us how to escape into positive alternatives; but … he insists that a courageous and honest confrontation of things as they are is the first step to freedom. If we are to resist the dangers of our society, we must not allow our heads to be buried in the sands of convention.

In Phantom of Liberty the struggle against convention is most powerful in the realm of art…. Buñuel valiantly tries to rebel against narrative conventions, breaking through to a totally open-ended form capable of frustrating the audience's expectations. Nevertheless, the film is enclosed in a structural circularity and repeats many of the same images, themes, situations, and narrative devices that Buñuel has used before. Despite his playful experimentation, he does not completely escape artistic convention or his own subconscious. Liberty is a phantom even in the creative process.

Previously, Buñuel had explored this idea most fully both in theme and structure in The Discreet Charm. Stressing the revolutionary nature of the subconscious, this dream film uses an expansive style opening outward, which defines narrow conventions, linear design, and rational interpretation…. In this film, we can never believe what people say, nor can we predict what they will do next. The lines between dream, inset story, and bizarre incident soon break down. (p. 23)

Despite the disruptive narrative structure, in Discreet Charm we repeatedly encounter our six bourgeois characters, dressed in their modish clothes, walking down a country road that apparently goes nowhere…. These characters are puppets manipulated by Buñuel, the master dreamer, who...