Which Director Best Understood Human Nature?

Wow, that is an exciting question.

Luis Bunuel understood that most people are sheep, cannot be bothered to think for themselves and that religion serves as a panacea for many.  He really seemed to enjoy skewering the upper middle class particularly, whom he looked upon as simple and simplistic, amoral (not immoral) and hypocritical without much capacity for autonomy.  Movies like "The Exterminating Angel", where a large group of upper middle class dinner guests cannot bring themselves to leave the dining room because - what are they going to do as soon as they leave?  He makes them look absolutely foolish and beyond petty.  They are helpless to good manners, but when push comes to shove, they reveal themselves to be barbaric.

"The Discreet Charm Of the Bourgeoisie" - he does the same thing, but inverts the plot.  This time, six friends, who are prisoners to civilized good manners, make many attempts, but cannot actually bring themselves to sit down and eat a meal.  They are much too precious for that.   And ridiculous and clueless and maybe even kind of dumb.  

"Viridiana" - He makes the religious faith seem like a foolish thing to invest oneself in.  The genuinely good (but likely naive) nun, named Viridiana, invites a bunch of beggars into her wealthy and debauched uncle's estate (he drugs his beautiful niece, dresses her in a wedding gown and then has sex with her unconscious body) and takes pity on them and feeds them and pretty much lets them have run of the house.  She has good intentions, but the beggars absolutely are shown by Bunuel to be greedy and ungrateful and unsympathetic and untrustworthy, and all of this makes the good intentions of those people, like Viridiana, look rather silly.

Bunuel is the least sentimental of all major movie directors that I can think of.  He has no illusions about people.  And the fact that his movies all have humor in them makes him enormously appealing, as do his surreal flourishes.


   I just saw "Viridiana" and agree.. Seems to be kinda Nietzschean (objective morality, organized values, lack of pity for the beggars).