The Golden Age [or L'Age d'Or] is an attack on repressive society but Bunuel views social repression and individual inhibition as two sides of a single reality. The ambivalent symbolism of The Golden Age enables Bunuel to capture a dialectic between the outer prison—"imperial Rome", Christian civilization, bourgeois society—and the inner prison: the guilt which denies pleasure, inhibits instincts and conditions man to conformity. Each side reflects the other; both form an indissoluble whole. It is the whole which is Bunuel's target.

For Bunuel the key to liberation is desire, the mainspring of human activity. The perfect ideological complement to The Golden Age is Freud's contemporaneous study, Civilization and its Discontents—civilization originated with the sublimation of the sexual urge, a process reflected in the development of the individual….

[The] inhibiting brick and concrete civilization which surrounds us is vulnerable only when our vision is sharpened...