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Humphries explores how cinema sometimes challenges codes of narration and representation in a reversal of expectation so that the narration as a production of meaning has constantly to be renegotiated. Themes and characters can be introduced with a seeming irrelevance, challenging the whole concept of character. Sometimes accepted codes are used, not in the form of reversal but as standard clichés which disrupt the miscognition where the subject believes that it controls words. though really the subject is an effect of the signifier. Thus, the ideology of the self-centered individual is overthrown by virtue of unconscious sources as the subject of enunciation is dethroned in favor of a message that is always already there of its own accord. Cause and effect are reversed to show the unconscious cause. Behind all this there is a loss which is repressed, as in fetishism where an absence is passed off as a presence. The technique of Buñuel introduces such elements as the ostrich, which returns suddenly like the repressed and in which the subject recognizes the “truth” (in the Lacanian sense) lying behind the discourse emanating from the place of the Other.