Bunuel's "Phantom of Liberty" is absurd. Everything about it makes me scratch my head and think "what the hell?". But, this is precisely what Bunuel wants. He is the master of surrealism, and Phantom of Liberty proves it.<br /><br />The main idea I took from this movie is that reality itself is absurd. Everything we accept in our day to day life is just as ridiculous as the scene where an emu walks into a couple's bedroom. I'm reminded of the concept of the butterfly effect, where the flapping of a butterfly wing may cause a hurricane somewhere else in the world. Bunuel shows ( such as the scene where people defecate in public at a dinner table but eat in private ) that if just one thing in a culture had gone differently, the unreal would become the norm. If you think long enough about any cultural norm, you begin to wonder "who the hell came up with that? ". <br /><br />My favorite scene in the film is where a professor stands in front of a class of french police officers. These officers engage in immature pranks and taunt their professor. As I watched it, I began to think "is this much different from what police officers actually do?". I can easily imagine many cops joining the force not because of some moral duty to society, but just so they can continue to play cops and robbers into their adulthood. Bunuel forces us to look at the institution of law and question if it actually works. Police brutality perhaps is nothing more than a school bully enacting his cruelty on the weaker kids at the playground. However, I'm certain most of us would rather have our personal security in the hands of a bully than say the little glasses wearing kid who has asthma... but is it really that much better?<br /><br />Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty shows us that our reality is just as crazy as Bunuel's surrealist ideas.